The Arabic Hermes

Abstract

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