In Our Time - Al-Kindi

Episode Date: June 28, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Arab philosopher al-Kindi. Born in the early ninth century, al-Kindi was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and supervised the translation of many works by Aristotle and others into Arabic. The author of more than 250 works, he wrote on many different subjects, from optics to mathematics, music and astrology. He was the first significant thinker to argue that philosophy and Islam had much to offer each other and need not be kept apart. Today al-Kindi is regarded as one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world.With:Hugh Kennedy Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of LondonJames Montgomery Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic Elect at the University of CambridgeAmira Bennison Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, 9th century Baghdad was a prosperous city at the center of an expanding empire. It was also a place of learning, where the leading scholars met and where the most important works of Greek philosophy were translated into Arabic for the first time.

Among the great minds at the court of the Caliphs of Baghdad was a man known to later write a man. as the philosopher of the Arabs. His name was Al-Kindi, and in addition to supervising the translation of Greek scholarship, he produced more than 200 works of his own. He believed religion and philosophy were not separate disciplines, but part of the same project.

He wrote about an astonishing range of subjects, from pharmaceuticals to music and from the workings of the human eye to the manufacture of swords. But today is best known for founding an entire philosophical tradition on which Islamic thinkers were able to build for centuries. With me to discuss the life and work of Al-Kindi are Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at Soas University of London, James Montgomery, Sir Thomas Adams' Professor of Arabic-elect at the University of Cambridge,

and Amir Abbasin, Sen, Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, also at the University of Cambridge. Amir Abkhazinian, Al-Kindy lived in the 9th century in the time of the Abbasid Caliphate. Can you give us some idea of the Abbasids and who they were? Yes, the Abbasids were the second Khammed. Kaliful dynasty in the history of Islam. They ruled from 750 up to 1258. But their heyday was very much 750 up until about 950. And they founded the city of Baghdad in Iraq, which by the 9th century had become a huge metropolis. It was one of the biggest cities in the world. It was extremely

wealthy. It was the site of the Abbasid court. And as a result of the money and the presence of the court, there was a great deal of investment in culture of various different kinds, including the promotion of knowledge and the translation of knowledge from other cultures. And this came about in part because the Abbasids had many Persian courtiers who were of Sasanian origin. And one of the views of the Sasanian monarchs had been that to translate knowledge was to bring it back to its source and that that part of the king's mission, if you like, was to try and to translate knowledge and bring it back to its source in Iraq and Iran, the heart of the Sasanian Empire. So in a sense, the Abbasid Caliphs were legitimising themselves by following

on a tradition that had been established for hundreds of years in the Sasanian Empire. And they were able to do that because they had this city full of wealth, money and also intellectual expertise. Why did they move the capital from Damascus, where the first ruling house of the, let's call it, the Islamic Empire, Why did they move it to Damascus, from Damascus, sorry, to Baghdad? They moved to Baghdad really for geopolitical reasons. The conquests had pulled the Muslim world further and further east during the 50 years before the Abbasids came to power. Muslims had conquered into Central Asia, what's now placed like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.

They were pushing into Afghanistan, Sindh in what's now Pakistan. So in a sense, the geopolitical weight of empire had moved east. In addition to that, the main support base of the Abbasids was in Hhorasan, eastern Iran. So the soldiers that supported them and the elements in the Muslim elite, which were very pro-Abasid, were all located in the east. So it made sense for them to move from Damascus in Syria, which was a little bit too far west from their centre of power to Iraq, which was more central to their empire. They came across a small place, Baghdad, but as you say quite soon, really, it was one of the biggest cities in the world and it was immensely wealthy. Where did that immense wealth come from?

The wealth came from a number of different things. Baghdad is founded in ancient Mesopotamia, which was very fertile from an agricultural perspective, so it was relatively easy to feed and support the population of Baghdad. It was located on the Tigris and close to the Euphrates, so it was very easy for sea-going ships to come up from the Persian Gulf at that time to the ports of Basra and then Baghdad. And the sources all describe Baghdad as being a real hub for trade from as far away as China.

So it was able to sort of gather commodities from the north, from south, east and west in a very effective way. Hugh Kennedy, how much is known about Al-Kindy's life? Well, disappointingly little. We don't have any sort of full biography or anything like that. But we do know that he came from an ancient Arab aristocratic lineage. He could trace his ancestors back for generations to the great tribe of kinder in the pre-Islamic period. So before Muhammad really, his lineage was longer and stronger than that of the Prophet? It was parallel.

But as Amira was saying, that it made him really rather exceptional amongst the interoperable. intellectuals of the period because you're talking about the Persian influence there, and Al-Kindi was a pure-blooded Arab, so to speak. And his family had been very influential. Let's just clear that up a minute. A lot of the scholars come drawn to Baghdad, as great cities always attract great artists, intellectuals who go there, because they can make a living.

But the Persians were coming there, and very few Arab scholars. So he's significant because, as you said, but just to draw it to people's attention. Yes. Exactly. And his family had been very influential in politics in the Umayyad period and so on. But by the time of Al-Kindi was living, so in the first half of the 9th century, they'd really lost their political power and influence. But they were still a very wealthy family. And he lived in probably most of his time in Baghdad. And he was very influential at the court, well known at the court. And he was a tutor of one of the children of the caliphs and so on. But like most people who, who were involved in the court, he had good days and bad days, so to speak, and for a time his enemies, jealous, rivals and so on, really took advantage of him and confiscated his books and so on.

And then he bounced back, and he seems to have been well-established again at the time of his death. But we do have unusually, we have a run rather peculiar piece of evidence about Al-Kindy's life, and that is that the great, really, cultural commentator, Jahis of the era, recounts an anecdote about him. Al-Kindy lived in a big house, and he took tenants into bits of it and so on. And one day one of these tenants foolishly asked whether his nephew could come to stay.

And Al-Kindy, according to Jahis, who may be making it up completely, wrote about a huge diatribe of seven or eight pages of saying how evil tenants were and how they were ruining his life and the footfall was destroying his property and so on. And this poor man must have wished he never sort of mentioned. of the subject. Now, we don't know,

of course, this is a very entertaining anecdote. We don't know whether Jahis is poking fun at somebody he didn't like terribly, whether he's just making it all up or whatever. But or are we looking at a, you know, a cantankerous old man? Well, there's a lot of concaten, he did an awful lot of work, didn't it? And he was buffeted

by rivals. He had his library stolen. There's plenty of contangrous about, really, you know, when you say? Right. Now, Amira mentioned the way that they directed their attention to culture. It was a very specific sense that we are the Caliphs, we are the Abbasis, we must have a great cultural, provide a great cultural heritage. Can you just talk a bit more about that?

Yes, it was certainly part of the Kedafal Mahmoon, is the famous and most intellectual of them, certainly set the trend. And the culture and activity at this period happen not in institutions, or in what will later become madrasis or universities or whatever, but really in big houses. People had salons, very much as in 18th century France or 18th century Britain, for example. Real intellectual life happened in big people's houses where they paid for intellectuals to come and say their peace and so on. So we're talking about really an informal and flexible intellectual world. No syllabus, no exams or anything like that. So that's one of the reasons I think why the whole intellectual life was so free, if you like.

people could rush off on tangents and investigate things that weren't on the syllabus, so to think. But more specifically, why did the Caliphs think that this was very important to them as rulers? What did it signify for them? I think it's just the prestige of knowledge in the same way that rulers would patronise poets who wrote wonderful things about what fantastic people they were and how they built buildings that people could come and admire and so on. So knowledge was part of the cultural and political capital of the system. And we have a city in great ferment in many ways,

and as often happens, the technology is accompanying and driving the culture. Paper had been invented in China, but by the time we get to Baghdad in the 9th century, they're manufacturing paper and better quality paper massively. Can you tell us the impact that had? Yes, the coming of paper has an impact somewhat similar to the coming of print in 16th century of Europe. It makes writing cheap. It makes democratises the whole process of writing

because before then you could either use papyrus which was kind of scratchy and difficult read-based material or you had to write on animal skins which were very expensive and so that necessarily meant that the actual material of writing was very pricey. With the coming of paper and this paper is all rag paper all paper before the 19th century is rag paper

not wool pulp paper. It's basically old clothes mushed up and spread out to dry and this produces this wonderful writing material and suddenly anybody who can afford the ink and a pen can start to write and it hugely increases the volume of literature that's produced. And one thing knocks on to another because as I understand it, you'll tell me Arabic itself becomes a more facile script faster and easier. Yes, there is a new way of writing Arabic is developed in Baghdad at this time,

which really looks like the Arabic that we see today. It's a much more fluid, much faster script to do. So you're writing faster, the material is cheaper, and you're producing hugely more literature. And it becomes possible in Baghdad at this period to write a book and sell it in the marketplace and make a living, which was probably the first time in human history, I think, that this was actually the case.

James Montgomery, Al-Kendi was heavily involved in something called the translation movement, which we discussed a few times on this programme. But that was in the past, can you just refresh us as to what that was and what his involvement was. Yes, of course. So the translation movement is a term that we use to describe 200 years of activity in which all the non-historic and non-literary

works available in Greek in a region spanning from Byzantium to modern day Tehran was translated into Arabic. It's a bit of a misnomer because it makes it sound as if it's a one continuous process. It's a number of different processes. And in order to get a sense of

the enormity of the project. Between the years 600 and 830 when Al-Kindi starts to write his philosophical works, it's very, very difficult to actually point to a work of philosophy such as we would understand it or recognise it today. So after all this continuous millennium of philosophical activity from Plato, all the way up to the late Alexandrian school, all of a sudden in 600 it stopped. We don't know why. There's a 200-year hiatus,

and then all of a sudden, Al-Kindi pops up, and he starts philosophy and kickstarts it and rejuvenates it. The other way of getting a sense of the scale of this project, of the amount of works that was translated, is if we take one example, Gaelin, the physician philosopher, who was hugely influential in the Arabic-speaking world and the Greek translation movement. The complete edition of his work,

works runs to 20 volumes nowadays. They were almost all available, and that's only a fraction of what we're talking about. So we have... So they translated them in the 9th century. Yes. Yeah. So this translation movement,

there's a number of things that we can think about with it. First, it's multilingual. It involves Greek. It involves Syriac. It involves Pahlavi, which is Middle Persian. It involves Arabic. And there's even a couple of Sanskrit works that are translated in times.

Arabic also. So that's the first thing. Second thing is the amount of money that was spent on it. It depends on how you do your sums, but let's think of the annual research budget of the Medical Research Council and then double it on some translations. So there was a lot of money being paid for this stuff to be translated. Can you say that again slowly about what sort of money is? Because I don't know the annual budget of renterner research and that sort of stuff. It's a lot. Yeah, well a lot isn't good enough. Come on. What sort of money are. Can we just? just find a way to express it better than a lot. Okay. I will, in slightly facetious terms,

someone like Honanabin ishak, one of the most famous translators, was probably on Wayne Rune's salary. Does that give us an idea of the kind of sums that we're talking about? I think that nails it. Yeah. So we've got all this money being spent on the translation movement.

But the other key thing is, it is, it is pragmatic. And so it begins by serving the needs of this empire that we've been talking about. We've been talking about its culture, but it's also things like military technology.

Burning mirrors, for example, was a very popular subject of text to be translated. The use of Greek fire for siege purposes. The use of automatic devices. Anything in Greek that can

concerned those pragmatic subjects was being translated. Can you, you've said Al-Kindi kick this off. There's this wonderful gap between 600 and 830, which we will certainly come back to you, but not today. So what was his involvement? Did he set up, is in his own great house by the sign of it? Does he gather, call us around him and say, I've got so many I can float you to tackle it?

What's going on? How did he get involved? Yeah, that's a really good question. if you don't mind me saying, because it seems that there are a number of research clusters or research programmes that are operating. Al-Kindi is first and foremost involved in what he would recognize as Falcifah, which is the Arabic word for philosophy. Now, before Al-Kindi, falcifah means the study of the natural world.

So it's tides, it's weather forecasting, it is metallurgy, pharmacology. this is what his primary interest is. And he becomes very influenced by the works of Euclid, both on Euclid's elements and his optics. He thinks he sees in Euclid a method that will allow him to make sense of this universe around him. So he sets out commissioning translations of Euclid. He sets out being involved in commissions of translations of Ptolemy, the Almagest and the Tetra Biblos.

There are translations from Galen that he's involved in. And then, of course, does Aristotle, because Aristotle codified everything. And so Kendi begins with Aristotle's work on animals and botany and so on. This then leads him to an interest in theology, in the nature of God. And he turns then, and also an interest in the soul. So he turns then to the Neoplatonic tradition. And he turns to Plotinus and he turns to Proclos. And he tries to find answers to those questions through those texts.

Amira Benison, can I move back to you? Because the religious background to Al-Kandhi's life is essential. I mean, he was a believer. He never wavered. But he did try to make different bodies of knowledge compatible, which is one of his great achievements. Was Islam itself changing during the 9th century? riding a change or was it creating a change?

I think he's intimately involved in a change. By this time, Islam is around 200 years old and certainly to start with, it was in many ways, an exoteric faith. It focused very much on the external rituals that people performed, saying their prayers, fasting, going on pilgrimage and so on. But as Islam moved from a religion of a conquest state

to the religion of a great empire. There was much more religious engagement with people of other faiths for a start. Christians, particularly in Iraq, would challenge Muslims. So, okay, fine, you know, your faith is top of the heap politically. But what about its attitude towards God?

You know, what do you really believe about God? What do you really believe about the universe? So there starts to be a challenge coming through. And that challenge was partly led by Christian Aristotelians who had been thinking philosophically and began to challenge Muslims to sort of answer their questions. So when Al-Kindi is looking to philosophy, in a sense he's also looking to find answers to theological problems

posed to Muslims by people of other faiths, but also that Muslims themselves are beginning to debate as they have more leisure, as they live as intellectuals in Baghdad and the other great cities of Iraq. And it's also the period when law is beginning to be codified. And the Islamic tradition is becoming more of a book culture. We've already heard about the introduction of paper. So in many ways, Islam is maturing significantly at this period

and is developing a sort of full panoply of theology, law and so on. It's interesting how religious distinctions and religious oppositions even often said to be deleterious are actually provoking thought and advancing philosophy, aren't they? Absolutely, yes. I would say that the sort of the salon culture we've already heard mentioned today that included people of different faiths.

These salons in great houses were not only peopled by Muslims, but also by people of other faiths who could challenge and question Muslims. And really the good debate was about who had the best Arabic and the best ability to express themselves and the most logical approach. So Muslims had to sort of sharpen their views and their approaches and make sure that they could answer people of other faiths

who would challenge them about their understanding of religion. Hugh Kennedy, one of Al-Kindi's most famous work is On First Philosophy. How does this fit into the religious context that Amira has been talking about? The first philosophy for Al-Kindi was metaphysics and the study of theology and the study of God's place in the universe. That's why it's the first philosophy, because it's the most important one. But not all the book survives, but he really honed in on the key issue of where God's place in the universe. Aristotle had constructed this model of the universe that was very mechanistic in lots of ways,

all the different spheres, what the stars were placed in and so on, all going round on its own. Aristotle posited a universe that had always existed, an eternal universe, that was, in a sense, like a giant machine. Now, for a believing Muslim like Al-Kindi and everyone else at the time, the real problem was how to fit God into this. You could either ditch the whole Aristotelian model, and they didn't want to do that because it was ancient and prestigious and very much part of their thought world,

or you had to find a God space in it, so to speak. And this was a problem that Christian philosophers in late antiquity had struggled with, where to place God in this universe. and in a sense, Akindi is drawing on this when he suggests that God is the prime mover and he is the man who sets, he is the being that sets everything in motion. And that is his role.

And of course, as a Muslim, he could not believe in an internal universe. He had to believe in creation at a certain moment that the universe, everything is we know it, was created by God at a certain moment. That's in Koran, you can't get away from that. Opposing Aristotle's view that it had always been there. Exactly.

The eternity was the constant. Yes. So he's rejecting that Aristotelian belief. But he wants to bring it in to play as well, doesn't he? Yes. Aristotelian thought, that is to say. Oh, yes. Yes, he's not... His great mission in this book and lots of his other work is to reconcile Aristotelianism

and the Aristotelian view of the universe with divinity, with... with Allah and divine revelation and so on. And that's his, as it were, his project. And it was a project that later Muslim intellectuals were very concerned about, Christian intellectuals, times like Peter Abelard, and in 12th century of France, again wrestling with the same problems of how you fit God into an Aristotelian university.

James Engombre, this takes straight on to another significant work of his. The theology of Aristotle. Can you follow on from what? what you said and bring that into play. Yeah. Well, first of all, the theology of Aristotle is enigmatic because it's not really a theology and it's not by Aristotle.

So what it is is an Arabic version of the Eniads of Plotinus. In particular, Eniads 4 to 6, so the second half of the book of the Eniads. But you wouldn't know that straight away because the relationship between the Arabic and the Greek is at times very tenured.

and not always easy to spot. Why then did he call it the Theology of Aristotle? The number of possibilities of why it was the theology of, became known as the theology of Aristotle. The first is that the work which has ten chapters has a prologue, and in the prologue it advertises this work as the completion of the Aristotelian project in metaphysics, and in particular in metaphysics book Lambda, which is the one that Aristotle explains the things he has been talking about, God. So on the one hand, the theology of Aristotle is advertised as the complement or the

completion of the Aristotelian theological project. The prologue also mentions the fact that although Al-Kindi was not the author of the work, the translator was a certain Christian called Ibn Naim al-Himsi. He translated a couple of other works, probably for Kindi. But the prologue says that Kendi corrected the translation, which is interesting because we don't think he knew any Greek, we don't think he knew any Syriac, so we're correcting the translation. One presumes

it means correcting the philosophy. So what was the philosophy he was taking over in that book? Yes, well what he was after was a set of ideas. One, the most important set of ideas in the work relates to the

soul and the human soul. And what we find is that there's very old, probably Pythagorean idea that we find in Plato which is that the soul is imprisoned in the body. And the task of the human being

in order to worship God is somehow to liberate the soul from matter, from its imprisonment in the body. This is part of the sort of

philosophy as religious that Al-Kindi seems to have, philosophy as an Islamic religion. So the soul is a substance which is intermediate. It is both in this world and it belongs to the next world. How do we enable the soul to break out of the shackles of the body? And this is the theme that runs through at least six of the ten chapters of this theology. We'll be coming back to that, I hope. But just for a moment, Amir Abinerson,

could you quickly give us some idea of the range? his works. I spoke in the introduction about having written more than 200 books and so and what does he, and Hugh said this was not a school's university, these were people in a free society just following their own noses really. So can you give us some idea of the range, or the listener, some idea of the range? Yes, certainly.

I mean the list of his titles that we know of runs to at least 269. Many of these would have been quite small works. They were mostly epistles, which means they were written in letter form addressed to someone or answering a particular question, which may have been posited by Al-Kindi himself, but provided a format. They range from the philosophy, which we've already discussed, to a large body of works on mathematics, on related sciences such as astronomy and astrology, a number of meteorological works, things like, you know, the book on hail and light.

and tides. There's books of writing on tides and the movement of waters. So Al-Kindi was very interested in how the heavens and the earth interacted and the impact of the natural world on humans. And he had a number of theories related to that. He was also interested in what we might call chemistry. He wrote books on perfumes and the distillation of perfumes, but also on pharmacology and medicines and also on various illnesses. He wrote works on gout, on leprosy. So he's an extremely... And on depression.

And on depression, indeed. But he also wrote more courtly works. He has a small epistle on how to petition caliphs and ministers, some literary works. So he was, he's described in a collection of his sayings as being sort of unique in the extent of his knowledge, that he really was a man. who knew something about absolutely everything

and sort of wrote an epistle and almost everything you could think of that was of relevance in his particular era? Hugh Kennedy, he was interested in mathematics and we're again at a time when it's like a whirlpool drawing water into itself more furiously Baghdad, isn't it? Because Indian mathematicists come across

and they're all become the Arabic numerals which speeds things up immensely. The Roman clanking columns of Roman numerals are no good for, fast calculations, but here we have it. Yes, it's a period when what we call Arabic numerals are being introduced into Iraq. The whole system of Arabic numerals in inverted commas, so to speak,

is of course Indian. It originates probably by the 6th century, certainly in northern India. And it's translated possibly by Middle Persian and into Arabic. There are two elements here, of course. One is the actual shape of the figures. And the other one is the idea of place value. where you put the figures gives them, I mean, that's why 60

is different from 6 and so on. And also the use of the 0 to create a space where there isn't actually a value number. And these two ideas come together. And by 9th century in Baghdad, people are starting to use this system, but not very fast, curiously.

It seems to us exactly so much more efficient than other sort of forms of numerical notation. You can't understand. San White didn't sweep the world instantly. But in fact, people were quite slow to take it up. But Al-Kindy was one of the people who realized very quickly this was a much more efficient system. And he wrote about it and publicised it and so on.

And so an important step between the invention of the system in India and its transmission to the Mediterranean world and hence to the modern world. James Ongomery, perhaps his most celebrated work is a treatise on race. Can you, I'm afraid rather briefly, because I want to move on. but still I must mention this book. Can you tell us tell the listeners about that and what was fine about that? Well it exists only in Latin and it sets out to give an account of how everything happens in the world under the stars and its mechanism for accounting for causation is rays. The rays are somehow beamed from the stars which for Kindi were alive and we're

endowed with reason and soul and these govern all human action in the world below through rays which then interact with the four elements and produce change and decay and generation and corruption and so on. It's very very

influential work in the Latin Middle Ages. So who picks it up? Why is it so influential? Is nobody else writing about this in those terms? No, I think that's true. I don't think that anyone had come up with as comprehensive a theory of explaining the harmony of the interaction between

this world down below and the world up above. And the mechanism of rays seem to satisfy lots of scholars. It had its critics, but it is also praised widely Pico della Mirandola, for example, says it's a good work, but Pico's son doesn't like the work. So it divides opinion, but it's very influential. In your opinion, is that his most, is that for you, his most influential, O'amara? I think it depends how you look at it. I mean, it has an enormous impact in Latin, but in terms of his impact in the Islamic world, it's his philosophy probably and his mathematics more directly, which are more influential. As we sort of said at the beginning, he sort of starts a tradition. that makes him crucial.

I think one of the authors who's written about him sort of says that without Al-Kindi, no one would have had the words to talk about these things. That not only is he involved in the translation or sponsoring the translation of Greek text, he also develops a very important language for philosophy, which all the Arab Islamic philosophers after him pick up and use. So in that sense, he starts a ball rolling,

which makes him incredibly important as a philosopher. As Hugh mentioned, passing earlier on in the programme, he had an, we must think of it as an immense library of his own, which was stolen by his rivals and only returned because his rivals made a mess up of some engineering project

and the new chap, Kindy's friend who went in to sort it out, said, I'll do it if you'll give him his library back. Now what's going on there? This is an interesting little episode which is mentioned in the short biographies of Al-Kindi in the sort of books of sciences by Ibn Abbey of Seibia and El-Qifti.

What seems to have happened is that the Banamusa, three brothers, who were also courtier scholars serving the caliphs, presumably became jealous of Al-Kindy's eminence and his prestige at court and somehow managed to persuade the caliph al-Mutuakil to exile, sorry, to steal, to take his library from him, to confiscate his library. They also exiled this other individual, Sindh bin Ali. We assume then that Al-Kindian Sindh must have been friends, colleagues working together because the way this is recounted intimately links these two men. Subsequently, the Banamusa tried to build a canal, as you mentioned, but seemed to have got the mathematics slightly wrong. And in order to avoid the caliph's displeasure, they relied on Sindh ibn. Ali, whom they had exiled, to help them get the logistics and the geometry of the canal corrected.

And he said he would only help them if they restored Al-Kindi's library to him. And this seems to have happened. It's a story that we don't seem to have all the details of, but I think we can only see it in terms of intercourt rivalries for patronage and for prestige between different courtiers scholars. And it underlines, again, that Al-Kindi isn't an intellectual. sexual in an ivory tower tucked away somewhere, but he's also part of the politics of his time.

He's working at court. He's influential at court as well as being a scholar. But the underlines what James are saying earlier, James Montgomery, that these were an incredible importance of pressure. They didn't pinch it, want his house. They wanted his library. They wanted his knowledge. They wanted his source of knowledge.

So that's what they took. How much influence did Alkin, have on that century he began to fade at court towards the end of his life didn't he or the court faded yeah the court faded but he but he his influence immediately

in Islamic Middle East was quite limited we only have a small proportion of his work as as Amira was saying and even of that small proportion of his work a lot of it survives only in one manuscript so it hangs by a very tenuous thread it wasn't a bestseller and I think this was partly because

of political reasons and so on, but partly because other intellectuals came along who did it rather better in a way, Farabi in the next century, is solving these, particularly the problems of the place of God in the universe and so on, in a more complete and more exciting way. And so, in a sense, he becomes out of date and sort of obsolete.

But the work, he is influential, and again we said this, in establishing the terms of the discourse, in establishing the language of philosophy, in Arabic and so on, and that's very important. And of course, is this legacy in the West. And James were just talking about works that only survive because they're translating to Latin

and become part of the syllabus of European universities in the late Middle Ages. But before we get into the West, let's just stick in the Arab world with Avaroyas and Abhis Sena and Al-Faravi. They seem to occlude his importance, don't they? And these are the next two centuries. Very great scholars whose reputation was glowed rather more brightly than his did for a while.

Yes, yeah. there are a number of things that happen, it seems to me. The first is that Al-Kindi's interest in trying to produce this philosophically coherent creator-god is actually trumped by a theologian. So the most influential theologian in Arabic is a man called Al-Ashari, and he comes up with a theory of creation and of God that hits all the buttons squarely, fully, no question. And so if Al-Kindi was trying to develop this idea of philosophy as a religion for intellectuals,

Elashiri provides a theology which actually satisfies the demands of language, the Quranic picture of a creative God, and the involvement of God in the continuous creation of the world. Second thing is that Al-Kindi's interest in this sort of geometrical method of reasoning from axioms Ezoch eclipsed by the momentum of the translation movement itself because by the 950s we have the re-translation of Aristotle's organ on his works on logic and these 10 works are translated into Arabic in very very intelligent translation very good editions and Farabi picks up is part of this interest in the organon And so logic eclipses geometry, if you like to put it.

And that then means that Farabi and Avicenna and so on can do their thinking about existence and not about God, because that's what they're interested in. They're interested in ontology, not divinity. Would you like to take that on in there? What's happening to his reputation through the next three-four centuries? Yes. I think as others are saying, it does become to a certain extent eclipsed. and I suppose what people tend to do with Al-Kindi is argue against him,

but that in itself does preserve him within the tradition to a certain extent. So all these other thinkers, although we remember them perhaps more clearly, they do often refer to Al-Kindi, even if it is to argue with him. So again, he would just stress that he starts a conversation, which then becomes crucially important. So in a sense he's unfairly sidelined. and he does become greatly significant in certain times and places. One example would be in the 16th century

with the philosophers of Isfahan, like Mullah Sardra, who go back to Al-Kindi, and I'm very interested in some of his ideas relating to the notion of the creator as the source of light, and take that as the foundation for what's called their illuminationist philosophy. So at different times and places, he does have a huge importance. impact. And if you look at the history of Arab Islamic philosophy, you see him at different points

creeping back in to the discussion, which shows us how important he really was. Yeah. And just to supplement what Amira was saying there, the work that becomes central to this rediscovery by the illumination of the School of Philosophy is the theology of Aristotle, which Al-Kindi has a hand in translating, commissioning and correcting. So it's not really his on first philosophy that is important, but this work that he sort of creates but doesn't author, the theology of Anastoth, becomes central to this vision of elimination.

Near the beginning, Hugh Kennedy, I talked about him as the Arab philosopher, and being the Arab philosopher began to matter a great deal in the modern, more modern age, didn't it, being the Arab philosopher? Yes, I think so, as when Arab intellectuals were trying in the 19th, 20th century to, as it were, justify the Arab intellectuals,

tradition, particularly against European comments and criticism, they came up against the obstacle that most of the intellectuals they were talking about were not in fact Arabs and they're well-known to be Persians and so on, just as James and an mirror have been saying. But Al-Kindy was one person that he was known as the philosopher of the Arabs, his lineage was impeccably Arab, he was the one figure they could point to and say as the great Arab intellectual. And I think that sort of inflates his reputation in the modern Middle East for quite

understandable reasons. And he becomes perhaps a more important figure in this sort of discourse than he was originally in his own time and afterwards. Do you think the world, and do you think that the work holds up that reputation, what you have left of the work? I think to some extent it does, but so much of the reputation is, so much the work is lost and a lot of his most interesting things survive only in other people's comments on them and other people's additions. But he clearly was a major force in generating all this discussion, which is one of the great glories of the Islamic Middle Ages, would not have been the same, as we said before,

it would not have been the same without Al-Kindi. Do you like to have had a comment about his legacy? Just to supplement what Hugh was saying, after Al-Kindi, it was impossible to do philosophy without thinking about the Greeks, whether you did it in terms of Greek texts or Greek ideas that he developed the language for. So in a sense, Al-Kindi is starting what,

someone like Descartes was still reacting to. And this seems to me to be the significant achievement that Kendi brings. It's impossible, after we were talked about philosophy dying, after the death of philosophy, Kendi in a sense resurrects it but sets a stamp on it. You can't do philosophy subsequently in the Western tradition without the Greeks. Well, thank you very much, James Montgomery, and thank you very much for wearing a purple T-shirt with green print on it,

saying, think, followed by an exclamation mark. That's kept us all going. Thanks to Mary Benison and Hugh Kennedy, and we are indeed going back to the Greeks next week and talking about the philosophy of scepticism. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it,

such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.