نوع المستند : مقاله پژوهشی
المؤلف
Professor & Chairman. Department of Arabic. Aligarh Muslim University.Aligarh-202002 U.P. INDIA
10.22034/lits.2026.244039
المستخلص
The Arab culture with Abbasid Baghdad (750-1258) as epicenter had embarked upon rendering the scientific, philosophical and literary legacy of its neighbor civilizations (Greco-Hellenistic, Syriac, Persian and Indian, chiefly) into Arabic in individual as well as official capacities under the banner of Baghdad’s Bait al-Hikmah. It was here that the wisdom corpus of the Schools of Nisibis and Edissa, the Academy of Jundishapur, the Library of Alexandria, the Imperial Library of Constantinople, and the academic depository of Buddhist Balkh was transformed into Arabic. The translation movement associated with itself a number of prolific translators such as Yaqub Al-Kindi (801-973), Hunain Ibn Ishaque (809-873), Ishaque Ibn Hunain (830-910), Thabit Ibn Qarra (826-906), Bakhtoshu Ibn Jibril (d. 970), Abu Bishr Matta Ibn Yunus (d. 940), and Qusta Ibn Luqa (820-912), among many others. Major Greco-Hellenistic scientific, mathematical, medical and philosophical texts (i.e. Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Theophrastus, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius, Brahamgupta, Aryabhatta, Charaka, Chanakya, etc) were translated, studied and commented upon in this period under the encouraging patronage of the Abbasid Caliphs al-Mansur (r. 754-775), Al-Rashid (r. 786-809) and Mamun (r. 813-833). This trend was facilitated by the encounter with Syraic Christians who maintained a rich, long-standing intellectual tradition of their own, had established Greek learning long before the arrival of the Muslims, and were often called upon to translate these texts from Greek and Syraic into Arabic. It was a historic moment for the Arab-Muslim orient to get initiated into a methodological enquiry on a plethora of cognitive and interpretative domains not confined to ontology, epistemology, natural theology, ethics, scholasticism, etc, but extended to mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine and other empirical disciplines.
