Al-Ḥajjāj's technical language is only one of the many sources of difficulty that we shall encounter in the following chapters, and where we will have occasion again and again to harp back on the benefits that could be derived from the adoption of this alternative narrative.
On the theoretical level, why do I call for the adoption of this alternative narrative? In response I must point to the importance of connecting the history of science to the social conditions in which science is spawned. For although I do not think we will be able to pinpoint exactly why a certain science is supported in a specific society at a specific time, while other fields of knowledge were stifled, I am certain we cannot fully understand the inner workings of the interaction between scientific production and the social, economic and political conditions without paying attention to this dialectic relationship. Adopting the alternative narrative will allow us at least to understand why certain translations were done at specific times, and why the very act of translation became important when it did. This will surely save us from the confusion usually offered by the classical narrative that attributes the origins of the translation movement to essentialist features of Islamic religion itself at times, while at other times it focuses on the racial composition of early Islamic society, like attributing the interest in the translations to the Persian "elements" of the Abbāsid empire, as we are so often told.
With this alternative narrative, we can see for the first time, after the insight of al-Nadīm, the clear relationship between scientific production and the social factors that made that production essential on the first hand, and possible on the other. With that insight we can come close to understanding the early intellectual history of Islamic civilization. And from that perspective we may finally come to appreciate the role played by the government bureaucrats (the kuttāb and the viziers) in promoting the acquisition of the ancient sciences, by patronizing this acquisition for their own purposes of competition and advancement in their jobs.
We would no longer need to continue to attribute such interest to a caliph's dream or the like, as if history marches in tune with the dreams of a single ruler or other. Furthermore, this alternative narrative allows us to explain why the 129 Galenic books on medicine were all translated for bureaucrats and not a single one of them to a caliph, as we were told by Ḥunain himself in the aforementioned treatise. We can also understand why the third, or maybe the fourth, translation of the Almagest was also patronized by another bureaucrat by the name of Abū Ṣaqr b. Bulbul (d. ca. 892), who worked first as a kātib and later promoted to a vizier, and not by the caliph himself.
I shall have occasion to return to these issues in light of the history of the Arabic astronomical tradition, where, as I have already said, I will use that discipline as a template against which I will check the validity of this alternative narrative. I will continue to use every possible occasion to illustrate the advantages gained by adopting this alternative narrative over and against the classical one, hoping that we can come to understand better the development of Islamic scientific thought.
With all that I hope that I have stressed enough the need to go back to the primary sources, both historical and scientific, and to try to re-read them without the biases of any ideological narrative, as much as possible, in order to detect from the sources themselves the direction that was taken by the scientific production and why. That process will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of the real developments in Islamic science, the various periods it went through, and come to finally appreciate, as much as we can, the real social forces that made all that possible.
Now that I have explained the motivation for the acquisition of the ancient sciences, and hopefully explained the processes and the social factors that brought it about, it is time to turn to the social conditions once more and try to detect the impact that these new "ancient" sciences had on the nascent Islamic civilization and how they were themselves transformed by this civilization. I shall devote the lion's share of the discussion to the impact of the Greek sciences on early Islamic society, for no reason other than the fact that those sciences became the focus of great concern from the earliest centuries and continued to capture the imagination of later scientists in everything they did, much to the neglect of the Persian and Indian sciences whose impact apparently began to fade rather quickly around the middle of the ninth century.
3. Encounter with the Greek Scientific Tradition
Like all messages that suffer from the reputation of the messenger, the incoming translations of Greek and Sanskrit texts, that began to be produced toward the end of the Umayyad and beginning of the Abbāsid period, as a result of 'Abd al-Malik's reforms, began to be naturally associated with those classes of people who were now considered outside the bureaucracy of the dīwān, thus foreign to the body politic of the government hierarchy itself. On the opposing side were those who acquired their new jobs by virtue of their mastery of the Arabic language, which was now the new language of the dīwān. The natural allies of the second group were those who had also staked a position for themselves that depended on the mastery of the Arabic language as well. But their dependency was for slightly different purposes. These allies who were mainly religious figures and jurists required the mastery of the Arabic language in order to use it as an authoritative tool that allowed them to master the Qur'ānic text, in the first place, as well as master the other ancillary sciences like the prophetic traditions (ḥadīth), grammar, lexicography, literature, poetry, as well as all disciplines that served the purpose of deriving juridical opinions from such texts. Those two groups: the religious scholars and jurists on one side and the new bureaucrats of the government on the other, whose claims to authority were based on their mastery of the Arabic language, began to be perceived together as one larger group only when they were contrasted with those whose main claim to power was based on their mastery of those "foreign sciences" that were being recently translated, and were naturally from outside the culture. In this context it is easy to see why the early epistemological division between "foreign sciences" and "Islamic sciences" could very quickly gain ground, in this early period and could persist throughout Islamic intellectual history.
Although the translations came from the two main cultural depositories of India and Persia, in the east, and from Hellenistic lands, in the west, the Greek classical tradition soon began to outshine the other competing traditions. We have already seen that some major Sanskrit texts began to be translated during the reign of the second Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr (754-775) if not before,[144] some texts on logic even before that,[145] and it has been generally accepted that the Persian and Sanskrit texts, few as they were, were indeed the first to be translated.[146] The fact that the Sanskrit and Persian translations seem to have come first, must mean that members of the Persian-speaking community were the first to arrive at the conscious realization of the need to import "foreign sciences", in order to compete in the new government market. It may also explain the proliferation of rebellions during the first half of the eighth century, all led by Persians who contested the authority of the then decaying Umayyad empire and whose rebellious efforts were finally crowned by the success of the Abbāsid "revolution" in the middle of that century. That revolution was mainly perceived, at first, as an alliance of various factions including several Persian ones, who were by then all dissatisfied with the Umayyads.[147]
144
See chapter 1 above, and allow for the early incorporation of Sanskrit and Persian medical and pharmacological material that may have taken place before the time of al-Manṣūr. On the astronomical technical level, much of the material discussed in this chapter had already appeared in a preliminary fashion in
146
Future research may change this consensus to allow for the evidence of earlier translations from the Hellenistic tradition as well. See, for example, Grignaschi, "Les "Rasā'il" on Hellenistic translations, and probably read as well the often used expression "old translation" (
147
The last years of the Umayyads witnessed increased upheavals in the eastern provinces that were still governed from the army encampments of Iraq. Some of those upheavals took the form of open rebellion of major proportions. Although they were crowned by the successful takeover by the Abbāsids, their forerunners, such as the rebellions of al-Mukhtār and the Mawālī (