Few events in human intellectual history rival the Baghdadī Greek-to-Arabic translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries. The Arabic translations reintroduced Greek philosophical and scientific thought to the Islamic world—and eventually to Europe—where they ignited new interest in humanistic and scientific inquiry. Dimitri Gutas’s influential study, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), has cast a long shadow on the study of Greek thought in the Islamic world. For while Gutas emphasizes the Muslim patrons’ organic interests in philosophy and science as a crucial catalyst in the birth of the movement, his study depicts the Christian translators as hired laborers rather than the producers of original works in their own right. Here Alexandre Roberts’s Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch offers a new portrait of translation culture in the Byzantine Empire. Shifting our focus away from Baghdad to the eleventh-century multicultural milieu of Antioch, Roberts highlights ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl, a Byzantine...

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