The Arabic Hermes From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science by Kevin van Bladel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 278 pages.)

Abstract

Unfortunately there is still far too much by way of conjecture, innuendo,
ahistoricity, ideology, and basic guesswork in the study of Islamic philosophy
and mysticism, at least in what passes for historical studies of these
intellectual traditions. But as we have seen the serious study of intellectual
history, particularly in the Graeco-Arabic period and in classical Islamdom,
flourish, so too has attention been placed upon those critical intersections
between disciplines and bodies of knowledge. One can no longer argue for
the Neopythagorean roots of a particular intellectual tradition or claim that a
thinker’s “esoteric” doctrine is due to his/her “hermeticism.”
The publication of Kevin van Bladel’s revised Yale doctoral dissertation
is a wonderfully solid historical masterpiece that greatly contributes to our
understanding of certain strands of intellectual transmission in the late
antique Near East, as well as disabuses us of many a myth about the presence
of Hermes and hermeticism in classical Islamic learned culture.
Hermetic manuscripts on the occult, alchemy, and the esoteric doctrine of
the soul abound within collections of Sufi works and without; what is critical
is to make sense of why they exist where they are found and to acquire
a deeper sense of what constitutes the Arabic Hermes in the same way that
we now understand far better the Arabic Plato and the Arabic Aristotle.
The historical transmission of texts and ideas is not just an obsession of
the positivist pedant, but rather a method to avoid woolly thinking on crosscultural
relations and their possibilities, exigencies, and lacunae. It is true
that unless texts were available to translators and adaptors, they could not
have emerged in an Arabic form. But we should not insist too much on strict
historical orthographical trails, however, for orality did figure as a medium of transmission (no doubt partly influenced by Platonic logocentrism) and
texts sometimes disappeared and reappeared over the ages. Nonetheless, the
story of how early Muslims appropriated Hermes is a case in point of how
ideas and figures were taken from their Hellenic (or Hellenizing Near
Eastern, or maybe even orientalising Hellenic) contexts and naturalized
within an Arabic idiom. The author rather carefully avoids the use of the
terms Hermeticist and hermeticism, because we have no evidence of any
Muslim community’s continuous engagement with hermetic learning and
practice from late antiquity into classical Islam ...