Al-Andalus of the 12th century was a tumultuous time politically, and a rich time intellectually. One of our major sources for the intellectual currents of the day was Hayy ibn Yaqzan, written by the physician Ibn Tufayl, an allegorical tale which proved enduringly popular through centuries, languages and cultures. It tells the story of a boy growing up in complete solitude on a deserted island, learning through experience about the world, entirely on his own, without guidance or texts, and thereby discovering the laws of nature and spirituality. By means of this frame, Ibn Tufayl introduces a series of philosophical, medical, moral and spiritual themes, many discussed in this episode.

Reading: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale. Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Lenn E. Goodman https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo25938805.html

The Ikhwan as-Safa, or Brethren of Purity, are shadowy figures in history, probably working in the late 10th or early 11th centuries CE, known only by the impressive 52 letters, known as the rasa’il, which present a curriculum of study designed to provide a comprehensive overview of all known subjects of the day. In the subsequent thousand years of scholarship their approach to knowledge and knowledge acquisition has led to all sorts of debates about what they really thought — some of which we will try to cover in this episode.

Reading: The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (Epistle 22), edited and translated by Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor. https://www.iis.ac.uk/publications-listing/the-case-of-the-animals-versus-man-before-the-king-of-the-jinn/

In 750 CE, a new power swept the Muslim world. This was the Abbasid dynasty. Their rule acted as a catalyst for a burst of intellectual activity, now called the translation movement, when most Greek philosophical, scientific and medical texts were translated into Arabic and stimulated a culture full of debate in books and public spaces.

This is the milieu in which the philosopher known as al-Jahiz lived. Al-Jahiz had a curiosity and originality rarely seen in history. Born around 776 CE in Basra (in the very south of current day Iraq), he lived an incredibly long life, dying in 868 CE in Baghdad. In this time he wrote an extraordinary amount of books, spanning politics, theology, literature, studies of countries and people, from misers to singing girls, arguing the merits and demerits of different cultures and ethnicities.

Reading: Al-Jahiz: In Praise of Books, by James Montgomery https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-al-jahiz-in-praise-of-books.html