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Systematisation and margins of the translation of the sciences of the ancient into Arabic

Paper · 2023 · Tagourramt El Kbaich, Abdallah

Summary

This is a historical, critical study of how the Arab-Islamic world turned the transfer of "sciences of the ancients" (mainly Greek, also Indo-Iranian learning) into an organised enterprise in the Middle Ages, and where that enterprise reached its limits. It is not an empirical or computational paper. It works through close reading of classical Arabic sources and modern scholarship. The argument follows four steps:

  1. Caliph al-Ma'mūn's reported dream of Aristotle, read as the symbolic starting point of the first state translation project.
  2. al-Ŷāḥiz's previously unpublished ideas about translation, which served that project.
  3. The link between those ideas and the Mu'tazilī doctrine, which the Abbasid authorities adopted to speed up the transfer.
  4. The ideological reasons translation declined in the Islamic East, after which its accumulated output became raw material for a translation circle in al-Andalus that passed the knowledge on to Latin Europe.

The paper matters because it frames translation as a tool of politics and identity-building, not as neutral linguistic transfer.

Key points

  • Two kinds of science. Following Samsó, the paper separates native Arab-Islamic sciences (religion, language, literature) from inherited ʻulūm al-awā'il. The inherited group covers exact and natural sciences, medicine, mechanical engineering (ʻilm al-ḥiyal) and philosophy.
  • Practical motives. Abbasid patrons such as al-Manṣūr (754–775) and al-Ma'mūn (813–833) had concrete reasons for sponsoring translation. Aḥmad Amīn links al-Manṣūr's interest in medicine to his stomach complaints and notes his belief in astrology.
  • The dream story. It comes from Ibn al-Nadīm's al-Fihrist, written roughly 150 years after al-Ma'mūn died. In it, Aristotle ranks what is best: first what reason approves, then what sharia approves, then what people approve.
  • Translation as contested ground. In the codification era (ʻaṣr al-tadwīn, 8th–9th c.), some groups used translation to Islamise the cultural record. Persian and Syriac translators used it to insert their own heritage into the dominant culture.
  • Timeline. The eastern movement is assumed to have ended around the late 10th to early 11th century. Its legacy then moved westward via al-Andalus.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author does not ask whether the dream really happened; he asks what the narrative was meant to justify, treating a source as evidence of its context.
  • I2. The roughly 150-year gap between the event and its written record is treated as analytically important in itself.
  • I3. The dream sets up an explicit ranking of authorities (reason, then religious law, then public opinion) for deciding what is best.
  • I4. Samsó's split between native and inherited sciences tags each piece of knowledge with its provenance.
  • I5. The author chose a fixed, scholarly transliteration scheme to keep the exact form of names and terms from the sources.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Speech-act and stance analysis could tag reported stories with their apparent purpose (legitimising, persuading) separately from their truth value.
  • I2 (world): The text world could store event time and report time as distinct attributes, so answers can flag claims recorded long after the fact.
  • I3 (learn): Disagreements among witness parsers or teacher tiers could be settled by a declared, inspectable priority order, which keeps the arbitration explainable.
  • I4 (world): The compiled knowledge layer could record where each fact came from (WordNet, FrameNet, Wikidata, induced), making trust and conflict tracing explicit.
  • I5 (tokens): A stable normalisation policy for diacritic-bearing foreign names would keep lemmas and entity links consistent across texts.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universitat de BarcelonaBarcelona · Spain8 works · 1,246 citations

📚 Shelves 5 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Social Sciences · 744 works Sociology and Political Science · 221 works Philosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1 Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Tagourramt El Kbaich, Abdallah. 2023. Systematisation and margins of the translation of the sciences of the ancient into Arabic. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.6035/monti.2023.15.09

@inproceedings{abdallah2023systematisation,
  title = {{Systematisation and margins of the translation of the sciences of the ancient into Arabic}},
  author = {Tagourramt {El Kbaich, Abdallah}},
  booktitle = {MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.6035/monti.2023.15.09},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6035/monti.2023.15.09}
}

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