New Literary History

Abstract:

Nearly all the celebrated scholars of the Islamic tradition have been described as polymaths. Yet the intellectual history of medieval Arabic polymathy per se has received only a modicum of attention in the field of Islamic studies. In asking what the constituent sciences and arts of early medieval polythematic knowledge are, this essay examines two key phases of this early history of Arabic polymathy. The first phase concerns the literary origins of Arabic polymathy under the aegis of the late Umayyad caliphate (r. 661–750) and the de facto division of knowledge between the “foreign” and the “Arab” sciences. The second phase comprises the rise of polymathy under the early ʿAbbāsid empire (r. 750‒1258) and the Graeco-Arabic translation movement as exhibited in the philosopher Abū-Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn-Isḥāq al-Kindī’s (d. ca. 870) classification of the Aristotelian corpus and his own polymathic œuvre.