The Arabic Language

ġaḏāʾan wa-ʾarṭab wa-tastaʿmil makāna l-istikṯār min al-ḫubz al-istikṯār min as-sawīq
). 
(
Kitāb Buqrāṭ fī ṭabīʿat al-ʾinsān
, ed. Mattock and Lyons, Cambridge, 1968, pp. 27–8)
The casual reference to the Greek custom of mixing wine with water is as inappro
-
priate in an Islamic context as the style of the entire text. In the writings of the 
greatest of all translators, Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq (d. 260/873), there is no trace of such 
translated language. He explicitly rejects the literal translations of his prede
-
cessors and uses a terse, businesslike style that makes full use of the syntactic 
possibilities of Arabic and shuns the ornate epistolary style. His preference for 
complicated infinitival and participial constructions may reflect the structure of 
the Greek original:
I wrote for him a book in Syriac, in which I took the direction he had indicated to 
me when he requested me to write it [lit.: in his requesting its composition from 
me]. (
fa-katabtu lahu kitāban bi-s-Suryāniyya naḥawtu fīhi n-naḥwa llaḏī qaṣada ʾilayhi 
fī masʾalatihi ʾiyyāya waḍʿahu
). (Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq, 
Risāla Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq ʾilā ʿAlī 
ibn Yaḥyā fī ḏikr mā turjima min kutub Jālīnūs bi-ʿilmihi wa-baʿḍ mā lam yutarjam
, ed. 
Bergsträßer, Leipzig, 1925, p. 1)
Both Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s treatises and the translations of Greek logical, medical 
and philosophical writings were publications in the real sense of the word. They 
were public books, not restricted to the court, but intended to be read by individ
-
uals. With respect to Islamic writing, that is, writing on legal matters (
fiqh
), tradi
-

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78
The Arabic Language
tions of the Prophet (
ḥadīṯ
), history, Islamic campaigns (
maġāzī
) and Qurʾānic 
exegesis (
tafsīr
), things were different. When the ʿAbbāsid caliphs requested 
scholars to write down their information in the form of actual books for the 
benefit of the heirs to the throne, who needed such information for their educa-
tion, they did so partially in reaction to the ʾUmayyads. The ʾUmayyad caliphs 
supported the scholarly work of individual 
ḥadīṯ 
collectors, but the ʿAbbāsid 
propaganda emphasised the ʾUmayyads’ worldly interests and minimised their 
role in the collection of Islamic writing. One of the earliest court scholars was 
Ibn ʾIsḥāq (d. 150/767). He had collected materials about the history of the Arabs 
and Islam in order to use them in his instruction. At the special request of Caliph 
al-Manṣūr (r. 136/754–158/775), he presented them in a structured form at court 
and deposited them as a fixed text in the caliphal library (al-Ḫaṭīb al-Baġdādī, 
Taʾrīḫ Baġdād
, I, ed. Beirut, pp. 220f.).
Although there are no copies of this or similar limited publications, Ibn ʾIsḥāq’s 
activities mark the beginning of historical writing, and to a large degree deter
-
mined its literary form and style. We may assume that the accounts of what 
happened during the Prophet’s life and the early conquests were written in the 
kind of narrative prose that we find in all early (and even later) historians, all of 
which grew out of the simple contextless 
ʾaḫbār
of the storytellers. The emphasis 
is on the liveliness of the story, which does not depend on literary decoration 
and uses simple words in a preponderantly paratactic construction, preferably in 
dialogue form. The following story about the reaction of the Muslims when they 
saw the beautiful garb of a Christian captive illustrates this style and shows the 
division of the report into two parts, a chain of informants (