Robert Irwin > Quotes

“In the realm of the phenomenal, "less is more" only when less is the sum total of more.”
― Robert Irwin

“Averroes, the last of the great medieval Arab philosophers, was fighting a rearguard defense of philosophy that was under attack from theologians, and, though translations of his works were to be much read in the universities of Christian Europe, he had little influence on later generations of thinkers in the Muslim world.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“The inner meaning of history . . . involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. (History,) therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of (philosophy).”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“it seems clear that Ibn Khaldun preferred al-Ghazali to Averroes. “He who wants to arm himself against the philosophers in the field of dogmatic beliefs should turn to the works of al-Ghazali.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“ibn Khaldun devoted a lot of space to the za’iraja al-’alam, or za’iraja of the world. This had been an earlier enthusiasm of his. He encountered this device, half divination machine, half parlor game, during his stay in Biskra in 1370 and, writing about it much later, he described it as “a remarkable technical procedure.” It is discussed in two places in the Muqaddima. The circular diagram of the za’iraja displays concentric circles representing the heavenly spheres, the elements, the sublunary world, existants, and sciences. The names of the zodiacal houses are written in the outermost circle. Chords run from the center out to the circle’s circumference. The za’iraja’s circle is set within a rectangle divided into numerous compartments and on one side of that square there is a verse ascribed to Malik ibn Wuhayb, one of the greatest diviners of the Maghreb.

In order to question this strange oracle, one first writes one’s question and then breaks the question down into its component letters. Then, having taken account of which sign of the zodiac is in the ascendant, one selects the chord that is astrologically indicated and follows its line to the center and thence to the chord that takes one to the opposite side of the circumference. On that chord are letters and numbers in tiny characters known as ghurab. The numbers are converted into letters by a process known as hisab al-jummal. The total of these letters is added to the letters of the question. Then further procedures, too complicated and tedious to list here, are used to gather yet more letters from the za’iraja and in the final procedure certain letters are produced that are in the same rhyme and meter as the verse ascribed to Malik ibn Wuhayb and the verse so formed will give an answer to the initial question.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“One day he became conscious that something was following him, a lazy white dog, a bitch with heavy dugs, padded behind him, whining continuously. When Balian sat collapsed in the shadows of the houses, the dog would circle him, breathing heavily and whining, her lips hanging loose in a sly sort of grin. In streets, in deserted ruins and in crowded market places Balian was aware that a flabby white shadow trailed behind him, and at nights, when Balian slept in the open, the dog would lie down too at a distance, panting in the hot night air.”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“Ibn Khaldun discussed the calculations of the ninth-century astrologer and polymath al-Kindi regarding the predestined end of the ‘Abbasid dynasty.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“Day and night Balian studied Arabic, both the language of the street corner and the more formal prose of his oneiric teachers. It was not that he mastered the language but rather that it mastered him. He found himself thinking in a language in which nouns shaded imperceptibly into verbs, a language which seemed to discount being in the present, a language with a special verb form for colours and physical deformities, a language of rhythmic syntax and many tiered layers of sense, communicated through hawking stops, gutturals, odd emphases and doublings.”
― Robert Irwin

“Magic is absurd. It is a system of thinking that does not work and does not get one anywhere," said the friar.

"It works, but it does not get one anywhere," said Vance.

"But it is very beautiful. Magic is an art that pleases the eye and the ear," said Bulbul.”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“Weirdness is beauty, beauty weirdness.”
― Robert Irwin

“It is curious to compare Ibn Khaldun with Edward Gibbon who in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) presented that decline and fall as being due to barbarism and religion. By contrast, Ibn Khaldun presented barbarism and religion as the sources of empire, for, as we have seen, he believed that empires were regularly renewed by barbarian incursions and he believed that religion was a desirable supplement to ‘asabiyya for tribal conquerors who aimed to conquer an old regime and set up a new one.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“Though it is tempting to think of A Hundred and One Nights as the little brother of the Thousand and One Nights, all the indications are that A Hundred and One Nights is the older sibling, for it was put together centuries before the version of the Thousand and One Nights which was translated by Antoine Galland. Both story collections owe a lot to earlier Sanskrit stories which Arab authors adapted and reworked but, in cases where the collections draw on the same Indian story elements, the versions contained in A Hundred and One Nights are closer to the to the original Sanskrit stories. It is curious to think of Indian stories making their way in ghostly form as far west as Tunisia.”
― Robert Irwin, A Hundred and One Nights

“Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.”
― Robert Irwin

“اسلام نه در عربستان و یکباره، بلکه در جای دیگری از خاورمیانه، بخصوص در عراق، نضج گرفت”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

“The Christian, when he had calmed down sufficiently, admitted that the riddle was good. “I have created something cleverer than myself," he cried.'
Here Yoll interrupted himself. 'I do not understand his astonishment, for who has not heard of a storyteller who is stupider than the story he invents?”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“contrast with, say, Whig historians, such as Macaulay in nineteenth-century England, is striking. The Arab historians had no belief in the progress of humanity. Instead they waited for God to declare the End of Time.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“ماروزوف معتقد بود که اسلام آغازین فقط شکل دیگری از بدعت آریانیسم مسیحی است. آریان‌ها منکر این بودند که مسیح موجودی کاملاً الهی یا با خدای پدر هم‌گوهر است”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

“آن‌طور که شنیده‌ام، جان وانزبرو در جوانی دوست ویلیام فاکنر و لودویگ ویتگنشتاین بوده است”
― Robert Irwin

“وقتی کاهن شش ساله بود، مادرش داستان مصائب لویی نهم در مصر را برای او بازگو کرده و او به گریه افتاده بود”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

“The student of story collections finds himself adrift on an ocean of stories, an ocean which is boundless, deep and ceaselessly in motion.”
― Robert Irwin, Arabian Nights. A Companion

“Hārūn al-Rashīd, who has a walk-on part in so many of the stories in the Thousand and One Nights, features briefly in two of the stories of A Hundred and One Nights. But in several other stories much greater prominence is given to the Umayyad Caliphs who ruled over the Islamic lands from 41/661 to 132/750. It would seem then that, though the stories were compiled in Abbasid times, memories of the Umayyads were still treasured in North Africa. (It is perhaps noteworthy, however, that these Umayyads are referred to not as “caliphs,” but as “kings,” perhaps by analogy with the mulūk al-ṭawāʾif, or “party kings” of Muslim Spain.)”
― Robert Irwin, A Hundred and One Nights

“گرونباوم در قبال آنچه از نظر او انحطاط اسلامی تلقی می‌شد نگرشی هگلی در پیش گرفت. تمدن اسلامی، با دریافت خرد یونانی از غرب، وظیفه‌ی تاریخی خود را به انجام رسانده بود و دیگر هیچ نقشی در تاریخ نداشت. مقایسه‌ی تمدن اسلامی با تمدن یونان و روم باستان، که تقریباً همیشه به ضرر اسلام تمام می‌شد، ترجیع‌بند نوشته‌های او بود. اسلام تمدنی بود تقلیدی و مرکب از عناصر وام‌گرفته از فرهنگ‌های دیگر و ناتوان از نوآوری مستقل. گرونباوم بر آن بود که مسلمانان نمی‌توانستند ارزش دانشی را که فایده‌گرا نیست درک کنند و به همین علت بود که مثلاً رساله‌های مربوط به ریاضیات و مکانیک از یونانی به عربی ترجمه می‌شدند، اما به تراژدی‌های آیسخولوس توجهی نمی‌شد”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

“من المُحَتَّم أنَّ أيَّ تأمُّلٍ في عالم الحيوان يُثير سؤالًا غيرَ قابلٍ للإجابة، وهو: ما معنى أن لا تكون إنسانًا؟”
― Robert Irwin, Camel

“History is nothing but the lies we tell about our ancestors”
― Robert Irwin, Wonders Will Never Cease

“در دانشگاه‌ها فشار برای انتشار کتاب و مقاله موجب پرگویی و پرنویسی مضحکی شده است”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

“. But things are not what they seem. The normal Arabic word for “philosophy” was and is falasifa and a “philosopher” is a faylasuf. Plato was a faylasuf and so were Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Farabi. But the word that Rosenthal has translated as “philosophy” in the passage quoted above is hikma, and hikma has a subtly different range of meaning.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“Apparently we sorcerers use black notebooks as diaries, but red notebooks for transcribing spells and exorcisms.)”
― Robert Irwin, Satan Wants Me

“It can be translated as “wisdom,” or “what prevents one from ignorant behaviour.” Hikma described those sciences that did not derive from the Qur’an and hadith. It was also used to describe a body of literature that offered aphorisms, wise counsel, and improving examples taken from the lives of kings, sages, and (yes) philosophers.”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“the fantastical and damned Iram City of the Columns reappeared in some of the stories of the twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft”
― Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

“ظهور اسلام از شبه‌جزیره‌ی عربستان محال به نظر می‌رسید، چون این شبه‌جزیره آن‌قدر از مراکز اصلی تمدن دور بود که نمی‌توانست دین تازه‌ای پدید آورد”
― Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents