The 'Indian Books' in ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī's Paradise of Wisdom. A new Arabic edition, first-time English translation, lore-historical introduction and multilingual glossaries

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Weninger
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; History of Science
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457223417

This project centres around a unique Arabic treatise that was appended by the Persian scholar ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī to his medico-philosophical chef-d'œuvre, completed in the year 850 AD. The main work bears the title Paradise of Wisdom, the appendix is headed by "Extracts from the Books of the Indians". In this appended treatise, the author explains to a largely Muslim audience the basic tenets of Ayurvedic medicine, and presents its salient features summarily and systematically. His expositions are based on a number of relevant Sanskrit writings that had been translated into Arabic about two generations earlier. Ṭabarī does not advocate the teachings of the Indians, but rather confines himself to a faithful rendition of their ideas, thereby displaying a kind of neutral distance which we today would call 'objective' and which in a medieval context might rightly be regarded as exceptional. Ṭabarī's treatise, conceived during a formative period in Arabo-Islamic scientific history, is in all respects a highly important document which, moreover, had no literary precursors nor indeed did it engender similar investigations in its wake. For our understanding of Arabic scientific history, Ṭabarī's treatise represents a veritable treasure chest of otherwise unattainable information, a source both central and neglected. For the field of Indology, too, we can expect to gain new and significant insights: the Arabic translations used by Ṭabarī when writing his treatise proceeded on their part from Sanskrit versions that predate all currently available Ayurvedic manuscripts by nearly a thousand years. The so-called "Indian Books" of Ṭabarī — famous but hardly studied among Arabists, almost unknown among Indologists — were edited in 1928, together with the bulk of the work, and partially translated into German in the 1950s. The edition of the Arabic text, however, is philologically unusable, and the partial German translation, which is based exclusively on this deficient edition, is equally unreliable. We are therefore proposing to prepare a new, critical edition of the Arabic text, drawing on all manuscript witnesses that are now known; on the basis of a newly established text, we will then provide an annotated English translation; the material suchwise acquired will be evaluated and interpreted in an introductory study, focusing first and foremost on questions related to the intricacies of textual transmission; finally, we envisage to compile multilingual glossaries (Arabic‒Sanskrit‒English), and thereby to give access to all philologically relevant terms. The results of this research project will be published in the form of a monograph.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants