Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 11

Looking at the plethora of subjects on which he wrote, there seems to be something of the “Renaissance man” about ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, as there is about other polymaths from an Arabic cultural background. This is partly because the European renaissance was a continuation of something already current in the Arabic-Islamic sphere, an intellectual movement that preserved the learning of the classical Mediterranean world and its wide Hellenistic hinterland. That culture had never died; rather, it had gone traveling, and it was to come back to Europe the richer.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf thus sometimes comes across as Leonardo-like, with his interest in mechanics (§1.4.27), his positing of a robot (§1.4.52), and his fascination with harmonious proportion (§1.4.22). Then again, that last concern looks back, too, to the fourth/tenth century and the Brethren of Purity, an intellectual wing of the Ismāʿīlī movement, who wrote on the moral value of proportion;²⁹ and the whole subject goes back in turn to the Pythagoreans, and their belief in number and proportion as the organizing principles of the cosmos.

From this it should be clear that “Renaissance” is indeed a misleading word. The intellectual tradition to which ʿAbd al-Laṭīf belonged had never needed rebirth; or, to extend the metaphor from the epigraph of this book, the torch of knowledge had merely been passed from hand to hand. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf had received the Promethean fire from his Greek and Hellenistic forerunners. As he himself put it, “Be aware that knowledge moves from nation to nation and from land to land.”³⁰

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf places himself overtly in this intellectual relay. Looking for historical references to the pyramids, for example, he goes first to the sacred scriptures, the Torah and the Qurʾan, and then to Greek authorities—Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Galen (§1.4.76). For ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, the continuum of knowledge begins with God and His revealed books, and continues on earth with the great Classical philosophers and scientists of Hellenism. Elsewhere, he relays information from the pharmacologist Dioscorides, the physician Hippocrates, the geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, the botanist Nicolaus of Damascus, and the little-known veterinarian Anatolius of Beirut.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf may not have been aware of the two great ancient writers on Egypt, Herodotus and Hecataeus, but he was their unwitting heir. For Herodotus, Egypt was the most marvelous land on earth³¹—as it was for ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, who saw at Abusir alone “more marvels than this book could possibly contain” (§1.4.71). Again for Herodotus, the Nile was uniquely contrary in its habit of rising in midsummer³²—as it was for ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, for whom a particularly unusual aspect of the Nile was that “it rises at the time when all other rivers decrease” (§1.1.3). Like Herodotus, the fourth-century bc Hecataeus visited the land of the Nile and—in his Aegyptiaca, perhaps the earliest known work of description devoted to the country—enthused about all things Egyptian.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf is the beneficiary of all of these Classical writers and thinkers; but he also inherited a longstanding Arabic legacy. Written Arabic accounts of Egypt supposedly began with ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣʼs (d. 42/663) short but poetic report to the caliph ʿUmar, the Prophet Muḥammadʼs second successor. “Give me such a description of Egypt and its current circumstances,” the caliph wrote to ʿAmr, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, “that would make me think I was actually there.” The reply, about a land of “tawny plains, rolling blue waters, black clay, a brocade of green” is impressionistic; but, being a report to a caliph from a loyal subject, it is the lineal ancestor of this book.³³

Subsequently, descriptive geographers, historians, and travelers added to the knowledge of Egypt and its antiquities available to Arabic readers. As ʿAbd al-Laṭīf says, the pyramids in particular were “already so extensively discussed, described, and surveyed by so many” (§1.4.2). Indiana Jones-style tales of boobytrapped ancient tombs were told with relish; writers like al-Masʿūdī provided soberer accounts of pharaonica.³⁴

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf does not belong to the sensational school of Egyptology; then again, he is not exactly sober, either. For what is new and different in this book—and seldom if ever bettered—is his esthetic response to antiquities. They are not merely wonders to be rubbernecked at, or repositories of earthly treasure to be pillaged for their contents, but—as he enthuses, in a rare flight of rhyming prose—“the utmost accomplishment man could achieve, and the most perfect embellishment stone could receive” (§1.4.44). For one thing, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf sees the monuments as the key to understanding another people who carried the torch of science: the true treasure to be gained, by reflecting upon antiquities rather than ransacking them, is knowledge of their creatorsʼ “noble intellects . . . pure minds . . . and enlightened souls” (§1.4.6).

For another thing, the Egyptian antiquities are beautiful in themselves, especially the “idols,” whose harmonious proportions and anatomical precision inspired ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs most intense enthusiasm. As a Muslim reacting to figurative art, he is at the opposite end of the spectrum to iconoclasts old and new. He would have been scandalized by two eighth/fourteenth-century acts of vandalism—the destruction of the celebrated Saite monolithic Green Chamber at Memphis, and the literal defacing of the Sphinx;³⁵ he would have been no less appalled by the spectacle of zealots blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan or sledgehammering Assyrian sculpture in our own not always enlightened millennium. Just as he belonged to a republic of learning that had no borders, geographical or temporal, he could respond with enthusiasm to the art of a culture that was at least superficially distant from his own aniconic, Islamic milieu.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, however, was an exceptional case, a connoisseur long before the term was invented. The sort of cool rapture with which he writes of the Sphinxʼs features and their proportions, for example, would not be heard again until the arrival of the French. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, contemplating “Old Father Dread”—as Arabic calls the Sphinx—sees it as “handsomely, indeed admirably portrayed, with a touch of elegance and beauty about the features, as if a smile were playing across them” and wonders at “how the sculptor . . . was able to follow the rules of harmonious proportion in the figureʼs features, given that they are so enormous” (§§1.4.21–22). Compare that with Vivant Denonʼs response to the Sphinx, almost exactly six hundred years on: “Colossal though its proportions may be, its lines are as supple as they are pure; the expression of the face is gentle, graceful, and tranquil . . . . The mouth . . . has a softness to its movement and a fineness in its execution which are truly admirable; it is the depiction of flesh, and of life itself.”³⁶ It might be ʿAbd al-Laṭīf rephrasing his own words, but it is in fact an artist and archeologist of the French revolutionary era speaking.

Personal, close-up observation is the basis of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs whole method: he is an arch-proponent of autopsy—in its original sense of “seeing for oneself” (although, for a medical man and anatomist like ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, who examined corpses, the usual modern sense of the word is appropriate too). Of those ancient authorities listed earlier, it is Aristotle who provides ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs methodology. For both of them, phainomena/aḥwāl, “appearances, observable states,” are the essential raw material of knowledge.³⁷ But ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs insistence on looking, particularly in order to understand the past, comes also from repeated divine promptings: «Do they not travel through the land,» the Qurʾan asks, «and see what sort of end came to those before them?»³⁸ These promptings were heard by the earliest descriptive geographers writing in Arabic in the third–fourth/ninth–tenth century, for whom ʿiyān—autopsy—was paramount.³⁹ A derivative of the word, muʿāyanah, “autopsized,” and its near-synonym mushāhadah, “eye-witnessed,” appear in the Arabic title of this book: they stare out, challenging the reader to look with the writer, before the first page is even turned.

The practice of looking, in all its aspects, is the basis of a truly scientific approach. It was a habit that rubbed off on at least some of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs many students; one of them, al-Ṣūrī, is on record as always taking a painter with him when going out botanizing, to draw plants at different stages of their development.⁴⁰ That sounds “modern”; so too does ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs own careful observation and analysis of Nile water samples (§§2.1.10–12). “Modern,” also, is the way in which repeated, regular observation leads to theory, as in ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs idea of building up a data bank on the Nile, to give early warning of potential disasters (§2.1.15). Careful collection of data is what meteorologists and climate-change scientists do today, only with computers instead of reed pens.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf is thus both an autopsist and an empiricist, someone who can form “a hypothesis constructed on the basis of evidence observed” (§1.2.20). It doesnʼt matter that his hypotheses can sometimes be wrong—that, for example, we know no one could have planted a date stone in a taro corm and grown a banana. You can be wrong and still be scientific, as he is in his marshaling of the data on those plants, and in his refusal to come to a dogmatic conclusion on the relationship between them (§§1.2.15–28). As Karl Popper put it, it is “not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a [scientific] system” that matters.⁴¹ Again, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf tries to correct another possible error of the venerable Galen—his description of the human sacrum—and half succeeds, then admits in a marginal afterthought, “I am not . . . certain of this, however . . .” (§2.3.32). By saying that, he is admitting his own falsifiability (as well as Galenʼs). Certainty is pre-scientific; it is ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs doubt that makes him scientific.