The encyclopedia is divided into four parts: 1)
mathematics, which includes essays on astronomy,
geography, and Aristotle’s logic; 2) natural science,
including theories of matter, botany, biology, body
and soul, death and resurrection; 3) psychological
and rational sciences; and 4) religious sciences.
The Neoplatonic theory of creation by emanation
from a single creator, together with the notion that
all creation was organized according to a hierar-
chical pattern (an idea that had circulated widely
in the pre-Islamic Middle East), was a dominant
theme in the encyclopedia. Indeed, the ency-
clopedia’s avowed purpose was to teach people
how to purify their souls of bodily and worldly
attachments and ascend back to the divine source
from which they had come. The most famous
section of the encyclopedia is the lengthy debate
between animals and humans, which questioned
the moral right humans had to exploit animals as
slaves. The debate ended by affirming that animals
indeed were inferior to humans, but they had their
own intrinsic worth as God’s creatures, requiring
humans to treat them humanely.
See also adab; arabic langUage and litera-
tUre; ismaili shiism.
Further reading: Lenn Evan Goodman, trans., The Case
of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn:
A Tenth-Century Ecological Fable of the Pure Brethren
of Basra (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978); Sayyed
Hossein Nasr, Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Boulder,
Colo.: Shambhala, 1978), 25–104; Ian Netton, Muslim
Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Breth-
ren of Purity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982).
Buddhism and Islam
Buddhism and Islam are two of the world’s major
religious traditions, and they have influenced each
other at points throughout history. Both religions
came into being in part through the isolated
meditations and subsequent spiritual insights of
the respective movements’ founders, Siddhartha
Gautama (known later as the Buddha) in the sixth
century b.c.e. on the southern border of Nepal,
and Muhammad in seventh-century c.e. Arabia.
After the seventh century, significant interactions
between Buddhists and Muslims took place along
trade routes through Central Asia known as the
Silk Road. Through these routes, Islam made sig-
nificant inroads into Central Asia and China begin-
ning in the seventh century. Though Buddhism in
Central Asia started to decline with the political
expansion of Islam at this time, the region retained
Buddhist influences, and the Mongol invasions of
the 13th century helped to further bring Buddhist
influences from the east into this largely Muslim
region. Accompanying Muslim political expansion
eastward, Islam spread from Iran and aFghanistan
into South Asia, where its eventual political ascen-
dancy coincided with the 12th-century disappear-
ance of Buddhism in the regions of Afghanistan and
pakistan, where it had existed in its “Serindian”
form, and in india, its birthplace.
Over the centuries, Buddhists and Muslims
have influenced each other in the fields of medi-
cine, art, architecture, and literature, evidenced,
for example, in the blend of Muslim and Buddhist
ideas in the Tibetan Muslim literary classic The
Autobiography of Kha che Pha lu. Another example
of such mutual influence is the life story of the
great Sufi ibrahim ibn adham (d. 778), whose
hagiography bears striking thematic resemblance
to that of the Buddha, for he renounced his life
as the prince of Balkh—a region of present day
Afghanistan, where Buddhism flourished in the
early centuries c.e. prior to the arrival of Islam
in the eighth century—for a pious, ascetic life.
Significant cultural contact between Muslims and
Buddhists is also evidenced in the 13th-century
world history called Jami al-tawarikh, written by
a Persian official named Rashid al-Din (d. 1318),
which includes a biography of the Buddha in its
chapter on India, discusses Buddhist concepts
in Islamic terms, and documents the presence
of 11 Buddhist texts circulating in Persia in Ara-
bic translation. The destruction in 2001 of the
Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by theK 116 Buddhism and Islam