Nestorian Christian physician and the most famous translator of ninth-century Baghdad, who with his son Isḥāq and their circle produced complete Arabic versions of books of Aristotle’s Organon.
Life
Ḥunayn was born in 194/810 at al-Ḥīra, an old Aramaean town south of Kufa, into the ʿIbād, a Christian Arab tribe, hence his nisba al-ʿIbādī; his father Isḥāq was a pharmacist. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he went to Baghdad at about twelve to study medicine with the physician Ibn Māsawayh, who expelled him from his circle for asking too many questions. The humiliation drove him to learn Greek, then the language of medicine and philosophy, perhaps first in Baghdad and then in Alexandria and Byzantine territory; he also perfected his Arabic in Basra. Back in Baghdad, he made his first translations of Galen at seventeen for Jibrīl b. Bukhtīshūʿ, the physician of the caliph al-Maʾmūn, and through him entered the Bayt al-Ḥikma as a translator. He served al-Muʿtaṣim, al-Wāthiq and al-Mutawakkil, becoming al-Mutawakkil’s personal physician; a rival’s intrigue brought him excommunication and six months’ imprisonment before he was restored. He continued in high positions under the following caliphs and died, of a stomach ailment according to the TDV, in 260/873.
Ḥunayn’s own interest lay above all in medicine and in Galen: his letter on the Galenic works translated in his time describes 129 works, ninety-five of which he translated into Syriac and thirty-nine into Arabic, and shows a method of research and translation that the TDV finds close to modern standards. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that what is known of Galen’s great logical work On Demonstration comes largely from Ḥunayn’s listing of it, and that his circle was ‘not unequivocally Aristotelian’.
For logic, his importance is the complete translation of Aristotle’s works. From perhaps the 850s, Ḥunayn and his son Isḥāq began to produce integral translations of books of the Organon, generally by way of Syriac versions, some of which dated from before the Arab conquests. The sources do not make clear which of the two translated the Categories; Ḥunayn seems to have worked with an otherwise unknown Theodorus on the Prior Analytics, and father and son both a hand in a new Syriac translation of the Posterior Analytics (SEP). The TDV article on logic calls Ḥunayn, head of the Bayt al-Ḥikma, the most famous of those who translated Greek works into Syriac and Arabic. To these versions Abū Bishr Mattā later added translations of the Poetics and the Posterior Analytics, completing the Arabic Organon of the Baghdad school (SEP).
Uncertain or disputed
- Which of the Organon translations are his and which his son’s is often unclear in the sources (SEP).
- Reports that he studied grammar with al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad or translated from Persian are rejected by the TDV, as are reports that he died of grief or by suicide.
Works
- Risāla ilā ʿAlī b. Yaḥyā fī dhikr mā turjima min kutub Jālīnūs رِسَالَةُ حُنَيْنِ بْنِ إِسْحَاقَ إِلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ يَحْيَىHis account of the translations of Galen’s works made by himself and his students; the main source for his method (TDV).eser
- Translations of books of the Organon (with Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn)Syriac and Arabic versions, among them the Prior Analytics (with Theodorus) and, with Isḥāq, a new Syriac Posterior Analytics; the Categories by one of the two (SEP).tercüme
- Kitāb al-Masāʾil fī al-ṭibb كِتَابُ المَسَائِلِ فِي الطِّبِّIntroduction to medicine, a textbook in the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, in medieval Europe (TDV).eser
Reception
His Arabic translations of Greek medicine, the TDV notes, made Galenic medicine available throughout the Arabic- and Syriac-speaking world and helped to form Arabic medical terminology.
In the history of logic his name stands, with his son’s, for the step from paraphrases and epitomes to complete Arabic translations of Aristotle’s logical works (SEP).
Sources (3)