Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

146 | CHAPTER 5 whole corpus (and Plato!). The father of encyclopedism, the catalogue of whose works served as a general classif ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 147 putatiousness, the Prophet himself can be said to have lived near the fringes of Aristotle’s sphere ...

148 | CHAPTER 5 false, but oblique acknowledgment of his influence on Alexandrian scholar- ship and the Museum.^97 Under the Pto ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 149 main cause of this decline was said to be student laziness, thanks to which basic medical textbooks ...

150 | CHAPTER 5 According to the Alexandria to Baghdad narrative, found in not only Fārābī but also the historian Masʿūdī (d. 95 ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 151 of Syriac scholarship is unmistakable—and not unjustified, despite being im- posed by a Baghdadi per ...

152 | CHAPTER 5 ence—on the body, the intellect, the soul—and on the quadrivium, i.e. on arithmetic,... geometry,... astronomy,. ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 153 texts On the virtues of the soul.^121 Evidently he knew Greek; as for his own books, they were in Sy ...

154 | CHAPTER 5 tween the Greek and the Qurʾanic mind is to blame, along with neglect of the Syriac intermediary.^124 From the F ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 155 was called, literally the science of discourse/controversy, owed a lot to earlier Christian apologet ...

156 | CHAPTER 5 predicate, among which those relating to quality were most relevant to dis- cussion of Allāh’s attributes. The C ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 157 Maʾmūn (813–33) required the religious scholarly elite explicitly to accept their doctrine that the ...

158 | CHAPTER 5 pursuit of philosophy in its own right as well as in relation to theolog y.^148 In addition to coordinating tran ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 159 unique eloquence the formation of an Islamic synthesis on Greek founda- tions, partly through creati ...

160 | CHAPTER 5 lated. The possibility of rendering Greek accurately into Arabic, and the re- lated issue of the primacy of gram ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 161 with the Aristotelian commentators, was profound. At Bukhārā, “the meeting- place of the most unique ...

162 | CHAPTER 5 this synthesis was the study of the rational soul and the related general ques- tions of how one knows (epistemo ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 163 nium—must take account that he was a Muslim philosopher and a central figure in the growth of kalām, ...

6 EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 LAW AND RELIGION The oriental philosophy of the Gnostics, the dark abyss of predestination and grace, an ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 165 Isagoge especially influential.^2 Indissociable from this didactic emphasis was the spread of encycl ...