Abū Naṣr Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Mag̲h̲ribī al-Lawī, Apostate

Abū Naṣr Samawʾal b. Yaḥyā al-Mag̲h̲ribī (?520-70/?1126-75)

Prominent physician and mathematician who lived and practiced among the notables of Syria, ʿIrāḳ, Kurdistān and Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān. Born and raised as a Jew, he gives an account of his conversion to Islam, including a brief autobiography, in an appendix attached to the second edition of his anti-Jewish polemic, Ifḥām al-yahūd (“Silencing the Jews”). His father, Yehūdah Ibn Abūn, was a rabbi and poet from Fās whose family came from al-Andalus. Also known as Abu ’l-Baḳāʾ Yaḥyā b. ʿAbbās al-Mag̲h̲ribī, the father moved to Bag̲h̲dād and married a literate and educated woman of a noble Jewish family named Ḥannah bt. Isḥāḳ b. Ibrāhīm al-Baṣrī al-Lawī (the Levite).

According to Samawʾal’s autobiographical chapter, he began his studies like other Jewish boys with Hebrew writing, and the study of Torah and its commentaries. By the age of thirteen, however, the age marking adult maturity and ritual responsibility in Jewish law, his father moved him out of the traditional religious curriculum because of his perspicacity and introduced him to the study of mathematics and medicine. He excelled in these fields and wrote a number of works, most of which no longer survive. His only extant medical work, the Nuzhat al-aṣḥāb , centres around diseases and syndromes associated with sexual dysfunction, and it includes a collection of erotic stories and descriptions of being in love without recognising it. His most important scientific work is his book on algebra, al-Bāhir , written when he was nineteen. He set out to provide the same kind of systématisation for algebra that al-Karad̲j̲ī did for geometry in his work, al-Badīʿ . He is the first Arab algebraist to undertake the study of relative numbers.

His early studies were taken under Abu ’l-Barakāt Ḥibat Allāh b. ʿAlī, another Jew who is said to have become Muslim, though late in life. Samawʾal is associated with yet another learned Jewish convert to Islam, Isaac the son of the famous biblical exegete, grammarian and philosopher, Abraham ben Ezra.

In al-Samawʾal’s time, the science of medicine was closely associated with rationalistic philosophy. It has been suggested recently that the aforementioned conversions may have been “provisional”. For example, Samawʾal’s polemic against Judaism expresses a philosophical relativism that may have been influenced by or associated with the Nizārī Ismaʿīlī ḳiyāma (resurrection/resurgence) centred around Alamūt, a contemporary movement that transcended the normative boundaries of religion and law in the lands of Syria and Persia (S. Wasserstrom, following S. Stroumsa, J. Kraemer and H. Lazarus-Yafeh). If so, then Samawʾal’s anti-Jewish Ifḥām may have been a safe way of criticising doctrinal thinking in general.

It has also been suggested that Samawʾal’s conversion was a result of exactly the process about which Moses Maimonides later cautioned in his Commentary on the Mishna , that Jews should avoid the study of history because in the Islamic world such study was overwhelmingly anchored in Islamic perspectives and world views and would therefore encourage apostasy from Judaism. Samawʾal’s conversion may have been a response to the difficult Jewish problem of accepting the negation of exile while accepting the need for infinite patience for a vague messianic redemption. Such a delicate balance of thought was difficult to ¶ sustain when confronted by the this-worldly reality of contemporary Muslim history, which fulfilled the Jewish longing for a polity, or dawla , a central concept in Samawʾal’s polemical attack against Judaism (Husain).

Unlike his father, whose kunya Abu ’l-Baḳāʾ suggests longevity, Samawʾal died in 570/1175 at a relatively young age (Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ ).

(R. Firestone)

Bibliography

1. Sources. Samawʾal al-Mag̲h̲ribī, Ifḥām al-yahūd, ed. and tr. M. Perlmann, in Procs. American Academy for Jewish Research, xxxii (1964)

idem, al-Bāhir ft ’l-d̲j̲abr, ed. Ṣalāḥ Aḥmad and Rus̲h̲dī Rās̲h̲id, Damascus 1972

Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaḳāt al-aṭibbāʾ, ed. A. Müller, Cairo-Königsberg 1882-4, Beirut 1955-6.

2. Studies. Suter, 124-5

M. Steinschneider, Die Mathematiker bei den Juden, Frankfurt 1901

Brockelmann, S I, 493-4

F. Rosenthal, Al-Aṣturlābī and as-Samawʾal, in Osiris, ix (1950), 560-4

A. Husain, Conversion to history: negating exile and messianism in al-Samawʾal al-Maghribī’s polemic against Judaism, in Medieval Encounters, viii/1 (2002), 3-34

S. Wasserstrom, False Messiahs and false conversion. Samawʾal al-Maghribi in the context of twelfth-century interconfessionalism, in Procs. XXVIII. Deutscher Orientalistentag, Bamberg 26-30 March 2001, forthcoming.

Cite this page

Firestone, R.. "Samawʾal b. Yaḥyā al-Mag̲h̲ribī, Abū Naṣr." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Brill Online, 2013. <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-isla...>