Al-Fārābī’s ‘Isrāʼīl’ and ‘Quwayra’

Abstract

There has been a time when scholars conducted lengthy investigations on the story of the transmission of Greek philosophy from the Roman Alexandria to the Abbasid Baghdad vis-à-vis Antioch and then the city of Ḥarrān. During the past three decades, scholars started to deconstruct the ‘from Alexandria to Baghdad’ narrative. Many scholars deem Ibn Abī Uṣaībiʿa reports on a story of such transmission related by the philosopher al-Fārābī in the former’s book, ʿUyūn al-Anbāʼ fī Ṭabaqāt al-Aṭibbāʼ, to be historically unreliable and untenable. It is because of this conviction, scholars almost never paused at al-Fārābī’s/Ibn Abī Uṣaībiʿa’s association of the transmission of philosophy to Baghdad with two students, who learned philosophy from a Ḥarrānian teacher, called ‘Isrāʼīl al-Usquf’ and ‘Quwayra’. Opposite to the undermining of the value of chasing after their identities, this essay tackles directly the question of the real identity of the two persons called ‘Isrāʼīl’ and ‘Quwayra’. The essay searches for these two persons by pausing at some historiological and biographical attestations one finds in extant, early Muslim and Christian historiographies, and it then proposes that the data available in our hands strongly suggests that these two persons can quite tenably and validly be the Nestorian Isrāʼīl of Kashkar and the Melkite Theodore Abū Qurra, the two intellectuals and mutakallims who were quite known within the circles of theological and philosophical reasoning in the third/ninth century’s Baghdad.