Al-Farabi's Manuscript for 8 string Oud
I could not sleep last night so I was reading fascinating but obscure notes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Opacity: What We Do Not See.
There is an interesting note from Taleb where he traces the etymology of the Al-lugha, the Arabic word for langue. Taleb maintains that is was a deliberate invention of the great Al-Farabi who purposely intended to define language as logic:
“Now I understand how the word “language” in post-Koranic literary Arabic got to be Al- lugha, اللغة from the Greek λόγος, rather than pre-Koranic lisan from the semitic lsn (lishon in Hebrew לשונ), “tongue”. AlFarabi, or the “second master” (a.k.a Alpharabius magister secundus) is effectively the most likely inventor of modern logic. And he wanted if for a purpose. It was meant to deal with both translation and reasoning.
The Abbasites era was a confusing period in the Near East. Many languages were used in the Empire alongside the official Arabic. Christians spoke both Syriac (Aramaic) and Greek (in fact learned people were so bilingual they did not need to translate many texts between these two languages); Moslems spoke Arabic, Farsi and Turkic dialects, but prayed and did science in Arabic. Alfarabi was trained in logic by the polyglot Syriac grammarians/logicians –but being Turco-Persian, he learned Arabic relatively late in life. His aim was to build on Aritotle’s Posterior Analytics to design an un ambiguous mode of expression in which people could communicate ideas, in a manner that would immediately reveal logical flaws. That language became associated with Language. Language, simply, was deduction.”
In another post Taleb notes that Byzantine or Byzantine Government has a connotation of complex, archaic, convoluted, unmanageable system. Taleb maintains that Byzantium was in fact bottom up collaborative:
“Time for some revision of historical reputations. Historians keep piling on the Byzantine for the alleged pettiness of their disputes. I hold that if the Byzantines argued, it was because it was a truly collegiate system & each bishop was entitled to voice his opinion. The system was (& still is) bottom up. The main Patriarchs now have more clout than in the past, but they cannot do anything without consulting each other. If the Westerners seemed more focused & less “Byzantine”, it was because their system was top-down & the Pope was the big boss.”
It is entirely likely that just like Renaissance intentionally branded the Middle Ages “Dark”, so the papal Rome had an interest in castigating the Byzantine culture.
Photo: Al-Farabi’s Manuscript for 8 string Oud, discovered and recreated by Naseer Shamma.
Further reading: