Saturday, April 18, 2020

Greek Intellectual Heritage in Arabic: Some Notes on ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī Part II

I first came across Badawī in 1996 as the editor of the famous 'Theologia Aristotelis' or Uthūlūjiyā, the text produced in the Kindī circle in Baghdad by Ibn Nāʿima al-Ḥimṣī based on paraphrases of sections of Enneads IV-VI of Plotinus (d. 270), an edition that was first published through the French Institute in Cairo in 1955 and remains the main edition that we use. I bought it in a (probably pirated but quite excellent and well bound in leather) edition produced by Intishārāt-i Bīdār a small outfit run by Muḥsin Bīdārfar himself a muḥaqqiq in Gozarkhān in Qum, a shop that opened (or at least used to) for a short time before Zuhr prayers and before Maghrib prayers. 

This was called Aflūṭīn ʿind al-ʿArab and included the edition with a useful introduction on the manuscripts as well as tables of correspondence to the Enneads and a Greek-Latin-Arabic glossary. 



The standard study on this is the Arabic Plotinus of Peter Adamson, his Notre Dame PhD dissertation published first in 2002 by Duckworth and then reprinted in 2017 with Gorgias




The ERC funded project of Cristina D'Ancona entitled Greek into Arabic on the text has yet to produce a new critical edition - although she has herself produced an excellent one on the first chapter of the text with an Italian translation and commentary


Also in the same year, 1955, he published an edition of various Neoplatonic texts in Arabic (al-Aflāṭūnīya al-muḥdatha ʿind al-ʿArab) including the influential Liber de Causis (fīʾl-maḥḍ al-khayr), which was to be more significant in the Latin medieval tradition through its translation. the text was based on the Arabic Proclus and related elements.  

At the same time, the editions of the Arabic Aristotle appeared:

The Arabic Aristotle (Arisṭū ʿind al-ʿarab) was published in 1947 by Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya (reprinted by the Kuwaiti government in 1978), and it contained book lambda of the Metaphysics as well as some of the famous commentarial glosses including Avicenna on book lambda from his non-extant Kitāb al-inṣāf (which has now been published with a French edition by Marc Geoffroy, Meryem Sebti and Jules Janssens by Vrin in Paris in 2014),

and his glosses on the Theologia Aristoteles also from the non-extant Kitāb al-inṣāf (which are forthcoming in an edition and French translation by Meryem Sebti, Daniel de Smet and Jules Janssens). These glosses were translated by Georges Vajda back in 1951.  Other important texts were various works of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the famous correspondence of Avicenna entitled al-Mubāḥathāt that was later edited and published by Muḥsin Bīdārfar in 1992. There is a slightly revised edition of this correspondence by Bīdārfar within the new Collected Works project of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy. 





The logic (Manṭiq Arisṭū) was published in 3 volumes in Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya in 1948, and reprinted by the Kuwaiti government in 1980. This was the complete organon: the Categories (Māqūlāt) translated by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn (c. 830-910), De interpretatione (fīʾl-ʿibāra) also rendered by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, Prior Analytics (al-Qiyās) rendered by Theodorus (who seems to be unknown), Posterior Analytics (al-Burhān) translated by Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus (c. 870-940) based on Isḥāq's Syriac translation, Topics (al-Jadal) rendered by Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī (d. c. 912), Sophistical Refutations (al-Sūfisṭīqā) in a team effort (consecutive drafts refined over generations) of Ibn Nāʿima, Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (893-974) and Abū ʿAlī ʿĪsā Ibn Zurʿa (943-1008). 

Since it was common in late antiquity to include the Poetics and the Rhetoric in the organon (and place the Isagoge of Porphyry as an introduction to the corpus), he published an edition of the Rhetoric (fīʾl-khiṭāba) in 1959 (reprinted in Kuwait in 1979), and on the Poetics (fīʾl-shiʿr) in 1953 along with the commentaries of Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd (reprinted in 1973).


On the discussion of why the Poetics and the Rhetoric were considered as part of the organon see the classic study of Deborah Black. Two years ago this useful study on the history of the Poetics appeared in Tehran by Sayyid Maḥmūd Yūsuf-i Sānī.

Later Rafīq ʿAjam and Gérard Juhāmī produced a new edition of the organon in the 1990s in two volumes, excluding the Poetics and the Rhetoric:




The De Anima was published by Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya in 1954 in the translation of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (809-873) along with some of the short commentaries. This was also reprinted in Kuwait in 1980. We know also from Rudiger Arnzen's work that there were other translations of the Greek and also paraphrases including one prominent one into Persian by Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī (d. c. 1209).

The De Caelo (fīʾl-samāʾ) appeared in 1961. 

The Physics (al-Ṭabīʿa) appeared in 1965. 

On the nature of Animals (Ṭibāʿ al-ḥayawān) came out in 1977. 

The Arabic de partibus animalium appeared in 1978. 
[I cannot say more about these works as they are in my office and I do not have access to them]

One of the critical elements of the corpus was the recognition of the importance of the commentators on Aristotle and even the realisation that some of those works were only extant in Arabic - this was Shurūḥ ʿalā Arisṭū mafqūda fīʾl-yūnānīya published by Dār al-Mashriq in Beirut in 1972, mainly Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius.



Badawī was one of the first to provide editions of the text of Proclus and Philoponus on the nature of the eternity of the cosmos that played a major role in the philosophical and theological debates in the ʿAbbāsid period and after. 

He also produced editions of the commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rushd as well as Ibn Sīnā's version of the Posterior Analytics, and on the Rhetoric by Ḥāzim al-Qarṭajannī in Cairo in 1961 and reprinted thereafter. 

As he has done for Plotinus early on, he published a volume of the corpus of Plato in 1973 - Aflāṭūn fīʾl-islām. This was the fruit of his year spent in Tehran and was published by the branch of the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies. 

Another result of that year was his edition of the Ṣiwān al-ḥikma of Sijistānī (d. c. 1000) that appeared in 1974, an important source for the history of philosophy and its conception in Arabic. 


This related interest in the history of philosophy also produced a very influential text - Ādāb al-falāsifa of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq that was published in 1985. 


Much later in his life, during his time in Kuwait, he wrote some works summarising his contribution such as Transmission de la philosophie grecque au monde arabe published by Vrin in Paris in 1968, 
and Histoire de la philosophie en islam in two volumes published by Vrin in Paris in 1972, 


[This work broadly ignored the post-classical work of Corbin and others and hence very much remained within the context of looking at philosophy up to Averroes]

His intellectual vigour and interests are further indicated by translations of literary works: Cervantes' Don Quixote and Goethe's Faust and West-östlicher Diwan

There are plenty of other works such as on the nature of Platonic forms in Islamic philosophy, on the conception of history, the thought of Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sīnā and many more which would require yet another post.

To do justice to the contribution of Badawī (even when one wishes to be critical of his editions, his conceptualisation and his historical vision) one would need a thorough research project to look at what he published, why he published it and to what end: did he have a vision of the nature of the tradition and how the 'Islamic' and the 'Greek' came together? Of course, elements of his memoirs and other writings give us a sense of that: that Sufism came together with Heideggerian existentialism, and in the quest for cultural authenticity the desire to recover the Arabic Aristotelian (and even the Neoplatonic) heritage. Unlike later historians and philosophers (foremost among whom is obviously Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī) who engaged with that tradition, he was not dismissive of the Neoplatonic as some 'conspiracy' to deprive Arabs of their rationality. 

Thus his career reflects various concerns of the emergence of modern Arab thought after or perhaps at the end of what Hourani famously called the 'liberal age' about the conception of philosophy that brought together tradition and the modern, the concern for the colonial subject emerging into the post-colonial space with new optimisms for the future articulation of individual subjectivity and cultural authenticity, the forging of a new liberal nationalism predicated on the dignity of the person, the liberal education, and the emergence of the culture wars to come between liberals, nationalists, and Islamists. Given the centrality of Egypt - and of Cairo University in particular - the contemporary Arab intellectual history, the story of Badawī is very much about the ebbs and flows of Arab philosophy and its dissemination into Iraq, the Levant and elsewhere, as well as its agonies and discontents after 1967.  


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