victories of Islam, the exploits of the first heroes of the faith, the fortunes of ʽAlī and his house. Then, too, history was often expressly forged for party ends. The people accepted all this, and so a romantic tradition sprang up side by side with the historical, and had a literature of its own, the beginnings of which must be placed as early as the 2nd century of the Flight. The oldest specimens still extant are the fables about the conquest of Spain ascribed to Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852), and those about the conquest of Egypt and the West by Ibn ʽAbd al-Hakam (d. 871). In these truth and falsehood are mingled. But most of the extant literature of this kind is, in its present form, much more recent; e.g. the Story of the Death of Hosain by the pseudo-Abū Mikhnaf (translated by Wüstenfeld); the Conquest of Syria by Abū Ismāʽīl al-Basrī (edited by Nassau Lees, Calcutta, 1854, and discussed by de Goeje, 1864); the pseudo-Wāqidī (see Hamaker, De Expugnatione Memphidis et Alexandriae, Leiden, 1835); the pseudo-Ibn Qutaiba (see Dozy, Recherches); the book ascribed to Aʽṣam Kūfī, &c. Further inquiry into the origin of these works is called for, but some of them were plainly directed to stirring up fresh zeal against the Christians. In the 6th century of the Flight some of these books had gained so much authority that they were used as sources, and thus many untruths crept into accepted history. (M. J. de G.; G. W. T.)
Geography.—The writing of geographical books naturally began with the description of the Moslem world, and that for practical purposes. Ibn Khordādhbeh, in the middle of the 9th century, wrote a Book of Roads and Provinces to give an account of the highways, the posting-stations and the revenues of the provinces. In the same century Yaʽqūbī wrote his Book of Countries, describing specially the great cities of the empire. A similar work describing the provinces in some detail was that of Qudāma or Kodāma (d. 922). Hamdāni (q.v.) was led to write his great geography of Arabia by his love for the ancient history of his land. Muqaddasi (Mokaddasi) at the end of the 10th century was one of the early travellers whose works were founded on their own observation. The study of Ptolemy’s geography led to a wider outlook, and the writing of works on geography (q.v.) in general. A third class of Arabian geographical works were those written to explain the names of places which occur in the older poets. Such books were written by Bakrī (q.v.) and Yāqūt (q.v.)[1]
Grammar and Lexicography.—Arab tradition ascribes the first grammatical treatment of the language to Abū-l-Aswad ud-Duʽalī (latter half of the 7th century), but the certain beginnings of Arabic grammar are found a hundred years later. The Arabs from early times have always been proud of their language, but its systematic study seems to have arisen from contact with Persian and from the respect for the language of the Koran. In Irāk the two towns of Basra and Kūfa produced two rival schools of philologists. Bagdad soon had one of its own (cf. G. Flügel’s Die grammatischen Schulen der Araber, Leipzig, 1862). Khalīl ibn Aḥmad (718–791), an Arab from Omān, of the school of Basra, was the first to enunciate the laws of Arabic metre and the first to write a dictionary. His pupil Sibawaihi (q.v.), a Persian, wrote the grammar known simply as The Book, which is generally regarded in the East as authoritative and almost above criticism. Other members of the school of Basra were Abū ʽUbaida (q.v.), Asmaʽī (q.v.), Mubarrad (q.v.) and Ibn Duraid (q.v.). The school of Kūfa claimed to pay more attention to the living language (spoken among the Bedouins) than to written laws of grammar. Among its teachers were Kisāʽī, the tutor of Harūn al-Rashīd’s sons, Ibn Aʽrābi, Ibn as-Sikkīt (d. 857) and Ibn ul-Anbāri (885–939). In the fourth century of Islam the two schools of Kūfa and Basra declined in importance before the increasing power of Bagdad, where Ibn Qutaiba, Ibn Jinnī (941–1002) and others carried on the work, but without the former rivalry of the older schools. Persia from the beginning of the 10th century produced some outstanding students of Arabic. Hamadhāni (d. 932) wrote a book of synonyms (ed. L. Cheikho, Beirūt, 1885). Jauharī (q.v.) wrote his great dictionary the Sahāh. Thaʽālibi (q.v.) and Jurjānī (q.v.) were almost contemporary, and a little later came Zamakhsharī (q.v.), whose philological works are almost as famous as his commentary on the Koran. The most important dictionaries of Arabic are late in origin. The immense work, Lisān ul Arab (ed. 20 vols, Būlāq, 1883–1889), was compiled by Ibn Manzūr (1232–1311), the Qāmūs by Fairūzābādī, the Taj ulʽArūs (ed. 10 vols., Būlāq, 1890), founded on the Qāmūs, by Murtadā uz-Zabīdī (1732–1790).
Scientific Literature.—The literature of the various sciences is dealt with elsewhere. It is enough here to mention that such existed, and that it was not indigenous. It was in the early Abbasid period that the scientific works of Greece were translated into Arabic, often through the Syriac, and at the same time the influence of Sanskrit works made itself felt. Astronomy seems in this way to have come chiefly from India. The study of mathematics learned from Greece and India was developed by Arabian writers, who in turn became the teachers of Europe in the 16th century. Medical literature was indebted for its origin to the works of Galen and the medical school of Gondesapur. Many of the Arabian philosophers were also physicians and wrote on medicine. Chemistry proper was not understood, but Arabian writings on alchemy led Europe to it later. So also the literature of the animal world (cf. Damīrī) is not zoological but legendary, and the works on minerals are practical and not scientific. See Arabian Philosophy and historical sections of such scientific articles as Astronomy, &c. (G. W. T.)
ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY. What is known as “Arabian” philosophy owed to Arabia little more than its name and its language. It was a system of Greek thought, expressed in a Semitic tongue, and modified by Oriental influences, called into existence amongst the Moslem people by the patronage of their more liberal princes, and kept alive by the intrepidity and zeal of a small band of thinkers, who stood suspected and disliked in the eyes of their nation. Their chief claim to the notice of the historian of speculation comes from their warm reception of Greek philosophy when it had been banished from its original soil, and whilst western Europe was still too rude and ignorant to be its home (9th to 12th century).
In the course of that exile the traces of Semitic or Mahommedan influence gradually faded away, and the last of the line of Saracenic thinkers was a truer exponent of the one philosophy which they all professed to teach than the first. The whole movement is little else than a chapter in Origin.the history of Aristotelianism. That system of thought, after passing through the minds of those who saw it in the hazy light of an orientalized Platonism, and finding many laborious but narrow-purposed cultivators in the monastic schools of heretical Syria, was then brought into contact with the ideas and mental habits of Islam. But those in whom the two currents converged did not belong to the pure Arab race. Of the so-called Arabian philosophers of the East, al-Fārābī, Ibn-Sīnā and al-Ghazālī were natives of Khorasan, Bokhara and the outlying provinces of north-eastern Persia; whilst al-Kindī, the earliest of them, sprang from Basra, on the Persian Gulf, on the debatable ground between the Semite and the Aryan. In Spain, again, where Ibn-Bājja, Ibn-Tufail and Ibn Rushd rivalled or exceeded the fame of the Eastern schools, the Arabians of pure blood were few, and the Moorish ruling class was deeply intersected by Jewish colonies, and even by the natives of Christian Spain. Thus, alike at Bagdad and at Cordova, Arabian philosophy represents the temporary victory of exotic ideas and of subject races over the theological one-sidedness of Islam, and the illiterate simplicity of the early Saracens.
Islam had, it is true, a philosophy of its own among its theologians (see Mahommedan Religion). It was with them that the Moslem theology—the science of the word (Kalām)—first came into existence. Its professors, the Mutākallimūn (known in Hebrew as Medabberim, and as Loquentes in the Latin versions), may be compared with the scholastic doctors of the Catholic Church. Driven in the first instance to speculation in theology by the needs of their natural reason, they came, in after days, when Greek philosophy had been naturalized in the Caliphate, to adapt its methods and doctrines to the support of their views. They employed a quasi-philosophical method, by which, according to Maimonides, they first reflected how things ought to be in order to support, or at least not contradict, their opinions, and then, when their minds were made up with regard to this imaginary system, declared that the world was no otherwise constituted. The dogmas of creation and providence, of divine omnipotence, chiefly exercised them; and they sought to assert for God an immediate action in the making and the keeping of the world. Space they looked upon as pervaded by atoms possessing no quality or extension, and time was similarly divided into innumerable instants. Each change in the constitution of the atoms is a direct act of the Almighty. When the fire burns, or the water moistens, these terms merely express the habitual connexion which our senses perceive between one thing
- ↑ The chief Arabian geographical works have been edited by M. J. de Goeje in his Bibliotheca Geographorum arabicorum (Leiden, 1874 ff.).
