The Islamization of Rhetoric: Ibn Rushd and the Reintroduction of Aristotle into Medieval Europe

Abstract

The development of the rhetorical tradition in the West owes a largely unacknowledged debt to Islamic scholars. Between 711 and 1492 CE, Muslim-controlled Spain became a significant site of scholarly inquiry into the European Classical heritage—often involving the efforts of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers. One of the luminaries of this scholarly tradition is Ibn Rushd (known more generally by his Latinized name, Averroes), known to Medieval thinkers as “The Commentator” for his vast, multifaceted corpus of work on Aristotle, The Master of Those Who Know.

Notes

¹Where applicable, dates are given according to both the traditional Western calendar, divided into BCE and CE, and the Muslim calendar, which begins in the year 622 CE, when The Prophet left Mecca for Medina (a journey referred to as the hijra). The acronym AH, then, denotes anno hijra—in the year of the hijra. Because the two calendars do not align perfectly, the Muslim calendar being lunar rather than solar, translation from CE to AH is done according to this formula: CE minus 622 multiplied by 1.031.

²This work is built upon a foundation of gratitude, particularly toward RR peer reviewers Richard Leo Enos and Jeffrey Walker. I owe a special debt to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose generous support, particularly in the form of a Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant, made much of my initial research possible. An additional debt is due to UNR's Department of English for funding my research assistant during the summer of 2006—and for funding me both before and since.

³Given that many of the translations with which Arab scholars worked were translations into Arabic of Syriac translations of copies of the original Greek manuscripts, corruption was unavoidable. Few commentators such as Ibn Rushd worked in isolation, however, and often had access not only to multiple copies of Aristotle in translation but also numerous commentaries on the text being studied. So the sorts of errors Murphy mentions were both unavoidable and often minimal among the better commentators. For a brief discussion of this dilemma in relation to Aristotle's Meteorology, see the fourth section of Lettinck's introduction (29–30).

⁴This approach to Aristotle is most naturally—most logically—referred to as the “context theory,” described by Ismail M. Dahiyat as “the belief that Aristotle classified his Poetics (and thus poetic theory) as the eighth branch of the Organon, preceded hierarchically by the Rhetoric and the six familiar treatises on logic proper” (3).

⁵Exactly how safe, secure, and tolerant the world of Muslim Spain truly was for infidels is a matter of debate. While writers such as Richard Rubenstein and María Rosa Menocal posit an al‐Andalus nearly mythical in its beauty and creative cultural flowering, they are by no means the only voices in the debate. A far more complex analysis of the interactions between Muslims and Christians on the Iberian Peninsula is provided by L. P. Harvey in Islamic Spain 1250 to 1500 (U of Chicago P, 1990).

⁶The matter of conversion to Christianity in medieval Spain is a particularly complex one, given that it was exerted upon Jews and Muslims alike—with the pressure often increasing after conversion and baptism occurred rather than lessening. In his history Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (Anchor, 2006), James Reston, Jr. paints a chilling picture of reconquered Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella.

⁷While I present the story of Aristotle's library—from the hands of The Philosopher to the bankruptcy of Faustus—in its normally accepted form, it is important to note that virtually no aspect of this story is beyond question. And it is not my intention here to explicate the Truth about anything. Because the story is largely—if mostly unthinkingly—accepted as truth, I seek only to add complexity to what is already a hopelessly complex historical debate. Readers looking to develop a more nuanced understanding should begin with Kennedy's retelling of the story of Aristotle's library and then move to Barnes's anti-telling.

⁸The commentary, as a scholarly text valuable in its own right, bears more than passing resemblance to the “epitome, the distillation of classical works into their essences” (Abbott 159), although study of the role of commentary as forerunner to other medieval and Renaissance practices of imitation is beyond the scope of this work.

⁹The assimilation of Greek texts into the Arab world and their subsequent transmission into Europe was an often-convoluted process fraught with the potential for disastrous translational difficulties as Greek texts were translated into Syriac, then Arabic, then perhaps Hebrew, and finally Latin. Additional difficulties of transmission and reception focus upon the order in which texts made their way from the Middle East to the West. The first three books of Aristotle's Meteorology, for example, were translated from Arabic into Latin in the latter half of the twelfth century CE. But the fourth book, an odd and unlikely fit with the other three anyway, had already been translated from Greek decades earlier. A complete Latin translation from Greek was not made until late in the thirteenth century CE (Lettinck 4).

¹⁰Salim Kemal dates this organization of the Organon to c. 533 and attributes it to Simplicius (113). This is in no way a certainty, and Andronicus is just as likely to have had a hand in the matter.

¹¹I owe special thanks here to Michael Seltzer. His work on the topic of the “poetic syllogism” during my spring 2006 seminar in the history of rhetoric both rekindled my interest in this work and broke some of the scholarly trail.

¹²Murphy's concern with the quality of the translations used by Arab commentators is most relevant in relation to Ibn Rushd's work on the Poetics, for the translation from which he worked may have been, argues Urvoy, “an ancient oriental translation of extremely poor quality where specific concepts are misunderstood, translated in several different ways or even completely distorted” (60). Butterworth, in his translation of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, makes a compelling argument that this is a fault of more modern translators than of Ibn Rushd himself, a fault of Western reliance on defective translations that “incorrectly render Averroes' various arguments and make his beautiful poetic citations read like doggerel” and manage to portray a completely coherent and completely Islamic commentary upon the Poetics “as a curious compilation of relics from some exotic but not very learned horde” (ix).

¹³It must be noted that because Arabic culture did not practice drama in any form similar to the Athenians, both Aristotle's discussion of drama generally and of tragedy specifically had to be greatly modified by Ibn Rushd. Naturally enough, he wrote of poetry, especially the eulogy, one of the primary genres privileged in the Arabic poetry of his time. Borges dramatizes this nicely in his short tale “Averroes' Search.”

¹⁴As Armour also argues, it is significant to note that Aquinas wrote on the topic of Islam, too, in Summary against the Gentiles and Reasons of Faith against the Saracens, Greeks, and Armenians.