Medieval Arabic medical autobiography.

• Author: Reisman, David
• Position: Ibn Ridwan - Critical essay

Posterity was not kind to Ibn Ridwan, the fifth/eleventh-century Cairene physician and self-proclaimed revisionist of the medical curriculum of his day. An example of this latter-day opinion is to be had from his earliest biographer al-Qifti (d. 646/1248) who concluded his Ta'rikh al-hukama' on something of a sour note with the following account of Ibn Ridwan. (1)

His name is 'Ali b. Ridwan b. 'Ali b. Ja'far, the physician. In his time he was a scholar in Egypt during the caliphate of al-Mustansir (2) in the mid-fifth [mid-eleventh] century. In his early days he was an astrologer, sitting by the side of the road and earning his living, but not by any method of verification (tahqiq), as is usual with astrologers. Then he read a little medicine and a little logic, but he was one of those scholars who obfuscate (mughliq) instead of clarify (muhaqqiq). Neither his face nor physique was attractive. (3) Nonetheless, a group of students did study with him and transmit knowledge on his authority and his reputation spread. He wrote books, but not the best in their genre; rather they were plagiarisms (mukhtatafa) (4) and composites of others' words (multaqata), deceitful (mutanakkir) and derivative (mustanbata). Ibn Butlan [d. 444/1052] had public debates, dialogues and disputes with him, some of which I have mentioned in the reports about Ibn Butlan. (5) I saw a book by Ibn Ridwan on astrology in which he comments on Ptolemy's Quadripartitum (6) but adds nothing significant. I saw a work of his on the order of Galen's books on medicine and on how to read them when studying, in which he hovers (7) around the words of the Alexandrians. (8) As for his students, the things they used to transmit on his authority about medical aetiologies (ta'lil tibbiyya), astrological doctrines, and logical terms were laughable, if the reports are to be believed. (9) Ibn Ridwan remained in Egypt, at the forefront of dispensing the types of science for which he was infamous, until he died sometime in the 460s [1060s-1070s]. Ibn Ridwan wrote in the mediocre script common to physicians (hukama'), [but] straight and with clear letters. I saw [copied] in his hand al-Hasan b. al-Hasan b. al-Haytham's Treatise on the Light of the. Moon (10) and he had vowelled it correctly and well, which shows his thorough study of such matters. He wrote at the end of it: 'Ali b. Ridwan b. 'Ali b. Ja'far al-tabib wrote this for himself; [the copy] was completed on Friday, mid-Sha'ban 422 [early August, 1031]. (11) Such a dim portrayal in a collection of biographies devoted to outstanding physicians, medical practitioners, and philosophers can be taken only as an admonition among encomia. In al-Qifti's view, Ibn Ridwan was something of a dilettante, correctly trained in neither astrology nor medicine; a dubious "compiler" of greater authors' works; perhaps physically grotesque; a transmitter of mediocre knowledge to students of poor skill; nonetheless possessed of reputation, but not by virtue of mastering the disciplines to which he lays claims; and, in the final judgment, naught but a tolerably reliable scribe.

The castigation of Ibn Ridwan by later biographers, perhaps beginning with al-Qifti, (12) is, of course, to be contrasted with their relative endorsement of his "nemesis" Ibn Butlan (d. 444/1052), the Christian physician from Baghdad, student of Abu l-Faraj b. al-Tayyib (d. 434/1043). That such contrast would be made by the biographers is in itself not surprising, given that the oral (so reported) and written controversies between Ibn Ridwan and Ibn Butlan form not only the most titillating aspect of both careers (and thus irresistible to biographers (13)), but also, as will be investigated here, the major source of biographical information that later biographers had of the two men. Important in this regard is the second question to be addressed here: why would the biographers opt to champion Ibn Butlan rather than Ibn Ridwan, insofar as both present equally disparaging portraits of each other in their correspondence? The answer to this question is to be located in the very purpose of medical "autobiography" in the medieval Islamic world as inherited from the Classical Greek authors and how the result of such purpose was perceived--at least in Ibn Ridwan's case--by those either unaware of or less willing to recognize this particular type of self-representation.

Ibn Ridwan is certainly not unknown to modern scholarship. He had something of a banner year in 1937, when Franz Rosenthal provided a brief study of Ibn Ridwan's "autobiography" in his Die arabische Autobiographic, (14) the first detailed evaluation of this genre of writing among medieval Arab authors, and Joseph Schacht and Max Meyerhof presented nearly all of the texts associated with the Ibn Ridwan-Ibn Butlan debacle in their The Medico-Philosophical Controversy between Ibn Butlan of Baghdad and Ibn Ridwan of Cairo. (15) Rosenthal provided a German summary of parts of the "autobiography" and correctly noted its "idealistic" character: "Ibn Ridwan does not give a mere curriculum vitae; rather he sets down his "manner of living" [Lebensfuthrung] (sira) as an ideal and exhortation. ... He has little to report about the outer events of his life" (p. 22), and made the percipient reference to Galen as one of the main inspirations for Ibn Ridwan's construction of identity and way of life. The scholarly collaboration of Schacht and Meyerhof resulted in what remains the fundamental sourcebook for the lives, careers, and contentious correspondence of Ibn Ridwan and Ibn Butlan. In addition to an introductory chapter that places this correspondence in its intellectual and historical context, the authors provided translations of the major biographies of the two physicians (along with a first attempt to rationalize the bibliographical information from the medieval sources) and established the Arabic text of five of the letters of the correspondence, (16) accompanied by paraphrastic English translations and excerpted summaries.

In the years since Rosenthal's study, many of Ibn Ridwan's medical works have been published and some attention has been directed to the so-called autobiography. While Rosenthal's analysis of Ibn Ridwan's "autobiography" is brief and somewhat schematic, he deserves credit for recognizing that the genre in which Ibn Ridwan was working has virtually nothing to do with the genre of autobiography as modern authors understand it. In perhaps the singular instance that Rosenthal missed the mark in his brief evaluation of Ibn Ridwan's "autobiography," the reason is easily identified: he did not find any thematic correlation between a given trope in Ibn Ridwan and those of the classical medical literature that Ibn Ridwan could have known. The example here is the amount of attention Ibn Ridwan gives to accounting for his financial acumen, which Rosenthal first found pedantisch and later perhaps a sign of financial greediness. (17) Much later, in 1984, Michael Dols presented an equally brief analysis of Ibn Ridwan's text and astutely noted the juxtaposition of it and the main elements of the Hippocratie Oath (in Ibn Ridwan's version) as presented in the biography compiled by Ibn Abi Usaybica. Like Rosenthal, Dols highlighted the apparent inconsistency between Ibn Ridwan's obsession with his finances and the spirit of the Oath. (18) However, it can be said that both Rosenthal and Dols operate on the assumption that there is more connection between the deontological literature of classical Greek medicine than with any modern concepts of "self-revelation."

An indication that the study of medieval Arabic "autobiographical" literature again attracted scholarly attention was the publication in 1996 of an issue of the journal Edebiyat (7.2) devoted to papers on the genre, guest-edited by Dwight Reynolds, which was followed in 2001 by the collective evaluation in monograph form, titled Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, again headed by Reynolds. (19) Like Rosenthal (and his predecessor, the classicist G. Misch), this collective undertaking takes as one presupposition that a motivation for writing "autobiography" in medieval Islam was to present the individual as an example of a highly esteemed predecessor (pp. 3-4). This is emphasized by the observation that the term sira--which is what Ibn Ridwan's later biographer Ibn Abi Usaybic'a employed to introduce Ibn Ridwan's text--carries the "connotation of an exemplary life" (p. 39). Finally, the connection between Ibn Ridwan's self-presentation and the Greek physician Galen is made (p. 45).

In the case of Ibn Ridwan, all of the observations made in past scholarship are quite correct. Here the intention is threefold: to confirm these findings; to give a detailed examination of Ibn Ridwan's literary influences; and, finally, to examine the later Arabic biographers' reaction to the framework and premises at work in Ibn Ridwan's autobiography.

We are served especially well by Rosenthal's observations in the case of Ibn Ridwan for a number of reasons. First, the sira composed by Ibn Ridwan was not intended to be read as an independent "tell-all" report about his own life. Rather, it was designed to be read as a protreptic to the study of medicine and, as such, originally formed one part of his major work al-Kitab al-nafi' fi l-tibb, (20) in which he outlined the correct way to study medicine, in its...