Announced by Lynne Malcolm for the late Alan Saunders

You're with the Philosophers Zone, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Sadly Alan Saunders passed away on June 15th. To celebrate the contribution he made to the discussion of ideas, we bring you the final part in the series he produced on the legacy of Greek Philosophy—first broadcast in November 2009. Here's Aland Saunders with a program that follows the journey of the classics as they spread from Greece to the Arab world and beyond.

Alan Saunders: At a time when Europe still hadn't got its act together, philosophically speaking, Arabs were busily translating and debating the ideas of the ancient Greeks. They weren't exactly the only people to do this, but really Europeans were a few hundred years behind Arabic philosophers and theologians.

So when and how and why did Greek texts find their way to the Arab world? Peter Adamson is a Professor of Philosophy at King's College, London, and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy.

Now the Arab project took place on such a scale that it's known as The Translation Movement. They translated Aristotle, they translated the great medical writer, Galen, so did they manage to translate most of what there was to be translated? Peter Adamson.

Peter Adamson: It's one of the most important and successful translation movements in history and one of the reasons it was so important and successful is because it was so comprehensive, so for example they translate pretty much everything that we now have for Aristotle, they had as well. A lot of Aristotle of course is lost permanently, and there is not any Aristotle that's lost to us that they have in Arabic, but they pretty much managed to translate everything that we've got.

They translate huge amounts of Galen, and in the case of Galen, there are in fact works, including important works on ethics and other subjects where there's no Greek version left to us, but there is an Arabic version, so they were even able to read texts that are unavailable to us sometimes, and we now have to read it in Arabic because the Greek is lost. They translated huge amounts of mathematics, so not only Euclid, but other mathematical authors, Ptolemy, he's very important, so they translated his works on astronomy and astrology, Theon of Alexandria, and other mathematical authors.

One could go on, right, so pretty much in every field of endeavour that the Greeks had engaged in, they produced translations. Two interesting exceptions, I guess, would be that they didn't translate poetry and epic so that we don't have for example an Arabic version of The Iliad and more pertinently to our interest in philosophy, they don't seem to have translated very much Plato.

Alan Saunders: When did Arab philosophers first start reading and discussing Greek philosophy?

Peter Adamson: Well it's basically in the 3rd century of the Islamic calendar, so that's about the 9th century A.D., or the end of the 8th century, and they began translating it under the Abbasid Caliphs, so that's the second Caliphate of Islamic history after the Umayyads. They came into power towards the end of the 8th century.

Alan Saunders: And something that was very important to them, and that was Aristotle's logic, wasn't it?

Peter Adamson: Yes, that's right. In fact Aristotle's logical works are among the very first works to be translated into Arabic. In fact they'd already been translated to some extent, into another Semitic language, which is Syriac, so this is an ancient language that was used in Syria as the name sort of implies, and Syriac sort of forms a bridge between Greek and Arabic. So you have to imagine that there are these monasteries in Syria, a bunch of Christian monks sitting around reading Aristotle's logic and translating the Greek into Syriac and writing commentaries on it.

Alan Saunders: Now as you've already suggested, we're not just talking about Muslim philosophers, are we? Some of the thinking and translating was done by Christians as well, and by Jews.

Peter Adamson: That's right. So in fact it's even the case that the vast majority of the translators, at least the ones we know about, especially the most important ones, were Christians, and the reason for that is sort of what I've already said which is that the translators come out of this Syrian background, so they're Greek-speaking Christians who might be bilingual or trilingual, so they might know Greek Syriac and Arabic.

So for example, probably the single most important translator of the 9th century, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, he was born in Iraq but he has a Syrian background, and he and his circle would often translate a Greek philosophical or scientific work from Greek into Syriac and then into Arabic. So they would use the Syriac as a kind of intermediary language. We actually have stories about Hunayn and other people going off or sending people to go off to look for Greek manuscripts for texts that they don't have, or even texts that they do have and want to have multiple manuscripts of. So if you think about what a modern editor of an ancient Greek work would do, they'll try to get all the manuscripts that they can, because obviously what does manuscript mean? It means it's hand-written, and you can imagine sitting down to copy out a work by Aristotle, right, how many mistakes you'd be likely to make. Any editor worth his salt will always try to get multiple manuscripts.

Alan Saunders: You say they're going off in search of manuscripts and so on, but where was all this material before they got their hands on it?

Peter Adamson: Some of it would have been available because it had been held in the monastic tradition in Syria, so again, it's sort of important to bear in mind the historical and geographical situation here. Really ever since Alexander the Great there's been a penetration of Greek culture into the Middle East and then further East into Persia and Central Asia, and certainly in the period of the late Roman Empire let's say, you've got a very widespread Greek speaking culture in Egypt and in Syria and other places in the Middle East. And that means that there's a pre-existing body of Greek literature and also a pre-existing group of people who can speak Greek. Whether they're capable of this very high level intellectual enterprise of reading, say, Aristotle in Greek is another matter.

Another possible source for them is of course the Byzantine Empire, which is right on their border, so this is a period at which there's a lot of military conflict between the Islamic world and the Christian Greek-speaking Byzantine world. But on the other hand there's also trade going back and forth, and so it's not inconceivable that there could be some kind of intellectual transmission across that border as well.

Alan Saunders: Now this flourishing in the 9th century was centred on the area that today is Baghdad; what was happening there intellectually at the time?

Peter Adamson: Actually the founding of Baghdad is not unrelated to the translation movement. It's important to know about Baghdad: it was a city actually founded by the second Abbasid Caliph, Al Mansur, who was also the person who we can properly credit with initiating the translation movement as a serious undertaking. So Baghdad was literally a new city at the end of the 8th century, and it quickly became one of the bigger cities in the world. In fact, it started attracting intellectuals and merchants from all over what we now call the Middle East, and during the mediaeval period Baghdad became a bigger city than any city in mediaeval Europe.

So it was really, as it were, where it was happening, and that meant that intellectuals from across the Islamic empire which we have to remember at that point already stretches from all the way in Western Africa, and you get into Spain, over to Central Asia, right into Afghanistan, sort of edging up against India. So it's absolutely a huge empire and people from a very wide range of that area would come to Baghdad because of their intellectual or other interests.

So you have this new caliphate coming in; they're looking for ways of stamping their legitimacy upon the Islamic people, and one of the things they do is they move the capital of the Islamic world to a new place. Another thing that they do is they start to put a lot of funding and energy behind this new translation movement, which hadn't really been going on under the Umayyads.

Alan Saunders: There was a wonderful place in Baghdad called The Palace of Wisdom, wasn't there?

Peter Adamson: The Bait al-Hikma, yes, which is something of a debated point, so often in the literature on this, you read that it was some kind of anticipation of a modern university, and it probably wasn't anything quite like that, it was probably more like a library, so a storehouse of books. But certainly it's true that whatever you think about this so-called House of Wisdom, there was certainly a lot going on in Baghdad very, very fast under the Abbasids, and by the middle of the 9th century, they're already well on the way to having translated almost everything that they could get their hands on, in terms of Greek philosophy, and also science.

So that's something that's important not to forget is that they're not only translating philosophy, which of course is more interesting to us on this show, they're also translating mathematics, engineering, astronomy, astrology, medicine, in fact I mentioned before Hunayn ibn Ishaq and one of his main interests is medicine. So it's a very broad spectrum of things that are going on. Whether or not that was attached to a kind of research centre called the House of Wisdom, I think it's a little bit harder to say.

Alan Saunders: So there was very clearly when we're talking about maths and astronomy and medicine, there was a clear practical edge to what they were doing as well as a theoretical one?

Peter Adamson: Absolutely. And I think if you're looking for reasons why the Abbasids would have done this, and it is actually... you might think 'Big deal, so they had some books translated', but it is a big deal because it was a very expensive thing to do. These translators were paid huge amounts of money, and books were hard to get one's hands on at this period, and in fact at all periods up until the modern period. So it's not the sort of thing that would just happen casually, it's the sort of thing that would happen for very good reasons, and so it's obvious , an obvious question, Why did they do this? Why did they do it and the Umayyads hadn't? So the first reason why you might do it, as you just said, it's a practical one, so you want to be able to heal diseases, you want to be able to build irrigation canals, you want to be able to build bridges, you want to be able to produce maps of your empire, and because good science was so advanced in so many areas, it was sort of an obvious thing to do.

Alan Saunders: One of the things about the philosophy though, is that it involves ideas which have the potential to challenge the orthodox ones. Why were they so interested in doing that, that they were willing to put in the time and resources (as you just mentioned) involved in translating them?

Peter Adamson: The idea that Greek philosophy might be somehow problematic for someone who's operating within a Muslim context, or for that matter a Christian context, that is one that crops up pretty early in the tradition, but I don't think it's something that they see as maybe obvious as it is in retrospect. So someone we haven't mentioned yet who I've done a lot of work on, al-Kindi, is really the first philosopher to write in Arabic, and he clearly thinks that Islam and Greek philosophy just go together, hand-in-hand, so he thinks that they basically teach the same things about the same subjects, in many cases.

So for example, he gives arguments for the oneness of God that are grounded in the Greek tradition, so he's basically just trying to show you that Greek philosophy can prove something that you're supposed to think anyway, if you're a Muslim. And then only once it started to be translated, did some people start saying, 'Hang on a minute, some of this looks pretty disturbing'.

Alan Saunders: What sort of things would they have found disturbing or confronting?

Peter Adamson: While he does the methodological problem, and then there's the problem of actual content. So methodologically some people said things like 'Why do we need this foreign wisdom when we have the Holy Qur'an to tell us what the truth is?' Which is sort of a very simple kind of a judgment, but a very powerful one. And pretty soon, this crystallised into more specific versions of the same objection.

So for example, about a generation or two after al-Kindi, there is a famous debate between a grammarian, so an expert in Arabic grammar, and an expert on Aristotlean logic, and in this debate the grammarian, al-Sirafi, said 'Why do we need this sort of pretentious imported Greek logic to tell us how to think and how to speak when we have this perfectly serviceable discipline of Arabic grammar? Because grammar is just the rules for speaking correctly, so we don't need logic to tell us how to speak correctly. We don't need to import foreign wisdom when our own wisdom is sufficient.' So that's the methodological level.

In terms of actual positions that philosophers held that might disturb a Muslim, there are a few that are quite well-known, so one of them is the eternity of the world. Aristotle had taught that the world is eternal, and a lot of Muslims and Christians and Jews for that matter, felt that if the world was created by God, then it clearly couldn't be eternal, it must have come into being with the first moment in time. That's a big debate which runs and runs through the tradition.

Another issue for example, is what we should think about the afterlife, so Aristotlean and Platonist philosophers typically believed that the soul outlives the death of the body, but they might have various surprising views about the way in which the soul outlives the death of the body, so for example they might think that only our intellect survives the death of the body, and they might further make it very hard to see how the body could be resurrected, which would be a problem for Muslims and Christians.

Alan Saunders: Now you've already mentioned al-Kindi, one of the Mu'tazilites, a group of rationalistic Islamic theorists.

Peter Adamson: Well he himself wasn't a Mu'tazilite. It's an interesting question, how he relates through the Mu'tazila or Mu'tazilites. They were a group of rational theologians at the time who were actually supported by the Abbasid caliphs, at least for a little while, and he seems to have had some kind of, as it were, intellectual, shared belief with the Mu'tazila. For example, something I mentioned earlier is that Kindi thinks you can use Greek arguments to prove the oneness of God, but he's clearly not, as it were, a theologian, because what they were doing was giving arguments on the basis of Qur'an and the Hadith, which are sayings about things the Prophet said and did, so these are the two main sources for Islamic theology. And Kindi certainly doesn't argue like that. There are a couple of works where he mentions passages from the Qur'an, and then tries to explain them philosophically. But what he was doing was a completely new thing. He was drawing entirely on the Greek philosophical tradition, for what he was doing.

Alan Saunders: He was apparently the first Arabic thinker to identify himself as a philosopher. So was this a new idea to Arabic thought? Philosophy as opposed to Theology?

Peter Adamson: Yes, I think so. So maybe the most telling example of this is the Arabic world for philosophy, 'falsafa', and as you can hear from the word, it's actually based on the, and is really a transliteration of the Greek word, "philosophia," which is where we get our word 'philosophy'.

So if you call yourself a 'faylasuf', a philosopher in Arabic, in a way you're indicating that what you do has a foreign provenance. So if you say, 'I'm doing falsafa' and you're doing whatever you're doing, whether it's theology or grammar or whatever it is, then what I'm doing is based on Greek wisdom, and what you're doing isn't. And although someone like Kindi was very keen to sort of get everyone to accept this Greek heritage as useful and harmonious with Islam, a lot of other people were willing to attack this stuff precisely because it was foreign. And so pretty soon the position started hardening, and instead of this more conciliatory attitude towards theology that you find in Kindi, you have later philosophers like al-Farabi and then even later, Averroes, taking the position that theology is a kind of second-rate form of philosophy, which does it by using passages from the Qur'an and the Hadith, instead of just arguing from first principles as a proper philosopher would.

Alan Saunders: One of his most Greek-influenced works is On Dispelling Sadness, which seems to take some of its inspiration from one of the Hellenic philosophers, Epictetus. What can you tell us about that?

Peter Adamson: Yes, that's an interesting and very unusual case of a passage which seems to show some kind of Stoic influence because Hellenistic philosophy, unlike neo-Platonism, and Aristotleanism, is very uninfluential in the Arabic tradition. So for example, they don't seem to have known almost anything about Epicureanism, and there are now Arabic philosophers who are Epicurean in their outlook. And also, you don't really have a tradition of Scepticism, based on the Hellenistic school Scepticism.

They certainly have some kind of exposure to Stoic ideas and one of them seems to have been this idea from Epictetus that our life in this world is like someone who's on a sea voyage, this is all in Epictetus and it's expanded in a much more flowery way via Kindi. So you have to imagine a bunch of people who are on a ship, and then they're allowed to disembark from the ship on an island or something. And so they're roaming around. And the important thing is not to get too sort of caught up in the things that you're allowed to see while you're disembarked, which is compared to our life between birth and death, because you'll be called back to the ship (which is death) and you have to go back very quickly and easily without lamenting because you'll get the best seats on the ship.

And so the people who kind of get caught up in the lights of this land that they've disembarked to from the ship, they're the ones who have the great difficulty getting back, and are punished by thorns and wild animals as they try to fight their way back to the ship, and then once they do get on the ship, they presumably have to stand, like on the Tube in London. There's a very charming kind of anecdote. But actually that whole image it's typical of that work, 'On Dispelling Sorrow because in that, al-Kindi is basically - I mean it has philosophical elements in it, for sure, but it's not as it were, a work of technical philosophy, it's much more as it were, popular philosophical literature. And that's something that was an important aspect of the Greek heritage in Arabic. So you have a lot of texts that are sort of pleasant and entertaining and maybe funny, which exhort you to be a good person, using anecdotes and other material derived from the Greek tradition.

Alan Saunders: There was a second flourishing of ideas under the translations a few hundred years later in the 12th and 13th centuries, the 12th and 13th centuries of the Christian era. Why was that?

Peter Adamson: If you're talking about Greek into Arabic, they'd pretty much translated everything that they can get their hands on by the 10th century, so what you have a couple of centuries later, which h is very important, is the translation, as it were, from the Arabic text back into the European context in the form of Latin. So especially in Spain and in Italy, you have this second big translation movement, which is translating Aristotle and other works, including their commentaries by Averroes and the works by Avincenna, translating all of this from Arabic into Latin.

Alan Saunders: None of which made any difference at all when it came to Christian attitudes towards Islam during the Crusades, did it?

Peter Adamson: Right. So that's maybe the more unfortunate flipside. In the 12th and 13th century, I've been thinking recently about the fact that Averroes an almost exact contemporary of Saladin who is the Muslim General and (sultan) who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders. So, what's going on again, maybe could be more easily understood in geographical terms, because even though in the near East you've got this war going on, or several wars going on between the Crusaders and various Muslim military forces, in for example, Spain, what's happened is a kind of gradual pushing back of the frontier between the Christian world and the Islamic world, so that the Muslim political rulers have been pushed down south out of Spain, and that's already going on in the 12th century.

What that leaves behind is a bunch of Arabic-speaking Jews and Muslims who could then collaborate with Christians to produce Latin texts, and this in fact had happened. So one very important centre of translation is Toledo, because once Toledo had been re-taken by the Christians, you've got a bunch of Arabic-speaking people with the text right there, and this is not very far from where Averroes actually lived, he lived in Cordoba in the south of Spain, so that's really the more fruitful frontier for interpenetration of the Arabic speaking Muslim and Jewish tradition and the Latin speaking Christian tradition.

Italy's another important place where translations happen, and for similar reasons, right, because it's in the south, so it's a place where people are coming through, like merchants and other people who know Arabic.

Alan Saunders: Somebody who certainly knows Arabic, Peter Adamson, from King's College, London.

And the music this week is from The Baghdad Lute, music by Naseer Shamma inspired by the philosophy of al-Farabi.

The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Steven Tilley. I'm Alan Saunders, 'bye for now.

Lynne Malcolm back announcement.