When did rational thinking emerge in al-Andalus? It is commonly thought that philosophy was first cultivated in the region of al-Andalus during the 11th century, but did rational thinking actually emerge earlier? We spoke to Professors Godefroid de Callataÿ, Liana Saif and Sébastien Moureau about their work investigating the origins of philosophy in al-Andalus, and its importance to the wider history of sciences and ideas. The 11th century is generally thought of as the period during which philosophy and rational thinking first emerged in alAndalus, a region on the Iberian peninsula which was under Muslim dominion at the time. However, evidence has been uncovered suggesting that philosophy in fact emerged in al-Andalus before this period, which would represent a significant shift in perspective. “We would have to re-think the history of the transmission of sciences, the history of the transmission of rational thinking,” outlines Godefroid de Callataÿ, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Louvain. This is a topic Prof. de Callataÿ is exploring in the ERC-funded PhilAnd project, in which he and his team are investigating the origins of philosophy in al-Andalus, including research into the work of a society of Muslim scholars called the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, the Brethren of Purity. “It is thought that the members of the Brethren of Purity lived during the 9th or 10th century in Iraq and that their work influenced people in al-Andalus,” he says. “One of the aims in the project is to show that this occurred during the 10th century, rather than in the 11th.”
also looking at how these philosophers transmitted their ideas.” The way in which the materials available for this inquiry are examined needs to be carefully considered, believes Prof. de Callataÿ. Mainstream scholarship into the Arab-Muslim world as a phase in the transfer of the intellectual legacy of Late Antiquity to Modern Europe has, until now, largely concentrated on what could be referred to as ‘well-defined’ materials and channels of transmissions. “‘Well-defined’ in this sense
refers to those processes which can be traced on rather secure grounds, since they involve the works of clearly-identified and usually high-brow scientists and philosophers whose lives, list of writings and areas of influence, can be determined with relative accuracy,” outlines Professor de Callataÿ. The influence exerted by the ’Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, the so-called ‘Jābirian’ alchemical corpus and the ‘Nabatean Agriculture’ ascribed to Ibn Waḥshiyya have attracted less attention however. “These three large corpora
PhilAnd project This research involves analysing manuscripts and producing critical editions of several important texts dating from the period, including certain parts of the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, the encyclopaedia of the Brethren of Purity. In his earlier research, Prof. de Callataÿ found that the Brethren of Purity had a significant influence on later scholars. “I started to see that they were more influential than one had previously thought, and that they had come to be seen as important figures by people in al-Andalus,” he explains. This earlier work eventually led to the establishment of the PhilAnd project, with researchers aiming to build a deeper picture of when and how philosophy developed in al-Andalus; philosophy here is viewed in a broad sense, including essentially all rational thinking. “In the project we’re mainly focusing on 10th-century philosophers in al-Andalus. These philosophers were interested in topics like occult sciences, mathematics, magic and astronomy,” explains Prof. de Callataÿ. “We’re
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Leaf from an Arabic translation of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides (“Preparation of Medicine from Honey”), The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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of texts were all produced in the Middle East and share with one another a noteworthy number of peculiarities. All three works were the result of stratified compilations, which possibly extended over various generations. All three were highly syncretic compositions, in which a philosophical – essentially Neoplatonic – conception of man and his place in the universe is inextricably intertwined with religious ideas and an esotericallyorientated conception of science which is commonly refered to in modern scholarship as ‘bāṭinism’,” says Professor de Callataÿ. “All three appear to have been compiled in milieus strongly influenced by Ismā‘īlism, although the nature of their relationships with specific Ismā‘īlī movements as we know them to have existed still remains enigmatic.”
Philosophy in al-Andalus The project’s agenda involves research into the works of a number of philosophers, including Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, a prominent intellectual who explored a range of topics in his work. Al- Qurṭubī is thought to have written the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm, the Book of the Rank of the Sage, which is a central text in the project. “The Rutbat al-Ḥakīm seems to be the text which introduced alchemy into al-Andalus. It appears to be the only Arabic alchemical text that has been preserved from that time in alAndalus,” says Prof. Sebastien Moureau, who is part of the team working on PhilAnd. Prof. Moureau’s primary focus in the project is the practice of alchemy, which can be thought of as the science of material transformation. “A lot of translations from Arabic into Latin from the 12th and 13th centuries have been preserved, providing evidence that alchemy was present in al-Andalus. The Rutbat al-Ḥakīm allows us to know from which point it was present. We have Latin witnesses that alchemy was practiced – I would say undercover – in alAndalus, but we don’t have Arabic traces, except for in the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm,” he says. “The Mālikī scholars did not accept some of these sciences, so alchemy was not openly studied, except under the rule of Caliph Abd al-Raḥmān III.” A lot of attention in the project is centered on investigating the relationship between the development of these esoteric and philosophical ideas in al-Andalus, and their development in the Eastern regions. As Assistant Professor in the History of Esotericism in the Middle Ages at the University of Amsterdam, Liana Saif holds a deep interest in occult sciences; her work in the project is focused on the corpus attributed to Jābir Ibn Ḥayyān. “The Jābirian corpus was produced in the Eastern region, most likely
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The PhilAnd team and colleagues at one of the international conferences organised as part of the project.
in Iraq, over a fairly long period of time. The authorship of this corpus is contentious,” she outlines. The significance of this corpus to the project as a whole can be understood through the impact of a text on magic called the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (or Picatrix in Latin). “This is translated as the Goal of the Sage and is the sister text to the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm. It was also written by Maslama Ibn Qasim AlQurṭubī, who was the tutor of the son of ‘Abd
al-Raḥmān III’,” says Prof. Saif. “He was from al-Andalus, but he also travelled to Eastern regions, which is one of the ways that his ideas were transmitted. The Jābirian corpus had a deep influence on Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī.” The specific text Prof. Saif is focusing on in the project is a book about magic called the Kitāb al-Nukhab, also known as Kitāb al-Baḥth, which is attributed to Jābir Ibn
The zodiac in an anonymous manuscript (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS. Orient, fol. 3306).
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