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Writing about the classical tradition in the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam resembles writing about these religions themselves. All three have, at different times, come into close contact with the Graeco-Roman heritage. All three originate in the Fertile Crescent, a region of the world that became thoroughly Hellenized after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century bce. All three religions also endeavoured to find an accommodation with the surrounding Greek culture at different times. This is true for Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries ce, but it also applies to Islam, which actively engaged with the classical tradition during its formative period. Nor was the contact between the Abrahamic religions and Graeco-Roman thought limited to some initial period. Rather, theologians and thinkers belonging to the three confessions drew on Greek ideas again and again.
It is also important to stress from the outset that this fruitful encounter between Graeco-Roman and Abrahamic civilizations did not occur in isolation. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, for instance, was first produced for the Jewish community: it became a Jewish classic (de Lange 2013). Later, however, Christians so much appropriated it that many Jews grew less and less comfortable with using it and referring to it. Great Jewish thinkers of Greek expression such as Philo of Alexandria or Flavius Josephus also had a profound influence on Christian writers. Likewise, the Graeco-Arabic translation movement during the heyday of the Abbasid dynasty not only influenced Christians and Muslims, but also many Jewish thinkers, not least the great Maimonides (Mūsā ibn ʿUbayd Allāh, known in Hebrew as Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, or Rambam; d. 1204). And Arabic-writing philosophers and physicians such as Avicenna and Averroes—both profoundly influenced by Greek thought—became core curriculum in the nascent European universities.
One of the defining features of the Abrahamic religions that ties them closely together is undoubtedly their constant recourse to the classical tradition. It is, therefore, difficult to do justice to this topic, as it is so vast. To tackle it here, I have decided to offer no more than a number of vignettes: I shall briefly discuss some salient examples that can illustrate the close links that the Abrahamic religions have both with each other and with the classical tradition. I shall first look at the strong relationship between early Christian theology, as expressed in the so-called apologetic literature, and Greek thought; here, the scholarship of Franz Overbeck will provide a guiding line. Then I shall turn to the concept of ‘wisdom of Greek’ or ‘Greek wisdom’ that we find mentioned in the Talmud and in later Jewish exegetical texts. Moreover, the seminal Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the ninth century will come under scrutiny. The figure of ‘the philosopher of the Arabs’, al-Kindī, in particular will illustrate how Muslims sought an accommodation between religion as revealed through the prophets and philosophical truths that can be attained through human intelligence. Next, the example (that we have already mentioned) of Maimonides will illustrate how much influence the translation movement exerted on later thinkers. But it will also show how the same philosophical and theological problems that were debated in late antiquity by Christians and Jews continued to interest thinkers from all three confessions in the Arabic and the Latin traditions of the Middle Ages. Finally, the examples of the Ottoman court and of the modern Arab world will illustrate that the engagement with the classical tradition continues until today.
οὐκ ἔνι Ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ Ἕλλην, οὐκ ἔνι δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος, οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ. πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither man nor woman. For you are all one in Jesus Christ.
St Paul, Letter to the Galatians (3: 28)
The connection of Christianity to Greek culture is a particularly intimate one, as its foundation text, the New Testament, was written in Greek, namely in a variety of Greek known as koinḗ or ‘common’ Greek. This said, there have been some scholarly speculations whether certain parts of the New Testament such as St Matthew’s Gospel were originally drafted in Aramaic. St Paul, whose theology as expressed in his letters had a crucial influence on the early community, mastered Greek to perfection; and he was himself a Roman citizen. One could approach the question of Christianity’s relationship with the classical tradition from a thousand vantage points. In the following, I shall discuss the interpretation of one historian of the early church whose analysis is both astute and compelling. He is Franz Overbeck (1837–1905), who spent most of his career in Basel, where he befriended Friedrich Nietzsche. Within Overbeck’s massive oeuvre, I shall focus on his works on patristic literature, written late in his life (Overbeck 1994–2010: Vol. III).
Overbeck saw the development of liberal theology during the nineteenth century with a very critical eye (Law 2012). Liberal theologians such as Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) sought an accommodation between the modern society of their time and the Christian message. Overbeck thought that they fundamentally misunderstood the core Christian belief. According to him, the earliest Christians believed in the imminent second coming of Christ: the world was about to end, and they lived in the expectation of this event. With the world, history would come to an end as well. As St Paul stated in the opening quotation above, societal, ethnic, and gender differences became irrelevant in the face of Christ’s message to repent and believe in the gospel. Yet, the world did not end, nor did Christ return. Rather, the fledgling community had to organize itself differently. Jesus had announced the immediate coming of the kingdom of Heaven, but, instead, the church arrived.
Christianity had to endeavour to find an accommodation in these circumstances and with the surrounding society. One might say that the doctrine of the coming of the Messiah was a core Jewish and Christian belief, only that the two differed in who the Messiah was. The early Christian community perpetuated the life of total abandonment in the expectation of doomsday through monasticism. For Overbeck, this was one strategy through which the church could survive in the new circumstances. The other main strategy was to defend Christian ideas by adapting them to a culturally Greek audience. This is the main feature of the so-called apologetic literature, of the writings of the early church fathers from the second century onwards. It is here that the influence of Greek thought on Christianity was felt particularly strongly.
In two works in particular, Overbeck argued that the writings of the early Christian community differ radically in form from the later apologetic literature; these works are the About the Beginnings of Patristic Literature (Über die Anfänge der patristischen Literatur), first published in 1882 (Overbeck 1994–2010: III. 33–90); and the About the Beginnings of Church Historiography (Über die Anfänge der Kirchengeschichtsschreibung), first published in 1892 (Overbeck 1994–2010: III. 113–202). Overbeck notes first of all that the different books and letters that make up the New Testament are not literary works, but rather historical documents. In other words, he uses the term ‘literature (Literatur)’ in a narrower sense than one would expect. The letters by St Paul, for instance, arise from concrete historical situations that often elude us today: they are letters, not literature. Likewise, the four Gospels are sui generis: they recount the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but not in a historiographical way. Finally, the Book of Revelation records John of Patmos’ vision of the apocalypse. Even the Acts of the Apostles (Apostelgeschichte in German) is a unique document rather than a literary or historiographical creation. For nobody writes gospels, revelations, or acts of the apostles in the later period under his own name. Later histories often begin with repeating or retelling events contained in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, but never with retelling the Acts of the Apostles. For Overbeck, the pseudepigraphic literature has no relevance here, for the very reason that it contains later fabrications.
Therefore, the New Testament should not be regarded as literature; its form—a key term for Overbeck—is radically different from the early patristic literature that begins in the second century ad, with Irenaeus (d. c.200) being one of its earliest extant exponents. Overbeck defines this literature as ‘Graeco-Roman literature which is confessionally Christian and pursues Christian interests (griechisch römische Literatur christlichen Bekenntnisses und christlichen Interesses)’. When Clement of Alexandria (d. c.215) or Eusebius of Caesarea (d. c.340) write their works defending Christianity, they write in Greek for a Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking audience. But more importantly, their works belong in their form (or genre, one might nowadays say) to Greek literature. Just as the early Christians differed radically in their beliefs from their later co-religionists, so the writings of the New Testament do not resemble in their form the writings of later apologetic authors.
Overbeck’s analysis of how Christianity developed as a result of its engagement with Greek ideas emphasizes the differences between early Christian belief on the one hand, and Christian theology as it evolved from the second century onwards. In this, he differed radically from other Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers who were keen to point out the differences between the sacred tradition as represented by the Abrahamic traditions and secular science which they associated with Greek thought (I shall return to this point in the conclusions). Some of the same Enlightenment thinkers also wanted to construe an essential difference between Judaism and the classical tradition, but this endeavour, too, is fraught with problems, as we shall see.
ואל תשיאך חכמת יונית אשר
[…] אין לה פרי כי אם פרחים
שמע דברי נבוניה נבוכים בנויים
על יסוד תהו וטיחים
ותשוב לך בלב ריקם ונעור
.ופה מלא ברב שיגים ושיחים
Let not wisdom of Greek (ḥokhmat yevānīt) carry you away
which produces no fruits but flowers
[…]
Listen to the confused words of those who understand it,
[words] built on a foundation of chaos and plaster;
it returns to you with a void and empty heart
and with a mouth full of abundant prater and babble.
Abū l-Ḥasan al-Lāwī (Judah Halevi, d. 1141)
The question of how religion and society should relate to Greek culture and thought did not only arise in Christianity, but also in Judaism. From the Middle Ages onwards, Jewish thinkers have often discussed this problem with reference to the concept of ‘ḥokhmat yevanit (wisdom of Greek)’ or ḥokhmah yevanit (Greek wisdom). The exact meaning of this phrase was already disputed in the Talmud, where we find it in a number of places (see Jospe 2009, whose argument I largely follow here). There is, for instance, an account of the sack of Jerusalem under Pompey that was made possible by the treachery of ‘an old man who knew the wisdom of Greek (זקן מכיר בחכמת יונית)’, because he could communicate in this language. The passage ends with a malediction: ‘Cursed be the person who raises pigs, and cursed be the man who teaches his son the wisdom of Greek (וארור האדם שילמד את בנו חכמת יונית).’ In another passage, Rabbi Yishmaʿel is said to have responded to an eager student who had learnt the whole Torah by heart that he should only study the ‘wisdom of Greek’ ‘at a time that belongs neither to the day nor to the night (בשעה שאינה לא מן היום ולא מן הלילה)’. This is an allusion to Jos. 1:8, ‘but thou shalt meditate therein [sc. in the book of the law] day and night (והגית בו [ספר התורה] יומם ולילה)’.
These accounts raise two exegetical questions: what does ‘wisdom of Greek’ mean here; and was its study forbidden in the Talmud. Both these questions are actually addressed in the explanation of the first account about the sack of Jerusalem; there we find that one rabbi distinguished between Greek language (lashon yevanit) and ‘wisdom of Greek’. The implication appears to be that Greek language is not forbidden; rather its use is rather necessary ‘in the land of Israel’. And even learning wisdom of Greek and Greek hairstyles are acceptable in the case of someone who is ‘close to the government (מפני שהוא קרוב למלכות)’. Moreover, the first story may only suggest that communication with the enemy in Greek is bad. Some exegetes such as Rashi and Maimonides therefore explained the expression ‘wisdom of Greek’ here as knowledge of a secret Greek cipher.
In the second passage, rabbi Yishmaʿel’s injunction to study the wisdom of the Greek neither during the day nor during the night appears to be a simple schêma katà merismón: time is divided into day and night, and if you forbid to do something both during the day and during the night, you simply prohibit this activity at all times. But Rabbi Yishmaʿel clearly wants to put an over-ambitious student in his place. Therefore, his remark may well contain an amount of irony. In any case, the issue at hand here is the neglect of studying the Torah (biṭul Torah), not the study of Greek thought in general. Therefore Jospe (2009) follows Saul Lieberman in his conclusion that ‘the study of Greek Wisdom is not forbidden per se’ and that ‘none of the early Rabbinic sources mentions the direct prohibition of the study of either the Greek language or Greek Wisdom’ (Lieberman 1962: 100, 102).
Even in later times ‘wisdom of Greek’ can clearly be used in a pejorative way, as the opening quotation from the poem Your words are fragrant like myrrh by Judah Halevi shows. Judah (d. 1141) was an important intellectual and poet who lived in Muslim Spain. In the quotation, he states that the wisdom of Greek bears no fruit, but resembles idle talk that only dazzles and confuses. Did he, however, reject Greek learning in general? Nothing could be further from the truth, as his Neoplatonic outlook shows. Rather, his criticism is aimed at certain Aristotelian philosophers who held the world to be eternal, and not created by God. In other words, ‘wisdom of Greek’ as a concept has a negative ring, but Judah uses it selectively: specific aspects of Greek doctrine are idle chatter, not all of Greek thought. Likewise, when one looks at the ample literature of so-called responsa (or Jewish legal opinions), one sees a nuanced picture. Even rabbis who have a rather sceptical attitude towards Greek philosophy do not quote the examples from the Talmud discussed above in support of an outright ban.
Some stories in the Jewish past such as the revolt of the Maccabees or that of Bar Kochba at Massada seem to tell a story of Jewish resistance against an occupying power and its culture. But obviously the relationship between Judaism and Greek thought is far more complex. We should not forget, for instance, that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was first a Jewish classic (de Lange 2013), and many Jews thought and wrote in Greek first, the most prominent example being Philo of Alexandria. But even the uprising against the Romans in ce 66 is chronicled in Greek by Flavius Josephus (d. c.100 ce), and he is also one of our main sources for Jewish life in Palestine at that time. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that even the language of the Talmud is replete with words and expressions derived from Greek, including for some of its religious institutions. And the rejection of ‘wisdom of Greek’ in the Talmud cannot be interpreted as a Jewish orthodoxy pitched against Greek culture.
Here, a comparison with Islam and its alleged relationship to Greek culture is useful. The founder of Islamic Studies, Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), wrote a seminal article about ‘the attitude of the old Islamic orthodoxy towards the ancient sciences (Stellung der alten islamischen Orthdoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften)’ (Goldziher 1916). In it, he argued that an ‘old orthodoxy’, represented by thinkers such as Ibn Ṭaymīya (d. 1328), was opposed to Greek learning; the ‘new orthodoxy’ of Goldziher’s day, represented by the Ottoman religious establishment, had no such opposition. Sabra (1987), Gutas (1998: 166–75), and others rightly refuted Goldziher’s idea. They basically argue that Goldziher quoted a few disparate opinions without putting them in their right context. Goldziher then extrapolated from these few quotations what the core belief—the essence—of the ‘old orthodoxy’ was, namely to reject Greek learning. In other words, he essentialized Islam, with little regard to the overwhelming amount of conflicting evidence. The discussion of ‘wisdom of Greek (ḥokhmat yevanit)’ teaches a similar lesson: statements against Greek learning should not be taken out of context in order to pitch religious orthodoxy against Greek philosophy. Both rabbinic Judaism and Islam emerged in a heavily Hellenized world, and both were profoundly marked by the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, as we shall see next.
وينبغي لنا أن لا نستحي من استحسان الحق واقتناء الحق من أين أتى، وإن أتى من الأجناس القاصية عنا والأمم المباينة، فإنه لا شيء أولى بطالب الحق من الحق.
We must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples, there is for the student of truth nothing more important than the truth.
Yaʿqūb al-Kindī (d. c.873; trans. Adamson and Pormann 2012: 12)
The age of the Graeco-Arabic Abbasid translation movement has rightly been compared by Dimitri Gutas (1998: 8) to Pericles’ Athens and Renaissance Italy. This translation movement took place from the second half of the eighth to the first half of the tenth century ce. In its wake, most philosophical, medical, scientific, and mathematical texts available in late antique Alexandria were rendered from Greek into Arabic. But the translated texts also included some verse such as the so-called Menander Sentences (pithy sayings in iambic trimetres attributed to the New Comedy playwright Menander, such as ‘whom the Gods love dies young’) (Pormann 2014), as well as the Alexander Romance, a somewhat mythical account of Alexander the Great’s exploits (Doufikar-Aerts 2010). This translation movement had a tremendous impact on the three Abrahamic religions, as it shaped not only the philosophical, but also the theological thinking of prominent Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
We can distinguish three main phases in this translation movement. During an earlier first phase in the late eighth and early ninth century, individual texts such as Galen’s On Simple Drugs and Euclid’s Elements were rendered into Arabic by Christian translators such as al-Biṭrīq (Ullmann 2002, Pormann 2011) and Ḥajjāj ibn Yūnus ibn Maṭar. Then the mid-ninth century (from the 820s to 870s) marks the heyday of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, where two distinct groups of translators had the greatest impact, namely Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s workshop and al-Kindī’s circle. Finally, some Aristotelian texts such as the Poetics were rendered into Arabic in the first half of the tenth century in the context of the Peripatetic school of Baghdad, where Christians such as Abū Bišr Mattā were active.
Both the circle of the Muslim al-Kindī and the workshop of the Christian Ḥunayn deserve further scrutiny, as they illustrate the importance of inter-confessional collaboration. Little is known about al-Kindī’s life for certain, apart from the fact that he could trace his ancestry to good Arab stock, that he hailed from Baṣra, that he was affluent, and that he rose to prominence in the courts of the Abbasid caliphs (Adamson and Pormann 2012). He came into contact with Greek mathematical texts translated during the first phase, such as Euclid’s Elements, and took a great interest in the geometrical method of proof (Endress 2003; Gutas 2003). This led him to employ his wealth to sponsor Christians to translate key philosophical texts into Arabic, the two most prominent being the so-called Theology of Aristotle and the Book on the Pure Good, the latter being known in the Latin West as the Book on Causes (Liber de causis) (Endress 1973; Zimmermann 1987, 1994). We do not know exactly how this process of translation came about, but the following scenario appears likely. The Theology of Aristotle is actually a paraphrastic rendering of Plotinus’ Enneads, end of book four to beginning of book six. ‘Paraphrastic’ here means that the resulting text often deviates from the original not only in its language, but also its philosophical content (Adamson 2002). For instance, Aristotelian concepts absent from the original are introduced into the translation. Moreover, on the level of style, we find some decidedly quranic overtones (Adamson and Pormann 2012: xxiv–xxvii). It seems likely that the translator of the Theology was the Christian Ibn al-Nāʿima al-Ḥimṣī, and we know from one manuscript that al-Kindī ‘improved (iṣlāḥ)’ it. One can therefore only speculate whether it was al-Kindī who revised the style of the translation in such a way that it would appeal to his fellow Muslims.
To make Greek philosophy acceptable and appealing to his co-religionists was part of al-Kindī’s intellectual programme, as we can also see from his philosophical writings. Two examples can illustrate this. In On First Philosophy, dealing mainly with metaphysics, al-Kindī insisted that truth is always the same, irrespective of who discovered it, and that one therefore should seek it out from wherever one can find it (see the opening quotation at the start of this section). And in his Epistle on the Quantity of Aristotle’s Books, al-Kindī distinguishes between two types of knowledge: prophetic knowledge and what one might call human knowledge. Prophets such as Moses or Muhammad were divinely inspired and had direct access to the truth. Normal human beings, however, need to work a lot harder to discover it, and philosophy offers the prime means to do so. Importantly, however, the truth of revealed religion and of philosophy is the same; only the modes of accessing it are different.
We also have one philosophical treatise by al-Kindī in which he explains a passage from the Quran, and notably from the sūra The Merciful (al-Raḥmān), verse six, which runs: ‘and the stars and the trees bow themselves’ (trans. Arberry 2008: 557). But what does it mean for the stars and trees to bow (or prostrate) themselves before God? Citing classical poetry as witness (shāhid, pl. shawāhid), al-Kindī argues that prostration here means obedience. It makes no sense to interpret this verse literally, as the stars have no limbs which to bend. They obey God, the Almighty, in their souls, and serve as the proximate agent cause for generation and corruption in the sublunar world. To put this differently, anything that happens here on earth is caused by the movement of the stars. But they do not move in a whimsical fashion or according to their own will, but according to the decree of the Creator; he is the ultimate cause for everything. This example illustrates how al-Kindī reconciled the cosmology developed by Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy with the holy writ. As al-Kindī stated at the beginning of his Epistle on the Prostration of the Outermost Body (§ I.2; Adamson and Pormann 2012: 175): ‘Upon my life, what Muhammad the truthful (may the blessings of God be upon him) has said and transmitted from God (the exalted and mighty) may indeed be understood wholly through reasonable deductions…’ Therefore, there is no contradiction between reason and revealed religion.
Al-Kindī’s circle provides one instance in which a Muslim patron, in this case al-Kindī himself, commissioned Christians to translate Greek texts. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s workshop represents another such instance. In Ḥunayn’s case, we are particularly well informed about how he went about translating from Greek into Arabic as he gave a detailed account of these translations of Galen (Käs 2010 with further references). We know that high-ranking members of the Abbasid elite—such as the Banū Mūsā, three sons of a famous highwayman turned plutocrat—often commissioned the Arabic translations, and paid handsomely for them. Not infrequently, this process of translation went via a Syriac intermediary: for example, Ḥunayn may translate from Greek into Syriac and then hand the task to produce an Arabic version to one of his collaborators (Bhayro et al. 2012, Pormann 2012, Vagelpohl 2011, all with further references). When translating medical texts, Ḥunayn and his collaborators would also take the religious sensitivities of their audience into consideration. When confronted with various deities of the Greek pantheon, they sometimes replaced them with ‘God (Allāh)’ or similar expressions (Strohmaier 2012).
It is hard to overestimate the impact of the translation movement on the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For many of their chief theologians and thinkers were profoundly indebted to Greek thought in Arabic translation, as the example of Mūsā ibn ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Maymūn, better known as Maimonides (d. 1204) demonstrates.
Maimonides illustrates like few others the importance of Greek thought for Arabic culture. He is equally famous for achievements in three areas: codifying Jewish law in his massive work The Repetition of the Law (Mishneh Torah), as well as dealing with other questions of practical theology, for instance, in so-called responsa (or legal opinions); contributing to theological and philosophical debates, notably in his Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn, known in Hebrew as Moreh Nevochim); and writing a large number of influential medical monographs and treatises. We have already seen that Maimonides solved the problem of ‘knowledge of Greek wisdom’ by interpreting this expression as referring to a Greek cipher which enabled treason during the siege (and ultimate sack) of Jerusalem. I shall not deal here with other aspects of his works of practical theology. But his medical works demonstrate that Maimonides could not have had any compunction about studying Greek texts in Arabic translation, as he frequently refers to previous Greek authorities such as Hippocrates and Galen. For instance, he wrote a commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms (Joosse and Pormann 2012); and he wrote his own books of Aphorisms, in which he often quotes previous Greek medical authorities; in the last chapter, he lists his doubts about Galen explicitly, thus displaying the same critical attitude as many Arabic-speaking physicians such as Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyāʾ al-Rāzī (d. c.925). He also practised medicine, notably serving as court physician to the Ayyūbid rulers; his medical ‘swan song’, for instance, offers advice to Saladin’s son al-Afḍal about melancholy and heavily draws on the Greek physician Rufus of Ephesus (Pormann 2008: 185–8).
His views about philosophy and speculative theology owe an equally great debt to the Greek tradition. We can illustrate this with the topic of anthropomorphism: God is described in the Bible and the Quran as having a number of attributes such as ‘wrathful’; but we also find references to his extremities. In Genesis, man is even said to be created in God’s image. This then begs the question of whether God looks like man, whether he has human traits, be they physical (hands, arms, etc.) or mental (wrathful, etc.). The question of God’s attributes already occupied Greek thinkers, and it continues to be debated by the proponents, of Islamic speculative theology (kalām) and philosophy, as well as Maimonides (Belo 2007). The opening chapter of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed offers an interesting example. His starting point there is the Bible verse where God says: ‘Let us make man in our image (beẓalmenu) after our likeness (kidmutenu) (נעשה אדם בצלמנו כדמותנו; Gen. 1: 26)’. Does this mean that God has hands and feet, is made of flesh and blood? Maimonides denies this by deploying a twofold argument. First, he talks about semantics. He specifies that the word for physical shape in the Bible is toʾar; therefore, when ẓelem (image) and demut (likeness) are used in this verse, it must mean something else: the comparison is figurative. Put in Aristotelian terms, they are homonyms (ism muštarak; ὁμόνυμον). For this usage, too, he adduces a number of examples, such as ‘I am like (damiti) a pelican in the wilderness (דמיתי לקאת מדבר) (Ps. 102: 7).’ The speaker does not compare his physical appearance to that of a pelican; rather what the two have in common is to be forlorn and sad.
Maimonides thus rejected the anthropomorphic interpretation of this verse in Genesis, chapter 1, and he then offers his own: man is created in God’s image in the sense that he possesses ‘intellectual understanding (idrāk ʿaqlī)’, or, to put it differently, because the divine intellect is connected to man (min aǧli l-ʿaqli al-ilāhīyi l-muttaṣili bihī). To be sure, Maimonides developed a much more sophisticated philosophical theology in his Guide for the Perplexed. In this, he partly drew on al-Fārābī’s notion of the negative attributes, which itself has its origin in late antiquity (Belo 2007). But this initial example can show that Maimonides continues debates that originate in antiquity. To give just two examples: both the Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria (fl. 1st century ce) and the Christian philosopher John Philoponus (fl. c.500 ce) already adhered to a similar interpretation to that put forward by Maimonides. In his On the Creation of the World (§ 69), Philo states that
nobody should apply the likeness [between man and God] to the outline of the body. For God is not anthropomorphous, nor is the human body god-like. The word likeness is used to apply to the intellect that rules the souls. (τὴν δ’ ἐμφέρειαν μηδεὶς εἰκαζέτω σώματος χαρακτῆρι· οὔτε γὰρ ἀνθρωπόμορφος ὁ θεὸς οὔτε θεοειδὲς τὸ ἀνθρώπειον σῶμα. ἡ δὲ εἰκὼν λέλεκται κατὰ τὸν τῆς ψυχῆς ἡγεμόνα νοῦν·)
Likewise, in his On the Creation of the World (6.6; ed. Reichardt 1897: 239) Philoponus says that it would be laughable and ultimately impious to think that the words ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ used in this verse apply to the body.
In this way, the first chapter of the Guide for the Perplexed illustrates how debates begun in antiquity continued in the medieval Islamic and Jewish writings; and they were to have a lasting effect on medieval Christian theology as well. This engagement with Greek thought was only made possible through the Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the eighth to the tenth centuries. But translations from Greek into Arabic continued to be produced even in the early modern period.
Mehmet the Conqueror (r. 1444–6, 1451–81) not only took the city of Constantinople, but also took an active interest in Greek history and literature (Raby 1983). For instance, when campaigning near Troy, he asked about the tomb of great heroes such as Achilles and Ajax, at least according to a contemporaneous Greek source. He also studied some Greek, as his schoolbook exercises show, although he did not become totally proficient in this language. But he did commission a number of Greek manuscripts which were produced in his scriptorium; among them we find Arrian’s Anabasis, an account of Alexander the Great’s exploits; and a copy of the Iliad, now in the National Library in Paris. That his interest in these matters was not superficial is shown by the fact that he had a number of texts translated from Greek into Arabic. His main focus here was theology, notably texts explaining the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet, he also commissioned translations of the Neoplatonic philosopher Pletho.
George Gemistus Pletho (c.1355–1452) formed part of the Byzantine intellectual elite that went to Italy in the build-up to the Ottoman conquest; another prominent example includes his student Basil Bessarion (1402–70), who was later to become cardinal. He took a strong interest in Platonic and Neoplatonic writings; Pletho and his pupil Bessarion inspired Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) to establish the Platonic academy in Renaissance Florence. Unlike Bessarion, Pletho appears to have adhered to certain polytheism; he wrote, for instance, a hymn to Zeus, perhaps inspired by the example of the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. He also penned The Laws (Nomoi), as did Plato before him. He was particularly known for his criticism of the Aristotelianism that dominated much of philosophical discourse, especially in the wake of Averroes being translated into Latin. Mehmet had these works translated into Arabic, so that he could peruse them (Akasoy 2002). The references to the Greek pantheon are largely retained in these translations, and the resulting Arabic text must have felt at least somewhat odd to read for any monotheist. For instance, there are direct addresses to Zeus, who is called God (ilāh).
The interest in Greek extended beyond Mehmet the Conqueror (Gutas 1998: 173–5). But we also find Latin medical texts being translated on quite a significant scale at the Ottoman court in the seventeenth century. The chief physician Ibn Sallūm commissioned a number of Latin medical works to be translated into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish (Pormann 2013b: 65–71). In the wake of these translations, even key elements of Paracelsus’ new chemical medicine became available in Arabic. As Paracelsus himself drew on Greek sources, especially in the alchemical tradition, we have here an instance of the classical tradition indirectly influencing Ottoman medicine.
The important point, however, remains that the interest in Greek (and to a lesser extant Latin) continued well into the Ottoman period. This is yet another proof, if additional evidence be needed, that the so-called Islamic religious orthodoxy did not oppose the interest in Greek learning. And this interest continued even in the modern period.
The Greek and Roman classics remained an important point of reference for Arabic and Islamic culture also in the modern period beginning with the so-called nahḍa, the cultural ‘awakening’ that took place from roughly the 1870s to the 1950s (Pormann 2006). In the following, I shall highlight some salient examples that illustrate the various ways in which Arabs engaged with the classical tradition in modern times, taking Egypt as the prime example, because of both its cultural and economic importance during this period.
The first major event that marks the beginning of an active engagement with Greek literature in Egypt was the publication of an Arabic verse translation of the Iliad by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856–1925) in 1904 (Pormann 2007). The translator wrote a long preface to his work, in which he compared ancient Greek with classical Arabic poetry. He emphasized the many parallels between the former and the latter poetic traditions, both characterized by a strong oral element. Al-Bustānī was particularly interested in the so-called Homeric question, which asked whether both the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one author called Homer, or whether they are in fact compilations resulting from long processes of oral composition. Al-Bustānī’s translation was celebrated lavishly, and his ideas influenced subsequent generations of Egyptian intellectuals.
The greatest Arab playwright, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987), argued fervently for a renewal of Arabic literature through contact with the Graeco-Roman classics. In the preface to his Oedipus, the King (Ūdīb al-Malik, published in 1949), he noted that during the medieval Graeco-Arabic translation movement, mostly non-literary texts were rendered from Greek into Arabic. For Arabic literature to experience its own renaissance, it would be necessary to take Greek poetry, drama, and literature more generally as a source of inspiration, just as various European literatures did during their Renaissance. It is, however, important to adapt the classical subjects to the religious and cultural sensitivities of the audience. He did this in a number of plays, such as Pygmalion (based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and Praxa or the Problem of Government (drawing on Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen with its female protagonist Praxagora). In both the areas of drama and epic, later authors continue to engage with the Graeco-Roman heritage. This can be illustrated by two examples: two full Arabic prose translations of the Iliad appeared over the course of two years (namely in 2002 and 2004); and an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, called Women’s Peace (Salām al-Nisāʾ), by the Egyptian playwright Lenin al-Ramlī, was produced on the Cairene stage in protest against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Pormann 2014b).
The study of Greek and Latin had no greater champion in Egypt than Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, perhaps the most famous Arab intellectual of the twentieth century and a highly influential thinker. Ḥusayn learned Greek and Latin in Paris, and became convinced that Egyptians would only be able to write their own history once they had mastered the two classical languages, because many of the sources for this history were written in them. In his seminal work The Future of Culture in Egypt (Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr), he argued fervently that specialist state schools teaching Greek and Latin ought to be set up; and that Classics must become part and parcel of the university curriculum. He failed in the former endeavour, but succeeded in the latter: Classics is now a well-established discipline in most Egyptian universities, including al-Azhar, the oldest Muslim university.
But classical studies also led to religious controversies, as two famous examples can illustrate. In the academic year of 1925–6, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn lectured on the origins of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. He applied the methods that he had studied in Paris, and notably the historical criticism famously associated with Theodor Mommsen. Using the concept of radical doubt inherited from René Descartes, Ḥusayn claimed that the pre-Islamic poetry was essentially a fabrication of later times. For the most part, the earliest sources for this poetry date from the eighth century, and Ḥusayn argued that the authors of the collections in which they are preserved invented the odes of pre-Islamic Arabia. This poetry is extremely famous, and schoolchildren still study it and learn parts of it by heart. For this reason, Ḥusayn’s suggestion that it was a fake provoked scandal in cultural, but also in theological terms. For the Islamic exegetical tradition relied heavily on pre-Islamic poetry to interpret the meaning of the Quran. When a word or phrase is obscure or in need of explanation, the commentator would quote so-called ‘witnesses (shawāhid)’ to elucidate its meaning; the rationale underlying this technique is that the language of the Quran and that of pre-Islamic poetry are similar to each other; if, however, these quotations are made up, then a large part of traditional Quran exegesis becomes unreliable. Therefore, the religious establishment took a dim view of Ḥusayn’s ideas and endeavoured to have him convicted as an apostate.
Ḥusayn also influenced the next generation of Arab intellectuals, among them Louis ʿAwaḍ (1915–90). The latter provoked similar outrage when he argued in the 1960s that much of the Epistle of Forgiveness (Risālat al-Ghufrān) by the celebrated littérateur al-Maʿarrī drew on Greek sources.
In both these controversies, Egyptian scholars applied to their own tradition academic techniques that they mostly learned in the West: Ḥusayn used the tools of historical criticism and ʿAwaḍ those of comparative literature and literary criticism. But classical scholarship had a far more profound influence on key beliefs about the Quran itself (Pormann 2013a). In the nineteenth century, the idea crystallized that one could reconstruct the exact words of classical authors such as Sophocles, Euripides, or Plato through textual criticism—what was sometimes called ‘Lachmann’s method’ after the German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). This is a method that strives for univocity: the classical author wrote one authoritative text that the modern scholar endeavours to reconstruct by drawing on the extant manuscripts (Timpanaro 2005). Now, both Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, a champion of modernization and engagement with the Graeco-Roman past, and Ibn ʿUthaymīn (1929–2001), a traditionalist and Salafist cleric from Saudi Arabia, adhered to the same notion that the text of the Quran is univocal, and that it can be reconstructed in the same form in which it was revealed to the prophet Muhammad. In their own way, both Ḥusayn and Ibn ʿUthaymīn are modernist: they reject the notion of ambiguity, whether textual or in meaning. In this, they go against centuries of traditional quranic exegesis which celebrated the complex character of the Muslim holy writ (Bauer 2011). Ḥusayn is conscious of his debt to classical scholarship, whereas Ibn ʿUthaymīn never studied it directly. And yet, both their views about the status of the quranic text ultimately derive from modernity’s preoccupation with univocity that was so important in nineteenth-century classical scholarship.
וַיַּדְרִיכֵם בְּדֶרֶךְ יְשָׁרָה
And he led them forth by the right way
Psalm 107: 7
καὶ ὅπου ἐγὼ ὑπάγω οἴδατε τὴν ὁδόν. Λέγει αὐτῷ Θωμᾶς· κύριε, οὐκ οἴδαμεν ποῦ ὑπάγεις· πῶς οἴδαμεν τὴν ὁδόν; λέγει αὐτῷ Ἰησοῦς· ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή· οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸν πατέρα εἰ μὴ δι’ ἐμοῦ.
And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
John 14: 4–6
المستقيم السراط اهدنا
عليهم أنعمت الذين سراط
عليهم المغضوب غير
الضالين ولا
Guide us on the straight path,
the path of those on whom you bestowed favours
not those against whom one is angry
nor those who go astray
This short series of vignettes on the links between the Abrahamic religions and the classical tradition could do little more than highlight a few examples illustrating the close ties between the two. All three religions are closely connected to each other and had constant recourse to the classical past, which served as a source of inspiration for countless generations of theologians, philosophers, and thinkers. Already in the three languages mostly associated with the three monotheistic religions, namely Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic, we can see the great influence of Greek. Hebrew is replete with words of Greek origin, and they include, as we have mentioned, major institutions of rabbinical Judaism. Latin, of course, is the language most closely related to Greek, and here, too, we find countless loan words. But even in Arabic, and notably in the language of the Quran, we find quite a number of words that have Greek (and even Latin) origins. The only noun that is mentioned twice in the opening sura of the Quran (al-Fātiḥa), apart from God (Allāh), is ‘path’, or sirāṭ in Arabic. But sirāṭ comes from Latin strata, in the sense of uia strata or ‘paved way’, whence English ‘street’ and German ‘Straße’. This highlights that the contacts between the various cultures run much deeper than just the contacts that I have detailed above.
The same could also be said for a number of key concepts that the Greek tradition shares with the Abrahamic religions, such as that of the ‘straight path’, or the ‘right way’. The opening quotations to this section show that it represents an idea that was expressed in the Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, and the Arabic Quran. For instance, when ‘doubting’ Thomas is asked to follow Jesus in St John’s Gospel, he is at a loss as to where to go (Most 2005: 64): he does not know ‘the way’, to which Jesus replies that he is the way. Furthermore, the Christian religion is often referred to in the New Testament simply as ‘the Way (hē hodós)’ (Strohmaier 2012: 184). Likewise there are more than two dozen places in the Hebrew Bible where the expression ‘straight path (דרך ישר/ה)’ or ‘good path (דרך טוב/ה)’ occur. And we have already mentioned that the word ‘path’ is the only noun mentioned twice in the opening sura (Sūrat al-Fātiḥa). And the notion of the right or straight path can already be found in antiquity, as the example Callimachus (Aitia 1 fr. 1, 25–9 ed. Pfeiffer) shows: he urges the reader to take the narrow, untrodden path.
Especially during the Enlightenment, there were a number of thinkers who denied the close ties between the classical tradition and the Abrahamic religions (see e.g. Leonard 2012). A famous example is Ernest Renan (1823–92), who emphasized the Semitic character of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and saw them incapable of scientific thinking, anchored in the Greek tradition. But our discussion here demonstrates that Renan and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers were clearly wrong in emphasizing the divide between Greek thought and the three monotheistic religions. In fact Judaism, Christianity, and Islam owe their very character to an active engagement with the classical tradition, which constitutes an important part of their shared heritage.
The subject is vast, so I am just going to mention some recent books and articles that will allow the reader to delve deeper into this topic. Goodman (2007) and Leonard (2012) look at the relationship between Jews and the Graeco-Roman world at different ends of the chronological spectrum, and are quite different in their focus, but well worth reading for the breadth of the learning and the depth of their analysis. For an impression how the Greek tradition fundamentally shaped Arabic philosophical thought, see Adamson and Pormann (2012); the classical study remains Gutas 1998, and Pormann 2011 contains a lot of relevant material. Law (2012) offers a good way into Overbeck’s perception of Christianity with further references to English literature. Finally, Pormann (2013a and 2013b) offers examples of the classical tradition continuing to exert its influence on the modern Arab world.