Collection
فلسفة
Falsafa takes its name from the Arabic word for philosophy — and until now it held nothing in Arabic. This is the first tranche: 20 works printed between 1898 and 1929, drawn from Arabic Collections Online, the public-domain digital library funded by NYU Abu Dhabi. 15 of them have no English translation at all.
These books had no text
ACO holds nearly eighteen thousand volumes as page images. It has no
full-text search, and its PDFs carry no text layer — a
pdftotext pass over a 277-page volume returns zero
characters. Where Falsafa's Greek and Latin arrived as marked-up text and
the work was segmentation, here there was nothing to ingest. The text on
these pages was produced from the scans.
That makes this the only text in the corpus Falsafa transcribed rather than received, so it carries two mechanical checks that nothing else needs:
- Two independent passes
- Every page was transcribed twice, by passes that never saw each other's output, then compared word by word. Disagreements beyond a threshold went to a third pass that saw both readings and the image. Neither pass was allowed to guess: an unreadable span is marked as a gap, because a marked gap is information and an invented word is not.
- A round-trip invariant on the romanisation
- Printed Arabic is unvocalised — the consonants are on the page, the short vowels are not — so romanising is a reading, not a lookup. But the inverse is mechanical: strip the vowels back out, map the consonants to Arabic, and the result must equal the source skeleton. A dropped word, an inserted clause or a reordering fails that check without an Arabic reader in the loop. Vowel choices it cannot check, and does not claim to.
- Every passage anchored to its page
- Each paragraph records the printed page number it begins on — not the scan's sequence number — and the image of that page. Any claim made here can be checked against the scan it came from.
Why these twenty
ACO's untranslated mass is not the famous classical canon — al-Ghazālī's Munqidh, Ibn Rushd's Faṣl al-maqāl and the Muqaddima have all been in English for decades. It is everything beside them: minor treatises by major philosophers, and the Nahda, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab modernist argument that has reached English in fragments. So the tranche runs in two strata of ten.
Translation status was checked per work against the published record rather than assumed. Four candidates were cut for being Arabic renderings rather than Arabic originals — including one of al-Afghānī's, whose Arabic is itself translated from his Persian — and one near-miss was caught in time: a volume titled "An Arabic Treatise on the Soul" that turns out to be an Arabic critical edition, not a translation.
Classical
Pre-modern falsafa, kalām, logic and ethics, in printings from 1861–1929. The works are medieval; the books are modern.
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Bayān zaghl al-ʻilm wa-al-ṭalab
بيان زغل العلم و الطلب
A short, unsparing treatise on the corruption of learning: al-Dhahabī, himself among the most prolific scholars of his age, sets out how the pursuit of knowledge turns into a pursuit of standing, and works through the disciplines one by one — hadith, law, logic, grammar, exegesis, poetry — asking what each does to the man who takes it up. The 1928 Damascus volume binds a second text after it, al-Naṣīḥah al-Dhahabīyah, a letter of admonition addressed to Ibn Taymīyah whose attribution to al-Dhahabī some scholars dispute; it is carried here as the volume's final chapter, as printed.
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Kitāb al-Safīnah al-Nūḥīyah fī al-sakīnah al-rūḥīyah
كتاب السفينة النوحية في السكينة الروحية
An epitome of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's treatment of the soul, written by one of his readers a generation later. Because the soul volume of al-Rāzī's al-Maṭālib al-ʻāliyah is lost, this abridgement is one of the surviving witnesses to what it argued.
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Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
رسالة بقاء النفس بعد فناء الجسد
An epistle on whether the soul survives the body's destruction, argued on philosophical rather than scriptural grounds. The 1923 Cairo volume is mostly not al-Ṭūsī: scans of its first two thirds carry al-Zanjānī's own extended introduction, a history of what the Greeks, the philosophers of Islam and the modern Europeans held about matter and spirit. Al-Ṭūsī's treatise occupies the last third, and is printed with its commentary interleaved line by line, so the two cannot be separated.
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Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
هاذا كتاب الزوراء والتعليقات عليه في تحقيق المبدأ والمعاد
A dense, deliberately compressed treatise on the origin and the return — where existence comes from and where it goes — printed with the commentary that grew up around it. Al-Dawwānī wrote al-Zawrāʼ to be unpacked by exposition rather than read straight through, and in this 1908 printing the commentary is run into the prose rather than set apart, the glossed phrases appearing as quoted lemmata inside the argument. The volume binds a second treatise after it, Taḥqīq ḥaqāʼiq al-ashyāʼ wa-daqāʼiq al-ʻulūm wa-al-ārāʼ, carried here as printed. Persian verse is quoted in a Cairo fount that had no Persian letters, so چ and گ appear as ج and ك.
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Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
مختصر في علم النفس الإنسانية /
A compendium on the human soul by the Syriac Orthodox maphrian, written in Arabic: the faculties, the senses, intellect, and the soul's relation to the body, set out in the Aristotelian vocabulary that Syriac and Arabic writers shared.
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Adab al-wazīr
أدب الوزير للماوردي
What a vizier owes the ruler, the ruler's subjects, and his own office. Al-Māwardī, whose al-Aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah defined the classical theory of the caliphate, here writes about the minister rather than the sovereign.
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al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
السعادة لا ابن مسكويه في فلسفة الاخلاق
Miskawayh on happiness: what the good for a human being consists in, and how the virtues get one there. The companion to his Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, and the less-read half of his ethics.
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Risālah fī ʻilm al-akhlāq
رسالة الشيرازي في علم الاخلاق
A short epistle on the science of character, ascribed in this printing to the Shāfiʻī jurist Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī. The ascription does not appear in the standard bibliographies of his legal writing and should be treated as uncertain.
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Tadhkirat Ibn Ḥamdūn
تذكرة إبن حمدون
A courtier's commonplace book: anecdotes, sayings, verse and advice on conduct, gathered by a secretary of the Abbasid chancery for the use of men who had to speak well in front of power.
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Bughyat al-murtād fī al-radd ʻalá al-mutafalsifah wa-al-qarāmiṭah wa-al-bāṭinīyah
كتاب بغية المرتاد في الرد على المتفلسفة و القرامطة و الباطنية :
Ibn Taymīyah's sustained attack on the philosophers, the Qarmatians and the Ismāʻīlī esotericists, and on the Sufi metaphysics he read as their heir. It is among the fullest statements of his case that reason, rightly used, does not arrive where the philosophers arrived.
Nahda
The Arab modernist argument, 1863–1925: philosophy, political theory and social criticism, including both sides of debates that survive in English as one voice.
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Risālat al-Wāridāt
رسالة الواردات في نظريات المتكلمين و الصوفية وفي الفلسفة الإلهية
ʻAbduh's earliest treatise, composed in his twenties under the influence of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and fair-copied in Shaʻbān 1290: a metaphysics of existence, knowledge and the divine that moves between the theologians, the Sufis and the philosophers, set out as a series of wāridāt — things that 'come upon' the mind. It is the philosophical work of a man known almost everywhere else as a reformer of institutions. The 1925 Manār printing, edited by his student Rashīd Riḍā, closes it with Riḍā's own postscript and binds a second work after it: al-ʻAqīdah al-Muḥammadīyah, composed in Jumādā II 1294, carried here as the volume's last four chapters.
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Ansāb al-ʻArab al-qudamāʼ
أنساب العرب القدماء
The genealogies of the ancient Arabs, set out by the founder of al-Hilāl. Zaydān treats lineage as historical evidence rather than inherited honour, which is what made his history controversial.
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Kitāb mīzān al-ḥaqq fī al-manṭiq
كتاب مزان الحق في المنطق
A logic textbook written for Ottoman military students and printed at the Damascus military press: an attempt to teach the subject on modern lines rather than through the scholastic commentary tradition. Its author was hanged by Jamāl Pasha in 1915.
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Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn
كتاب مذاهب الأعراب وفلاسفة الإسلام في الجن /
What the Arabs believed about the jinn and what the philosophers of Islam made of those beliefs — a reformist scholar setting popular cosmology beside philosophical argument, and asking which claims survive examination.
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Asbāb wa-natāʼij wa-akhlāq wa-mawāʻiẓ
اسباب ونتائج ؛ واخلاق ومواعظ
Causes and effects, morals and homilies: the 1898 collection in which Qāsim Amīn worked out the social diagnosis that his two famous books on women would apply a year later. This is the argument before it narrowed to its subject.
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Tarbīyat al-marʼah wa-al-ḥijāb
تربية المرأة والحجاب /
The reply to Qāsim Amīn, published the same year as Taḥrīr al-marʼah: an argument that the education of women and the veil are not the questions Egypt's reformers say they are. Reading it beside Amīn restores a debate that survives in English as one voice.
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Jawāmiʻ al-ādāb fī akhlāq al-anjāb
جوامع الأداب في اخلاق الأنجاب
A compendium of manners and character for the young, by a reformist scholar who wanted ethics taught from argument and evidence rather than inherited formula.
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al-Nisāʼīyāt
النسائيات : v.1
The collected essays of the first Egyptian woman to argue the woman question in print under her own byline. Writing as Bāḥithat al-Bādiyah, Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif took positions that neither Qāsim Amīn's camp nor his opponents had room for. English has carried a lecture and a few pieces; this is the volume.
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ʻIbrah wa-dhikrá, aw, al-Dawlah al-ʻUthmānīyah qabla al-dustūr wa-baʻdahu
عبرة وذكرى، أو، الدولة العثمانية قبل الدستور وبعده
Written in the months after the 1908 Young Turk revolution restored the Ottoman constitution: what the empire was before it and what a constitution can and cannot repair. Its author had spent twenty years turning Homer into Arabic verse, and writes about political transmission with a translator's sense of what survives a crossing.
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Ibn Rushd wa-falsafatuhu
إبن رشد وفلسفته
The 1903 book that set off the most consequential argument of the Nahda. Anṭūn read Averroes as a rationalist whose fate showed what Islamic civilisation had done to philosophy; Muḥammad ʻAbduh answered him in al-Manār, and the exchange became the standing quarrel over reason, religion and who owns the Arab philosophical past. One chapter exists in English; the book does not.