Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 204

also by other causes which uniquely com-
bined to sustain it for well over two cen-
turies. The exigencies of religio-political
confrontation played a major role. Reli-
gious debate within Islam and polemics
between Islam and other religions became
particularly acute after the Abbāsids came
to power, both because the revolution
raised expectations that were bound to be
thwarted and because of the universalist
claims of Islam as a religion put forth by
the new imperial ideology. Under Mahdī,
attempts to resolve the conflict were on
occasion violent—like his persecution of
the Manichaeans who, long suppressed
under the Sāsānids, re-emerged during the
Umayyad period and returned en masse to
Irā, the place of origin of their founder,
Mānī—but for the most part they rested
on disputation. The need to understand
better the rules of dialectical argumenta-
tion prompted Mahdī to commission from
the Nestorian Patriarch Timothy I, with
whom he debated, a translation of the
best handbook on the subject, Aristotle's
Topics . Within Islam, there was injected
into theological discussion a cosmologi-
cal element, and in particular atomism,
apparently by the Manichean sects. The
need for an alternative cosmology occa-
sioned the translation of Aristotle's Physics ,
a work which, like the Topics , was to be
re-translated repeatedly. Further develop-
ment of such discussions eventually led,
by the middle of the 3rd/9th century, to
the translation, in the circle of al-Kindī, of
theologically significant Aristotelian and
Neoplatonic texts.
By the time of the civil war between
Amīn and al-Mamūn, the ideological
orientation given to the Abbāsid state
by Manūr had won wide acceptance
and the translation movement was firmly
entrenched in the cultural life of Ba ∞ dād.
Al-Mamūn, back in Ba ∞ dād as both a
fratricide and regicide, made use, among

other things, also of the culture generated
by the translation movement in order to
re-establish and expand the centralised
authority of the caliph. He engaged in
an intensive propaganda campaign that
aimed at portraying him as the champion
of Islam abroad and as the final arbiter
about the true interpretation of Islam at
home. In order to achieve the first objec-
tive, he initiated an aggressive foreign
policy against the Byzantines, who were
portrayed not merely as infidels but also
as culturally benighted and inferior both
to their own ancestors, the ancient Greeks,
and to the Muslims, who appreciated and
translated ancient Greek science. The
cultural superiority of the Muslims was
presented as being due to Islam itself as a
religion: the Byzantines had turned their
back to ancient science because of Chris-
tianity, while the Muslims had welcomed
it because of Islam. Anti-Byzantinism thus
became pro-Hellenism. The second objec-
tive could be achieved only by divesting
the criteria for religious authority from
the religious and adī º scholars among the
common people and concentrating them
in the person of the caliph; this in turn
could be effected only by making the
caliph's personal judgment in interpret-
ing the religious texts, based on reason,
the ultimate criterion, not the dogmatic
statements of religious leaders based on
transmitted authority. One of the public
relations campaigns through which these
policies were pursued was the dissemina-
tion, by his commander and right-hand
man, Abd Allāh b. āhir, of the dream
which al-Mamūn allegedly had about
Aristotle. According to this original ver-
sion, the philosopher states that personal
judgment ( ray ) is the ultimate criterion for
the best [political and religious] speech,
thereby promoting both the rationalist
anafī orientation of the mina as insti-
tuted by al-Mamūn and the philhellenism