Following a comment that had been done in a recent article on the Greeks and the Arabs (cf. http://cheminsantiques. blogspot.com/2010/05/les-grecs-les-arabes-et-nous.html ), I set about reading Greek Thought, Culture Arab Dimitri Gutas. Very interesting!
I admit I skipped some parts that went into the details of any translator, but the essentials are: a painstaking, serious and thorough, which gives us a comprehensive overview movement of translation of Greek works in the early centuries of the caliphate. Again, as in the other book I mentioned here, we understand that the entities "Greeks" and "Arabs" have no intrinsic meaning, they have very different meanings depending on the time, the place, religion. Translations related languages as varied as the Pahlavi (language of Sassanian Persia), languages of India, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac (Semitic language spoken by Arab Christians including Syria) for various peoples (Arabs from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Greek and Byzantine Egypt, Persians from Iran and Iraq) and of various religions (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, Pagans), all these intersecting categories happily in a rich broth cultures!
Gutas Dimitri explains well the history of these translations, their sponsors, and even the legends built afterwards these movements translation. Legends which I thought myself well in an article earlier this year (see http://cheminsantiques.blogspot.com/2010/01/des-livres-tres-lourds.html ), I spoke of "Bayt al-Hikma (" House of Wisdom ") of al-Mamun, and it was really just a library, extremely rich, certainly, but in no case university or a translation center.
One point I found very interesting and would do well to ponder the fundamentalists all edges (and also those who accuse all Muslims to be fundamentalists!) is as follows.
One reason that has prompted some Muslim religious scholars, followed by the caliphs, to translate some Greek texts, including Plato and Aristotle, dealing with rhetoric and argument, is that they wanted to find a dialectical method to be able to counter the arguments of their opponents in religious discussions (either with non-Muslims, between Muslims of different persuasions). The funny thing is that the Byzantine Christian emperors, themselves, wanted instead to get rid of these pagan Greek texts, fearing the possibility of a reasoned discussion of their risk losing the faithful if the opponents arguing better. They were all so happy to see that the Muslims had taken possession of these texts, and thought to have played a trick on the gullible!
I do not care one or the other religion, but I think in this story, people the wisest, most humane, are those who preferred the possibility of a discussion with others Even if this discussion could involve the risk of being persuaded by one we wanted to convince (which, incidentally, did not happen: the dialogues Dimitri cite Gutas show great to listen to others, but in the end both remained in their positions, convinced of his faith!)
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