Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
|
|
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari (ca 838 - ca 870 CE) was a scholar physician in 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 (thus his name al-Tabari "from Tabaristan") but converted to Islam, a hakim. He was proficient 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, 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 was never transmitted its information to 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.
Sources
- H. Suter: Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber (l0, 1900)
- M. Steinschneider: Die arabische Literatur der Juden (23-34, Frankfurt, 1902).