Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

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of Syriac scholarship is unmistakable—and not unjustified, despite being im-
posed by a Baghdadi perspective that plays down the Alexandrian teaching
model’s simultaneous dissemination to a spectrum of other destinations
from Canterbury via Italy and Constantinople to Armenia and, as we saw,
northeast Iran.^113 From Constantinople we have a closely interlinked group
of seventeen philosophical manuscripts copied c. 850–75, whose origin
some seek in the removal perhaps of a single scholar and his books from
seventh- century Alexandria.^114 Several of the texts derive from late Alexan-
drian circles, so this “philosophical collection” provides an interesting specu-
lative parallel to the Alexandria to Baghdad narrative and its emphasis on
individuals and their libraries. It may also reflect demand for Greek manu-
scripts triggered by the early Abbasid translation movement.^115
Behind the Alexandria to Baghdad narrative’s concern with familiar Syr-
ian terrain and teachers there lurks anxiety about the status of the Greeks.
Because Fārābī stands at the receiving end of a teaching tradition, it is hard
for him to diminish its Christian phase. His own teacher was a Christian, as
he concedes in the passage just summarized. But other Muslim writers were
less reticent about hailing philosophy in its new, caliphal phase as something
qualitatively different from what was on offer in rival East Rome.^116 The East
Romans read and spoke Greek after a fashion, nobody denied that. But oth-
erwise they were not to be compared with the true Greeks, the Ancients,
men like Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Galen, Democritus, Hippocrates, or
Plato. These, not the Christian Romans, are the Greeks, argued Jāhiz, man of
letters and Abbasid propagandist, who died in 868.

Their religion was different from the religion of the East Romans, and

their culture (adab) was different from the culture of the East Romans.

They were scientists, while these people are artisans who appropriated

the books of the Greeks on account of geographical proximity.^117

Masʿūdī painted a similar picture, with more strongly contrasted colors:

During the time of the ancient Greeks, and for a little time during the

Roman Empire [probably he means the first two centuries of the First

Millennium, up to the time of Galen], the philosophical sciences kept

on growing and developing, and scholars and philosophers were re-

spected and honoured. They developed their theories on natural sci-

113 Bischoff and Lapidge, Biblical commentaries [5:111] 255–59; Calzolari [5:65], in D’Ancona
(ed.), Libraries [3:3] 262–63.
114 But see the articles by Roueché [5:111].
115 See various contributions to D’Ancona (ed.), Libraries [3:3], e.g., 54–57, 145–48, 155–65,
167–75; Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 181–86.
116 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 85–90.
117 Al- Jāhiz, Letters [ed. ʿA. M. Hārūn (Cairo 1964–79)] 3.315 (tr. Gutas, Greek thought [5:92]
87).