This volume introduces ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī (d. 219/834), one of the central figures in the transmission of classical Greek and Persian wisdom into Arabic. It offers an edition, translation, and evaluation of his book Jawāhir al-kilam , one of the oldest collections of proverbial wisdom and moralia in Arabic, as well as other remaining pieces of his works. The first part of the book surveys the content of his more than sixty books and suggests that among his translations from Middle Persian into Arabic were the Sindbād-nāma and Bilawhar wa-Budhāsf. Moreover, he emerges as the author of the famous al-Adab al-ṣaghīr heretofore wrongly attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa‘. The second part contains the Arabic texts and translations as well as a rich documentation of their sources and their further transmission.

Winner of the 2022 Goldstein-Goren Book Award from the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewish authors of this period formed two distinct views of Socrates: one as a wise, ascetic, monotheist, and the other as a vocal skeptic. The latter view has its roots in Plato's Apology where Socrates describes his divine mandate to question all knowledge, including knowledge of the divine. After exploring how this and similar questions arise in the works of Judah Halevi and the Hebrew Averroes, Halper traces how such open-questioning of the divine arises in the works of Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, and Abraham Bibago.

How did Iran remain distinctively Iranian in the centuries which followed the Arab Conquest? How did it retain its cultural distinctiveness after the displacement of Zoroastrianism - state religion of the Persian empire - by Islam? This latest volume in "The Idea of Iran" series traces that critical moment in Iranian history which followed the transformation of ancient traditions during the country's conversion and initial Islamic period. Distinguished contributors (who include the late Oleg Grabar, Roy Mottahedeh, Alan Williams and Said Amir Arjomand) discuss, from a variety of literary, artistic, religious and cultural perspectives, the years around the end of the first millennium CE, when the political strength of the 'Abbasid Caliphate was on the wane, and when the eastern lands of the Islamic empire began to be take on a fresh 'Persianate' or 'Perso-Islamic' character. One of the paradoxes of this era is that the establishment throughout the eastern Islamic territories of new Turkish dynasties coincided with the genesis and spread, into Central and South Asia, of vibrant new Persian language and literatures. Exploring the nature of this paradox, separate chapters engage with ideas of kingship, authority and identity and their fascinating expression through the written word, architecture and the visual arts.

From the Greeks to the Arabs and Beyond written by Hans Daiber, is a six volume collection of Daiber’s scattered writings, journal articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries on Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations, Islamic theology and Sufism, the history of science, Islam in Europe, manuscripts and the history of oriental studies. The collection contains published (since 1967) and unpublished works in English, German, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, including editions of Arabic and Syriac texts. The publication mirrors the intercultural character of Islamic thought and sheds new light on many aspects ranging from the Greek pre-Socratics to the Malaysian philosopher Naquib al-Attas. A main concern is the interpretation of texts in print or in manuscripts, culminating in two catalogues (Vol. V and VI), which contain descriptions of newly discovered, mainly Arabic, manuscripts in all fields. Vol. I: Graeco-Syriaca and Arabica. Vol. II: Islamic Philosophy. Vol. III: From God’s Wisdom to Science: A. Islamic Theology and Sufism; B. History of Science. Vol. IV: Islam, Europe and Beyond: A. Islam and Middle Ages; B. Manuscripts – a Basis of Knowledge and Science; C. History of the Discipline; D. Obituaries; E. Indexes. Vol. V: Unknown Arabic Manuscripts from Eight Centuries – Including one Hebrew and Two Ethiopian Manuscripts: Daiber Collection III. Vol. VI: Arabic, Syriac, Persian and Latin Manuscripts on Philosophy, Theology, Science and Literature. Films and Offprints: Daiber Collection IV.

A collection of documents from antiquity to the 16th century in the historical West (Bactria to the Atlantic), in the original languages with an English translation and introductory essays, about the motivations and purposes of translation from and into Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, as given in the personal statements by the translators, scholars, and historians of each society.

This book studies the Counsel for Kings as an illuminating commentary on the milieu and polity in which it was written and as a composition that seeks to persuade by drawing allusions between the diverse repertoire of wisdom literature available to the author and his audience and the circumstances of the author’s time and place.

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 672/1274) Nasirean Ethics is the single most important work on philosophical ethics in the history of Islam. Translated from the original Persian into Arabic in 713/1313, the present text was primarily intended for the Arabic-speaking majority of the people in Iraq. A fine example of medieval Persian-to-Arabic translation technique, this first edition carefully reproduces Middle Arabic elements that can be found throughout the text.

This is the first major study devoted to the early Arabic reception and adaption of the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian sage to whom were ascribed numerous works on astrology, alchemy, talismans, medicine, and philosophy. The ancient Greek Hermetica, with which the tradition begins, are products of Roman Egypt of the second and third century CE. Thereafter, in late antiquity, they found a wide readership, both among pagans and Christians. Their ongoing popularity depended on the notion that Hermes had lived in extremely ancient times, perhaps before the Deluge, and his antiquity endowed him with a pristine intellectual priority and made him attractive as an authority in religious arguments. Early Arabic literature beginning in the eighth century also includes detailed discussions of Hermes Trismegistus, both as a teacher of ancient legend and as the alleged author of works on the apocryphal sciences, especially astrology. Moreover, Hermes is imagined in Arabic as a prophet, lawgiver, and the founder of ancient religion. This book shows how the Arabic Hermes developed out of the earlier Greek and other late antique traditions into something new, which would in turn form the background to the later reception of the Greek Hermetica in the Italian Renaissance. Assembling information in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic primary sources, The Arabic Hermes will be of great interest to scholars in many fields, including Classics, Arabic Studies, Iranian Studies, Egyptology, and Medieval Studies.

The collection of essays assembled in this volume addresses the models of divine and practical wisdom in some of the earlier Arabic prose texts passed down to us. All essays were initially presented and discussed at an international conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin in October 2014. More than isolated case studies, the contributions offer ground-breaking new research on essential works and figures of the early translation movement (from Greek, Syriac and Middle-Persian into Arabic). They also address, from the viewpoints of intertextuality and philology, the dissemination process of innovative syntheses elaborated by original medieval thinkers.

The articles in this volume are dedicated to Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani for the breadth and depth of his interests and his influence on those interests. They attest to the fact that his fervor and rigorously surgical attention to detail have found fertile ground in a wide variety of disciplines, including (among others) Persian literature and philology; Islamic history and historiography; Arabic literature and philology; and Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence. The volume has brought together some of the most respected scholars in the fields of Islamic studies and Islamic literatures, all his prior students, to contribute with articles that touch on the fields Professor Mahdavi Damghani has so permanently touched with his astonishing scholarship and attention to detail.