Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The term Translation Movement is a rather humble name for a phenomenon that is as culturally important as the Renaissance but that isn’t much know about outside the Arab world. Gutas is keen to point out that it was not an unreflective borrowing of materials. Muslims seemed to be quite focused in what they wanted. They had their interests – for instance no Greek literature was translated. But they did target the particular areas of science that they wanted to see developed.
Now tell us about Dimitri Gutas’s Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society.
Gutas is very keen to flag up the role of the caliphs as patrons committed to an intellectual project. He looks at the Translation Movement and looks at what was happening in the 9th century in Baghdad. He sees the Abbasid caliphs as being important in patronising the translation of scientific knowledge from Greek into Arabic and its further development by Arabic-speaking scholars and researchers. Saliba sees the Translation Movement as beginning earlier, and being, not exactly generated from the bottom up, but a movement that was initiated by people working within the bureaucracy, who were trying to get the edge in employment terms. A lot of what they were doing was mathematical and astronomical, in terms of working out the correct taxes for times based on the harvest. For people who wanted to keep ahead in the civil service, translating information of this kind from Greek into Arabic was a way of improving their employment opportunities. Either way, the term Translation Movement is a rather humble name for a phenomenon that is as culturally important as the Renaissance but that isn’t much known about outside the Arab world.
The one thing both Gutas and Saliba are keen to point out is that it was not an unreflective borrowing of materials. Muslims seemed to be quite focused in what they wanted. They had their interests – for instance, no Greek literature was translated. They had no interest in Homer. But they did target the particular areas of science that they wanted to see developed. Both scholars point out that when translation stopped that doesn’t mean Islamic science stopped. That’s an assumption that Muslim scholars were doing nothing with it, that they were just translating it and passing it on, but the point is that they were developing it. So they naturally got to the point where they surpassed the Greek heritage, they didn’t need it any more.
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Deputy-Chair of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dr Bennison has published widely on the medieval and early-modern Maghreb. She says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned much of the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were appalled by the brutal and primitive medical techniques of the early crusaders. Most Muslim towns had a hospital by the 10th Century.
