Greek Gnomological Wisdom in Islamic Intellectual Culture: Transmission, Adaptation, and Islamization

Abstract

This article examines the role of gnomological literature as a key medium in the transmission, adaptation, and Islamization of Greek wisdom within the Islamic intellectual tradition. While previous scholarship on the Graeco-Arabic translation movement has primarily focused on systematic philosophical and scientific texts, this study highlights the distinctive function of aphoristic wisdom literature in shaping Islamic ethical discourse. Drawing on Syriac and Arabic gnomological corpora, alongside modern studies on translation, adab literature, and the concept of ḥikmah, the article argues that gnomology offered a particularly flexible and socially pervasive vehicle for cultural negotiation. Through processes of linguistic adaptation, theological filtering, genre recontextualization, attributional reconfiguration, and ethical selection, Greek aphorisms were integrated into Islamic moral frameworks without preserving their original philosophical systematization. Figures such as Plato and Hippocrates appear in Islamic gnomologia less as metaphysical authorities than as moral sages whose concise statements supported ethical self-cultivation, governance, and pedagogy. By situating gnomological literature at the center of Graeco-Islamic intellectual exchange, this study demonstrates that Islamization functioned as a creative and selective transformation oriented toward moral utility and ethical coherence. Gnomology thus emerges as a strategic interface through which Greek ethical insights were domesticated and incorporated into Islamic conceptions of wisdom (ḥikmah), offering new perspectives on the social life of knowledge in premodern Islamic civilization.