Gathering Knowledge. Towards a Typology of Arabic Compendia

Compendia are the best way to understand the intellectual and scientific culture of an epoch. In them compilers gather the general knowledge of the educated people. Contrarily to the works of great thinkers in which we may witness soaring flights of intellect, compendia present the average level of education and learning of a certain time and thus provide us with a mean to know about intellectual daily life which would otherwise remain much in the dark. A particularly interesting epoch within the history of ideas are the first centuries of the newly founded Islamic Empire, a time when the Arabic-Islamic world became acquainted with, assimilated and appropriated the intellectual heritage of the Greeks sometimes via the Syriac , and, to a lesser degree, the Persians. Whereas the great scholars of this period, starting with al-Kindi and Hunayn ibn Ishaq in the ninth century, followed by al-Farabi in the tenth and finally the towering figures of Ibn Sina in the eleventh and Ibn Rushd in the twelfth century, are well known and studied today, we are much less familiar with the intellectual background of their time, with which alone we may contrast their achievements in order to understand and appreciate them. An excellent way to change this situation and to shed some light on the average level of education and learning from the 9th to the 12th century of the Islamic world is to analyse compendia originating in that period. Often only preserved in manuscripts, these compendia contain the ethical values predominant at that time in gnomologia, i.e. collections of anecdotes and sayings of moral content attributed to sages and philosophers. The level of knowledge on the history of philosophy is reflected in doxographies, namely compilations of topics on which different philosophers held various doctrines. A further category of compendia on which the main part of the project will focus are the philosophical and scientific readers. These readers gather passages of varying, but often considerable length, which stem from a number of sources and cover philosophical and scientific subjects prevalent at the time of composition. Based on a thorough study of the existing manuscript evidence the project Gathering Knowledge presents a representative text corpus of compendia, which is analysed, partially edited and classified in a typology. This provides answers to questions as to the purpose, function, use and readership of compendia and paints a picture of the intellectual culture of the Arabic-Islamic world in the Middle Ages.

Compilations and compendia are composed of excerpts and passages taken from other texts in order to address a particular issue or several topics. In this way collections of knowledge are created which deliver insight into the education and interests of the compiler and his time. Fragments of text which make up such collections gain considerably in importance if the writings from which they have been excerpted are lost today. If this is the case, compilations are often the only mean to reconstruct, at least partly, these no longer known texts and to evaluate their influence on the readership of their time. In the course of the project Gathering Knowledge it has been possible to establish a hitherto little considered genre of writing as one source for Arabic compendia of the ninth and tenth centuries. The genre in question are the so-called Prolegomena, i.e. preliminaries and introductions, which were widespread in Greek and Syriac during Late Antiquity, and whose diffusion and popularity are now also demonstrated with regard to the Arabic-Islamic world. Greek Prolegomena were used in the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria to introduce students to philosophy, medicine, and other sciences. They therefore contain clear and simple material which may be excerpted and compiled easily and without further explanation. An anonymous and untitled Arabic compilation, which is today incompletely preserved in a manuscript in Tehran, contains material which undoubtedly stems from the tradition of Greek Prolegomena to philosophy and medicine. Thereby this compilation provides some important indication for the existence, the prominence, and the significance of this material also in the Arabic-Islamic world of the ninth century. A further compendium, the Book of Definitions of Logic (Kitab udud al-maniq) composed by Ibn al-Bahriz and dedicated to the caliph al-Mamun (reg. 813-33) turns out to be almost entirely compiled from Prolegomena-material. This is of particular importance as completely preserved Arabic versions of Prolegomena are few, and based on the surviving evidence one may thus easily conclude that this genre of writing did not play an important role in Arabic. A closer look, however, reveals that a number of philosophers and scholars writing in Arabic made use of it. Prolegomena-material preserved in compilations and compendia may now allow for a better understanding of the sources which were available to these Arabic writers. Further the continuity in the impartation of philosophical knowledge from Greek Late Antiquity to early Islamic times becomes apparent.