5 ms·

I really want to read these texts by early Islamic physicians/polymaths but it's tricky to find translations (though in fairness I haven't dug as deeply as I pr

I really want to read these texts by early Islamic physicians/polymaths but it's tricky to find translations (though in fairness I haven't dug as deeply as I probably could've). There's some fantastic history there, and I would love to compare them to Renaissance and pre-Renaissance writings. If anyone has any book recommendations or journal publications I'd love to hear them.

vdfs 4y ago
I'm native speaker and find reading those manuscript hard, they are like an exclusive club, manuscript scattered in libraries around the world and you have to know the right people or who to ask to get what you want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Yeah, I imagine it'd be like reading Latin, I even struggle with English texts written only 4 centuries ago, forget 14 centuries ago. Access is a good point too, I think Medieval and Renaissance texts tend to accumulate at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc, at least in the Anglosphere.
  - mulligan 4y ago
    the cool thing is that written Arabic, for the most part, does not suffer from that. A speaker can pick up a book written in the 11th century and find that the grammar, words, structure are all consistent and understandable. it isn't like English and something like the The Canterbury Tales
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vdfs 4y ago
      True, What i find hard is reading or figuring out the word, it's really easy to read the published book of a manuscript, but only people with experience can read the manuscript. For example these words: Fine, Fun and Fan are all written as Fn, we understand the 3 words but which one they mean depend on the context of speaking
    - omneity 4y ago
      It goes even further than that to a certain extent. In a past wikipedia rabbit hole I was surprised to recognize and understand some (transliterated) sumerian words! Suddenly being thrown 8000 years in the past is not the catastrophic scenario I was worrying about. (native arabic speaker here)
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Latin is largely similar due to an obsession with preserving the language dating all the way back to antiquity. I think the big difference with English (and European vernacular at large) is that spelling was standardized surprisingly late, no earlier than the the 16th century, but with many languages several hundred years later. Before that you had the weird-looking "Thys boke is myne"-style spelling. Sounds weird when you point it out, but the first English dictionary (the "Table Alphabeticall") was printed around the same time Shakespeare died.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Why Islamic specifically? What differences do you see from the above linked Arab Christian's writings and what Muslims might write? Is there a specific difference in theology betwen Arab Muslims and Arab Christians that translates to physicians/polymaths that you are interested to explore? I know there are artistic differences but I'm not aware of medical/mathematics ones?
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Whoops, that's not what I meant at all. I really just wanted to avoid excluding Persians like Avicenna/Ibn Sina. I actually wasn't aware of al-Quff before this post, nor that he was a Christian before your comment. Goes to show I really have a lot of reading to catch up on.
- PeterWhittaker 4y ago
  My read of the word "Islamic" in that case was, uh, for want of a better word, inclusive, in that I took it to refer to "the culture that was flourishing in the Arabic world in the 7th C". Given when the subject of the original article was born (c. 630), it is, I think, both harmless and descriptive to conflate the terms Arabic and Islamic: Islam was born in Arabia and was at that time purely Arabic, and it spread quickly enough that most/all of Arabia was Islamic during the physician's lifetime. I don't know how fruitful it is to attempt to determine the extent to which the respect for knowledge then prevalent was a result of Islam or of other factors. The simple fact is that for a period that covered at least the physician's life, preservation and extension of knowledge was prized in that area. Contrast that with the predominantly Christian cultures to the northwest-ish, that were at that time far more concerned with dogma, their own intellectual flourishing still a few centuries. What we in the west know of the ancient Greeks we owe to the Arabs, who were predominantly muslims, of that period. It's far more complicated than that, of course, but to this day, writers conflate "Islamic" and "Arabic" when referring to that period (cf, e.g., [1]), and I think forgivably so. I think. (I hesitate because on the one hand it is both difficult and fraught to tease apart the various influences, on the other hand western society was predominantly Christian and many of the western values I cherish arose and flourished in those Christian societies, on the third hand there was definitely a Jewish influence in some of those societies and an Islamic in other, on the fourth hand I share many of those values despite being none of Christian, Jewish, or anything else theistic, and on the fifth I am often irked when Christians claim (wish I could find a source, but alas, I cannot, but I've seen this many times) that those values could NOT have arisen elsewhere... not enough hands to balance these complexities.) [1] https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/01/how-scholars-islamic-golden-age-saved-ancient-greek-knowledge/ https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/01/how-scholars-islamic-go... (I am often reminded of how applicable to social discourse is Postel's Law, written in regard to TCP, "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" - be liberal, be open in one's interpretation of the wording of others, seek neither offence nor exclusion when one can charitably and gracefully assume none was meant. Nope, he didn't mean it that, but it does seem a useful heuristic.)
nraf 4y ago
I would recommend looking into the work of Professor George Saliba. He has a bunch of talks on YouTube that I came across recently that I highly recommend, one being: https://youtu.be/JEAfHGBQlkc https://youtu.be/JEAfHGBQlkc For those who understand Arabic, this interview is excellent: https://youtu.be/Sl24jUcidN8 https://youtu.be/Sl24jUcidN8 His book on astronomy might be well worth reading as well (I've ordered a copy as well): https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-arabic-astronomy-planetary-theories-during-the-golden-age-of-islam-new-york-university-studies-in-near-eastern-civilization_george-saliba/1935848/#edition=6882078 https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-arabic-astronomy-...
nestorD 4y ago
There appear to be some work done on numerizing these manuscripts and making them available: https://twitter.com/M_T_Miller/status/1339315848373297158/ https://twitter.com/M_T_Miller/status/1339315848373297158/ Translation wise, if you do not read Arabic then you could give ChatGPT a try. I am currently using GPT4 to clean-up+merge several OCRs of a Latin text and then translate it to English: while not perfect the result is very good.
brenainn 4y ago
Anecdotes and Antidotes: A Medieval Arabic History of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah. I started reading it last year and got distracted and didn't finish it, but it's very interesting. It's basically a chronicle of all the physicians this guy knew of. There's some genuinely interesting history in there, like how much they respected Galen and still referenced those works. And then there's some esoteric stuff like diagnosing a sick sultan by looking at a vial of his urine, or copious warnings of not to have sex with older women as they'll steal your life-force. Also oddly specific accounts of how much these physicians were paid and what in. Hopefully the sort of thing you're looking for. I just found it in a book store one day. edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Abi_Usaybi%27a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Abi_Usaybi%27a - this fella, as that work goes under a few names.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Read the "Canon of Medicine" by Avicenna (Ibn Sina).
erie 4y ago
The Vatican still has some Ibn al Quff's books and probably they have it translated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4173333/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4173333/
macrolime 4y ago
Once ChatGPT opens up the image analysis support of GPT-4, you can probably upload images of manuscripts that you can find online and get them translated.

vdfs 4y ago

I'm native speaker and find reading those manuscript hard, they are like an exclusive club, manuscript scattered in libraries around the world and you have to know the right people or who to ask to get what you want.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lofatdairy 4y ago
Yeah, I imagine it'd be like reading Latin, I even struggle with English texts written only 4 centuries ago, forget 14 centuries ago. Access is a good point too, I think Medieval and Renaissance texts tend to accumulate at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc, at least in the Anglosphere.
- mulligan 4y ago
  the cool thing is that written Arabic, for the most part, does not suffer from that. A speaker can pick up a book written in the 11th century and find that the grammar, words, structure are all consistent and understandable. it isn't like English and something like the The Canterbury Tales
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vdfs 4y ago
    True, What i find hard is reading or figuring out the word, it's really easy to read the published book of a manuscript, but only people with experience can read the manuscript. For example these words: Fine, Fun and Fan are all written as Fn, we understand the 3 words but which one they mean depend on the context of speaking
  - omneity 4y ago
    It goes even further than that to a certain extent. In a past wikipedia rabbit hole I was surprised to recognize and understand some (transliterated) sumerian words! Suddenly being thrown 8000 years in the past is not the catastrophic scenario I was worrying about. (native arabic speaker here)
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Latin is largely similar due to an obsession with preserving the language dating all the way back to antiquity. I think the big difference with English (and European vernacular at large) is that spelling was standardized surprisingly late, no earlier than the the 16th century, but with many languages several hundred years later. Before that you had the weird-looking "Thys boke is myne"-style spelling. Sounds weird when you point it out, but the first English dictionary (the "Table Alphabeticall") was printed around the same time Shakespeare died.

ROTMetro 4y ago

Why Islamic specifically? What differences do you see from the above linked Arab Christian's writings and what Muslims might write? Is there a specific difference in theology betwen Arab Muslims and Arab Christians that translates to physicians/polymaths that you are interested to explore? I know there are artistic differences but I'm not aware of medical/mathematics ones?

lofatdairy 4y ago
Whoops, that's not what I meant at all. I really just wanted to avoid excluding Persians like Avicenna/Ibn Sina. I actually wasn't aware of al-Quff before this post, nor that he was a Christian before your comment. Goes to show I really have a lot of reading to catch up on.
PeterWhittaker 4y ago
My read of the word "Islamic" in that case was, uh, for want of a better word, inclusive, in that I took it to refer to "the culture that was flourishing in the Arabic world in the 7th C". Given when the subject of the original article was born (c. 630), it is, I think, both harmless and descriptive to conflate the terms Arabic and Islamic: Islam was born in Arabia and was at that time purely Arabic, and it spread quickly enough that most/all of Arabia was Islamic during the physician's lifetime. I don't know how fruitful it is to attempt to determine the extent to which the respect for knowledge then prevalent was a result of Islam or of other factors. The simple fact is that for a period that covered at least the physician's life, preservation and extension of knowledge was prized in that area. Contrast that with the predominantly Christian cultures to the northwest-ish, that were at that time far more concerned with dogma, their own intellectual flourishing still a few centuries. What we in the west know of the ancient Greeks we owe to the Arabs, who were predominantly muslims, of that period. It's far more complicated than that, of course, but to this day, writers conflate "Islamic" and "Arabic" when referring to that period (cf, e.g., [1]), and I think forgivably so. I think. (I hesitate because on the one hand it is both difficult and fraught to tease apart the various influences, on the other hand western society was predominantly Christian and many of the western values I cherish arose and flourished in those Christian societies, on the third hand there was definitely a Jewish influence in some of those societies and an Islamic in other, on the fourth hand I share many of those values despite being none of Christian, Jewish, or anything else theistic, and on the fifth I am often irked when Christians claim (wish I could find a source, but alas, I cannot, but I've seen this many times) that those values could NOT have arisen elsewhere... not enough hands to balance these complexities.) [1] https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/01/how-scholars-islamic-golden-age-saved-ancient-greek-knowledge/ https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/01/how-scholars-islamic-go... (I am often reminded of how applicable to social discourse is Postel's Law, written in regard to TCP, "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" - be liberal, be open in one's interpretation of the wording of others, seek neither offence nor exclusion when one can charitably and gracefully assume none was meant. Nope, he didn't mean it that, but it does seem a useful heuristic.)

nraf 4y ago

I would recommend looking into the work of Professor George Saliba. He has a bunch of talks on YouTube that I came across recently that I highly recommend, one being: https://youtu.be/JEAfHGBQlkc https://youtu.be/JEAfHGBQlkc For those who understand Arabic, this interview is excellent: https://youtu.be/Sl24jUcidN8 https://youtu.be/Sl24jUcidN8 His book on astronomy might be well worth reading as well (I've ordered a copy as well): https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-arabic-astronomy-planetary-theories-during-the-golden-age-of-islam-new-york-university-studies-in-near-eastern-civilization_george-saliba/1935848/#edition=6882078 https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-arabic-astronomy-...

nestorD 4y ago

There appear to be some work done on numerizing these manuscripts and making them available: https://twitter.com/M_T_Miller/status/1339315848373297158/ https://twitter.com/M_T_Miller/status/1339315848373297158/ Translation wise, if you do not read Arabic then you could give ChatGPT a try. I am currently using GPT4 to clean-up+merge several OCRs of a Latin text and then translate it to English: while not perfect the result is very good.

brenainn 4y ago

Anecdotes and Antidotes: A Medieval Arabic History of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah. I started reading it last year and got distracted and didn't finish it, but it's very interesting. It's basically a chronicle of all the physicians this guy knew of. There's some genuinely interesting history in there, like how much they respected Galen and still referenced those works. And then there's some esoteric stuff like diagnosing a sick sultan by looking at a vial of his urine, or copious warnings of not to have sex with older women as they'll steal your life-force. Also oddly specific accounts of how much these physicians were paid and what in. Hopefully the sort of thing you're looking for. I just found it in a book store one day. edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Abi_Usaybi%27a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Abi_Usaybi%27a - this fella, as that work goes under a few names.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Read the "Canon of Medicine" by Avicenna (Ibn Sina).

erie 4y ago

The Vatican still has some Ibn al Quff's books and probably they have it translated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4173333/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4173333/

macrolime 4y ago

Once ChatGPT opens up the image analysis support of GPT-4, you can probably upload images of manuscripts that you can find online and get them translated.