Took an hour and a half off from the computer this afternoon and actually read, polishing off the first two chapters of "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture" (by Dimitri Gutas). As it turns out, the Abbasid translation movement of the 8th-10th Centuries A.D. is all Alexander the Great's fault.

Let me explain: the Sassanid revival of the ancient Persian Empire came up with the idea that in the beginning, the great Zoroastrian religious and philosophical body of texts - the Avestan - contained within it all of the knowledge of the world. As the story goes, this collected wisdom was scattered to the ends of the earth when Alexander the Great and his merry Macedonians conquered the Persians, had the books in question translated into Greek, then burned the originals so that everyone would think that the Greek bootlegs were in fact the sources (never mind that this would have been the exact opposite of what the real Alexander would have done for a moment, but hey, this is the Persian Empire's official point of view we're looking at here!). It was incumbent upon these Neopersian revivalists therefore to recover as much of their past as they could; and through a clever bit of rationalization by a Sassanid dynast that effectively made every foreign work of nonfiction a part of this lost heritage, suddenly the new Persian Empire was consumed with a mania for acquiring books and translating them into their native Pahlavi.

Now when the Arabs conquered the Sassanids, they assimilated this bibliomania along with it, particularly when the Abbasid revolution moved the capital of the Muslim Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad. With a power base that was primarily Persian, the new dynasts had to adapt their rule accordingly; and this tendency was reinforced by the ranks of the Abbasid bureaucracy, which was heavily Persian and thus already committed to this idea of recovering the glories of antiquity through translating the texts of other peoples, in particular the works of the Greeks. The irony here is that the Umayyads - who made up the first dynasty of the Caliphate - had more Greeks working for them directly, since the Eastern Mediterranean had been thoroughly Hellenized, and the early Arab polity took its lead from the neighboring Byzantines as far as administration was concerned. These latter-day Greeks, however, were less concerned with their own antiquity; some were even downright hostile towards the authors of their pagan past.

It was only by getting away from the Byzantine obsessions with theological minutiae that the Arabs were at last able to apprehend the bigger picture of the Greek legacy, a weird irony by means of which the bulk of ancient learning was preserved for the ages. But then again a study of history is essentially nothing more than a study of applied irony. I wish someone had told me this back in high school - I might have paid a lot more attention!