The Reformation of Morals: A Parallel Arabic-English Edition.

• Author: Marcotte, Roxanne D.
• Position: Book review

The Reformation of Morals: A Parallel Arabic-English Edition. Translated by SIDNEY H. GRIFFITH. Provo: BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xlvi + 133. $35.

Griffith, a specialist of Syriac and Arabic Christianity and translator of A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons by Theodore Abu Qurrah, Bishop of Harran (c. 755-c. 830 A.D.) (1997), has provided an excellent and elegant translation of Yahya ibn 'Adi's (d. 974) Kitab Tahdhib al-Akhlaq. The translation will be useful to students and scholars of medieval Middle Eastern philosophical traditions. The work is a testimony to the "interreligious polity" and "interdenominational" intellectual milieu of tenth-century Baghdad, where Ibn 'Adi became a leading exponent of the Peripatetic tradition.

Griffith provides a concise but comprehensive introduction. In Section I, he presents a short biographical sketch of the life of Ibn 'Adi, who came from Takrit, one of the intellectual and spiritual centers of the Jacobite church. A professional scribe with a passion for logical and philosophical books, Ibn 'Adi was equally at ease translating Syriac works into Arabic. Almost nothing, however, is known about his life.

In Section II, Griffith introduces Ibn 'Adi al-Mantiqi, the logician. Logic was a discipline fostered by the "exigencies of inter-faith discourse" (p. xix) that played a central role in the "ways of dispute and dialectic." Griffith discusses the "epistemological crisis" between the philosopher-logicians, the theologians, and Ash'arite positions (for example, Ibn 'Adi refutes the notion of acquisition; p. xxi), and takes issue with the claims of Dimitri Gutas and Joel Kraemer that, for Ibn 'Adi and the philosophers of the time, reason is superior to religion (pp. xxi-xxv). He believes that it was Muslim (rather than Christian) theologians who were challenged, and rejects the implication that Ibn 'Adi's "cultivation of reason, supplanted his devotion to revelation" or that he thought of "his theological notions as embodiments of philosophical concepts" (p. xxiii). Griffith argues that Christian theologians of the time were already making use of Aristotelian logic as an "auxiliary discipline," and that Ibn 'Adi "would have found the categories of the philosophers far more congenial for his religious, apologetical purposes in Arabic than the methods of the Islamic mutakallimun" (p. xxiii). Ibn 'Adi uses logic as a tool in the defense of established Christian doctrines against the...