Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries)

Dimitri Gutas's Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society, published by Routledge in 1998, is a widely cited scholarly study of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, the sustained early Abbasid era project that rendered a huge body of Greek philosophical and scientific writing into Arabic and shaped the subsequent development of Islamic philosophy and science. Gutas is a leading specialist in classical Arabic and Islamic intellectual history. Its strength is that it reframes the translation movement as a deliberate, socially and politically driven Abbasid project rather than a passive absorption of Greek learning, an influential and well evidenced argument. Its limit is that, like any single synthesis of a large and still developing field, some of its specific claims about individual translators' motivations remain debated among specialists in the area.