Rutba vs Ġāya: A Reconsideration of the Impact of the Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ on Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī

This study aims to reconsider the impact of the Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ on the Rutbat al-ḥakīm (The Rank of the Sage) and the Ġāyat al-ḥakīm (The Aim of the Sage). Exclusively concerned with textual evidence taken from the three works and making extensive use of the programme Qawl, it shows that the way Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī refers to the Iḫwānian corpus in the Rutba reveals a far less familiarity with that work than at the time he writes the Ġāya. This difference of treatment suggests that, contrary to what was previously assumed, Maslama had no access to the text of the Rasāʾil before he started writing his ultimate treatise.

The Authorship of al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa Re-Examined

Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ and its summary, al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa, are commonly attributed to the same authors. The strongest argument for this is the presence of references from the former to the latter. The aim of the present article is to analyze all of these references to establish their import for the theory of common authorship. When the fourteen references in the Beirut edition are compared with the oldest manuscripts, the result is that only six of these references appear in the latter, and even among these two are highly ambiguous. The only references from Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ to al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa unambiguously confirmed by the oldest manuscripts are the four references in version B of epistle 52, which is itself of dubious authenticity. Since all or most of the references outside epistle 52 are then clearly later interpolations, the conclusion is that the references in Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ do not support the theory of common authorship.

Looted Libraries and Legitimation Policies: Ptolemy, the Library of al-Arawšī and the Translation Movement in Toledo

MS Tunis, Dār al-kutub al-waṭaniyya, 7116, is the only extant manuscript containing a complete copy of the Isḥāq/Ṯābit version of the Almagest. Paul Kunitzsch has underlined the close similarities between the marginal notes in the Tunis manuscript and those in Gerard of Cremona’s Latin translation of the Almagest, so that Kunitzsch has concluded that Gerard of Cremona had a manuscript close to the Tunis manuscript before him during the revision of his translation of the Almagest. A note in MS Tunis, Dār al-kutub al-waṭaniyya, 7116, points out that this manuscript was copied from a model owned by al-Arawšī, a bibliophile living in Valencia famous for the size of his library, a significant part of which was looted by al-Maʾmūn b. Ḏī l-Nūn and sent to Toledo, arguably shortly before Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī wrote his Ṭabaqāt al-umam. Based on MS Tunis, Dār al-kutub al-waṭaniyya, 7116, the present contribution explores the significance of al-Arawšī’s looted library as an important link between Umayyad Cordoba and Toledo. It also calls attention to the highly unusual paper of MS Tunis, Dār al-kutub al-waṭaniyya, 7116, made of woven fibers, maybe flax.

Scientific Method in Late-Antique Paganism: The (Rational) Empiricism of al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture)

The reputation of the late-antique or early Islamic al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture) as an esoteric forgery has recently begun to shift and its value as a source for the study of early-Islamic or late-antique Near Eastern paganism has been restored. This article contributes to a further reinterpretation of the work by elucidating its value for the history of late-antique and early Islamic science. It argues that the work distinguishes between the epistemological categories of the rational and the marvelous and critically approaches both based on a rational empiricism which it shares with contemporary disciplines such as medicine and astrology. The concepts of experience (taǧriba) and reason (qiyās) are central to al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya’s epistemology, and the work relies on observation and experiments, combined with methods of deductive and analogical reasoning to obtain applied botanical and agricultural knowledge. Al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya also contains competing views regarding prophecy and astrological knowledge which are illustrative of epistemological debates within Pagan late-antique scholarship.