Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East

Abstract

The Late Antique Aristotelian tradition inherited by the world of early Islam in the Near East considered the Rhetoric an integral part of one’s training in logic and reasoning. Thus far, however, there has been little academic interest in it, apart from Deborah Black’s ground-breaking monograph published some two decades ago and the recent edition in Maroun Aouad’s translation and study of Ibn Rushd’s commentary on it. Vagelpohl’s revised Cambridge dissertation is a careful historical and linguistic study of its translation and naturalization in Syriac (less so) and Arabic learned culture in the Near East. As such, he considers the text a case study that raises wider questions about the whole process of the translation movement that, after a relative absence of interest, is again inspiring a new vogue of academic literature. Since translation is a process of cultural exchange, it is important to pay attention to details and formulations. The choice of the Rhetoric requires some justification, as Vagelpohl admits, for two reasons: (a) the Aristotelian text was not that significant in antiquity; more practical manuals were more widely used and taught, and (b) the Arabic tradition distinguished between two traditions of rhetoric, an indigenous genre of balaghah (and bayan) that drew upon classics of the Arabic language and was essential for training preachers and functionaries, and a more philosophical and Hellenizing khitabah represented by the Aristotelian text and its commentary, such as the one by Ibn Rushd. Clearly the former tradition dominated, for even a cursory examination of the manuscript traditions and texts in libraries attests to this imbalance. However, Vagelpohl argues that the challenges posed by the text reveal strategies and approaches used by the translators to deal with the cultural exchange that may assist our understanding of the wider translation movement ...