Kitab al-Fihrist Part II: Dipping into History

The origin story of the Kitab al-Fihrist (described in Part 1: Cataloging the Rescue of Science) is a fascinating one: but as a generalist reader, I found myself spending a considerable amount of time reading the 1969-1970 English translation by Bayard Dodge to get a bit of knowledge about the people who created the early Golden Age of Islam. Here's a taste of what I found.

Folk Tales, Legends, and Workers in the Field

There are numerous tasty tidbits in al-Fihrist that make it worth dipping into. For archaeology nerds, in Book 10 (alchemy and alchemists), there is a description of investigations led by an Egyptian official around and into an Egyptian pyramid, most likely Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza. Among the folk tales included in Book 10 are early versions of the Scheherazade and Sinbad tales.

In terms of project personnel, the Banu Musa appear with some regularity: they were three 9th century Persian brothers who played a major role in translating Greek scientific works. Different members of the Barmakid family from Persia appear, as viziers and scholars in Baghdad who obtained documents. There is considerable discussion of the difficulties of translating Ptolemy's Almagest. United States scholar Devin Stewart (2011) found an account of a visiting Chinese scholar who recorded all the books of the Greek physician Galen (129-200 CE) in shorthand while the Persian physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925 CE) and one of his students dictated. And there is an account of the Abbasid ruler al-Ma'mun's dream in which he met and talked to Aristotle, which has said to have stirred his hunger to amass more and more lost science.

Women in Islamic Sciences

Among the scientists listed in al-Fihrist is the woman astrolabe-maker known as Maryam al-Astralubi. Out of sheer nosiness, I somewhat haphazardly searched for other women in al-Fihrist's entries. Of most interest is Ibn Abi Fatimah (Vol 1:12), the youngest daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, who is listed as a transcriber of the Q'uran. Others included Thana, an enslaved woman scribe listed as a pupil of a man named Ishaq ibn Hammad, one of the transcribers at the founding of the Abbasid Caliphate (Vol 1:12).

Three other women were listed as tribal scholars involved in the collection of legends and colloquialisms: Ghaniyah Umm al-Humaris, a scholar of Bedouin dialects; Ghaythah Umm al-Haythem, a language scholar of tribal origin; and Qaribah Umm al-Buhlol, a scholar of tribal origin from the Banu Asad, who studied dialects and language (Vol 1:103).

A female Indian physician Rusa (or Rusha) is listed for having written a book on the medical treatment of women which was translated into Arabic (Vol 2: 710). There are fourteen female poets, as well as singers and musicians. I searched, but was unable to find reliable sources for these women, but then, the al-Fihrist was the only source for Maryam al-Asturlabi. Accessing the latest Arabic version of the al-Fihrist (2014) would be critical for readers intent on a serious investigation of women in early Islamic sciences: the 2014 edition is linked in the sources below.

Astronomy and Astrology

The Staring into Space project is dedicated to the pursuit of astronomical/astrological science, so much of my random poking around was focused on those chapters. Only the authors and titles of their works are listed in al-Fihrist, but they hint at intriguing content, and one of the most represented are the works of Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca. 800–870 CE). He is commonly referred to as al-Kindi, and "The Philosopher of the Arabs," a prolific polymath who wrote books on logic, philosophy, geometry, calculation, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and many other things (and, according to al-Nadim, he was miserly). Vol 2: 615-626

The following are a few of the titles of al-Kindi's astronomical and cosmological treatises listed in al-Fihrist that caught my eye, and which I would love to read if they had survived.

• The visibility of the new moon cannot be determined accurately, a statement about it being approximate
• Questions which are asked about the states of the stars
• An explanation of the cause of the retrogression of the stars
• The speed appearing with the movement of the stars, when on the horizon, and their slowness after they have risen
• The causes for the positions (settings) of the stars
• The most remote world (extreme universe)
• Explanations of the Book of Euclid
• Ptolemy's art of cosmology
• Essence of the celestial and the inherent azure color perceived in the direction of the heavens
• The relativity of time
• The great atmospheric phenomenon in 222 AH (836-837 CE)
• The star that appeared and was observed for some days until it faded out

Scholars have identified those last two entries as referring to an early sighting of what we now call Halley's comet. Recently, Iranian scholar Hamid-Reza Giahi Yazdi (2014) discovered what appears to be an Arabic commentary on Aristotle's discussion of comets, and it includes either a summary or a fragment of al-Kindi's treatise on the comet, including his ecliptic coordinates. Based on that fragment (translated and presented in his 2014 article), Yazdi was able to perform an in-depth analysis of al-Kindi's cometary observations. A commentary of a summary of a lost treatise: that wisp of information is often all we have of the survival of many ancient manuscripts. It's pretty cool that Yazdi could catch it.

Project Takeaways

As a addicted generalist, I find spending time among ancient manuscripts to be enlightening and delightful. So much to learn, so little time. If I were a student of medieval Islam, Persia, Greece, China, or India, looking for a topic for a research paper, I might be tempted to look here. For the Staring into Space project, the al-Fihrist documents an intense scholarly attention to the night sky and its celestial orbs. I'll be back.

Figure Captions

1. The bottom edge of the 990 CE copy of Kitab Al-Fihrist, conserved as MS3315 in the Chester Beatty Online Collections. Image credit: Chester Beatty, Dublin, CC BY 4.0.
2. Drawing of the constellation Cassiopeia from 1010 copy of Al-Sufi's Book of the Fixed Stars. Bodleian Library at Oxford. CC BY 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_of_the_Fixed_Stars_Auv0109_cassiopeia.jpg https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/c1caa84c-f6d2-483f-9eb4-2439cccdc801/
3. Halley's Comet, March 21, 1986. Image from the European Southern Observatory. CC BY 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comethalley-21mar1986.jpg

Sources

• Ibn al-Nadim, Muhammad ibn Ishaq. "Kitab Al-Fihrist, Volume 1." The Fihrist of al-Nadim, edited by Bayard Dodge, translated by Bayard Dodge, vol. 1, Columbia University Press, 987. https://archive.org/details/fihristofalnadim0000unse/
• Ibn al-Nadim, Muhammad ibn Ishaq "Kitab Al-Fihrist, Volume 2." The Fihrist of al-Nadim, edited by Bayard Dodge, translated by Bayard Dodge, vol. 2, Columbia University Press, 1970 987. The Fihrist of al-Nadim; a tenth-century survey of Muslim culture, https://archive.org/details/fihristofalnadim0000ibna/
• Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq. The Fihrist of Al-Nadīm. edited by Ayman Fuad Sayyid, 2nd ed., London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2014. doi: http://doi.org/10.56656/101011
• Osti, Letizia. "Authors, Subjects and Fame in the Kitab Al-Fihrist of Ibn Al-Nadim: The Case of Al-Tabari Adn Al-Suli." Annali di ca' Foscari, vol. 38, no. 3, 1999, pp. 155–70.
• Stewart, Devin. "Abu ’1-Faraj Muhammad Ibn Ishaq Ibn Al-Nadim (D. 990)." Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 925-1350, edited by Terri DeYoung and Mary St. Germain, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011, pp. 129–42.
• Stewart, Devin J. "Editing the Fihrist of Ibn Al-Nadīm." Journal of Abbasid Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2014, pp. 159–205, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/22142371-12340010
• Wellisch, Hans H. "The First Arab Bibliography: Fihrist Al-'Ulum." Occasional Papers, vol. 175, The University of Illinois, 1986. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED278419
• Yazdi, Hamid-Reza Giahi. "The Fragment of Al-Kindī's Lost Treatise on Observations of Halley's Comet in A.D. 837." Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014, pp. 61–77, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/002182861404500104

This article is part of the Staring into Space project.
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