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István Kristó-Nagy : La pensée d'Ibn al-Muqaffa(. Un «agent double» dans le monde persan et arabe . (Studia Iranica XIX.) 618 pp. Versailles : Éditions de Paris , 2013. [euro]34. ISBN 978 2 85162 272 3 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
The fascination with Classical Arabic literature and its early builders has not lost any of its lively momentum since modern scholarship engaged it more than two centuries ago. One of the founders of that literature was the well-known author and translator Ibn al-Muqaffa( (d. 140/757), who translated a series of Middle Persian mythic-historic, political and literary texts into Arabic. His role was pivotal not only to transforming Arabic prose into a polished medium for literature, but equally to the process of cultural transfer and preservation of the pre-Islamic lore of Iran. This being so, he has been one of the more fortunate of his generation and immediate followers to attract the attention of modern researchers. Kristó-Nagy's contribution comes at the end of a rich and long tradition of scholarship on Ibn al-Muqaffa( (IM) and his legacy.
The book begins with a preface by Marie-Thérèse Urvoy in which she briefly contextualizes IM's oeuvre within the Hellenic-Persian culture of the late Umayyad period. Her comment that under the Caliph (Abd al-Malik (65-86/685-707) an "arabisation totale" of the language of the chancellery took place is inexact. More than fifty years after (Abd al-Malik the diwÄns of KhurÄsÄn and Isfahan were still kept in Persian.
Kristó-Nagy's text begins with an introduction announcing his main objective: to create a monograph in...