Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 218

Life
unayn was born in 192/808 in al-īra,
where his father was a pharmacist. The
nisba indicates that he was a descendant of
the so-called ibād, i.e. Arab tribesmen who
had once embraced Christianity and who
after the rise of Islam remained faithful to
the Syrian Nestorian church, refusing to
adopt the new religion. unayn may be
assumed to have been bilingual from his
youth, for Arabic was the vernacular of
his native town, and Syriac was the lan-
guage of the liturgy and of higher Chris-
tian education. Later in life, when settled
in Ba ∞ dād, he translated far more topics
into Syriac than into Arabic, in accor-
dance with the wishes of his clients. He
himself showed a certain predilection for
the Syriac language at the expense of
Arabic, which he blamed for its lack of
an adequate nomenclature as compared
with either Syriac or Greek or Persian.
But in their Arabic translations he and his
school avoided mere transcriptions as far
as possible, and thus helped to forge the
Arabic scientific terminology. He was also
at pains to acquire a sound knowledge of
Arabic grammar; he is even said to have
studied it at Bara and to have brought
from there al- ‡ alīl's Kitāb Ayn . That he
had the advantage of meeting the famous
grammarian personally, as Ibn ⁄ ul ¡ ul
and others point out, is impossible for
chronological reasons. The Arab bibliog-
raphers unanimously attest that unayn
was faī .
How unayn acquired his astonishing
knowledge of Greek is told by the eyewit-
ness report of a certain Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm,
which does indeed sound very trustworthy.
It relates that unayn began his study of
medicine at Ba ∞ dād under Yūannā b.
Māsawayh, the famous court-physician
and director of the bayt al-ikma . But as
unayn used to ask too many trouble-
some questions, he incurred the anger of

his master, who eventually ordered him to
leave his school. unayn then disappeared
from the capital for more than two years.
The narrator himself is silent upon his
whereabouts, but some sources contend
that he went to Alexandria, others that
he was staying in bilād al-Rūm . When he
came back, he was so thoroughly versed
in the Greek language that he could even
recite from Homer. Afterwards he was
reconciled with Ibn Māsawayh, who also
encouraged him further to translate from
the Greek.
Under the caliph al-Mutawakkil
unayn was appointed chief physician
to the court, but he had to suffer great
hardships through the capricious behav-
iour of this Commander of the Faithful.
One day he fell a victim to an intrigue
of his Christian colleagues. As he was an
enemy of image-worship, they induced
him to spit on an icon during an audi-
ence. This provoked the indignation not
only of the Nestorian katholikos , but also
of the caliph. unayn was flogged, put
in jail and deprived of his whole estate,
including his library. After six months he
was set free and reinstated in his office,
which he held until his death in 260/873.
He had two sons, Dāwūd and Isā. Both
of them became medical practitioners; the
latter, following in his father's footsteps,
excelled in translating from the Greek,
but concentrated more on philosophical
works.

Translations
unayn is credited with an immense
number of translations, ranging from
medicine, philosophy, astronomy, math-
ematics to magic and oneiromancy. His
Arabic translation of the Old Testament,
made after the Septuagint, was regarded
as the best among other renderings. So
far as his versions are conserved, they
can help in establishing the Greek text,