Connected Stories

Contacts, Traditions and Transmissions in Premodern Mediterranean Islam

Mohamed Meouak, Cristina Puente, Mohamed Meouak, Cristina Puente

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9783110773859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Concepts such as influence, imitation, emulation, transmission or plagiarism are transcendental to cultural history and the subject of universal debate. They are not mere labels imposed by modern historiography on ancient texts, nor are they the result of a later interpretation of ways of transmitting and teaching, but are concepts defined and discussed internally, within all cultures, since time immemorial, which have yielded very diverse results. In the case of culture, or better Arab-Islamic cultures, we could analyze and discuss endlessly numerous terms that refer to concepts related to the multiple ways of perceiving the Other, receiving his knowledge and producing new knowledge.

The purpose of this book evolves around these concepts, and it aims to become part of a very long tradition of studies on this subject that is essential to the understanding of the processes of reception and creation. The authors analyze them in depth through the use of examples that are based on the well-known idea that societies in different regions did not remain isolated and indifferent to the literary, religious or scientific creations that were developed in other territories and moreover that the flow of ideas did not always occur in only one direction. Contacts, both voluntary and involuntary, are never incidental or marginal, but are rather the true engine of the evolution of knowledge and creation. It can also be stated that it has been the awareness of the existence of multidimensional cultural relations which has allowed modern historiography on Arab cultures to evolve and be enriched in recent decades.

Part I: Linguistic Stories

Sociolinguistic Infrastructures

Prerequisites of Translation Movements Involving Latin and Arabic in the Medieval Period

Daniel G. König

1 Introduction

The following contribution systematically compares two medieval “translationTranslation movements” involving the languages Latin and Arabic.

During the first translationTranslation movement, a handful of Latin texts was ArabicizedArabicization in the Christian and the courtly milieus of late Umayyad al-AndalusAndalus, al-. Translation activities began approximately in the middle of the 9th century and petered out by the middle of the 11th century.¹ They did not stand at the beginning of a systematic study of Latin and the development of Latin studies in the Arabic-Islamic sphere: Latin–Arabic translationTranslation was not taken up again until much later, this time by very different agents: between RomeRome and the Middle EastMiddle East, Christians of various denominations attached to the Roman ChurchChurch transferred a huge corpus of medieval and early modern Latin-Christian texts into Arabic between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Muslim Arab scholars, in turn, only began to produce Arabic translations of a large corpus of ancient and a very much smaller number of medieval and early modern Latin texts after the introduction of a system of secular academic education to the Arab world at the beginning of the 20th century.²

During the second translationTranslation movement, hundreds of texts were translated from Arabic to Latin in various European and Mediterranean locations. Translation began in the 11th century at the latest, but only gained momentum at the beginning of the 12th century. It tied in with the millennia-long diffusion of ancient Greek texts in the wider Mediterranean sphere—the late antique LatinizationLatinization of a limited number of Greek works at the hands of BoethiusBoethius (d. c. 524) and CassiodorCassiodor (d. c. 580–585),³ the Greek–Syriac–Arabic translationTranslation movement of the 5th to 10th centuries,⁴ as well as the systematic translationTranslation of Greek texts into Latin that also began in the 12th century.⁵ Arabic–Latin translations continued to be produced until the early 16th century. This translationTranslation movement provided one, if not the basis for the emergence of Arabic studies in Christian Europe. TranslationTranslation activities were taken up by European Arabists who produced a limited number of Latin translations of Arabic texts until the 19th century, when Latin ceased to be used as a language of academic endeavours.⁶ The medieval Arabic–Latin translationTranslation movement became a battlefield for two ferocious debates. One opposed Graecophile humanists and Arabists in Christian Europe of the 14th to 16th century and revolved around the question, whether scientific texts produced by the ancient Greeks were superior in quality to their medieval Arabic–Latin translations and Arabic writings in general.⁷ The other debate involved and continues to involve those who accept and those who refuse to accept that influences from the Islamic(ate) sphere contributed to the early modern rise of the sciences in Europe.⁸

Although they involve the same languages, the two translationTranslation movements subject to comparison in this article are obviously highly unequal in terms of duration, scope, and their mid- to long-term legacy.⁹ The aim of this article is to understand why they differed so much. To this end, the article systematically compares the sociolinguistic prerequisites of both movements. Building on deliberations by Cyrille AilletAillet, Cyrille, Matthias MaserMaser, Matthias, Dimitri GutasGutas, Dimitri, Dag Nikolaus HasseHasse, Dag Nikolaus, and others,¹⁰ its objective is to understand why they began, why they took place in a particular period, in particular places, and in a particular manner, and—last but not least—how and why they ended. The article will analyse each translationTranslation movement individually and end with a comparative conclusion. Analysis and comparison build on a set of parameters. These include (1) the relation between geopolitical shifts, the emergence and/or availability of specific forms of “intellectualized bilingualism”, and the beginnings of translationTranslation activity; (2) the scope and duration of the translationTranslation movement as circumscribed by the availability and thematic breadth of appropriate texts, the motivations to translate, and the supporting institutions of patronagePatronage; finally (3) the resulting degree of institutionalization in the spheres of language learning, teaching, and translationTranslation in relation to the end and the respective legacy of translationTranslation activity.

2 From Latin to Arabic in Umayyad al-AndalusAndalus, al- (9th–11th Cent.)

Latin–Arabic translationTranslation in Umayyad al-AndalusAndalus, al- involved two sets of texts: Christian texts including the Psalter, the Gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the ecclesiastical canons of the Visigothic era on the one hand, historiographical texts, specifically an enlarged version of OrosiusOrosius’ (d. c. 417) late antique “Histories against the Pagans” (Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem) and, possibly, a list of Frankish kings on the other hand. Translations were generally produced in the environs of Cordoba“Cordoba”, both in a “Mozarab” Christian milieu and in circles attached to the Umayyad court.¹¹

2.1 Geopolitical Preconditions and the Emergence of Romance-Arabic Bilingualism

The beginning of translationTranslation activity in the middle of the 9th century ultimately resulted from the geopolitical shift brought about by the Muslim invasion of the Iberian PeninsulaIberian Peninsula in 711. The invasion extended the recently established contact zone of Latin and Arabic, which had come into being in North AfricaNorth Africa at the end of the 7th century. This contact zone had brought together Arabic speakers from the Middle EastMiddle East as well as speakers of what we may either call “vulgar” Latin or a Romance idiom derived from Latin.¹² The latter included Romanized North African city-dwellers and Romanized Berbers accustomed to communicating in a Latinate idiom. Since both groups had already lived under Muslim rule for several decades, we can assume that some of their members were able to communicate with the Muslim elites in Arabic. If we accept these preconditions,¹³ it seems plausible that North African linguistic mediators facilitated acts of collaboration and administrative interaction between Arabic speakers and Iberian speakers of Romance during the period of invasion.

Initially, communication between the different speaker groups must have been confined to the exchange of rather basic and thus easily explicable information.¹⁴ Communication on more complex ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Connected Stories. Introduction
• Part I: Linguistic Stories
• Part II: Intellectual Stories
• Part III: Material Stories
• Part IV: Spiritual Stories