É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

STROHMAIER, Gotthard: Ulüm al-awa il and Orthodoxy: a Famous Monograph of Goldziher Revisited

CULÜM AL-A WÄ'IL AND ORTHODOXY: A FAMOUS MONOGRAPH OF GOLDZIHER REVISITED Gotthard Strohmaier Berlin One of the most important and pioneering studies of Ignaz Goldziher appeared in 1916 in the proceedings of the Prussian Acadcmy of Sciences in Berlin. It bears the title Stellung der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften

1 and is written in an almost flawless German. He gives there a broad and vivid picture of one aspect of the many-sided phenomenon of the reception of Greek philosophy and sciences in Islam, namely the hostile reaction on the part of a so-called orthodoxy. This was at a time when work on Graeco-Arabica had just begun, and classical scholars had to recognize that a certain part of the Greek heritage that was lost in its original version had to be retrieved via Arabic translations made in the early Middle Ages. European self-confidence which saw itself as the only legitimate heir to the Greek mind was prepared to see Graeco-Arabica as a kind of plant transferred to a foreign and infertile soil where it could not take deep root and was doomed to wither away in the course of the centuries. Goldziher himself wisely refrained from such statements, so far as I know, but the material accumulated by him was liable to reinforce the opinion that the Greek heritage which stood in our occidental mind for enlightenment and scientific progress was in the long run incompatible with the spirit of Islam. The study has nevertheless the great merit of being a first attempt to delineate the phenomenon of Graeco-Arabica within a social context, although on a limited scale, as Goldziher was only concerned with the hostile reaction. The question why the reception ever took place at all remained outside the scope of the inquiry. Dimitri Gutas has recently endeavoured to show that behind the reception lay a deliberate imperial programme on the part of the Abbasid caliphs, i.e. to continue a specific Persian tradition of rivalry with the Byzantines." I would rather see it as a quite natural process whereby members of the ruling class of the Abbasid empire, even some caliphs, of course, among them, came into contact with Syrian and Greek ' In: Abhandlungen der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1915, phil.hist. Kl., Nr. 8. 2 Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries). London-New York 1998. 251