Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 9

Who was this man, peering into a pit of hell with an all-seeing eye—and an all-searching mind that sought to make sense of novelty, beauty, and tragedy? We are fortunate to have a good account of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs life in a biographical dictionary of physicians by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 668/1270), who knew him personally; ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a close friend of the biographerʼs grandfather, and the teacher of his father.⁴ In fact we are doubly fortunate: not only does the biography include a long list of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs works, and a selection of his memorable sayings (one of them quoted as the epigraph to this book); it also includes an extract from ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs own memoirs. As the biography–autobiography has been translated and annotated,⁵ what follows here is only an outline of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs life, including a few salient dates.⁶

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad al-Baghdādī, also surnamed Ibn al-Labbād (“Son of the Feltmaker/-seller”), was born in Baghdad into a family of scholars, originally from Mosul, in Rabiʿ al-Awwal 557/March 1162. He had a rather miserable-sounding childhood: he says he “knew no fun or games,” but instead was crammed with lessons. In his youth, a charismatic wandering scholar and alchemist called al-Nāʾilī (fl. after 525/1131) turned up in Baghdad; ʿAbd al-Laṭīf fell under the manʼs influence, but was eventually to renounce alchemy as nonsense. A more lasting formative experience (mentioned in another surviving fragment of autobiography⁷) came about when, having fallen ill, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf diagnosed and treated himself using al-Rāzīʼs (d. 313/925 or 323/935) encyclopedic medical work, The Comprehensive Book on Medicine (al-Ḥāwī fī l-ṭibb). The success of the treatment sparked off a fascination with medicine that was to endure, grow, and gain him fame. At around the same time, he also developed a deep and lasting interest in philosophy.

Baghdad may have been the seat of a caliphate that at least nominally reigned over the Sunni Muslim world, but it was far from being an intellectual center. In his mid-twenties, therefore, like so many keen young scholars, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf set off in search of knowledge, contacts, and patronage. Arriving in Damascus in 586/1190, he found himself in a new and vigorous polity, the Ayyubid sultanate of Syria and Egypt. Its founder and ruler, Saladin (d. 589/1193), was famous as a warrior fighting the Franks, but the great manʼs magnetism (and money) were attracting scholarly as well as military talent. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf made for the sultan himself, and found him encamped at ʿAkkah (Acre); there, the young man made an impression on Saladinʼs learned secretary and adviser, al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil (d. 596/1200). The latter wrote him a letter of introduction to an influential contact in Cairo. A door opened.

Arriving in the Egyptian capital, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf hobnobbed with intellectuals, including the celebrated Jewish physician and thinker Moses Maimonides (d. 601/1204). The biggest influence on the young scholar, however, was a philosopher called al-Shāriʿī (d. 598/1201),⁸ who steered him away from the sophistries of more recent Arabic thinking, and back to what ʿAbd al-Laṭīf regarded as a pristine Aristotelianism. In that other surviving autobiographical fragment, we learn that al-Shāriʿī was, in effect, ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs guru: “his speech and his doubts remained in my heart like something which gnaws away inside”; he was, in short, “the perfect master.”⁹

Returning to the Levant in 588/1192, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf caught up again with Saladin in Jerusalem, where the princely patron awarded him a monthly allowance of thirty dinars. When ʿAbd al-Laṭīf moved on to Damascus, the sum was upped by Saladinʼs sons to 100 dinars—ten times the usual stipend of a professor of law.¹⁰ This pleasing amount continued to be paid after Saladinʼs death in 589/1193.

With the great man gone, however, a game of musical thrones began within the Ayyubid family. Saladinʼs son, al-Malik al-ʿAzīz, emerged as the ruler of Egypt; when, in 592/1196, he went to take his seat, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf traveled in the princeʼs entourage. Back in Cairo, our author fell into a busy schedule, holding Qurʾan classes at the great mosque–academy of al-Azhar, teaching medicine, and writing—including “ghosting” at least one title for the young sultan. Al-ʿAzīz, however, died in 595/1198. There was a new and bloody round of the inter-Ayyubid struggle, but eventually, in 596/1200, Saladinʼs brother al-ʿĀdil managed to plant himself firmly on both the main thrones of the realm, in Syria and Egypt.

Soon after, in 597–98/1200–2, came the devastating Egyptian famine and plague described so vividly in the coming pages. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf had already been working on a big volume on Egypt and its history, largely compiled from earlier sources; he now realized that his first-person observations of the country and its catastrophe could be the material for a shorter book—this one—that would be uniquely “striking [in] impression.” He finished it in situ, in Cairo, at some time in Shaʿban–Ramadan 600/May 1204. Shortly after, he moved to Jerusalem, where he continued teaching and writing; he also worked on a final version of this book, now lost. What we have here is by no means a rough copy, but it is a text still in motion, still growing, and particularly in its second, unsettling part. It loses nothing by this; rather, the “Admonition” gains in immediacy. We are there in the editing suite, as it were, watching the rushes.

From Jerusalem ʿAbd al-Laṭīf moved to Damascus, then to Aleppo, teaching, practicing medicine, and writing on medical matters. This time the Levantine sojourn was long: before, he had kept ahead of the years by frequent changes of scene; now they caught up with him. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah, meeting him in Damascus, described him as “a thin, elderly man, of medium height, sweet-voiced and expressive.”¹¹

ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs travels, however, were not yet over, nor was his search for patronage. He was to move on again, after 616/1220, to Erzincan in eastern Anatolia, where once more he taught, wrote, and attached himself to the local ruler, Dāwud ibn Bahrām. As with al-ʿAzīz, the attachment involved at least one ghost-writing job. Following a regime change in Erzincan in 625/1228, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf headed back for the Levant, settling again in Aleppo in 626/1229.

But there was still one journey to be made. It had two destinations: the first was Godʼs representative on earth, the second His house in Mecca. For ʿAbd al-Laṭīf had decided to go on the Pilgrimage, and to travel via his native Baghdad, from which he had been absent for nearly half a century. There, he intended to present some of his choicest works to the current Abbasid caliph, al-Mustanṣir—titles that doubtless included the most recent version of this book. After all, in the copy we have, he had written on the first page of his intention “to present it to the ruling authority and leader of the age” (§0.2), the caliph.¹² It has been suggested, quite plausibly,¹³ that ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was angling for a teaching job at the caliphʼs Mustanṣiriyyah law college, then under construction in Baghdad (and still extant today in that mother-city of vicissitudes). That would have been only natural.

Did ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, and this text, reach that first destination, the caliph? No one knows. It was soon after arriving in the city of his birth that he fell ill and died, on 12 Muharram 629/9 November 1231. He was survived by a son, Sharaf al-Dīn Yūsuf, and by a multifarious corpus of writings. Few of them are extant; none of them, however, could have been more extraordinary than this book.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was remembered with fondness by many. The memories, however, were not unmixed. One contemporary, Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 646/1248), attacked him for his “pretensions to learning . . . like a blind man groping his way but claiming to be sharp-sighted.” He added that everyone nicknamed ʿAbd al-Laṭīf “al-Muṭajjin,” the Frying-Pan-Man; the precise implications of this are unclear, but the word has a faintly ridiculous ring in Arabic, and perhaps a touch of the English “potboiler.”¹⁴ Ibn al-Qifṭī seems to have been a less than amiable character himself: according to a verse rhyming with his name, “They all agree heʼs mean and shifty.”¹⁵ That said, it seems ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself had attacked a friend of Ibn al-Qifṭī as no less than a “damned devil.”¹⁶

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself was no angel; he could clearly rub people up the wrong way. His aversions—to alchemists, to tomb-robbers, to officials “devoid of foresight” (§1.4.4) and others who had committed “wanton and puerile vandalism” (§1.4.28)—are strong, and strongly expressed. Even the admiring Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah admitted that “on occasion, he could—God have mercy on him—go too far in what he said, because of the high opinion he had of himself; he would detract from the achievements of the scholars of his own time, and of very many earlier scholars too.”¹⁷

We can only judge him by the trail of knowledge that he left behind—his surviving works. When we do, what comes across is, admittedly, a sometimes spiky character, but with an acute, humane, and ever-curious mind, one that probed a vast body of interests. In the catalogue of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs compositions, there are 173 titles, of which fifty-three are on medicine and forty-eight on philosophy; sixteen of this total are known to be extant, plus a collection of eleven short treatises that are not on that main list.¹⁸ Among the losses are not only the big book on the history of Egypt, alluded to several times in the present work, but titles on a whole gamut of topics, “from rhetoric to rhubarb and from Aristotle to infinity.”¹⁹