Other Influences

Discussions of the contribution of ancient Greek and Persian literatures to the development of Arabic autobiography focus primarily on the impact of works by the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (d. ca. 200) and the Persian physician Burzōē (sixth century).^[29] Arabic translations of these texts circulated widely in the Middle Ages, and references to them appear in several Arabic autobiographies written between the tenth and twelth centuries. The philosophers al-Rāzī (Latin Rhazes) and Ibn Sīnā (Latin Avicenna), the physicians Ibn Riḍwān and Ibn al-Haytham, and Samaw’al al-Maghribī, a Jewish convert to Islam, all note their familiarity with one or another of these texts in their own autobiographical writings.^[30]

Burzōē is best known as the translator of the famous collection of animal fables, the Panchatantra, from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. His Persian text was then translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 755 or 756) in the early eighth century and retitled Kalīla wa-Dimna. All that is known about Burzōē's life comes from the short texts prefaced to various redactions and translations of Kalīla wa-Dimna, which include at least five different versions of his travels to India and two versions of his autobiography. One of the most common of the accounts of his journey to India relates that the Persian king Khusraw Anūshirawān (r. 531–79) had heard of a fabulous collection of tales in India and charged Burzōē with the task of obtaining it. Once in India, Burzōē resides in the court of the Indian king for a time before daring to attempt to see this marvelous book. He befriends an Indian by the name of Azawayh and discourses lengthily with him on the nature of true friendship. Finally, he makes his request, and Azawayh brings him the book from the king's chambers. Burzōē copies it, translates it, and then returns to Persia. King Khusraw is so pleased that he offers Burzōē whatever reward he should desire, but Burzōē accepts only a cloak as recompense and requests that his own life story be appended to the work. The king orders this done.

Another version has Burzōē traveling to India in search of powerful herbs that grow in the mountains there, which, when properly prepared, are capable of reviving the dead. Despite many attempts, Burzōē fails in this task. He then meets a group of Indian sages, however, who explain that this legend is but an allegory: the mountains are wise men, the herbs their books, and the dead the ignorant of the earth. Satisfied with this explanation, Burzōē returns to Persia and presents a large number of books he has translated to King Khusraw.^[31]

Burzōē's autobiography offers yet another version of the events narrated in the account of his journey to India. An accomplished physician, Burzōē despairs of his craft because, in the end, he can only cure disease temporarily and all of his wards eventually succumb to death. He seeks spiritual solace, but none of the religions he turns to offers an answer to his malaise. In the text he twice mentions that he traveled to India, presumably as part of his spiritual quest, and once notes that he translated books there. Eventually, however, he renounces the world and becomes an ascetic.

Burzōē's life story is recounted in an ahistorical mode devoid of such details as names, dates, or places and is structured in a manner that evinces little sense of chronology. It can scarcely be said to have influenced the vast majority of Arabic autobiographies, which are specifically devoted to documenting the historical details of their authors' lives. Yet one text in particular, by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), does bear some resemblance to Burzōē's text. Al-Ghazālī was a religious scholar and professor at the pinnacle of his highly successful career when he suffered a crisis that literally left him unable to speak. According to his autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (The Deliverer from Error), as a result of this episode he retired from public life in pursuit of Truth.^[32] None of the known schools of religious thought satisfied him, however, until he encountered Sufi mysticism, which provided the spiritual peace he craved. He withdrew from the world to live the life of an ascetic but eventually, years later, returned to his post and wrote his autobiography as a guide to other seekers. Thus, unlike Burzōē's nihilistic despair, al-Ghazālī's text draws on Islamic traditions of didacticism and emulation and offers itself as a guide to the true path.

Galen of Pergamon included personal references and autobiographical details in a number of his writings, but two works in particular are thought to have had some influence on the early Arabic tradition: On My Books and On the Ordering of My Books. In the former, Galen sought to provide a definitive list of his own works after having noted in the book markets of Rome that some of his works were circulating under the names of other authors and still other works were being falsely attributed to him. In the latter, however, Galen did more than simply list his works. In the opening section he attempted to order them as they should be read by students, from the most basic texts to the most difficult and complex, while in a subsequent section he provides brief accounts of his reasons for writing certain works and the time and place in which he did so. In this rough chronology Galen includes brief references to his travels and education and his lengthy conflicts with rivals jealous of his success.^[33]

Autobibliographies similar to Galen's On My Books did indeed become one of the common features of Arabic autobiography. At times these book lists circulated independently, but more often, unlike Galen's work, they were included in a larger autobiographical work that also documented other aspects of the author's life such as his birthdate, genealogy, teachers, and travels. Although On the Ordering of My Books includes more in the way of personal detail, no Arabic autobiography is structured in a manner similar to Galen's text. The one element for which there are numerous parallels, however, is Galen's account of his jealous rivals. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's autobiography (translated in this volume) is very similar in tone to passages in Galen, and Ḥunayn, the preeminent translator of Galen of his day, was certainly familiar with this text; however, Ḥunayn's account is more closely patterned on the biblical/Qur’ānic account of Joseph, which he, as a Christian, would have known equally well (see the introduction to the translation). Another account of intellectual rivalry is found centuries later in the autobiography of al-Suyūṭī, also translated in this volume.

It is clear that the autobiographical writings of both Burzōē and Galen circulated widely and may thus have helped to set the stage for the emergence of the Arabic autobiographical tradition; however, other than the autobibliography subgenre noted above, neither text seems to have influenced in any direct manner the form, structure, style, or content of Arabic biographical or autobiographical writing.

A final thread that played a critical role in the rise of Arabic autobiography was that of spiritual, particularly Sufi, autobiographical writings the origins of which are traced by Rosenthal as far back as al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) and al-Tirmidhī (d. 898), and continue through al-Ghazālī's al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl and the works of many later Sufi autobiographers such as al-Simnānī, Zarrūq, al-Sha‘rānī, al-Yūsī, and Ibn ‘Ajība.^[34] In these works the author's path of spiritual development constitutes the central focus of the text. They are thus by definition texts that portray primarily an “inner self” and are constructed on a model of transformation and development. They are also, even more clearly than their scholarly counterparts, constructed as models for emulation in the sense that embedded in the text is a call or an invitation to the reader to travel the same spiritual path. Several of these texts culminate with the author's “conversion” to the spiritual or mystical life and may thus also be linked to conversion autobiographies such as those by Samaw’al al-Maghribī, who converted to Islam in the twelfth century, and the Christian writer Fray Anselmo Turmeda, who converted to Islam in the fourteenth century.

Autobiography as a specific type of Arabic literature thus evolved mainly in the context of the Arabic biographical tradition, which in turn had emerged primarily as a branch of historical writing. Autobiographical writing developed first within two primary forms: sīra and tarjama. Limited exposure to pre-Islamic Greek and Persian models in Arabic translation exerted some influence on physicians and philosophers of the tenth to twelfth centuries—the two classes of scholars most directly involved with ancient Greek and Persian thought. The Sufi spiritual autobiography also emerged as a recognizable subtradition of its own, which in turn influenced even some nonspiritual autobiographical texts. The two recognized indigenous Arabic genres, self-sīra and self-tarjama, took on numerous modified forms in different social and literary contexts, but they continued to be understood by late medieval and premodern writers as constituting a single recognizable act of writing an account of one's life for posterity regardless of the formal differences in the resulting texts.