by formulating the doctrine of the hidden Imam, with its implication that an
inner faith would substitute, during the indefinite future, for political activism.
If we separate the Jewish positions (since they would have been ignored by the
Muslims, and in any case paralleled Muslim factions), we still find seven or
eight distinctive stances struggling for attention in the intellectual field (see
Figure 8.2). This strains the limits of the law of small numbers, and it is not
surprising that only a few of these positions were successfully propagated to
succeeding generations.
Most of these thinkers were at Baghdad. Basra had had its last gasp of
activity; by the end of the century, its lineages had shifted to Nishapur, far to
the east in Persia. Baghdad hung on for a few more generations, but hereafter
its philosophers became increasingly embattled by anti-intellectual forces. Al-
ready by the end of the 900s, Persian cities such as Rayy (near modern Tehran)
were becoming rival centers, and henceforth creativity was much more scat-
tered, not only in Persia but also in central Asian Khwarazm and Afghanistan,
as well as back to the Mediterranean coast, where Cairo, Damascus, and
Aleppo acquired intermittent prominence. With this geographical dispersion,
in later centuries the philosophical networks became less concentrated, their
creativity more sparse.
Greek philosophy, falsafa, had by the early 900s largely passed the era of
translations. The philosophers and logicians up to now had been almost
entirely non-Muslim—Christians, together with some Sabians (Babylonian star
worshippers) among the astronomer-mathematicians. Since translation ceased
to be patronized by the court, the main social support of falsafa was the
practice of medicine. In the Greek medicine of antiquity, the doctor was not
merely a dispenser of cures but a public figure; arguing and lecturing was a
major part of legitimating medicine at a time when its practice was not very
effective. This style carried over into the Islamic context. Isaac Israeli, the first
notable cosmopolitan Jewish philosopher, was a court physician at Tunis. His
medical books, translated from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, were more
famous than his philosophy, and served as the medium by which his name as
a philosopher became known. The same would happen to another doctor, Ibn
Sina.
Galen’s and Aristotle’s logic was part of the medical apprenticeship and
provided the terrain on which took place much of the innovations of the
falasifa. Logic was treated broadly, as a means of classifying the disciplines of
knowledge and expounding the modes of reality as well as of argument.^13
The doctor Abu Bishr Matta, and his pupil al-Farabi, and in turn his pupil
Yahia ibn ÀAdi (another doctor), led the logical developments of the “Baghdad
school”; two generations later, Ibn Sina would construct the most comprehen-
sive treatment of logic to date.
408 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths