Miskawayh

Works

• c. 1000The Experiences of the Nations

  Universal history from the Persian kings to the Buyid period, which Miskawayh knew as a court official: he leaves aside miracles and chooses events from which rulers and officials can learn prudence.

• c. 1020The Refinement of Character

  Treatise in six discourses on the soul and its virtues: drawing on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Arabic translation, on Plato and on Galen, Miskawayh describes virtue as a mean, shows how character can be trained as the body is, and places friendship and love at the centre of social life.

Position

Miskawayh is on the map as the author of the most widely read work of philosophical ethics in Arabic and as a central figure of what Mohammed Arkoun called the Arab humanism of the tenth century. The Refinement of Character begins with the soul: it is an incorporeal substance whose proper perfection lies in knowledge and right action. Following Plato, it has three faculties – rational, irascible and appetitive – whose virtues are wisdom, courage and temperance, with justice as their harmony; with Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics he knew in the Arabic translation of Ishaq ibn Hunayn, Miskawayh describes each virtue as a mean between two vices. Against those who held that character is fixed by nature, he argued that it can be changed by habit, discipline and education, and he set out a programme for the education of children and a care of the soul modelled on medicine. Happiness has degrees, from bodily and external goods to the perfection of the intellect; but human beings cannot reach it alone, so friendship and love are the bonds of a good society, and he interpreted communal religious practice, such as congregational prayer, as a school of fellowship. In The Experiences of the Nations he wrote history without miracles, as a record of decisions from which statesmen can learn, drawing for the recent past on what he had seen at court. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi made the Refinement the basis of the first part of his Nasirean Ethics (1235), through which it shaped ethical writing in Persian for centuries; Mohammed Arkoun translated it into French (1969) and devoted his doctoral thesis to Miskawayh (1970).

Life & context

Abu ʿAli Ahmad ibn Muhammad Miskawayh was born around 932, probably in Rayy near present-day Tehran, into a Persian family; whether he or his family had been Zoroastrian before converting to Islam is disputed. He spent his life in the service of the Buyid dynasty, which ruled western Iran and Iraq: as boon companion and secretary of the vizier al-Muhallabi in Baghdad, for some years as librarian of the vizier Ibn al-ʿAmid and his son in Rayy, and later at the court of ʿAdud al-Dawla. He belonged to the circle of scholars around the philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani in Baghdad and answered questions put to him by the writer Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi in a joint book, “Wandering Questions and Comprehensive Answers”. Besides his ethics and his history he wrote on medicine, the soul, prophecy and the wisdom of the ancients. He died in Isfahan in 1030.

Further main works

• The Lesser Victory (al-Fawz al-aṣghar), on God, the soul and prophecy
• Eternal Wisdom (Jāwīdān khirad, also al-Ḥikma al-khālida), an anthology of Persian, Indian, Arab and Greek wisdom
• Wandering Questions and Comprehensive Answers (al-Hawāmil wa-l-shawāmil), with Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi