A force that shaped thought: the translation movement

This lesson asks you to describe forces that shaped the development of metaphysical thought over time, and to analyse their impact. The curriculum's examples come from neuroscience and computers. The museum offers one historical force, the Abbasid movement to render the books of the ancients into Arabic, as Ibn al-Nadim tells it; it does not analyse its impact. Other forces are for your class to add. ¹

Look at the expectation: it asks for forces and then an analysis of their impact. Separate what a source says about the cause of an event from what you conclude about its effect.

Read one report of a cause. In the Fihrist, as the record of the translation movement has it, Ibn al-Nadim relates that al-Ma'mun saw in a dream a man sitting on his throne, who told him that he was Aristotle, and answered his question about the meaning of "the good" ². Ibn al-Nadim counts this dream among the strongest causes of the production of the books ². He goes on to a practical step: al-Ma'mun wrote to the king of the Romans asking permission to translate what he chose of the ancient sciences kept in his treasury, and the king answered after refusing ². Notice that the account joins a private event, a dream, to a public one, a letter, and that Ibn al-Nadim tells us how he ranks them.

No record preserves al-Ma'mun's own words on why he wanted the books. What the records give is Ibn al-Nadim's ranking of the dream among the strongest causes, and the means. Al-Ma'mun sent a group, among them al-Hajjaj ibn Matar, Ibn al-Bitriq and Salm, who was in charge of the House of Wisdom ². The Banu Shakir, Ibn al-Nadim reports from Abu Sulayman al-Mantiqi, paid translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Thabit ibn Qurra about five hundred dinars a month ². In Ahmad Amin's account, under al-Rashid the physician Yuhanna ibn Masawayh was put in charge of translating the old medical books found in Byzantine lands ³.

The record states that this picture comes from Ibn al-Nadim alone, and that other sources that confirm or discuss it are not recorded there. Ahmad Amin, in Duha al-Islam, calls the House of Wisdom the greatest library whose report survives from the early Abbasid period, and the source states that its system and its exact location both remain shrouded in uncertainty ³. A reader therefore has a library that is named, a letter and a dream that are reported, and no plan of the building.

Ibn al-Nadim ranks a dream among the strongest causes of the translations, and also reports that the Banu Shakir paid translators about five hundred dinars a month. Which of the two could a historian check against other sources, and why does that matter for deciding what shaped later thought?

• The translation movement: Ibn al-Nadim's account, with the record's note that it rests on him alone.
• The House of Wisdom: what Ahmad Amin reports of al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun, and what stays unclear.
• Aristotle: the books of his that Ibn al-Nadim says were translated, and who interpreted them.

Read the record of the translation movement. Write down two ways Ibn al-Nadim says the ancients' books arrived, then a question you would put to a second source.