Ibn al-Muqaffa'

The Fables of Bidpai by Anonymous.

Translated by Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa and Joseph Harris.

Preface.

The Fables of Bilpai, or Bidpai, to use the form nearest to the Arabic, have enjoyed a remarkable reputation in the East, and from time to time have been translated into Western languages.

Like similar wild goose chases recorded in history and fable, he came back without the drug but with this collection of fables.

Another version makes him to have been sent on purpose for this book, which was jealously guarded by its Indian possessors, and to have obtained it only by surreptitious means.

Two centuries later, the first Arabic version was made by a Persian named Rusbeh, who was converted to Mohammedanism and took the name Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa.

His translation of these fables is in the East usually called the Book of Kalila and Dimna, from the names of two jackals who act a conspicuous part in the first story.

The Fables of Bidpai by Anonymous.

Translated by Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa and Joseph Harris.

Preface.

The Fables of Bidpai, or Bidpai, to use the form nearest the Arabic, have enjoyed a remarkable reputation in the East, and from time to time have been translated into Western languages.

Like similar wild goose chases recorded in history and fable, he came back without the drug but with this collection of fables.

Another version makes him to have been sent on purpose for this book, which was jealously guarded by its Indian possessors, and to have obtained it only by surreptitious means.

Two centuries later the first Arabic version was made by a Persian named Ruzbeh, who was converted to Mohammedanism and took the name Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa.

His translation of these fables is in the East usually called the Book of Kalila and Dimna, from the names of two jackals who act a conspicuous part in the first story.

The Fables of Bidpai by Anonymous.

Translated by Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa and Joseph Harris.

Preface.

The Fables of Bidpai, or Bidpai, to use the form nearest the Arabic, have enjoyed a remarkable reputation in the East, and from time to time have been translated into Western languages.

Like similar wild goose chases recorded in history and fable, he came back without the drug but with this collection of fables.

Another version makes him to have been sent on purpose for this book, which was jealously guarded by its Indian possessors, and to have obtained it only by surreptitious means.

Two centuries later the first Arabic version was made by a Persian named Ruzbeh, who was converted to Mohammedanism and took the name Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa.

His translation of these fables is in the East usually called the Book of Kalila and Dimna, from the names of two jackals who act a conspicuous part in the first story.

The literature and theology that we read toward this season's close was the product of a world in transition.

Ibn al-Muqaffa's Qalila and Dimna was originally a collection of beast fables from India.

Later, it was translated into Middle Persian, and in the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa, the wonderful stories of lions and oxen and crows were rendered into Arabic at the dawn of the Abbasid Caliphate.

This caliphate had manifold leaders and wars, but at its heart were the cities of the Sawad, namely Baghdad and Basra, Sawad meaning the black, arable lands of the lower Fertile Crescent.

This territory, as always in history, produced culture as well as agriculture.

The poet Bashar ibn Burd, whom we met a couple of episodes ago, wrote poetry about life on the streets of Iraq's great big new cities, trading the antiquarian vocabulary and romantic themes of Jahiliyya verse for a more modern Arabic that sounded like people actually talked in Abbasid towns.

Ibn al-Muqaffa and Bashar ibn Burd were ethnic Persians in an Arabic-speaking world, and like so many of their contemporaries, they mastered the language of the colonizers and made lives for themselves in an evolving civilization.

Meanwhile, to the far away east, Zoroastrian holdouts set their oral traditions in the storied old Sasanian tongue of Middle Persian.