BY RAFIQ A.

TSCHANNEN ON APRIL 10, 2018 • ( LEAVE A

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From Baghdad to
Barcelona: The
Anxiety of Influence
in the Transmission
of the Greek and
Arabic Sciences

By:
Glen M. Cooper
Drawing on Harold Bloom’s model of poetic influence and
supersession in his famous book, “The Anxiety of
Influence,” and considering several historical cases of
cross-cultural reception of the natural sciences from the
Middle Ages that involved translation, this paper sketches
a dynamic for understanding how one culture receives the
intellectual riches of another. It argues further that the
relative or perceived power relationship of the translator to
the source culture can significantly affect the quality and
usefulness of the translations. For example, a translator
within a victorious culture, with an imperial language,
tends to handle the source materials that he acquired from
a vanquished culture with greater confidence than a
translator in a self-perceived position of inferiority, who
may be trying to imitate, catch up, or is defensively
preserving a heritage that he fears will be lost. The former
is exemplified by the 9th-century translations from Greek
into Arabic that took place in Baghdad, and the latter by
the earliest phase of the translations from Arabic into
Latin that took place in Europe, 12th/13th centuries. Lastly,
“anxieties of influence” are adduced as a partial
explanation for the systematic attempts to purge Greek
thought from Islamic civilization associated with al-
Ghazali et al., and to erase Arabic thinkers from the
intellectual genealogy of the West, beginning in the
Renaissance.

Figure 1. Article Image Banner

***

Note of Editor: “From Baghdad to Barcelona: The Anxiety

of Influence in the Transmission of the Greek and Arabic
Sciences”[1] (http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/transmission-greek-and-arabic-

sciences#_ftn1)
sciences#_ftn1)
article was presented in the 93rd Annual
Medieval Academy of America Meeting, held on 3rd March
2018 in Atlanta (GA), USA. We are grateful to the author for
permitting publishing this article on the Muslim Heritage
website.

***

Introduction
500 years ago, in an academic setting such as this, we would
be discussing the works of Avicenna, Averroes, Algorismi,
Alhazen, alongside those of Plato, Aristotle, Galen and
Euclid. Every educated person in the West knew who these
Muslim thinkers were and that they had contributed much
to the West. Nowadays, few Westerners have heard of
them. What happened? In brief, their ideas became part of
the genealogy of Western knowledge, and then they passed
into oblivion, disavowed by some Western thinkers, and
forgotten by others. Why do we in the West not celebrate
the Arabic/Islamic part of our heritage? I argue here that
the historical process of translation and appropriation of
the intellectual legacy of another culture involves power
relationships that affect how the recipient culture receives
and remembers the legacy of the received culture.

Figure 2. Painting depicting Muslim scholars, Syed

Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi (1930-1987) (Source
(http://www.worldsultimate.net/sadequain-the-legendary-ultimate-
 artist-and-calligrapher.htm))
The Muslim Times
FOSTERING UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD IN OUR GLOBAL VILLAGE
In the case just mentioned, western Europeans at first
encountered Arabic thinkers with awe, from the position of
a less advanced culture, eager to learn what they could
from them. Gradually, however, Western thinkers saw
themselves as heirs equally of Greek and Islamic thinkers,
and eventually as the rivals of the Arabs as heirs of the
classical past. By the time of the Renaissance, there were
two strands of thinkers in the West. One group continued
to seek valuable insights from the Arabic intellectual
tradition, viewing the classical tradition as a continuity
from Greco-Roman, to Arabic, to Byzantine, and lastly, to
Latin Europe, with themselves as the beneficiaries of this
rich tradition. This group included Guillaume Postel and
others. The other group, whom we know as the Humanists,
sought a more direct route to the Greco-Roman heritage,
and bypassed the Arabs and Byzantines, whom they
labeled as corruptors of the pure classical heritage. This
group included: Niccolò Leoniceno, Giovanni Manardo, and
Leonhart Fuchs. The latter strand won out in the West,
which is why I, for example, had to take a special course on
medieval philosophy before I even heard about the rich
intellectual debt of the West to Islamic civilization. Here I
consider three representative cases—more are discussed in
the article version of this talk. They are: 1) The Graeco-
Arabic translations of the High Abbasid period, 2) The
Arabo-Latin translations of the post-Carolingian period,
and 3) the Byzantine reception of Arabic authors after the
devastating Islamic conquests, during the Macedonian
Renaissance of the 9th-10th Centuries.

The Emergence of Arabic as an Imperial

Language
Arabic began as a tribal dialect of Western Arabia, but with
the rise of Islam and the conquests in the 7th Century, it
became the language of the Islamic empire, from western
India to Spain. The Persian Empire was completely
conquered, and the Byzantine Empire was severely reduced
in size and power. Under the early Umayyads, Greek and
Pahlavi continued to be used in administrating those areas
that formerly belonged to those two empires. However,
Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705), in order to centralize his
power, Arabized everything, and standardized coinage,
weights and measures. Arabic gradually became what Latin
would become in the West: the language of intellectual,
religious, and legal discourse for peoples whose mother
languages were something else throughout Islamdom.
Thus, Arabic was promoted at the expense of Greek,
Persian, and Syriac, the languages of the conquered
peoples, who had much older intellectual traditions.

Figure 3. Arabic letters transformed into a high art culture,

traditional calligraphy (Source
(http://moslemcalligraphy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/definition-of-islamic-

calligraphy.html))
As a consequence of the Abbasid transfer of power from
Damascus to Baghdad (750 CE) and the establishment of
the new regime, the Arab conquerors realized that their
subject peoples had intellectual legacies with much to offer
to the new Empire. Arithmetic for accounts, geometry for
land surveys, astronomy for timekeeping and astrology;
philosophy was useful for the development of theology
and religious law, and it along with rhetoric were useful for
debating with Christians and Jews. All this needed to be
translated into Arabic. As George Saliba has argued,
beginning in late Umayyad times, some of the early
translators came from families who had previously served
in the Byzantine or Sassanian administrations, but who
had been displaced by court-appointed men who knew
only Arabic. These men found careers in translating, and
laid the foundation of the epoch-defining Greco-Arabic
Translation Movement of 9th and 10th C. Baghdad.
 Figure 4. The alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, from a 15th
century European portrait of Geber, Codici
Ashburnhamiani 1166 (Source)

Arabic was now the language of the Islamic Empire under

Abbasid rule, its capital, Baghdad, the greatest city in the
world. Ancient thought was imperialized, i.e. to
appropriated, naturalized within the Islamic imperial and
religious cosmology, and brought into subjection. The
Abbasids considered themselves victors in a multifaceted
rivalry with Byzantium, which included a contest over the
legacy of the Hellenistic world.[2]
(http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/transmission-greek-and-arabic-sciences#_ftn2)

The Abbasids claimed a translatio studii et imperii from

Constantinople to Baghdad. The swiftness with which
Muslim armies had conquered most of the Byzantine
Empire, and had laid siege to Constantinople twice within
the first century of Islam (although unsuccessfully) was
evidence of God’s favor toward Islam. The Byzantines were
culturally degenerate, for which Christianity was to blame.
The Iconoclastic conflicts, which gripped Byzantium on
and off for over a century, and resulted in the ultimate
victory of the pro-icon faction (Iconodoules), were, in
Muslim eyes, divine punishment on the infidel Christians
for their idolatry, one of the worst sins, according to Islam.
So, although the Byzantines spoke a form of Greek, they
had lost both the capacity for and the rightful heirship to
the ancient Greek intellectual legacy.

However, the Arabic translations were not a simple

transfer of Greek thought into an Arabic context. In the
case of philosophy, all of the ancient schools were dead—
Stoicism, Epicureanism, Peripateticism, Platonism—their
chains of transmission from master to student were
broken in Late Antiquity, as Dimitri Gutas and Pierre
Hadot have discussed. There was a disorganized mass of
writings, but no living guide to sort it all out and show both
what was most important as well as the proper order to
follow in mastering philosophy.[3]
(http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/transmission-greek-and-arabic-sciences#_ftn3)

The translations were done a work at a time—a gradual

appropriation and assimilation—without a broad overview
of the doctrines of any school, at least at first, nor of the
Greek intellectual legacy in general.
Figure 5. Socrates and his Students, illustration from ‘Kitab
Mukhtar al-Hikam wa-Mahasin al-Kilam’ by Al-Mubashir,
Turkish School, (13th c) Photo by Bridgeman (Source
(https://aeon.co/ideas/arabic-translators-did-far-more-than-just-
preserve-greek-philosophy))

MORE:

http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/transmission-
greek-and-arabic-sciences
(http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/transmission-greek-and-arabic-
sciences)

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