Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
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- For other use, see al-Tabari
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari (c.838 – c.870 CE) was a Persian scholar physician who produced the first encyclopedia of medicine. His famous pupil, Zakariya al-Razi ("Razi"), has eclipsed his stature.
Ali was from a well-known Jewish family of Merv in Tabaristan (hence al-Tabari – "from Tabaristan") but became an Islamic convert (a hakim). He was fluent in Syriac and Greek, the two sources for the medical tradition of antiquity, which was lost to medieval Europe, and versed in fine calligraphy.
His Firdous al-Hikmat (Paradise of Wisdom), which he wrote in Arabic but also translated into Syriac to give it wider usefulness, was in seven sections. The information in Firdous al-Hikmat has never entered common circulation in the West because it was not edited until the 20th century, when Mohammed Zubair Siddiqui assembled an edition using the five surviving partial manuscripts. There is still no English translation.
He was the first translator of the Almagest into Arabic.
He has four works in total attributed to him.
[edit] Sources
- H. Suter: Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber (l0, 1900)
- M. Steinschneider: Die arabische Literatur der Juden (23-34, Frankfurt, 1902).
- Edward G. Browne, Islamic Medicine, 2002, p.37-38, ISBN 81-87570-19-9
