Abstract Summary
Translation plays a central role in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. Two episodes of translation bookend the “Golden Age”: the translation from Greek to Arabic, and that from Arabic to Latin. In both processes, translation is understood as a mode of acquisition and/or loss where knowledge moves across a linguistic divide in a process that begins (or ends) a particular historical episode. However, this translation-as-transition paradigm fails to capture the linguistic diversity that existed on both sides of this seeming divide, and the production and consumption of this translated knowledge and its diffusion beyond the spheres of learned scientific and medical practice. Moreover, translation-as-transition paradigm foregrounds the fixity and “foreignness” of Greek knowledge rendering Islamic sciences derivative and secondary—a science-in-waiting for European Renaissance. In this paper, I look at translation in the history of Islamic medicine not as a transition but rather as a part of a larger and more comprehensive process of archive-making. Through following the works of translators and historians, I investigate how translation contributed to the production of a particular form of learned medicine, and to the making of specific socio-professional identities. I argue that understanding translations as part of the production of knowledge is key to pushing a more accurate, innovative and comprehensive global history of science in the pre-modern world.
