Volume 71, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Putting the House of Wisdom in Order: the fourth Islamic century and the impulse to classify, arrange and inventory Edited by James Weaver, Letizia Osti and Ulrich Rudolph

In 1996, Hādī Ḥasan Ḥammūdī published an edition of a medical dictionary based on two manuscripts he had found in a private collection in Oran, Algeria. The dictionary was allegedly written by ʾAbū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad al-ʾAzdī, known under the name Ibn al-Dhahabī (d. 456/1064). The transcription shows hamzat al-qaṭʿ but not hamzat al-waṣl , therefore: ʾabū but ibn . The author of the dictionary acquired his knowledge in several regions of the Islamic world and allegedly studied with such famous scholars as al-Bīrūnī (d. 440/1048) and Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037). Complaining that his contemporaries frequently used non-Arabic terms, he decided to compile a dictionary, arranging the terms in alphabetical order by their roots, and explaining their medical as well as their linguistic aspects. He entitled his dictionary the Book of Water ( Kitāb al-māʾ ), after its first entry, on water ( al-māʾ ). This paper investigates the text with regard to its author, content, principles of organisation, authorities, and intertextuality, with the aim of verifying the authorship of Ibn al-Dhahabī and of better understanding the literary environment and the reading culture of the fifth century.

This article links classifying activities to practices of emotion. Re-reading al-Tanūkhī’s collection al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda (“Deliverance after hardship”), it focuses on the arrangement of the book on the one hand, and on how the involved emotions are handled on the other. This double approach suggests that by connecting the fields “order” and “emotion” the scope of knowledge with regard to the Arabic scholarly tradition can be reviewed and extended. Against the background of the widespread impulse to arrange and classify, the emotional spectrum is given a framework which generalizes, even rationalizes, the feeling itself. In turn, emotional representations in the stories shed light onto the fragile mechanisms of encyclopedic presuppositions and on definitions in general. Since both concepts are affected and shaped by narrative structures, story-telling can be considered as a significant means of structuring the world.

Al-Muḥassin ibn ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī (327–384/939–994) included a number of items about Indian elephants and Indians in his compilations of stories and anecdotes Nishwār al-muḥāḍara (“The table-talk of a Mesopotamian judge”) and al-Faraj baʿda al-shidda (“Deliverance follows adversity”), both of which approach the organisation of knowledge in novel ways and on a new scale. This paper lists the items, summarises their contents, and explains al-Tanūkhī’s interest in elephants in the light of an autobiographical narrative. It then surveys the ethnology of his Indian stories, which are often told by sailors or merchants, and compares them in content and style with the sailors’ tales in Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind (“Accounts of China and India”), with al-Bīrūnī’s observations in Mā li-l-Hind (“India”), and with an alleged shift from factuality to fabulation said to be taking place at around this time, which is exemplified by ʿAjāʾib al-Hind (“The Wonders of India”). Close reading shows how al-Tanūkhī’s portrayal of elephants as rational agents of divine providence is managed, and how exotic humans are proved to play their part in God’s plan like any others. Al-Tanūkhī’s response to “the exotic” leads us to question it as a category of enquiry in the light not only of cultural studies but also of its content and of the multiple Arabic literary fields to which apparent exotica may belong. The significance of the organisation of Faraj and Nishwār is reassessed. We conclude that al-Tanūkhī’s purpose in composing the works was not to impart facts as such, exotic or otherwise, or cultural judgements, but to teach people how to read stories properly so as to understand the kind of truth they convey, an endeavour which may be compared to his contemporary al-Āmidī’s systematic approach to training his readers to become critical readers of poetry.

Recent scholarship has brought important new insights into the chronology of the writing and dissemination of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’). This new chronological perspective prompts us also to reappraise the pioneering role of the Ikhwān with regard to the problem of classifying knowledge. The first part of this paper will be devoted to this issue. We shall re-examine the tripartite division of science as purposefully designed by the Ikhwān in Epistle 7, as well as another classification in the form of an allegorical fable as found in Epistle 26, and which the Ikhwān have derived from Persian literature. The second part of our contribution will focus on the tenfold classification put forward by Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), now correctly identified as the genuine author of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (‘The Aim of the Sage’) and the Rutbat al-ḥakīm (‘the Scale of the Sage’) and, in all likelihood, as the scholar through whom the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafā ’ were first introduced into al-Andalus.

This paper will focus on the Arabic grammatical tradition and, in particular, on the new arrangement, in the 4th/10th c., of grammatical matters already elaborated in the first centuries of Islam. With this aim in mind we will take into consideration two representative grammatical treatises of the 8th c. and the 10th c.: Sībawayh’s Kitāb and Ibn al-Sarrāj’s al-Uṣūl fī l-naḥw , which both represent watershed moments in the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. Abū Bakr ibn al-Sarrāj’s philosophical training is obvious in the way he approaches the subject through the precise description of single items and in the laboured logic of the subdivision of his treatises. He follows the principle of “comprehensive subdivisions” ( taqāsīm ) borrowed from the logic he had studied under the direction of al-Fārābī. Ibn al-Sarrāj’s method of organizing and introducing linguistic matters will be contrasted with the approach of the father of Arabic grammar, Sībawayh, who wrote – two centuries earlier – the most comprehensive description of Arabic.

In the fourth/tenth century a great number of new intellectual centers appeared in the Islamic world, and an increase in the number of persons involved in production of written works on mathematics and astronomy took place. One such new center was Aleppo under the Ḥamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla. According to al-Qabīṣī the generosity of Sayf al-Dawla led to the situation that ignorant people pretended to be astronomers or astrologer. Therefore, al-Qabīṣī argued, exams should be established for testing the level of competence and the completeness of knowledge of a candidate. Al-Qabīṣī was engaged in teaching by giving lectures based on a textbook, the Fuṣūl of al-Farghānī. This was a novelty in teaching astronomy, since before memorizing didactic poems and operating with astronomical instruments was the preferred method. While al-Qabīṣī’s aim in teaching astronomy was to train future professional astronomers and astrologers, in other contexts astronomy was a propaedeutic subject as part of the quadrivium. The philosopher Muḥammad Ibn al-Haytham (not to be confused with the mathematician al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham) wrote a commentary of the Almagest, in which his intention was “to elucidate subtle ideas for the benefit of students”, and not to go into technical details of calculation. Obviously his aim was to educate future philosophers in the “philosophical sciences” (mathematics, natural sciences and metaphysics). Some generations earlier, al-Fārābī wrote a commentary on the Almagest with similar intentions. His preferred subject was the geometric proof, while observations and calculations were of little interest. Astronomy was incorporated into a curriculum of general scientific knowledge, – similar to the curriculum of the Alexandrian schools in late antiquity –, and ancient Greek texts on astronomy were preferred. This development was indeed a renaissance in the sense Jacob Burckhardt used the term.

The usefulness of the term “encyclopaedia” in the study of pre-modern Arabic and Islamic literature has been the subject of some discussion over the last decade. The main concern has been that it is applied to a wide range of texts and text-types in a vague and inflationary manner, leaving the intended meaning unclear in any given case. Although there is much merit to this criticism, the discipline also knows of more systematic usages. This paper surveys some of these, arguing that although the label “encyclopaedia” indeed has its disadvantages, the analytical concepts and categories lying behind a usage are of greater importance than the choice of term itself. In light of these arguments, some of the most prominent scholarly usages of encyclopaedia and encyclopaedism in regard to the fourth Islamic century/tenth century CE are assessed.

This paper offers a brief sketch, first, of the organization of knowledge that was inherited from the Middle Ages and remained dominant in Europe around the year 1450, and in the second place, of the ways in which this organization was modified in response to the challenges of the early modern world, notably the Renaissance, the Reformation, the invention of printing and the discovery of America.

The wealth of topics and the vast range of themes dealt during the Zurich Workshop have stimulated me to propose some preliminary remarks coming from a Chinese point of view. The difficulty of dealing with different set of words and different way of classifying things makes it necessary to provide some basic information, sources and insights into how such fundamental issues as the power of writing, the categorisation of knowledge, and the preeminence of the role of the traditional Classic texts in intellectual, political and administrative life were developed in ancient China. The written language was an empowering language. The privilege of mastering the Classical texts and the ability to write elegantly made success in the imperial exams possible, allowing the scholar to become a member of the powerful élite. This explains the close link established in China between the exercice of power and the literary language. The need to provide the necessary tools to acquire this ability became the main incentive for the production of a set of texts such as dictionaries, glossaries, thesaurus, and encyclopaedias or “books according to categories”. In these texts the world of knowledge was ordered according to categories which were functional and useful for the preservation of imperial power in the hands of loyal bureaucrats, carefully selected through the perfect machinery of the examinations, to perpetuate the “mandate of heaven” throughout the centuries.