ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY – SCIENCE – CULTURE AND RELIGION STUDIES IN HONOR OF DIMITRI GUTAS

Islamic Philosophy – Science – Culture and Religion Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas Edited by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman

ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY – SCIENCE – CULTURE AND RELIGION STUDIES IN HONOR OF DIMITRI GUTAS

Some Book Contents

• Graeco-Arabica Christiana: The Christian Scholar ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Faḍl from Antiochia (11th c AD) as Transmitter of Greek Works
• Aristo of Ceus: The Fragments Concerning Eros
• Professional Medical Ethics from a Foreign Past  
• The Arabic History of Science of Abū Sahl ibn Nawbaḫt(fl ca 770–809) and Its Middle Persian Sources  41
• The Physiology and Therapy of Anger: Galen on Medicine,the Soul, and Nature  
• In Aristotle’s Words    al-Ḥātimī’s (?) Epistle on al-Mutanabbī and Aristotle  
• The Prison of Categories—‘Decline’ and Its Company
• Also, via Istanbul to New Haven—Mss Yale Syriac

Christian scholars played a decisive role in the transmission of Greek science to the Arabs, either as translators or as commentators and authors of monographs based on Greek works. This is well documented in Georg Graf’s classical work Geschichte der christlich-arabischen Literatur (CGAL) and Joseph Nasrallah’s Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’eglise Melchite du Ve  au XXe  siècle.

Both historians of Christian Arabic literature pay sufficient attention to the most prolific Melkite scholar Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Faḍl ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Mutrān ̣ al-Antākī, a deacon from Antiochia, whose grandfather after the death ̣ of his wife became bishop.

  We do not know anything about the life of Ibn al-Faḍl. Two of his works are dated 1052 A.D.  Graf concludes that a part of his works belongs to the middle of the 11th century; Nasrallah maintains that Ibn al-Faḍl died at the end of the 11th century, before the first Crusade.3 Ibn al-Faḍl translated parts of the Bible and patristic works from Greek into Arabic and a section of Isaac of Nineveh’s Way of Monasticism from Syriac into Arabic.

His original works are often anthologies and compilations from other works and concentrate on questions of Bible exegesis,