Mensch und Tier vor dem Konig der Dschinnen: Aus den Schriften der Lauteren Bruder von Basra, Ihwan as-Safa.

• Author: Nasr, Seyyed Hossein

The appearance of the "Dispute between Man and the Animals" for the second time in German and in an important collection, Die philosophische Bibliothek, devoted to major works of Western and Eastern thought, indicates the particular significance of this text in the annals of Islamic philosophy. Coming at the end of the treatise on zoology in the second book of the Rasa il, the section on the dispute between man and the animals before the king of the jinn constitutes an independent work which already attracted the interest of 19th-century orientalists, including not only F. Dieterici, who translated it (Der Streit zwischen Mensch und Thier |Berlin, 1858~) along with the rest of the Rasa il into German, but also J. Platts, who rendered it into English as an independent book in his Dispute between Man and the Animals (London, 1869). The work continued to receive attention during this century. It was analyzed by S. H. Nasr in An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrine (London, 1978), 73ff. This analysis in turn attracted the attention of L. Goodman who rendered it again into English as The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (Boston, 1978). Also, within the Islamic world, this section of the Rasa il has received independent treatment and has even been printed separately as Tada i alhayawanat ala'l-insan aw risalat al-hayawan wa'l-insan (ed. F. Asad |Beirut, 1977~). The text has been translated into Hebrew as well as Spanish and recently it has even appeared in Serbo-Croatian or Bosnian as an independent book (tr. E. Karic, Rasprava covjeka sa zivotinjama |Sarajevo, 1991~).

The reason for the great interest shown in this work is two-fold. On the one hand, it is an account, of some literary quality and highly readable, concerning a subject of great philosophical interest, and, on the other, it contains one of the most profound discussions of the relation between man and his natural environment and is of particular significance during the present-day environmental crisis. Few Islamic sources deal in such plain language with an issue that lies today at the center of the intellectual concerns of most thinking men and women wherever they might be.

The gripping story contained in this treatise involves the complaint of animals to the king of the jinn against man's abuses. A trial is held in which man seeks to justify his dominion over the animals by pointing to his superior wit, cleverness, inventiveness, and the like, but...