Ideas - How a translation movement made Western philosophers famous

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

From Greek to Arabic and then to Latin, translators in 8th-century Baghdad eventually brought to Europe the works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and others who became central pillars of Western thought. IDEAS explores what is known as the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement. *This episode originally aired on June 19, 2025.

We'd love to know more about our audience, what you like, and how we can improve. Complete our short survey, and you'll have a chance to win some CBC swag. Find the link in the episode description. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. In the year 762, the Caliph, El Mansour, commissioned the construction of the city of Baghdad. They really wanted to establish themselves as something different than what came before. And they settled on the location of Baghdad because Baghdad is at the heart of so many ancient civilizations and empires.

El Mansur ruled over the Abbasid Caliphate, a region with a story past. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, ancient Sumer, the Abbasids were very much aware of all of this history. and we're very much trying to position themselves in that long lineage. And out of that long lineage came a movement that would transform Western and world culture forever. Here was a culture that began the traditions in the West of scholarly inquiry that was entirely open. Its formal name is the Greco-Arabic translation movement,

which saw countless translations done over centuries of ancient Greek texts into Arabic. There was certainly those who were very much enamored of Greek science. And so Elkindi, the first Arabic philosopher, actually will argue in one of his texts on first philosophy, or what we would call metaphysics, he simply says, look, here's a case in which these people have done some really good work. Why shouldn't we build on it? The movements not only built on an intellectual tradition, it gave birth to a new one.

By sharing manuscripts across languages and borders, it connected Europe with some of the finest minds in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Everybody was a polymath. Everyone was a physician, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, you know, butcher, baker, candle mystic maker. Can you talk a little bit about that? You know, what is it about this time where everybody's a polymath? Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa takes us inside the centuries-long

Greco-Arabic Translation Movement. There's many facets to that particular question. I mean, one is that today if somebody claimed to know everything about everything, we would call them an idiot. I would say you can't simply know everything about everything. This was at a time at least in the Greek, Arabic, Latin, Hebrew world of the Middle Ages, It was possible for somebody to sort of know all the sciences and know them very well. And so in some cases, the reason why in answer to your question, everyone's a polymath,

not everyone was a polymath, but the ones that really shined and would go on and their legacy would be with us today were those folks. My name's John McGuinness. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. I specialize in medieval Arabic and Islamic philosophy and history of science with a focus on Ibn Sina or in the Latin tradition Avicina. John says studying the philosophy of translation movement figures thinkers like Ibn Sina meant he also had to embark on a journey, learning everything about. everything. As I went to try to understand, say, Iman Sina or Avicenna's own philosophy, I found myself only able to do that by starting to know about Aristotelian and medieval logic, Arabic grammar, warning more about astronomy. We can have wonderful talks about astronomy. I'm probably the best Gallenic physician around. It's outdated. But, I mean, it was all part and parcel to actually trying to understand, at the time, I was just trying to understand

Binzina's theory of time as part of his natural philosophy or physics. And yet, I got drawn into just subject after subject in order to understand it. And part of that is this particular man, Bin Sena. He has a worldview that just is intended to incorporate this. And he is truly a genius. He tells us that, say, by the age of 16 or something, he had mastered men. medicine. And he goes, that's one of the easy sciences. I was able to do that in a little under two years. And you think he's just bragging. But he actually, his work on medicine was used

even in Europe until the 1800s is like the text still used by traditional medicine in parts of the Middle East and further East. John's already got us in the 19th century. But to understand where this story starts, we need to rewind a thousand years to mid-eighth century Baghdad. Oh, it seems to be the place to be. Yeah, in some ways, I guess first thing to say is this is a freshly minted city in some regards. It's the newly established capital. Very quickly, though, becomes a cosmopolitan center. So my name is Sarah Ann Knudsen. I'm an assistant professor of teaching and the Department of History at UBC. And one of the things I work on is the research and teaching of the Basid Caliphate.

This is a place that was incredibly diverse, had people walking around the streets of different ethnicities, speaking various languages, different religious identities. And this definitely seems to be a place where these people could interact freely, there was a lot of opportunities for intellectual debate. There were materials being circulated in Baghdad from all over the world. So in many ways, a true cosmopolitan city in that sense. What was the creative force? What was the creative energy like?

What was this sort of a hustle and bustle of all kinds of creative generation? Or was this primarily focused on scholarly work? No, I think there's a lot of creative. generation, as you say, taking place in Baghdad. There's a lot of craftworking happening. I'm trained as an archaeologist, so one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is the production of various materials. So Abbasid ceramics, for example, take on new forms, particularly as Abbasid-era society is coming into contact with ceramics from China. So the Abbasid start adopting that kind of visual style.

for their own pottery. What do you think it was about the culture of this time that allowed it to become this creative force in terms of translation and knowledge production? You've talked about the sort of the ceramics part of it, but why translation, why that particular thing? Yeah, historians have been asking themselves this for a very long time, and I think there's a number of factors to consider. I think the first one that sometimes gets overlooked but is a really important factor is

the rise of book culture. And this happens largely because I'm going to mention China again because of the spread of papermaking technology that arrives from China over Central Asia and into the Caliphate. So very quickly, we see the rise of Arabic literacy, the increased production of books, which was made cheaper by using paper. And because of it, they have access to this papermaking technology. So Abbasid culture, in short, really quickly becomes a book culture, and I think that sort of helps support the translation movement. There's also very clear social importance placed on education and knowledge. So there was this idea in the Abbasid Caliphate that knowledge was something that did not belong just to the elites. So you see people from all walks of

life, all social classes, being able to receive an education. I'm thinking of one scholar, Al Jihad, who describes that he describes what we would think of today as secondary education. He's describing the education of his youth, and he describes that, you know, he received an education next to alongside the butcher's son. So this really was a cultural context where people of all walks of life could receive an education. So intellectual activity comes to be seen as very important and something that a wide range of people could be involved in. Very early on, the Abbasid saw the application potential of Greco-Roman knowledge. This fueled the kind of intellectual interest that went on to feed the translation project. This intellectual activity was

enhanced by a patronage system developed by the court of the caliph through which patrons would dedicate money and resources to fund translators. Education and knowledge production became important aspects of a Bassett culture, not merely because many caliphs were also amateur scholars, but because the public had a very positive impression of any ruler who funded the sciences and translations. Investing in intellectual work was a win-win. Add to this atmosphere the creation of institutions that supported translation work. One's such place was the Beit al-Hikma or House of Wisdom. Not much is known about how it functioned practically, but it's been described as a royal archive and library sitting at the

center of the translation movement. Another key institution, salon culture. So this was an institution, the modulus in Arabic, but it gets translated as salon, very much the product of the court of the caliph. These salons were places that the caliphs often themselves presided over, but again, as we're developing this culture of social prestige around patronage and so on, very soon, other members of the social elite also come to hold their own salons. And they seem to be competing with each other to hold these gatherings. So these salons could include and did include, again, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, people of many different identities coming together, Christians, Muslims, Jews, probably even Zoroastrians. And even that just speaks to the academic freedom of the time that people of various backgrounds were able to more or less freely express themselves in these kinds of intellectual spaces. And these salons are also places where aspiring scholars and translators could come to and almost use it as somewhat of a networking opportunity.

They would use it as a way to find potential patrons who would be willing to sponsor their intellectual work. Some patrons were willing to offer scholars and translators room and board. and they would otherwise use it to find more permanent employment options. So whether that was as bureaucrats in the Abbasid administration, scholars at the court, that kind of thing. You teach about this time period. You look at a variety of different things about this time period. What is your, I don't want to say favorite thing about it, but what is the thing that sticks out to you the most in all of the learning that you done that you sort of point to to say, look at this, look at this time period. Like,

this was an amazing time to be alive. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, this is, this is such a good question. I guess this will tell you something about my own values as a teacher and researcher. I'm someone who's really interested in thinking about the cultural heritage of the past. So I am a proponent of the idea that the past never stays in the past. It continues to be relevant in so many ways in the present. And I think what I often will tell my students in this when we're working through this period is to resist the tendency to always compare this region, this time and place to developments in Europe. I think there are very real political reasons to avoid doing that as has often been done in the past. So you often see scholars who work on the

translation movement, talk about, you know, the very real ways in which the Abbasids made such a tangible impact on the intellectual activities that taken up in medieval Europe. But I think what's also really important to point out is that the works of key Abbasid scholars, I'm thinking of people like Al-Biruni, Ibn Suna, and so on, their work often transcends, you know, medieval Europe. So it's not that the Abbasids are doing all this work, but then it's overshadowed by the Renaissance. Some of the things that these Abbasid scholars were able to do wasn't able to be replicated or so-called surpassed in that sense until much later in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can't think about the Abbasid period and the translation movement as this great intellectual moment that then gets surpassed immediately by the Renaissance. I don't really think about it that way.

I think that the things that happened during the translation movement, the incredible contributions to humanity that these translators and scholars were able to give us still today, they have much, much longer lasting effects. Abbasid rulers and statesmen wanted to establish a connection to the ancient Greeks. It wasn't merely driven by interest in the works of Plato or Aristotle or Galen. It was also about building a narrative of one great civilization, the Abbasids, as a continuation of another, the Greeks. But what about the thinkers, translators, writers, and philosophers of the translation movement? What was in it for them?

Excellent question. It also has different answers depending on whom we're speaking, of whom we're speaking. So, I mean, there was certainly those who were very much enamored of Greek science, and they're continuing that tradition. They are consciously aware of continuing that tradition. And so El-Kindi, the first Arabic philosopher, actually will argue in one of his texts on first philosophy or what we would call metaphysics, he simply says, look, here's a case in which these people have done some really good work. Why shouldn't we build on it? In the 9th century, Al-Kindi saw the value in building on Greek science and philosophy. 300 years later, the conversation was still ongoing.

Ibn Rushed, the Latin of Averroes, now all the way over in Spain, in this case. He's going to make a similar point. He's actually going to point to the Quran and say he was both a philosopher and a lawyer. And so he was wearing his lawyer's hat at this moment. He says, look, the Quran asks us to explore our world, to understand God, not just blindly, but because of the signs that God has presented. He goes, how do we do this? Will we use reasoning? And he ends up maybe equivocating on an Arabic term kiosk that the lawyers were using.

But he just says, look, this particular notion, it's done best by these Greeks. And let's use the sort of at least the logical systems as well as some of the scientific systems to build. And in most cases, there are going to be some who say, look, so we've been rushed I mentioned, we'll say Aristotle said it. I believe that that settles it. There's not really much more to do other than to explain what Aristotle said. But most thinkers thought, if we can see farther than those before us, it's only because

we're on the shoulders of giants type attitude. And this is certainly one of the Mancina, who was absolutely a wonderful thinker. So I guess getting back to your question, there's at least one group usually identified in Arabic as the philosopher. It comes from the Greek word philosophia. I mean, so it's the philosophers, literally. And they simply recognize that there's something here of value and we can build on it. But it wasn't all just a direct import of Greek thinking. Some schools of thought emphasized Islamic legal.

reasoning and philosophy based more on the Quran. It was an epoch defined by discussion and debate. One of the earliest debates that goes on is, do we really need logic? It turns out that Greek logic is, at its very basis, is a type of categorical logic. That is to say, we're interested in how different groups of things relate to one another. But those categories frequently paralleled the grammatical categories of the Greek language. Turns out that the Greek language requires what's called a copula. Usually it's our verb is. So humans are animals. And so R is this copula that links these to. You don't need that in Arabic. And it turns out that there are different grammatical categories that are used in Arabic.

And so one of the debates is exactly how universal is this Aristotelian logic. And there's this wonderful debate between a grammarian who's very philosophically sophisticated, Sarafi, and an early, in this case, not a Muslim logician, but a Christian Arabic-speaking logician, Abel Bishamata. And the debate was basically transcribed, and so we actually have a pretty close approximation of it. Now, having said that, who transcribed it, it was the grammarian. obviously probably was presented in such a way. But what the grammarian did just an excellent job of showing is that without knowing how the target language works, in this case, Arabic, you can make all sorts of category mistakes regardless of your category. So what's more important is not this universal logic done in categories, but rather the target language itself. And this very much impressed a number of philosophers who actually realized, oh, you know, maybe, you know, being part of a linguistic community is, you know, and those conventions are, need to be incorporated into our overall philosophy.

And so you see this. But then later, El Hazali, who was a certainly, he was one of the theologians, one of the great theologians. But he was one of the first within this Islamic legal. and theological schools to say, you know what, actually, there's a lot we can learn from this Aristotelian logic as well. Maybe we don't need to be afraid of it. And so he wrote a whole text in which he incorporates and shows how Islamic legal reasoning can be enhanced greatly by the introduction of Greek science. I always like to call it, you know, logic for lawyers, Arabic style. So I have perhaps gotten away from your question.

But the question is like, what sorts of interactions are going on and how were they viewing the Greek world? Well, we see both sides of it. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is it becomes this amalgam. And it's no longer Greek and foreign philosophy. It becomes Islamic and Arabic thought. It becomes incorporated into something much bigger than some of its parts. You're listening to an episode about the Greco-Arabic Translation Movement, a centuries-long effort that saw a vast amount of Greek writing and thinking translated into Arabic. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Gordon Caddick from Cited Podcast. Cited is about the politics of science and research. Our new season is called Green Dream. Each episode tells the story of a utopian thinker and their dreams for our green future.

You'll learn about prominent environmental thinkers across the ideological spectrum and about some lesser-known figures that operate in the shadows. Should we make their dreams a reality, or are they actually, a nightmare? Catch green dreams at sightedpodcast.com. Beginning in 8th century Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliphate had a mission, translating Greek science, math, and philosophy into Arabic. Among others, works by Galen, Plato, and Aristotle made their way into the philosophy and science of thinkers in the Muslim world.

Aristotelian logic became the bedrock for key thinkers like Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rusht. This world-changing effort began with something quite ordinary, learning to debate. Is there a moment you can point to where the translation movement begins? It starts out as an interest in learning Greek logic. And part of this was motivated by missionary interactions between Muslims and Christians, most of the Christians having been trained, they were Syriac Christians having been trained in Aristotelian logic.

And the plain and simple fact was that their ability to debate was superior on a lot of these issues where there had been just sort of like the Quran says, the Quran says, well, I don't, if you don't accept that basis, and then they were giving these sort of logical arguments. And so there was this recognition that if we're going to have this, debate. If it's going to be fruitful one way or the other, we all have to be talking the same language. So at the very least, our folks need to know how these folks are talking. So Aristotle for apologetics. Aristotle for apologetics, yep. And this was if you're going to have this sort of dialogue,

and yes, it's the sort of dialogue. I know you're going to hell. You know I'm going to hell, but we're going to debate this anyways. And it's okay. We can still debate. And so the first things that get translated or logic is they're part of this I love this aerosol for apologetics. That's exactly what it was. Then it's like, okay, sometimes we're beginning to now talk about

the different world views that informed these Christians that were coming out of the Greek world and so they started translating some works in a natural philosophy or what would be called physics now. But around 8.50

or so, there's this decided effort by Mansour, this Abbasid Hailef, to literally understand and translate pretty much the entirety of the Greek intellectual tradition. Now, it's not just philosophy, not just science, but it's mathematics, astronomy, history, works on usually not literature, but certainly the histories, certainly all the philosophy. And why, I mean, and then he put a lot of money into this. There was, and I don't want to overplay this as something called the Betel Ghechma, the House of Wisdom, but it was at least someplace where learning, research, collection of information, and now not

just from the Greeks, but also from the Persians as well, that there's this wisdom tradition. And so we can begin dating this sort of gradual move for theological purposes to this sort of concerted effort. And so you would get, I mean, the big names are Hunain Ibn Ishak, his son Ishak Iman Hunain, a cousin, Huaysh, and then a person who worked with them, Issa Abin Yahya. It's just like a handful of, you know, a half a dozen. And then there were some others, but this small group of literally probably not more than 10 or 12, ended up doing just this enormous amount of hundreds of books by this one group, the Hunane group, hundreds. I mean, the son esaucted at least 100 alone on translating Galen.

And it turns out in this relatively short period. So you got this first stage of just sort of dabbling in translations for apologetic reasons to this sort of full-blown interest in which almost in about 100 years. So, you know, the span of two generations, a father and a son, this entire body of Greek knowledge, again, from history to science to philosophy to mathematics, gets translated into Arabic, as I said, right around 850 to 900. And then the second stage or the final stage, the third stage is usually taking these texts, finding better editions of the Greek or things like this. correcting them, they become school texts and stuff. But we can really almost localize it in this period between 850 and 900. And we can identify those individuals that were sort of like instrumental in this translation movement happening.

And these translations aren't lost to the past. As John McGinnis found out, they're still with us. I'm going to tell a story. So when I was living in Cairo, I wanted to get a copy of Aristotle's physics. I was working on natural philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition. And so I thought I should just get an Arabic copy of the physics. So I just went into a normal bookstore, I don't know, like a regular bookstore, and I said, I want a copy of Aristotle's physics?

Oh, yes, we do. And they take me over, and there's these two volumes. I opened them up, and it's Isaac of a new name. This is this translator from, you know, the late 800s. And so, you know, my first assumption was that, okay, well, maybe this is more of a specialty book. This seems, and he goes, oh, no, no, that's just the only translation I know of that's out there.

It was done so well that it still remains the standard translation, at least in Cairo in 1995. And so is it because people weren't interested? Aristotle was always still of some interest. It just turns out this translation was extremely well done. And just going back to some of the linguistic things, these translators made decisions about how Greek terms were understood. And some of those decisions literally change the direction of scientific and philosophical inquiry.

Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, as he's often called in the West, was a highly influential figure not only in the Muslim world, but later in medieval Europe as well. Ibn Sina's work included writings on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, alchemy, geography, and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, and poetry. So by the time Ibn Sina comes on the scene, this process, of translating and commentating and engaging has been going on for about a hundred years? Why don't we put it at about 150? If we started at about 850, and as I said, it's a little bit later, he was born. There's some controversy about this, but I think probably best around 9-73. And so by this point, most of the texts were in translation.

there were improved texts that were coming around. We do know, for instance, that there had been, that Ebensina initially had very early, one of these very literal translations of Aristotle's physics. A new translation came around, probably this is hoc one that I had mentioned. But by that time, we're tailing off on that third period of the translation movement.

So maybe one generation before they were doing, some sort of corrections. But by the time he's there, he really does have access to almost this full body of Greek thought in good Arabic translations. And so how does he become such a central figure? Short answer is he's just damn impressive. Okay, but that's that. So I mentioned these two traditions at one point. There's this falsifish tradition, this very positive tradition, this very positive tradition towards Greek learning. Ibn Sina's certainly its greatest

exponent. There was also this other tradition that was more critical of Greek science. Even Sina more than just anyone before, what he wants to do is come up with a genuine synthesis

of these ideas, all of these ideas. He wants to provide a framework that even though he himself probably wasn't a mystic erfan, this divine, you know, mystic knowledge, was part of the system, something that at least needed to be explained. And so he doesn't back off of anything trying to offer an explanation and do so not in the type of way that might be piecemeal. So, you know, here's a philosophical problem. Let me work on that. Here's a philosophical problem. Let me work on that.

No, he wants to see a whole system. And in this respect, he's following in the footsteps of an earlier thinker, El-Frabi. El-Rabi was part of this group called the Baghdad Parapetetics, a group that included Abel Bishirmata, Y'ihan al-Nadi, El-Frabi, a number of others. Most of these others were problem solvers. El-Rabi actually has two texts where he lays out in schematic form, an outline, a system that tries to incorporate all of Aristotle, Neoplatonism, kind of work in the Ptolemy and astronomy,

also is sympathetic to issues that are showing up in the arising out of Calam, that is to say, Islamic speculative theology, the Quran. He's not a particularly religious thinker, but on the other hand, he's sympathetic to it. And so he, in a very outline, or schematic way, he presents a worldview.

So a unified theory of everything. Pretty much unified theory of everything. And what Ibn Sina does is systematically fill in the details on this one, where there's hand-waving and gestures, all of a sudden there is detailed argumentation. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely places

where Ibn Sina is doing his own thing. But he's working with, within this Frabian framework, introducing some novel ideas that will just fundamentally change the way that theology or metaphysics gets thought of, not only in the Islamic world, but in the Latin world, I mean, part of the single most important influence on, say, somebody like Thomas Aquinas, who sort of is the official theologian of the Catholic Church, for instance, is Evan Sina, certainly early on, a distinction between essence and existence. Now, that's something new that Ibn Seen will introduce into this Farabian framework, but again, it takes questions like, for instance, Aristotle did not have a theory of creation.

Even Sina will introduce a theory of creation. Eternal creation, mind you, that at every single moment, every, you know, infinitely past, infinitely in the future, things are dependent upon God. But he's doing this in part because, look, I'm a good mother. Muslim says Ibn Sina, part of what I have to believe is that God creates ex-Nihalo from nothing. And how do I do that with a guy like Aristotle who says, oh, no, no, matter and form have always existed. And you have somebody who might explain why they're moving, but didn't create them. And Imensina can't, as a good Muslim, no, that's got to be wrong. But then he incorporates ways to make errors, and going back to how he, when does comic, he will put these into the

mouth of Aristotle, things that are so unaristatillion that you can it sounds believable. So Thomas Aquinas reads this and all of a sudden, oh, this is the way to understand Aristotle. It is amazing to the point that

to this day, say in parts of Adirang, even seen as read as living philosophy, not as this dead artifact. And his vision so fundamentally changed the way that the intellectual circles moved after him.

The people now were not going back to Aristotle. They were not going back to the Neoplatonists. They were going straight to Ibn Sina. And so now what Phelsopha or philosophy became was was Imensina just because this world vision that gets everything from why you behave the way you do to why the planets behave the way the planets do, to medicine, health,

the most deepest questions in metaphysics and theology you can ask. And it's not just like, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem. It's integrated. And I had actually mentioned that when I was trying to understand one topic on time,

I found myself being pulled into this whole system because it naturally lends itself to it. When we study Aristotle in school or when philosophers talk, How close is the Aristotle that we study today to the Aristotle, the actual Aristotle, or how much of it is actually a version of Aristotle that we've received through this entire process that you've been talking about? In some cases, it's absolutely impossible to say what the historical Aristotle's position is. I mean, and historians of philosophy will spend a great deal, but even today,

there's ongoing debates about what was the historical Aristotle. When I teach my Aristotle class, there's one question or one issue that comes up. It involves the intellect and how one understands universal knowledge. And as part of that, Aristotle, in a very, very short two paragraph, half a page, introduces this notion of what is called an active or an ancient intellect. I'm not going to try to tell you what it is. I'm just going to say two relatively short paragraphs. He does this.

When it comes to me having to interpret this, what I do is I present about a dozen historical interpretations that almost from the very beginning. So Greek interpretations, Arabic interpretations, Latin interpretations. And they are wildly different. And so, you know, it's like, what is the historical? Aristotle say, that's a hard question for even us to deal with. When you look at this long relationship, I mean, it starts right from, you know, the Greeks and then it moves forward in time and it that moves through geography as well. How do you think about that very long duet of these ideas? When you, when you think about it, what occurs to you? What do you reflect on? I'm a philosopher.

I'm also a historian, and as a historian, I am very, very interested in maybe trying to the extent one can to figure out what historical figures might have thought how those ideas transferred, how the culture, the geography, and by the way, the geography sometimes very much does affect, certainly political climates and everything else. And so as a historian, I'm happy to look at these things as these intellectual artifacts that I want. to uncover what was going on that, you know, led up to them and led to them still being of enough interest that I can teach a class on them. But I'm also a philosopher. And as a philosopher, I want to evaluate these arguments. In some cases, are these still good arguments or is this just interesting, antiquated science that we need not take all that seriously?

And indeed, when I started working on natural philosophy, you know, what would become the history of physics in some sort of way people are like well why are you working on that text those texts because this is just old bad science that's not what philosophy does and then i'm like well actually here's what they have to say about time and oh that's philosophically interesting i mean today philosophically it's still philosophically interesting he goes oh but that's just you know a one-off that was like do you ever read these texts well no of course i haven't read why would anyone read them and i'm like well then until we've actually read them we don't know whether there, it's all bad philosophy or, and I just happen to, you know, luckily happen on the one

instance of a philosophically interesting idea, or are there more? And my own experiences that very frequently, I'll put on my, I will put on my historians hat, I will talk about the history, but sometimes you step back and you're like, okay, this is an interesting idea. So, I don't know if that answers your question or it says something about me, but you ask me about what do you feel like? I feel like I've got the biggest sandbox or playground in the entire world sometimes when I'm dealing with this guy. And I'm just going to play with it. And so I just get excited and have fun. happen in a vacuum. Societies and civilizations learn from each other, borrow and build. The Abbasid

translation movement flowed from work being done in various Hellenistic Christian communities throughout the region. Similarly, the Arabic translation movement fed into a Latin one, moving knowledge into Europe. My name is John Wolinsky, and I'm an emeritus professor at Stanford University, and I have created a project called the Public Knowledge Project that's very committed to open access to research and scholarship. John Wollinsky says the effort to translate texts from Arabic into Latin offers a model for contemporary conversations about open access to research. After a number of years of working and really struggling to encourage people to consider open

access to research to be very important, I asked myself, well, why? exactly would I think that people deserve a right to know, a right to knowledge and research? Where does that come from? Well, what is it based? And so I started working back historically. And in fact, my original target was just to go back to John Locke, who talks about intellectual property, but certainly property. And my fascination with his contributions in that area into democracy left me still with that notion of where did this concept come from. And the medieval period proved to be fascinatingly rich in terms of the sharing. There was no, as it were, publishing economy. There were just manuscripts that circulated, and certainly the monasteries and nunneries

and cloisters, and were not operating on that kind of economic basis that we think of today, in terms of research and scholarship and publishing. And so I was fascinated by that sense that here was a culture that began the traditions in the West of scholarly inquiry that was, in entirely open and free in the sense that everything could circulate, certainly in a narrow group in terms of monks and nuns, but still it had that openness. And then I happened upon this translation movement, upon the notion of where did these ideas, where did this culture that was so important, the philosophers and the scientists, how did that come into being, and particularly around the formation of the universities?

Why is it that the 12th century was such a turning point for the West? What was introduced or what brought about to that kind of change? And that's really for me was an eye-opener because as a student of scholarly publishing and the sharing of scholarship, the interactions with Islam and the Islamic culture had not been a part of the picture of my own education. And so the translation movement was a very powerful turning point and thinking about the circulation and the openness and the importance of sharing scholarship and research.

In the 12th century and 13th century, all of a sudden we get this, what I think of as a kind of manuscript tourism, that is scholars from the west, really from the north, if you think about it technically, from throughout Europe, began to look for manuscripts at the contact zones with Islamic culture, That is, in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, Constantinople was another spot, Antioch, and other places where Christian and Islamic cultures were beginning not always on a peaceful basis, but there was a contact zone. And there was a realization in the West that Islam had the goods, as it were. They not only had all of the works of Plato and Aristotle, which had been completely missing

from the Middle Ages in terms of Europe, but they had common. They had developed this thinking, and it had evolved, and they had contributed, the Islamic scholars had. And so that aspect of a great translation movement that had still continued in terms of Islam's interest in other cultures, but that was particularly concentrated in the move from Arabic to Latin. And I think of it as, I don't want to be too dramatic. It's not a tsunami. Each text took a long time to translate, and there was a lot of consultation, and there would be, Arabic scholars and Christian scholars and Jewish scholars and combinations of those working on the manuscripts in order to bring the richness of learning that Islam had assembled into Latin

and thus into the West. One of those scholars was Ibn Rush, or in the Latin, Averroes. Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar and did a lot of work on Aristotle in particular. And he took on, in fact, he gained the reputation as the commentator. That is, people would refer to him, much as we might refer to Sting or Edge or these one-name kind of stars. He was the commentator. And his approach was to provide a summary of a work of Aristotle, then to paraphrase it in a way that made it easier to understand. And then finally, what he called the long commentary, which would be all of his thinking and others thinking that he would bring to it.

And that's a very strong pedagogical approach. It's a very good way to begin to create an educational setting for Aristotle. And part of my argument then is that the sheer weight of these translations with the commentaries created a breakpoint for the monasteries and a beginning for the universities. That is that the educational institution of the Middle Ages, the monastery, was overloaded by this new influx of learning, and that created the need for a new, institution, a different approach, a focus on teaching rather than prayer. Can you say something about the philosophy underlying these ideas of knowledge sharing?

You know, it seems as though there's a kind of buy-in to this idea that knowledge is a kind of common good or is something that it's meant to be shared and built upon. Yes, I mean, this is the whole principle of my work as a teacher and a teacher. as a scholar, is that it's that exchange that you want to give, and it enriches both parties, that the best teaching is learning twice. And that aspect is very much a part of this. And I would say that, I mean, to kind of characterize it, the monk who's been spending their life in a monastery, rising at dawn, and saying vespers at midnight, and just carrying on this kind of habitual life, all of a sudden is engaged in a very new kind of life.

virtue of visiting a place like Toledo where a great deal of translation is going on. They wake and rise in the morning for something they knew in terms of their engagement. And they see their responsibility. I mean, I think there are repeated cases in Islamic learning where the translation is the first step. And then it's the commentary. And the commentary itself revolves into a much more exciting, different and new kind of thinking. So the philosophy, if you like, is a celebration of philosophy. That is, the thinking of things through, the trying to understand.

And again, it's within very strong religious beliefs, whether they're Muslim or Christian. But it was to say we are not just looking into the face of God. We are, in fact, engaged in a conversation about and potentially with God in terms of how the world operates and exists. When you look at this, you know, this period of history and you reflect on it as an educator, as someone who's interested in learning and teaching, how do you think about this time period in terms of the work that you do? What does it offer you on a kind of personal and scholarly level? Yeah. So the important thing for me in terms of this theory of the contribution to the development of the universities, for example, is this idea of why we want to open learning in a way that can change society, that can improve society. I don't think anyone would question. As soon as I say that, I think actually there are people who are questioning today as we speak, the value and contribution of universities over the center. They're one of the oldest institutions. certainly the church is older, but the universities, in terms of that particular focus and contribution. So I think of it as a lesson to be learned and certainly I can be selective

and what I champion in it in terms of focusing on the exchange. And the other aspect is the global element that we still bear a legacy of imperialism, of a center and periphery kind of metaphor in which we think about the north as having being a center that distributed knowledge and learning to the rest of the world, to the periphery, as it were. So we're still overcoming. 20th century was, you know, just a collapse of imperialism on some levels. And we're still, as it were, addressing that. So I think there is a purposeful political aspect, which we need to consider an opening learning so that it is the openness can mean simply having access, but we need to understand the global dimensions of that opening. And this historical

perspective gives you a sense that it was once much more globally enriched than we think of today and that we should be taking as a target for a larger growth and development. The period that we're talking about in the 12th and 13th century was very much an Islamic and Christian engagement with Jewish and other elements involved. But I think generally what we're we're looking at today is a similar aspect of change, a similar approach in the digital era compared to the manuscript period where knowledge is circulating on a new basis and a much more globally inclusive one. And that to me is a very exciting element as an educator, as a human being. You've been listening to Ideas about the Greco-Arabic Translation Movement.

Thank you to our guests. So my name is Sarah Ann Knutzen. I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of History at UBC. My name's John McGuinness. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. My name is John Wulinski, and I'm an emeritus professor at Stanford University. If you'd like to hear more like this program, check out our episode about the 14th century historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun was a North African Muslim scholar who became renowned for having written a book that was not a classic in his time, but became a classic from the 18th century old called the Introduction, or in Arabic, the Muqadima, has been widely set.

not only by scholars, but many people in the popular press, and even Ronald Reagan, when he was president, thought that Ibn Khadun was a precursor and somebody who announced in advance that there could be such a thing as supply-side economics. So he is, as one person described him, a kind of amorphous polymath, who knew a lot of things, wrote a lot of things,

and has been cited in many areas, both inside and outside the academic world, in and outside the Muslim world. Ronald Reagan wasn't the only one who made a connection between Ibn Chaldoon and thinkers who came along centuries later. The reason why the similarities exist between Ibn Caldun, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Durkheim, all these people, is they're all approaching the study of human society using philosophical ideas and methodologies. That's the reason. So it's very fair to say that Ibn Caldun developed some important economic theories

because, in fact, Ibn Caldun wanted to develop history. For him, history really met what we now consider social sciences as well as what is now considered history. He felt it was essential to generalize, that is to say, to compare things and draw generalizations. Because he says, quoting Aristotle, that if you simply narrate events or talk about individual, events, that is not knowledge. It's not knowledge unless you show how it's related to other aspects of reality. So it's perfectly reasonable to say that Ibn Caldune was the first person to develop an economic theory, kind of proto-Kinsey in economic theory, or proto-Adam Smith's economic theory, because he was. It's true. You can find this episode along with

hundreds of others in the Ideas podcast feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Sam McNulty. The senior producer is Nikola Lukshic. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.C.com slash podcasts.