Quick Take: No, Muslim Scribes & Translators Didn't Save the Graeco-Roman Legacy

All the same, Islamic propagandists have spent centuries arguing otherwise

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I’ve been puzzled for a long time by what one might call “intellectual urban legends.”

These are not, of course, simple “urban legends” as defined by Wikipedia as a modern genre of folklore. Urban legends are modern stories that people tell because they include some alleged teaching about, say, the health complications that may result from drinking Coke straight from cans; or about governments’ general nefariousness, exemplified by tall tales like those about the Roswell Incident.

“Intellectual urban legends” are similar to “urban legends” in that they contain some sort of moral or teaching; but they are not widely popular. Rather, they’re only well-known among well-read people, and often recirculated by middlebrow media of the sort all of us tend to peruse or subscribe to, places like the New Yorker (a magazine I quite enjoy, thank you very much.)

Among the most popular of those legends, there’s one that can be summarized as “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten.” This a surprisingly widespread view. I’ve lived in several countries, and heard versions of this legend, often told in very simple terms over somewhat complicated drinks, from well-educated people often working in academia or the financial sector (which makes more sense than it appears — I’ve worked in the financial sector myself, and people there are highly educated as a rule).

I’ve even heard scholars (normally not Medievalists) express this view, and I’ve read views to this effect in multiple occasions. Just Google “did the arabs save graeco-roman books” and look at the top results, if you don’t believe me. Lots of well-educated people believe this, not to speak of history enthusiasts all over the Internet.

However, the truth is that Arab translators had only a modest impact on the transmission of Graeco-Roman texts to modern times. There are various reasons that explain this, but first let me provide some clarity on why Baghdad’s Medieval “House of Wisdom” — oft-cited, correctly, as the center of the Abbasid-era translation movement inasmuch as there was one — is one of history’s most misunderstood institutions.

The House of Wisdom functioned as a state library with a focus on the transcription and storage of manuscripts, and their translation to the court’s main language, Arabic. Based on a similar library patronized by the Sasanian emperors and staffed with some of its personnel from about the 8th century, the House of Wisdom employed Christian Greek speakers – very few Muslims spoke or read Greek fluently in this era and others, particularly Arabs – as well as Muslim and Zoroastrian Arabic or Syriac speakers who worked to translate and disseminate work.

This what Dimitri Gutas, the go-to scholar on the subject, writes about the House of Wisdom (“Bayt Al-Hikma” in Arabic) in his book “Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society,” (Routledge, 1998, p. 55):

“It was a library, most likely established as a “bureau” under al-Mansur, part of the ‘Abbasid administration modeled on that of the Sasanians. Its primary function was to house both the activity and the results of translations from Persian into Arabic of Sasanian history and culture. As such there were hired translators capable to perform this function as well as book binders for the preservation of books. This was its function in Sasanian times, and it retained it throughout the time of Al-Rashid, i.e. the time of the Barmakids. Under al-Ma’mun it appears to have gained an additional function related to astronomical and mathematical activities; at least this is what the names associated with the Bayt Al-Hikma during that period would imply. We have, however, no specific information about what those activities actually were; one would guess research and study only, since none of the people mentioned was himself actually a translator. Al-Ma’mun’s new rationalist ideological orientations… would explain the additional functions of the library during his reign. This then is all we can safely say about the Bayt al-Hikma. We have absolutely no evidence for any other sort of activity. It was certainly not a center for the translation of Greek works into Arabic; the Graeco-Arabic translation movement was completely unrelated to any of the activities of the Bayt al-Hikma. Among the dozens of reports about the translation of Greek works into Arabic that we have, there is not even a single one that mentions the Bayt al-Hikma. This is to be contrasted with the references to translations from the Persian: we have fewer such references and yet two of them, both in the Fibrist as cited above, do mention the Bayt al-Hikma. Most amazingly, the first-hand report about the translation movement by the great Hunayn himself does not mention it. By the same token, the library was not one which stored, as part of its mission, Greek manuscripts… The Bayt al-Hikma was certainly also not an “academy” for teaching the “ancient” sciences as they were being translated; such a preposterous idea did not even occur to the authors of the spurious reports about the transmission of the teaching of these sciences that we do have. Finally, it was not a “conference” center for the meetings of scholars even under al-Ma’mun’s sponsorship. Al-Ma’mun, of course (and all the early ‘Abbasid caliphs), did host scholarly conferences or rather gatherings, but not in the library; such gauche social behavior on the part of the caliph would have been inconceivable. Sessions (magalis) were held in the residences of the caliphs, when the caliphs were present, or in private residences otherwise, as the numerous descriptions of them that we have indicate.”

The House of Wisdom was launched just as the group of mostly Aachen-based scholars funded by Charlemagne kicked off what would later be called “Carolingian Renaissance.” Their work was similar, in both cases involving much transcription, although the Carolingian scholars were exclusively interested in the compilation of Latin-language classics mostly on philosophical, legal and literary themes, while those under Abbasid patronage focused in particular on Persian-language literature.

Although it was later turned by Muslim propagandists into a sort of lifeboat for Classical scholarship that wouldn’t have been lost if not for the efforts of well-meaning caliphs, the House of Wisdom merely was one of several centers of learning – together with the network of Carolingian scholars and those at Constantinople, among others – that contributed to the survival of many of the most prestigious texts from the Graeco-Roman antiquity. It wasn’t even the most important.

A handful of key Greek-language works from Classic times were only recovered via Arabic translations, made outside of the House of Wisdom itself; this, indeed, was for the most part, as Gutas explains, a translation movement that was separate and independent of the House of Wisdom (with its specific focus on storing Arabic-language books and commissioning translations from Persian-language books), even if sometimes the translations were made by people associated with the library – a fact that later helped muddle the distinction.

This is notably the case of Claudius Ptolemy's Optics, an important scientific book that survives only in a Latin translation of a lost Arabic translation from the lost original Greek. Likewise, Ptolemy’s “Mathematike Syntaxis,” a vast collection of empirical data that produces a mathematical model of the observable celestial sphere – and thus helped Muslims with the determination of prayer times and the geographic direction of Mecca, among other things – was translated into Arabic in total five times starting around 800.

Islamic astronomers improved on some of these works. For example, they added new mathematical methods to improve the Syntaxis, sometimes borrowed from Indian astronomical tables translated from Sanskrit by the likes of Al-Fazari (d. 796) and Yaqub ibn Tariq (d. 796), or from the Iranian astronomical tablets Zij al-Shah. This compilation later became widely known by its Arabic name: “Almagest.”

Most often, however, Arabic translations were surplus to existing copies in various Christian libraries and monasteries. The Almagest itself was translated to Latin in the 12th century both from Arabic versions and from older Greek versions of Ptolemy’s work.

The story of Euclid's “The Elements” is another example of the actual impact caused by Arabic translations of important Western works. In the 4th century AD, Theon of Alexandria (father of the famous Hypatia) produced a Greek edition of Euclid which was widely used in the Roman Empire – for as long as it lasted, that is, very long indeed in the East. Euclid's work was never truly “lost,” not even in Europe; it was only unknown to Western audiences but well known in the Christian East in several versions, a fact that Muslims rulers and their propagandists strove to hide.

Much the same can be said about the works of Aristotle. Likely translated in bulk in Baghdad and already discussed in some detail by the theologian Al-Hakam in the late 9th century, they were likewise reintroduced into Western Europe in the 12th century from Arabic-to-Latin translations, together with the, often critical, commentaries of the Islamic scholars. This led, thanks largely to the work of Albertus Magnus (1200-1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), to a surge in the popularity of Aristotle and the beginnings of scholasticism. But the work of Aristotle was never lost in the original: Byzantine scholars did copy Aristotelian texts until Aldus Manutius printed almost all of the known texts by Aristotle in 1498.

Despite this, at best, modest impact, the translation of Graeco-Roman works contributed to the Caliphate’s underlying agenda, allowing Muslim scholars to accuse Christians of bringing about the death of Greek science. Many blamed the decline of science and philosophy on the Christianization of the Roman empire after Constantine, creating a Black Legend focused on the notion that Christians stole philosophy from the Greeks.

This Black Legend was later enthusiastically embraced by Atheistic Enlightenment thinkers from the 18th century, which explains why Islam was never seen, among such “enlightened” Europeans, as a threat to reason and science in the same scale as Christianity¹.

Getting these ideas into the minds of cultured people took a long time and effort. The veteran caliph-whisperer Al-Jahiz (776-868), author of over 100 books mostly from Baghdad, was an enthusiastic promoter of the theory that the Byzantines were not the true successors to the ancient Greeks (Hellenes) by stating that the Greek philosophical and scientific knowledge was neither Byzantine nor Christian:

“Had the common people but known that the Christians and the Byzantines have neither wisdom nor clarity of mind nor depth of thought but are simply clever with their hands… they would have removed them from the ranks of the literati and dropped them from the roster of philosophers and sages because works like the Organon, On Coming to Be and Passing Away, and Meteorology were written by Aristotle, and he is neither Byzantine nor Christian; the Almagest was written by Ptolemy, and he is neither Byzantine nor Christian; the Elements was written by Euclid, and he is neither Byzantine nor Christian; medical books were written by Galen, who was neither Byzantine nor Christian; and similarly with the books by Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, and so on. All these are individuals of one nation; they have perished but the traces of their minds live on: they are the Greeks. Their religion was different from the religion of the Byzantines, and their culture was different from the culture of the Byzantines. They were scientists, while these people [the Byzantines] are artisans who appropriated the books of the Greeks on account of geographical proximity.”²

As a propagandist of great skill, Al-Jahiz conceded some ground to his enemies, only to use it to gather momentum so that his denunciations gained even more kinetic impact. Thus, in another book he didn’t care to contradict earlier statements to describe the Byzantines (whom he, like most Arabic writers, called Rum) as people of great merit and scientific accomplishments – so he then could pretend to be shocked by the fact that such people, under the influence of Christianity, believed in three gods and claimed that a mere mortal who urinates and defecates was one of those gods. For a final flourish, he added that these people, for some reason, “still take pride in his crucifixion and slaying” as do the Jews who did the torturing and slaying — thus managing to strike a blow against two rival religions in a single sentence.

Al-Kindi (801-873), like Al-Jahiz a rationalist with more prestige than lower-level Islamic propagandists, wrote a genealogy proposing that the eponymous founder of the Greeks was Yunan, brother of the equally mythological ancestor of the Arabic people, Qahtan. Similar genealogies were continued and expanded by later Arabic scholars like Al-Masudi (896-956).

By divorcing the Byzantines from the Greeks, Arabic society claimed a right of inheritance over Hellenic sciences. This Abbasid claim to Graeco-Roman knowledge was supported by the Zoroastrian tradition that these sciences, like (in the view of some) Alexander the Great himself, were originally Iranian. Abbasid support for these typically fantastical Iranian theories only served to enhance a politically very important Iranian identification with the Caliphate; Baghdad itself had been founded on a region that at the time was widely considered part of Greater Iran.

The Abbasid claim also drove Iranian scholars like Abu Sahl – son of Nawbakht, Al-Mansur’s Iranian astrologer, into even less grounded flights of fancy:

“Then when he [Darius III] refused to pay the tribute still imposed upon the people of Babylon and the kingdom of Persia, he [Alexander] killed him, Dārā ibn Dārā the king [Darius III], taking possession of his kingdom, destroying his cities, and razing the ramparts built by devils and giants. His destruction [ruined] whatever there was in the different buildings of scientific material, whether inscribed on stone or wood, and with this demolition there were conflagrations, with scattering of the books. Such of these things, however, as were fathered in collections and libraries in the city of Istakhr he had transcribed and translated into the Greek and Coptic tongues. There, after he had finished copying what he had need of, he burned the material written in Persian. But there was a book called Al-Kushtaj from which he took what he needed of the science of the stars, as well as of medicine and the natural sciences. This book and the scientific material, riches, and treasures which he hit upon, together with the scholars, he sent to the land of Egypt. In the regions of India and China there were left some things which the kings of Persia had copied at the time of their prophet Zoroaster and the wise man Jāmāsb. They cared for them in those places, as their prophet Zoroaster and Jāmāsb had warned them of the actions of Alexander with his conquest of their land and destruction of as many of their books and scientific materials as possible, and of his transferring them to his own country.”

Just to give a final touch of class to these absurd claims, Abu Sahl added the detail that the Greeks, dunces as they all are, forgot to actually steal many Iranian books, and simply memorized the contents before they torched them, so the actual Greek copies of Iranian greats are, by necessity, inferior versions diluted by the Greeks’ faulty memory.

Some Muslim scholars later came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim (932-995) wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 987. The same Al-Nadim transmits from someone “trustworthy” that the Byzantines burned fifteen loads of books by Archimedes, which never happened.

Abdullah Ibn-abi-Zayd (922–998), a prolific North African writer on Islamic law, came up with a wrinkle for this wrinkle: that the Byzantine emperor gathered books and hid them in a secret building to prevent heresy among potential readers; and when Yahya, a prominent Bamarkid Persian in the Abbasid court, heard of the repository he asked if he could borrow the texts. The emperor agreed on the condition that they were never returned, so that they would never hurt the delicate Christian feelings of his subjects.

Others with less experience of the Christian West, like the Egyptian Arab Ibn Ridwan (988-1061), claimed that ancient sciences were forgotten there, and only survived in the Ummah because of the supreme wisdom and care displayed by Al-Mamun and their successors. Ridwan’s fable showing just how obscurantist and dumb Christians are proved particularly successful, being often retold with the kind of reverence typically reserved for hadiths:

“The history of medicine begins with a brief account of the development in antiquity from Asclepius to Galen. After Galen, the community of the Christians emerged from and prevailed over the Greeks. The Christians considered it a fault to study intellectual matters and their kings cast away the care for medicine and failed to take care of its students. So its students ceased to commit themselves to the toilsome study of medicine and found reading Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works too tedious; thus, it fell into disorder and its condition worsened. Then came Oribasius, after the Christian kings’ lack of interest in the instruction [of medicine] was firmly rooted… When none of the kings any longer felt the desire to promote the teaching [of medicine] and the people found Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works on it too tedious and tended to compendia and abridgments, the most prominent Alexandrian physicians, afraid that the art would vanish altogether, asked those kings to retain the teaching [of medicine] in Alexandria and [to allow] only twenty books on medicine to be read, sixteen from Galen’s and four from Hippocrates’ works… The teaching stood on shaky ground until al-Ma’mun ‘Abd-Allah ibn-Harun al-Rashid became caliph, who revived and spread it and favored excellent physicians. But for him, medicine and other disciplines of the ancients would have been effaced and obliterated just as medicine is obliterated now from the lands of the Greeks, which had been most distinguished in this field.”

I should also mention that it wasn’t just the Graeco-Romans who the Abbasid-era Muslims ripped off in bulk. The fact that Indian numerals came to be known in Europe as “Arabic” numerals, and chess was widely, and wrongly, believed to be an Arabic invention, gives an idea about the impact that Caliphate scholars had as synthesizers and popularizers of scientific knowledge.

Indeed, when the Iranian Al-Khwarizmi (780-850), head of the House of Wisdom from around 820, published the earliest Arabic text on Indian numerals, he chose a title of disarming honesty: “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation.” Such honesty was rarely imitated by Al-Khwarizmi’s successors.

I think you are probably getting the gist of how the story about the Muslim salvage of Graeco-Roman antiquity came about, and was later embraced by every Atheist writer in the West, so that he or she could have nice laughs at the expense of those barbarian fools who never washed themselves, the Christians.

Still, I would like to cite a couple of extra cases of Graeco-Roman classics of great value, to illustrate my central point that Christian scholars had a much more relevant role in salvaging Graeco-Roman classics than Muslim scholars ever did.

The first example is the “Saturnalia.” This is a wonderful, if little known, 5th century book. A late antiquity classic. Written in Latin by a literate provincial named Macrobius, the Saturnalia is an antiquarian project that provides a last glimpse at a vanishing society, just when it’s already receding in the distance. Its dialogues are redolent of relaxed, easy lives in spacious country villas, bringing to mind indoor dining halls.

As in the case of every other Latin-language book, Medieval Muslim translators couldn’t read Saturnalia to start with, so they never bothered with it. A Christian Roman advisor to Ostrogoth King Theodoric, Cassiodorus (485-585), was the first person known to cite the Saturnalia and, by the 7th century, an extract of the book – on the Roman calendar – was produced in Ireland by Christian monks.

Various extracts of the Saturnalia were later copied in Carolingian monasteries, before Servatus Lupus (805-862) and other scholars later took up the task. Although none of these extracts was known outside of France until the turn of the millennium, some appear in England in the 12th century; at that point, all the extant manuscripts presented a text that had suffered losses ranging from the serious to the catastrophic, but most of the book made it through the worst of the dark European ages.

My last example refers to a much better-known book, one that I personally don’t care much about, although a huge amount of people love it: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, easily the most famous book ever written by a Roman emperor, and perhaps the most famous, oft-quoted Graeco-Roman classic as of the 21st century.

The Meditations was written in Greek, because the Roman Marcus Aurelius was that kind of a snob, but never caught anybody’s interest in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the book was copied by alumni of Constantinople Magnaura, a Byzantine proto-university that, unlike the House of Wisdom, did teach students, including the monk Cyril who had such an impact of Slavic evangelization, about Greek philosophy and sciences.

In particular, it was Arethas (860-939), archbishop of Cappadocia’s Caesarea Mazaca, who produced a codex with commentary that was instrumental in ensuring the transmission of a book later lionized by many who were scornful of both Christian priests and the Byzantine state.

Indeed, there was no translation of the Meditations into Latin until 1558, so the entire history of the book’s survival is an example of supreme Byzantine scholarship. Not that anyone cares. When was the last time that you heard a tipsy, well-read person praising Byzantine scholarship and translations? Yeah, I thought so.

1. See Maria Mavroudi’s “Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic during the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition.” Speculum 90.1 (2015): 28–59.

2. The translations from the Arabic that I use that are not quoted by Gutas are taken from the wonderfully informative essay "Bang For His Buck: Dioscorides as a Gift of the Tenth-Century Byzantine Court," by Yvette Hunt, found in “Byzantine Culture in Translation,” Ed. by Amelia Brown & Bronwen Neil (Brill, 2017).