Early Arabic Conceptions of Animals (6th-10th Centuries)

Brill, Leyde, 2026, 325+xii p., ISBN 9789004769625. Series, Global Arabic Literary Cultures, Volume: 5

The earliest Arabic sources do not encompass the entire animal kingdom under a single term. This book traces the development of generic categories referring to animals throughout all branches of Arabic literature, including poetry, theology, philosophy, and medicine, from the 6th to the 10th century. How would a jurist or a philosopher define animality? How did the large-scale translation of Greek works into Arabic reshape broader cultural perspectives? By highlighting the variety of conceptions held over a period of five centuries, this book confronts us with the cultural contingency of classification.

Sommaire

Introduction
1 State of the Art: Classification of Animals in Medieval Arabic Works
2 Research Questions and Corpus
3 Outline

Part 1 The Pre-Islamic Period

1 Pre-Islamic Philosophical Discourses
1 Ancient Greek Classification
2 Animals in Plato’s Timaeus
3 Aristotle’s Zoological Works
4 The “Disappearance of Aristotle’s Zoology”
5 The Reception of the arbor porphyriana: the Case of Paul the Persian

2 Pre-Islamic Religious Discourses
1 The Zoroastrian Tradition
2 The Bible
3 Jewish and Christian Literature on Animals

3 Pre-Islamic Arabic Material: Epigraphy and Poetry
1 Sources Documenting Pre-Islamic Arabic Conceptions of Animals
2 Domestic Animals
3 Wild Living Beings
4 Hypernyms for Living Beings
5 Analogism and the Created World

Part 2 The Early Islamic Period

4 The Qur’an
1 Life Forms as Created Things
2 Creation as Evidence for Resurrection
3 Condemnations of Beast-Like People
4 The Breath of Life and the Moral Soul
5 Life in the Qur’an

5 Religious Discourses in the Early Islamic Period
1 Hexaemeral Writing in the Early Islamic Empire
2 The Biographies of the Prophet Muḥammad
3 Common Elements between Human and Nonhuman Animals in Hadith
4 The Emergence of the Concept of Ḥayawān in Fiqh
5 Early Qur’anic Exegesis

6 Early Islamic Poetry and the Beginnings of Arabic Philology
1 The Formation of Hypernymic Zoonyms
2 Reference to Animals in Lexicographical Works
3 How the Organization of a Lexicon Reflects Implicit Classificatory Logics
4 Referring to Animals by their Hooves
5 The Etymology of a Neologism

Part 3 The Abbasid Period

7 The Translation Movement
1 Before the Translation Movement
2 The Early Phase of the Translation Movement
3 Options for Translating Ḥayyūthā
4 The Arabic Translation of Aristotle’s Zoological Writings
5 The Arabic Translation of Galen’s Usefulness of the Parts
6 Plato’s Timaeus in Arabic
7 The Influence of the Translation Movement

8 Speculative Theology in the Abbasid Period
1 The Design Complex
2 Muslim Speculative Theology
3 Al-Jāḥiẓ’s Appropriation of the Aristotelian ḥayawān
4 Al-Kindī and the Neoplatonic Formation of the Elite
5 Al-Jāḥiẓ’s Articulation of a Muʿtazilī Counter-Discourse
6 After al-Jāḥiẓ

9 Medicine, Pharmacology, and Philosophy
1 The Usefulness of Animals
2 Abū Bakr al-Rāzī against the Design Complex
3 Ibn Abī l-Ashʿath’s Taxonomy
4 Al-Fārābī and the Triumph of Aristotelian Logic
5 The Synthesis of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ

10 Arabic Poetry and Philology in the Abbasid Period
1 Abū Nuwās, Abū Tammām, and Dīk al-Jinn al-Ḥimṣī
2 Ibn al-Rūmī
3 Al-Mutanabbī and 4th/10th-century Poetry
4 Philology
Conclusion
1 The Analogist Framework
2 The Ḥayawān within the Analogist Framework: a Living Being
3 Differentiating the Animal from the Living
4 The Progression of Monotheism and the Animal Genus
5 A World Heritage