Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 206

translations themselves were repeatedly
revised with three objectives in mind:
greater fidelity to the original, a more
natural Arabic style, and greater accuracy
in the technical terminology. The trans-
lators, who worked as private individuals
unaffiliated with any institution (the Bayt
al-ikma was the Abbāsid palace library
whose chief function was to store Arabic
translations of Sāsānid literature and his-
tory) invested time and effort into their
work because it was a lucrative profes-
sion. Abū Sulaymān Si ¡ istānī said that
the Banū Mūsā used to pay monthly 500
dīnārs “for full-time translation”. usā b.
Lūā, as a young man out to make his
fortune, left his home town of Baalbakk
and went to Ba ∞ dād where he trans-
lated, for pay, some of the topics he had
taken with him. The high level of transla-
tion technique and philological accuracy
achieved by unayn's school and other
translators early in the 4th/10th century
was due to the incentive provided by the
munificence of their sponsors, a munifi-
cence which in turn was due to the pres-
tige that Ba ∞ dādī society attached to the
translated works and the knowledge of
their contents.
The translation movement was natu-
rally transformed during the Būyid era
into the Islamic scientific and philosophi-
cal tradition; by the end of the 4th/10th
century, the work of scholars who wrote
in Arabic far surpassed, from the point of
view of the society that demanded it, the
scientific and philosophical level of the
translated works, and royal or wealthy
sponsors commissioned original works in
Arabic rather than translations of Greek
works. Most of the seminal Greek works
had been translated; for the little that was
left untranslated there was no longer any
social or scholarly need.
After the end of the translation move-
ment there are almost no recorded

instances, before the modern age, of Ara-
bic translations from the Greek. On an
individual level, it was always possible to
find a Greek speaker in the Islamic world
for oral translation; al-afadī's infor-
mant on Greek matters, for example, the
famous scholar · ams Dīn al-Dima ª ī,
would appear to have received his infor-
mation from some such source in Damas-
cus. The only exception is the Ottoman
scholar Esad al-Yanyāwī who lived dur-
ing the Tulip Period. Dissatisfied with the
early Abbāsid translations of Aristotle, he
learned Greek from certain Greek func-
tionaries in the Ottoman administration
and translated anew into Arabic some
Aristotelian treatises. This effort, which
appears to have been short-lived, is to
be seen as part of the trend for moderni-
sation in 17th-18th century Ottoman
culture through translations and compila-
tions from European languages into Turk-
ish, and, within that context, in relation
to the resurgent Aristotelianism among
Greek intellectuals.
The particular linguistic achievement
of the early Abbāsid Graeco-Arabic
translation movement was that it pro-
duced a scientific literature with a tech-
nical vocabulary for its concepts, as well
as a high koiné language that made Clas-
sical Arabic a fit vehicle for the intellec-
tual achievements of Islamic scholarship;
its particular historical achievement was
to preserve for posterity both lost Greek
texts and more reliable manuscript tradi-
tions of those extant. On a broader and
more fundamental level, the translation
movement made Islamic civilisation the
successor to Hellenistic civilisation. As
such, not only did it ensure the survival of
Hellenism at a time when the Latin West
was ignorant of it and the Byzantine East
busy suppressing it, but proved that it can
be expressed in languages and adopted in
cultures other than Greek, and that it is