In the first half of the 17th century, the chronicler Is??q al-Mun?f? freely quoted Galen in his famous history “Akhb?r al-Uwal”. Among contemporary scholars, al-Mun?f? was not an exception. Along with many other Greek scientists and scholars, Galen was regularly quoted on various issues scientific and medical issues but also on problems related to morality, piety and manners. The corpus of medical knowledge which was translated, studied and appropriated in the early middle ages created a full discourse of science and knowledge which permeated intellectual life in the Middle East until and as recently as the 18th century.
This process of transmission was not a mere act of translation. It was a wide-ranging intellectual process of reading, understanding, commenting and adaptation. It resulted in a scientific dialogue and posed many conceptual challenges to the theories laid out in the Greek sources. Moreover, it created connections between scholars and ideas which laid the groundwork for scientific theories in many fields of knowledge: botany was employed to assist in the production of drugs and understand their effect; Optics developed close connections with fields as wide ranging as ophthalmology, psychology, and astronomy, and surveying; the study of animals, along with various strands of theological and philosophical thought, helped to provide a better understanding of anatomy and formulate theories of disease transmission.
Also, the process of creation and circulation of knowledge in the Middle East did not consist merely in the adaptation of slightly modified Greek sciences and theories of knowledge. Persian writings, among other sources, affected medical theory. Moreover, evidence suggests that connections were established and maintained between the Ottoman sphere and Eurpean scientists long before the French expedition to Egypt in 1798. Throughout Islamic history, scholars raised philosophical and theological questions which affected the progress of medical knowledge.
This panel discusses the dialectics of creation/circulation of medical knowledge through a number of case studies spread over a long period of time. Ranging from the analysis of the Arabic translations of Galen to the incorporation of Euclidean optics in the study and practice of ophthalmology, the panel addresses questions related to the incorporation and appropriation of Greek sciences. The study of anatomy in the Ottoman realm reveals the intellectual connections and exchanges between Ottoman scientists and their Western and Eastern counterparts and the effect of theological and philosophical questions on the medical thought and practice during that period.
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Dr. Elaheh Kheirandish
This paper addresses the medical and ophthalmological context of early Arabic optics with reference to the Optics of Ahmad ibn ‘Isa, an early Arabic text with notable features beyond its little known author and date. The only recorded reference to the text is in a work known as “Light of the Eyes” (Nur al-‘uyun) by Salah al-Din Kahhal (ca. 1296), itself revealing for aspects of early Arabic optics beyond medical and ophthalmological considerations. Besides containing the single reference to Ibn ‘Isa’s Optics by both author and title, the text opens with a formulation of the Euclidean visual-ray hypothesis that illuminates complex problems in transmission by overlapping with at least two other early Arabic sources: the pseudo-Euclidean De speculis (extant only partially in Arabic), and the Rectification of al-Kindi (extant fully in Arabic in contrast to al-Kindi’s De aspectibus surviving only in a Latin version). Of the seven sections of the Optics of Ibn ‘Isa itself, a text with its own unique feature of explicit references to ancient Greek authors (i. theories of external senses, with reference to “the ancients”; ii. polished surfaces, with reference to Euclid; iii. burning mirrors, with reference to Anthemius and Archimedes; iv. transparent surfaces; v. halo and rainbow, with reference to Aristotle; vi. vision and perception, with reference to Euclid, and vii. double vision, with reference to Galen), only the opening and closing sections are strictly related to the medical and ophthalmological contexts of early Arabic optics.
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Dr. Uwe Vagelpohl
The translation of medical texts, chiefly the prolific oeuvre of the Roman physician Galen, was one of the most important contributions of the Greek-Arabic translation movement to the development of medicine in the medieval Islamic world.
Among the more important Galenic works translated into Arabic was his commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics, an extensive collection of medical case notes. Of the seven books of the Epidemics, Galen considered only the first three and the sixth to be authentic and wrote an extensive commentary on those books. Less than half of it survives in Greek; however, we have an almost complete Arabic translation created in the ninth century. Its author was none other than Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the most accomplished translator of his time and also himself a practising physician. Its importance for the Arabic medical tradition is amply attested in the later medical literature.
Throughout the translation, we find remarks by Hunayn himself who talks freely about the quality of his source text, his own interpretation of certain passages and also, where the source was incomplete or problematic, about his attempts to heal or even reconstruct whole chunks of it. Hunayns extremely pragmatic approach to this text tells us a lot about his own interests and methods and also the purposes and practical slant of the Greek-Arabic translation movement as a whole.
An analysis of translation samples, Hunayn's notes and related texts lets us take a glimpse into the translator's workshop and helps us answer important questions about the work of the translator, its wider context and the transmission of medical knowledge to the Islamic world. Does Hunayn as a physician approach this text differently than the non-medical texts he translated? How does he deal with the translational and medical problems posed by his sources? How did he view his own role as a translator, his Galenic and Hippocratic sources and the contemporary state of medical practice?
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Prof. Ahmed Ragab
In his comments on the famine of 1200 in Egypt, al-Baghd?d?, who was a celebrated physician in the Abbasid court, suggested that the bodies of the dead could be used to study the anatomy of the human body. Al-Baghd?d?, who was accused of performing postmortem dissection, was part of a debate around the legality of using human bodies to study anatomy. This theological and philosophical question had many dimensions. On one hand, it put into question the nature of the medical theory and the importance of the science of anatomy towards the understanding of diseases and cure. On the other hand, it raised questions related to the sanctity of the human body and the limits to the reach of science and scientists. Last, but not least, an overarching question concerned the relations between science and religion and how such relation should be managed and dealt with.
Al-Baghd?d? was part of a tradition of religious scholars addressing the questions of medicine and medical knowledge extending through al-Maqdis? (13th centuries), Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah (14th century), al-?uy??? (15th century), al-Qaly?b? (17th century) to al-?A???r (18th century). All these treatises modified/portraied a consistent continuous dialectical relation between religious thought and theological theory, on one hand, and the medical thought and practice, on the other.
This paper raises questions related to the role of theological and religious thought in the creation and the circulation of medical knowledge. In doing so, a different understanding of the relation between science and religion is tested. Such understanding does not share the premises of the European renaissance experience, where the religion was perceived as the arch-enemy of scientific reasoning and theory. However, it presents a framework, where the religious and theological discourses and theories play a significant role in creating and recreating the givens and the conclusions of the medical theory alongside the scientific and philosophical intellect. The paper will study a number of writings by al-Suy???, al-Qaly?b?, al-Damanh?r? and al-?A???r, among others, to depict their understanding of the process of the production and circulation of medical knowledge and their perception of the interactions between science and religion. Through analyzing the intellectual context, in which these treatises and writings were produced, the paper will try to redraw the role played by religious and theological discourse in the formulation and propagation of the scientific discourse.
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Dr. Rainer Broemer
Historians of medicine in Islamic civilisations tend to suggest an essential quality of medical theories and practices performed in states and empires ruled by Muslim elites. “Islamic medicine”, in a traditional reading, would be organised around a corpus of Hippocratic, Galenic, and Avicennan writings, based on humoral theory and preserved, with minor modifications, well into the twentieth century (e.g., Unani tibb in the Indian Raj). Only gradually does the historical complexity of medical developments across and beyond the Dar al-Islam emerge from under the curtain of essentialist stereotypes. It then emerges that, e.g., medical writers in the Ottoman Empire early on made use of works from western (Italy, Spain) as well as eastern sources (e.g., Persia). Far from being unidirectional, the movement of approaches to healing came in tidal waves often triggered by political commotions (Alavi 2008). This paper analyses some exemplary cases of anatomical descriptions of the human body from the time of Shemseddin Itaki (fl. 1630) to the early nineteenth century, when the Egyptian scholar Hasan al-‘Attar (ca. 1760-1835) reflected his encounter with a variety of medical concepts during his exile in Istanbul, adopting the time-honoured form of a commentary on a classical work by Dawud al-Antaki (d. 1599), while his contemporary Shanizade Ataullah (1771-1826) printed the first medical textbook in Turkish modelled on current European works. Particular emphasis is given to the varied cultural meanings of human anatomy (and physiology), between metaphysics, theology, medical diagnostics and therapeutic interventions.
