The book under review presents, with the weighty exception of the Syriac writer Bar Serāṕyōn, the mentioned source texts in their Razian Arabic versions with English translation; in addition, the corresponding Sanskrit passages are given in the original and translated into English. Full access to the contents is thus restricted to readers conversant with Sanskrit as well as Arabic, not to mention other source and auxiliary languages, such as Greek, Middle Iranian, Persian, etc. Recipients are asked to accept the author's translational choices (for the reviewer, from Sanskrit), which in view of the indeterminacy of many key botanical, zoological or other technical terms is quite a momentous request. Similarly questionable is the author's automatic adoption of “Sanskrit” and “Pahlavi” for (al-lugha) al-hindīya and al-fārisīya, implicitly attributing to the sources a quasi-modern precision (e.g. p. 15).
Evidently Kahl's book is the fruit of enormous work and substantively advances our knowledge of Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī (251–313/865–925; without prejudice to historical context, I will henceforth use the latinized form Rhazes). Within and without the boundaries of his own cultural environment of formative Islam, Rhazes was a towering figure in the then frequent mould of polymath, as both his immense productivity and his reception in medieval Hebrew and Latin scholarship demonstrate.
Rhazes' most voluminous work, the Comprehensive Book (in Latin also Continens), is a rare surviving specimen of a pre-modern Arabic – not “Arab” – scholar's reference library in the form of excerpts from every medical author on whose writings he could lay hands, at times supplemented by comments deriving from his own professional, including clinical, experience. The fact that many of the texts Rhazes quoted or paraphrased with varying degrees of precision have either not been preserved at all, or not in his Vorlage versions, adds source value to a work the sheer bulk of which by itself attests his extraordinary erudition.
The very volume of the Continens necessitates strict selectiveness when undertaking the verification of its sources. Thus Kahl's choice of Indian and Iranian authors is entirely plausible; however, if they formed “clusters”, as he states, implying intertextual relations, quotations from their writings should have been grouped together by subject rather than by author – as Rhazes himself did – in order to demonstrate the chain of transmission linking them (on a practical note, page headings with authors' names would have facilitated locating the respective passages on the basis of the indices). Moreover, separating Syriac- and Arabic-writing authors of the first Islamic centuries up to Rhazes ahistorically ignores the common background of medical learning they all shared; to omit, schematically on linguistic grounds, Ahrun “the priest” (al-Qass) or Yaḥyā b. Māsawayh, to name just two from among them, severely distorts the picture. And then there is the problem of the Syriac medical author Shamʿūn's identity (this form of his name is by no means “Arabicized”, as Kahl would have it, p. 44, but a straightforward transcription; in Arabic, it would have been Simʿān). According to Kahl's colleague Grigory Kessel, Rhazes' and the lexicographer Bar Bahlūl's quotations from “Shamʿūn” cannot possibly derive from works by the seventh-century monastic author Shemʿōn dǝ-Ṭayḇūthā, one of the reasons advanced being the unflinching discussion of sexual matters in the Razian excerpts. Here as well as generally concerning Rhazes' treatment of references, a comparison with the pseudo-Razian compendium al-Kunnāsh al-Fākhir would have been advisable, given the appearance of a namesake – Shamʿūn “the monk” (ar-Rāhib) – among its sources (not to mention, again, Ahrun al-Qass, here as a clerical contemporary of Shemʿōn dǝ-Ṭayḇūthā). Admittedly, any division of the enormous corpus of related texts into manageable portions is bound to entail deficiencies.
A few more critical observations will follow here: had the book been prepared with less haste, a number of infelicities and errors might easily have been avoided. Rhazes' Continens certainly does not qualify as a Gesamtkunstwerk (p. x). His knowledge of languages other than the – merely spoken? – Persian of his childhood and Arabic was at best negligible beyond some familiarity with technical terms (pp. 6–7) – as physicians nowadays may know their anatomy in Latin without being Latinists.
In the quotation from al-Qifṭī on p. 7 (even if his work only survives in al-Zawzanī’s abridgement, he should be credited rather than his epitomator), al-Hind refers to “the Indians” rather than to the country, as the context makes clear; ʿinda jamīʿi l-umam means “in the opinion of all nations”.
In Baghdad, ʿAlī b. Rabban aṭ-Ṭabarī was well placed to have access to the latest translations of non-Arabic materials; there is no need to posit an interval of “at least one generation” (p. 10) between the actual translations and the composition of his Firdaws al-ḥikma in 235/850.
The author of the Fihrist (“catalogue”), Muḥammad b. Isḥāq an-Nadīm, need not be reintroduced every time he is quoted, nor are other well-known figures in Arabic letters, such as al-Bīrūnī, (or for that matter, present-day students of Arabic, etc.) in need of eulogistic qualifiers. But when citing later bio-bibliographical witnesses, such as the two unavoidable seventh/thirteenth-century writers al-Qifṭī (d. 646/1248) and b. a. Uṣaybiʿa (d. 668/1270; not to be called a “medical historian”), their testimony should be vetted for dependence on an-Nadīm and other predecessors.
The Angevin king of Naples, to whom the Agrigentan Jewish physician Faraj b. Sālim in 1279 presented his Latin translation of al-Ḥāwī, might be numbered as Charles I (p. 17). Kahl is not oblivious to the differences between Faraj's Arabic Vorlage and the version printed in Hyderabad (p. 17), although the reader might at first be induced to think so (Kahl's assessment of the Hyderabad edition may well be too lenient, but his stricture on Khalid Harbi (p. xii) is to be endorsed unreservedly). As for vagaries of transmission, it would seem entirely possible that the Sanskrit Vorlage of the Tibetan Siddhasāra differed from today's received Sanskrit text (p. 77, n. 13).
For “whose periods are infrequent” (al-latī lam tu'ta ḥīnan kathīran, p. 100:-3f/101:6) read, as in the Sanskrit source (p. 101–4), “who… has not had any sex in a long time”.
Notwithstanding the extant Sanskrit text of Siddhasāra as adduced by Kahl (p. 134, n. 133) and parallels, the Arabic verb shḥdh I (“to sharpen”) would seem to fit “the mind” (adh-dhihn) better than “the male member” (adh-dhakar), as he conjectures.
“Female hyena” (aḍ-ḍabuʿa al-ʿarjāʾ, pp. 317–8, with fn. 421; it need not actually have been lame, this being merely the animal's traditional Arabic name!) was a customary ingredient of antidotes.
To conclude, may I add two comments on matters of secondary importance. I realize that as a non-native user of English I am liable to the same criticism that I am voicing here, yet I cannot refrain from expressing regrets that the text was not reviewed by a style- as well as content-sensitive editor before being sent to press. And finally, the cover illustrations demonstrate a patent lack of historical sensitivity; neither the Arabic nor Devanāgarī nor Esṭrangelā characters reflect Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī’s cultural milieu or personal erudition.
