Hunayn ibn Ishaq
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Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi (also Hunain or Hunein) (809 – 873) was a famous and influential Nestorian (Christian) scholar, physician, and a scientist from Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq. He and his students transmitted their Syriac and Arabic translations of many classical Greek texts throughout the Islāmic world, during the apex of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥaq was the most productive translator of Greek medical and scientific treatises in his day. He studied Greek and became known among the Arabs as the "Sheikh of the translators". He mastered four languages: Arabic, Syriac, Greek and Persian. His translations did not require corrections; Hunayn’s method was widely followed by later translators. He was originally from southern Iraq but he spent his working life in Baghdad, the center of the great ninth-century Greek-into-Arabic/Syriac translation movement. His fame went far beyond his own community.
See also
- Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye (book)
- Ishaq ibn Hunayn, Hunayn ibn Ishaq's son, also a translator and physician
- Galen § Influence on Islamic medicine
- History of medicine