Modern historians of Islamic science have already begun to demonstrate the ingenious research that seems to have taken place in early Islamic times, just as the translations were being carried out. And if we come to realize, as we now hopefully do, that the dīwān translations had already opened the door for further more advanced translations, then it becomes only natural to expect such creative results once the door for creative activities had been swung wide open for all qualified people to compete. This would be an ideal dream for a society that was undergoing what we would now call nation building. And something of the sort seems to have happened.
Modern research has also begun to uncover that this creative activity included most and foremost a process of re-assessment of the Greek scientific legacy, as we shall see later on, which constituted an active program of correcting the Greek mistakes. It even went further than that to create new scientific disciplines, such as algebra and trigonometry, as we have already seen. It even reformulated older disciplines, as was the case with the discipline of astronomy when the new science of hay'a (theoretical astronomy) was created at the same period. All these results need to be fleshed out and their consequences pursued even further before we can come to grips with their full social and cultural implications.
But we can also say that the results that have been established so far can definitely demonstrate very clearly that the process of monopoly which was first exercised by the dīwān employees, and then attempted again by the more educated class of their descendants, as was clearly demonstrated by Ibn Māsawayh's treatment of Ḥunain and the group of physicians at al-Mutawakkil's court, who afflicted the same Ḥunain with all sorts of calamities and intrigues, came to no avail. The reason for its failure came from the very nature of science itself, which does not easily allow for the monopoly of such activities, especially when there is a desperate societal need to pursue them. We can also say that the resulting flourishing activities at the time of the early Abbāsids, who themselves simply inherited all those competing classes of very qualified people from the Umayyad reforms, created an unprecedented recovery of the sciences of antiquity with a deep desire to deploy them for the purposes of the time, a phenomenon that was not to be repeated until the time of the late European renaissance.
At this point, I would like to go back and raise the question about the actual benefits that could be derived from the adoption of this new alternative narrative. In my defense, all I can say is that this new narrative had to be adopted after I have been fully convinced by al-Nadīm's strategy in presenting his argument about the translation movement. It was in that argument that he made the direct connection between the Islamic Civilization's appropriation of the ancient sciences and 'Abd al-Malik's reforms which were mainly centered around the order to translate the dīwān. It was al-Nadīm as well who saw that appropriation as a consequence of the reform. One wonders if 'Abd al-Malik himself ever contemplated all the consequences that his order entailed. But for us, by adopting this new narrative, if it does not do us any good, at least it will certainly help us explain the behavior of the dīwān employees, and the social conditions that ensued by isolating them as a class whose children will from then on strive to come back to the government at the higher, more desirable and more indispensable positions.
But on the theoretical level, what would be the benefit from adopting this new narrative in preference to the classical narrative that was in fact the brain-child of some of the most distinguished orientalists? This, when we also know that this very classical narrative seems to have served the community of Islamic intellectual historians for more than a century now. The answer to this question must be sought on two levels: The practical level which touches directly on the process of narrating the internal history of science itself, where we could pursue the developments of scientific ideas from one concept to the next, and the methodological level, which touches upon the reasons for which the history of science is written in the first place. As a corollary the answer also touches upon the best way to write history in general.
On the practical level, by adopting the alternative narrative, we would be able to answer some of the questions that will be discussed later when we use the discipline of astronomy as a template for the remaining disciplines and as a direct application of the impact of the new narrative. This will serve us well when we undertake to explain the developments in that discipline once it came to be pursued and reformulated within the Islamic civilization. We will then see that many phenomena, which had remained as veritable enigmas under the classical narrative, could now become easily understandable with the alternative narrative. To give only one quick preview at this point, I point to the language of the translation itself and the manner in which this very language could resolve the scientific technical terms so that someone like al-Ḥajjāj b. Maṭar could produce the earliest surviving translation of the Almagest in a fluid, technical and highly readable Arabic. This, when we know that this book is probably one of the most densely-written technical books, if not the most, and in which such terms as "auj", "ḥaḍīḍ", "ufuq" for "apogee" "perigee", and "horizon" respectively, were freely used without having to transliterate the Greek as was done in other works from the same period or even from a later period, as in the works of Qusṭā and Isḥāq b. Ḥunain. How could al-Ḥajjāj, who was one of the earliest Abbāsid translators, create this technical language? How could he succeed when we know how difficult such an enterprise can be? To convince one's self of that difficulty, all that one has to do is to consider the heroic efforts that have been pursued in the modern Arab countries, over the last fifty years or so, and continue to be pursued, to create such a technical language? If the alternative narrative does not answer any question other than this one, it would indeed prove its worth over and above the older classical narrative that remained silent about it, or turned it into an irresolvable puzzle in the first place. That is, if we stick to the classical narrative, which assumed that there were no sciences to speak of before the Abbāsid translation period, the hegemony of the Mu'tazilites, the dream of al-Ma'mūn and the like, we will not be able to explain the rise of this technical language of Ḥajjāj at this early period.
But if we go along with al-Nadīm and affirm that the translation movement had already started with the translation of the elementary sciences of the dīwāns,[143] and then remember that this dīwān translation movement preceded the translation of al-Ḥajjāj by about a full century, then it would become easy to understand the benefit that these earlier translations must have produced at the level of coining technical terms for someone like al-Ḥajjāj to use so freely 100 years later. There is no doubt that al-Ḥajjāj must have introduced some of his own terms, as we can still see in the hesitation of people like Qusṭā and Isḥāq to follow him. At this point, I have no desire to underestimate the efforts that were definitely expended by al-Ḥajjāj himself in accomplishing this project, but I do wish to emphasize that the alternative narrative puts him in his historical context, which allows him to pick up from the newly available language of the dīwān translations, add some of his own, as could be understood in a normal historical process, and not force him to perform miracles by creating a whole new technical language from scratch, as the classical narrative would have asked us to believe.
143
Evidence of translations of non-scientific nature, as well as fresh compositions based on the same, can be also gleaned from such works as Mario Grignaschi, "Les "Rasā'il 'Arisṭāṭālīs 'ilā-l-Iskandar" de Salim Abū-l-'Alā et l'Activité Culturelle a l'Époque Omayyade",