Arabic bibliographical scholarship has collected an impressive list of his writings - all of them lost, except a full-scale work on physical and mental hygiene, three fragments on diverse topics, and a few brief quotations. For classical Islamic scholarship, Abu Zayd’s merits lie, besides his exemplary prose style, in his mastery of theological subjects, that is, exegesis of Qur’anic passages or a study of the names and attributes of God. Today, he is best known as an early representative of Islamic geography, the eponym of the so-called BalkhI School. Unfortunately, his geographical work is not extant and survives only in the later geographical descriptions by al-Istakhrl (d. 934) and Ibn Hawqal (d. after 973). Abu Zayd’s Geography is said to have consisted of 20 regional maps accompanied by descriptions; its principal new feature being, beyond the data of physical geography, a special interest in climate, agricultural produce, and their impact on the geographic humaine.
Abu Zayd’s smooth and elegant style, his appeal to the tastes of the educated court official, and his balance between technical terminology and common ethical sense can best be studied in his sole extant monograph on the Welfare of the Body and the Soul. Its first part treats the principles of the interaction between the four elements, seasons, bodily elements, temperaments, etc., and the traditional ‘‘non-natural’’ factors of health, among them food, drink, sleep, bath, and gymnastics, including a quite sophisticated chapter on music therapy. The second, shorter, part of the book on the hygiene of the human soul deals with four mental disorders: anger, fear, sadness, and hallucinations. The concept of interaction between body and soul, and particularly Abu Zayd’s demonstration of how the bodily disposition and dietetic and behavioral measures may correct an unstable condition of the soul, constitute a remarkable contribution to contemporary discussions between ethics and medicine in the Alexandrian tradition and Islamic theology. Obviously, Abu Zayd’s psychosomatic concept and his physiology are indebted to Galen’s writings; his ethics of the equilibrium between extremes (Greek mesotes, Arabic itidal) and his types of principal mental diseases are largely due to al-Kindl’s reception of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic concepts. In some contexts, notably in his discussion of themes in poetry and songs, we also find consideration of old Arabic Bedouin ideals, but more pervasive is Abti Zayd’s concern for the welfare of the ruler and his entourage, which he sees as a prerequisite for the welfare of his subjects and which is a distinct echo of Sasanian political thought and court ethics.
In a fragment, preserved in an anthology of the great litterateur al-Tawltldi (d. after 1009), Abti Zayd defines politics (siyasa) as a craft which serves the cultivation of a country and protects its inhabitants. The ‘‘product’’ of politics, he says, is owed to five causes (‘ilal): the material cause that corresponds with the affairs of the subjects; the formal cause: their general welfare; the active cause: the ruler’s concern for the affairs of his subjects; the intentional cause: the perpetuation of the general welfare; and the instrumental cause: the employment of incitement and intimidation (targeb wa-targtb, echoing the Qur’anic ragaban wa-ragaban, sura 21, verse 90). As an illustration of how these causes are valid for other crafts, too, Abui Zayd names architecture and medicine, where, for instance, the material cause is earth, clay, stones, and wood for the former, and the human body for the latter, etc. Another parallel between politics and medicine lies in the double function of both the ruler and the physician, to maintain and to restore order. The combination of the four established Aristotelian causes with the Neoplatonic instrumental cause may be due to al-KindiI’s understanding of Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus (cf. I 263, 19-30, Diehl (ed)) or of the Theologia Aristotelis, and the parallelization of architecture and medicine as practical crafts is a common feature of the classification of sciences and arts in late antiquity. The inclusion of statecraft, however, especially the usage of terms such as maslaha, ‘‘common welfare,’’ and the pair targtb-targTb, is a feature of Abui Zayd’s own characteristic design to combine three traditions of political thought: Hellenistic, Islamic, and Iranian.
Another fragment of Abui Zayd takes the games of backgammon and chess as examples of the principles of deterministic thinking (jabr, ‘‘compulsion’’) versus free will (qadar). Determinists, the backgammon players, he says, would attribute the source of human action to God or to the influence of the celestial spheres, and the proponents of free will, the chess players, would hold the individual good or bad choice responsible for a person’s fate. In the medieval discussions, notably among Islamic theologians, on the relative admissibility of chess and backgammon, chess was mostly given precedence. Abui Zayd refrains from offering his own preference, and his noncommittal and rational report on both positions is as remarkable as his analysis of the types of, and motives for, the veneration of heathen idols, preserved in a Qur’ain commentary of Fakhr al-Din al-RazI (d. 1209). However, it has been suggested that Abui Zayd’s analysis of the principles of chess might be interpreted as ‘‘an argument in favor of Mu'tazilism, as against the ‘orthodox’ Muslim nard view of the world, and it could have been the brilliant invention of one of the proponents of Mu'tazilah views’’ (Rosenthal Gambling 167).
Although Abu Zayd’s orthodoxy has been attested to by his contemporaries, later Islamic scholarship has neglected his memory. This is shown by how small the extant part of his considerable auvre is and how ambiguously later biographers have labeled him. For all of them, the range of his scholarship was notable, but some hesitated whether to list him as a philosopher or a litterateur, others wavered between putting him into philosophy or theology, yet others admired his ability to combine both, hikma and shart a. This multiple outlook is precisely a central feature of the scholarship as it was conducted in the Eastern provinces of the Islamic Empire in the few decennia between al-Kindi and al-Farabi.
See also: > al-'jAmirl, Abii l-Hasan > Aristotle, Arabic
> Ethics, Arabic > Fakhr al-Din al-RazI > Galen, Arabic
> Ibn FarijgUn > al-Kindl, Abu Yusuf Ya'qUb ibn Isljaq
> Proclus, Arabic > al-Sarakhsi, Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib
> al-Tawltidl, Abu Hayyan
World History
