Interreligious Scholarly Collaboration in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist

Abstract

This paper explores Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist, a major primary source for Abbasid intellectual history. Although its importance for the field has been acknowledged since its first edition at the end of the nineteenth century, the studies dealing with this encyclopedic work as a whole are remarkably rare, since its material has mostly been used by researchers looking for biographic details regarding specific scholars of the Islamic Middle Ages. Our research aims to examine how Ibn al-Nadīm depicts the religious affiliation of scholars and cases of interaction between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim intellectuals. It focuses on the seventh section (maqāla) of the work, which deals with the rational sciences, a field well known for involving scholars from different religious backgrounds in Abbasid centers of knowledge, especially in the context of translation activities. After some methodological remarks, two main lines of inquiry guide our study. First, we analyze whether Ibn al-Nadīm explicitly acknowledges the religious identity of the scholars he mentions, with what vocabulary, and in which circumstances. Second, we investigate the cases of »interreligious scholarly collaboration«, when Ibn al-Nadīm depicts scholars from different religious backgrounds working together, in order to determine his conception of the knowledge produced by the Abbasid intellectual milieu. We will argue that the way he deals with interreligious relations results in emphasizing the existence of a common knowledge, in Arabic, that is shared beyond communal boundaries. By focusing on the inner structure of this work, we aim to shed new light on the question of interreligious collaboration in Abbasid society, as well as to lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the relationship between the Fihrist and its social and cultural context.