150 | CHAPTER 5
According to the Alexandria to Baghdad narrative, found in not only
Fārābī but also the historian Masʿūdī (d. 956) and elsewhere, once the teach-
ing of medicine and Aristotelian logic died out at Alexandria it was trans-
ferred to Antioch under the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (717–20). It persisted
there until only one teacher remained, with two pupils who eventually left
“taking the books with them.” One went to Harrān in northern Mesopota-
mia close to Edessa, and the other to Marw far away in what is today Turk-
menistan. By these routes the erudition of the Greeks eventually reached
Baghdad, where the scholarly caliph Maʾmūn especially favored it—as had
several of his predecessors, but our narratives’ common source was evidently
well disposed to Maʾmūn. Fārābī’s and Masʿūdī’s accounts both highlight the
role of Christian teachers in disseminating philosophy.^109 With one of them,
Fārābī himself studied the fuller version of Aristotelian logic up to the end of
the Posterior analytics.
In other words, Fārābī locates himself in a clearly articulated and reformed
tradition of Aristotelian studies, ultimately derived from the master himself,
but to whose purification and organization the Emperor Augustus had per-
sonally contributed almost exactly a millennium earlier. We need not take
literally the historical data provided by this narrative. It would be pedantic to
object that it neglects cities such as Nisibis^110 or Constantinople^111 which
had also been favored by doctors and philosophers—not to mention monas-
teries on the Fertile Crescent highway, such as Qenneshre. What the narra-
tive does accurately reflect is ninth- and tenth- century Baghdadi intellectu-
als’ awareness that their books and teaching techniques derived either directly
or indirectly from Alexandria,^112 and that this transmission had been effected
by individual teachers and by books they carried with them. The discovery of
neglected manuscripts in libraries is not excluded, and we know that such
finds occurred. But here the ideal is the reception of learning from living
sources, and specifically from Syriac scholars (as implied by the prominence
assigned Antioch and Harrān) whose intellectual genealog y could be traced
through the Greek schools of Alexandria to Aristotle himself. The transla-
tion movement into Syriac is not evoked at all. But the centrality of Syria and
109 Cf. C. Ferrari, “La scuola aristotelica di Bagdad,” SFIM 352–79.
110 Becker, Fear of God [5:94] 92–95, 126–54; S. Stroumsa, “Soul- searching at the dawn of Jewish
philosophy: A hitherto lost fragment of al- Muqammas’s Twenty chapters,” Ginzei qedem 3 (2007) 143*.
111 B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge (eds), Biblical commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore
and Hadrian (Cambridge 1994) 50–64. M. Roueché, “Stephanus the Alexandrian philosopher, the
Kanon and a seventh- century millennium,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 74 (2011)
1–30, and “Stephanus the Philosopher and Ps. Elias,” Byzantine and Modern Greek studies 36 (2012)
120–38, questions Stephanus’s removal from Alexandria to Constantinople, but upholds Ps.- Elias’s pres-
ence there.
112 C. Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: Von der spätantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur
arabischen Enzyklopädie (Frankfurt am Main 1985); G. Schoeler (tr. U. Vagelpohl, ed. J. E. Montgomery),
The oral and the written in early Islam (Abingdon 2006) 46–49.