Islamic Philosophies

Contemporaneous with the circle of al-Kindi, the Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873) initiated a tradition of sophisticated translation of Greek philosophical, medical, and scientific works into Syriac and Arabic. In contrast to the al-Kindi group, Hunayn's group of translators and their successors made extensive efforts to track down works for translation, exercised greater care in selecting and collating manuscripts, translated by consideration of whole phrases or sentences rather than individual words, and standardized much vocabulary. Translation, particularly of works by Galen and other physicians, was a lucrative business, and some of its practitioners were paid well by wealthy families for quality translations and the revision or retranslation of earlier versions. The enormous wealth of translations of this period recorded in the Fihrist or book catalogs of Ibn al-Nadim bears witness to the fertile ground for the rise of a new Aristotelianism in Baghdad fostered by Christian translators and philosophers of Syriac background, such as Abu Bashr Matta, Ishaq ibn Hunayn, and many others who were able to consult Syriac as well as Arabic translations. F. W. Zimmermann notes that "in the contemporary milieu of Baghdad the predominant language of Christian scholarship still was Syriac. Syriac Christianity, owing to its roots in the Greek church and a considerable tradition of Hellenic learning in Syriac, had a virtual monopoly of access to the Greek legacy" (al-Farabi, 1981, lxxvii). The tradition this movement inherited was that of late Aristotelianism of the Alexandrian School. And while he apparently did not know Syriac and depended on his teachers and colleagues for philosophical sources, the representative of this tradition most well-known today is al-Farabi.