Prophets, viziers, and philosophers stand at the crossroads of civilizations. In world literature, they came to represent Judeo-Christian, Persian and Greek influences. As literary figures, they convey a sense of supranatural authority, elicited from their intimate experience of the divine, the mundane and the physical. Stemming from both orally transmitted material and some of the earliest foreign works to be translated into Arabic (the Bible; the Pañchatantra; the Alexander Romance), the three types of authoritative wisdom reveal a pivotal, civilizational moment in the development of Arabic literature from an oral tradition to a written one. By the middle of the eighth century CE, the unique fusion of Graeco-Roman political theology with Persian and Indian political traditions led to the renewal of questions already associated with authority in the Biblical and Byzantine traditions.The development of Arabic prose literature during the 8th-11th century CE captured, in a multiplicity of literary genres (legendary biographies, philosophical doxographies, mirrors for princes, collections of wise sayings and theological essays), a protean wisdom embedded in divine knowledge, practical discipline, scientific achievements and moral teachings.

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.

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Contents

Foreword VII

Transliteration and Abbreviations IX

Contributors XI

Abstracts XV

EMILY J. COTTRELL
Introduction: The Prophets, Viziers and Philosophers as Sapiential Figures 1

PAUL L. HECK
This World and the Next: al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) on the Wisdom of Rule by Islam 33

JANIS ESOTS
The Image of the Sage in Pseudo-Ammonius’ Ārāʼ al-Falāsifa 51

DAVID ZUWIYYA
Kingship, Wisdom, and Knowledge in the Arabic Alexander Romance 65

FAUSTINA DOUFIKAR-AERTS
“Give us immortality!”: The Contest between Alexander and the Brahmans in the Arabic Tradition 83

MIKLÓS MARÓTH
Die Wurzeln der politischen Theorie des Islam 109

ISTVÁN T. KRISTÓ-NAGY
Wild Lions and Wise Jackals: Killer Kings and Clever Counsellors in Kalīla wa-Dimna 147

AMANDINE ADWAN
La Sagesse du prince dans le Kitāb al-Išāra ilā Adab al-Imāra d’Abū Bakr al-Murādī (m. 489/1095) 211

GERALD GROBBEL
Die Hundert Sprüche ʻAlīs 231

GOTTHARD STROHMAIER
Das Stilmittel der Chrie im veränderten arabischen Kontext 277

MOHSEN ZAKERI
Aphorisms engraved in philosophers’ signet-rings: Ps-Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq’s Ādāb al-Falāsifa and Persian-Arabic Wisdom Literature 285

EMILY J. COTTRELL
Retour sur la biographie de Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (m. 873) : Que nous apprend un manuscrit inédit du Ādāb al-Falāsifa? 329

Index of names 393