It was after the initial successes of this Persian community that the Syriac-speaking community began to follow suite and to commence the translation of the Greek texts into Arabic. For the philosophical and scientific sources, the forerunners of the Syriac translations included, for example, the early attempts of Ibn al-Muqaffa' to translate the Persian texts on logic.[148] One has to assume that at least some other Sanskrit/Persian texts, dealing with medicine and pharmacology, quickly followed suit. And they would have obviously included the attempts of al-Fazārī and Ibn Ṭāriq, who were already mentioned before, to translate the Sanskrit astronomical texts into Arabic and to produce Arabic texts that were modeled after the Sanskrit ones. Those compositions may have also included especially modified Sanskrit texts that allowed their contents to fit the new Arab environment by adjusting, for example, the years of the mean motions into Arab years, meaning Hijra years that are smaller than the solar years by about 11 days each. This conversion task was not a trivial task as we have said before. But we are quite certain that it was in fact accomplished according to the report of al-Nadīm about al-Fazārī when he says that the latter had produced a "zīj 'alā sinīy al-'Arab" (an astronomical table according to Arab years).[149]
From a cultural perspective, and in contrast, the Arabic translations of Greek sources, which were mainly executed by the Syriac-speaking community, were much more comprehensive, and included, besides the pure sciences and medicine, very sophisticated texts on philosophy and logic. Taken as a whole, the Greek philosophical corpus, which was also understood to include such disciplines as medicine, astronomy and mathematics, appeared as a self contained and integrated body of knowledge that could explain many varied phenomena by resorting to an all encompassing philosophical system such as the Aristotelian system. And in all likelihood, this system was found particularly appealing, especially because of its general applicability to various phenomena and because of the interconnectedness of the various parts of the scientific principles embedded into the formulations of that system. Within a few years, that is, in just half a century or so, between 820 and 870, almost all translations shifted, for all practical purposes, from the Persian and Sanskrit, as source languages, to Greek as the preferred language to be tapped on all levels.
The success of the latter translation attempt was unparalleled. It included almost all serious philosophical and scientific Greek texts. And technically speaking, the translations themselves began to be more organized, more systematic, involving teamwork, and at times operated very much like workshops in their own right. When one thinks of someone like Ḥunain b. Isḥāq and his son Isḥāq as well as his nephew Ḥubaish,[150] all involved in similar activities or joint projects during that same period, one can begin to detect the family structure of that activity. One may also anticipate the possible abuse of these activities by monopolizing entrepreneurs, or by patrons who at times wished to control the information those translations were bringing into Islamic civilization. These conditions could also explain why Ḥunain b. Isḥāq almost devoted his full time translating for Banū Mūsā, while he also occupied the formal position of the Caliph's physician, especially during the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847-861).
The monopolizing entrepreneurs did at times include professionals who required translations of specific Greek texts into Syriac rather than Arabic, so that they would at least monopolize the information for a while before the text would eventually be translated into Arabic. We know from Ḥunain's account of the translations of the Galenic books that he had translated some into Syriac for physicians like Jibrā'īl b. Bakhtīshū' ,[151] The same may be true of all the Aristotelian books that were reported by al-Nadīm[152] to have been translated into Syriac as well during this period, or just before. As we already said, the so-called "old translations" (naql qadīm), may have also been part of this competitive attempt at monopolizing information by the Syriac-speaking community.
To those who were not involved in the translation activity themselves, the world looked like it was already governed by two main groups. On the one hand, there were those who possessed the information contained in the "foreign sciences" now understood to be mainly Greek. Those same people were either employed at the highest echelons of the government offices like advisers to the caliphs or were competing for those same jobs from outside the government. On the other hand, there were those who possessed the mastery of the Arabic language and who worked at the lower echelons of the government at the old dīwān jobs but now allied to religious figures mentioned before who also jointly claimed the same sources of power: Arabic linguistic sciences. This intellectual split continued to express itself, as we just saw, in various forms like "foreign" versus "indigenous", "ancient" versus "modern", "rational" versus "traditional", etc., all signifying those two main centers of the new power structures.
In such an environment, and with the affiliations of the people involved in the pursuit of those sciences, it is easy to explain the appearance of such movements as the shu'ūbīya movement, which was widespread during the first half of the ninth century, and which pitted Arab versus non-Arab in almost every field of life. By the ethnic term Arab at this period one should probably understand it to mean an Arabophile as well, or designate people who laid their claim to power through the use of the Arabic language. Anecdote after anecdote relates this sentiment, even when the purpose of the anecdote was purely entertainment. Al-Jāḥiẓ's story, for example, as reported in his book al-Bukhalā',[153] about the Arab physician Asad b. Jānī (before 850) speaks directly to this widespread sentiment. Asad was once told that his medical business was expected to flourish during a plague year, to which he answered that it was no longer possible for someone like him to make a living. When asked for the reason he said: that he was a Muslim— and people always thought, even before he became a physician or he was even born, that Muslims would never succeed in medicine; his name was Asad when it should have been Saliba, Morayel (sic), Yūḥannā or Pīrī; his agnomen (kunya) was Abū al-Ḥārith when it should have been Abū 'Īsā, Abū Zakarīyā, or Abū Ibrāhīm. Moreover, he said, he wore a white cotton cloth, when it should have been a black silk robe. And his diction was Arabic, when it should have been the tongue of the people of Jundīshāpūr.
The competition between Arabs and non-Arabs, and among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, could not have been expressed any better. Furthermore, the anecdote illustrates the clear separation between those who depended on the foreign languages to make a living, like the people of Jundīshāpūr, and those Arabs or Arabophiles who sought to establish their authority through the Arabic Language. The anecdote also illustrates why people like Asad would naturally ally themselves with their co-religionists who also sought their power through the Arabic language.
148
Qifṭi, p. 35f. Here one should also remember the similar references to "old translations" (