Abu Hanifa Dinawari


Abū Ḥanīfah Aḥmad ibn Dāwūd Dīnawarī was an Iranian Islamic Golden Age polymath, astronomer, agriculturist, botanist, metallurgist, geographer, mathematician, and historian. His ancestry came from the region of Dinawar, in Kermanshah in modern-day western Iran. He was instructed in the two main traditions of the Abbasid-era grammarians of al-Baṣrah and of al-Kūfah. His principal teachers were Ibn al-Sikkīt and his own father. He studied grammar, philology, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy and was known to be a reliable traditionist.
His most renowned contribution is Book of Plants, for which he is considered the founder of Arabic botany.
Dinawari was said to have been of Persian origin. Although he was also said to have been Kurdish, or Arab of Persian ancestry. He may have studied astronomy in Isfahan..

Works

The tenth century biographical encyclopedia, "al-Fihrist" of Al-Nadim, lists sixteen book titles by Dinawari:

Mathematics and natural sciences

  1. Kitâb al-kusuf
  2. Kitāb an-nabāt yufadiluh al-‘ulamā' fī ta’līfih, ‘Plants, valued by scholars for its composition'
  3. Kitāb Al-Anwā 'Tempest'
  4. Kitāb Al-qiblah wa'z-zawāl "Book of Astral Orientations"
  5. Kitāb ḥisāb ad-dūr, "Arithmetic/Calculation of Cycles"
  6. Kitāb ar-rud ‘alā raṣd al-Iṣbhānī Refutation of Lughdah al-Iṣbhānī
  7. Kitāb al-baḥth fī ḥusā al-Hind, "Analysis of Indian Arithmetic"
  8. Kitāb al-jam’ wa'l-tafrīq ; "Book of Arithmetic/Summation and Differentiation"
  9. Kitāb al-jabr wa-l-muqabila, "Algebra and Equation"
  10. Kitāb nuwādr al-jabr, "Rare Forms of Algebra"

    Social sciences and humanities

  11. Kitāb al-akhbār al-ṭiwāl, "General History"
  12. Kitāb Kabīr "Great Book"
  13. Kitāb al-faṣāha, "Book of Rhetoric"
  14. Kitāb al-buldān, "Book of Cities "
  15. Kitāb ash-sh’ir wa-shu’arā’, "Poetry and the Poets"
  16. Kitāb al-Waṣāyā, Commandments ;
  17. Kitāb ma yulahan fīh al’āmma, How the Populace Errs in Speaking;
  18. Islâh al-mantiq
  19. Ansâb al-Akrâd.

    Editions & Translations

His General History has been edited and published numerous times, but has not been translated in its entirety into a European language. Jackson Bonner has recently prepared an English translation of the pre-Islamic passages of al-Akhbar al-Tiwal.

''Book of Plants''

Al-Dinawari is considered the founder of Arabic botany for his Kitab al-Nabat, which consisted of six volumes. Only the third and fifth volumes have survived, though the sixth volume has partly been reconstructed based on citations from later works. In the surviving portions of his works, 637 plants are described from the letters sin to ya. He describes the phases of plant growth and the production of flowers and fruit.
The first part of the Book of Plants describes astronomical and meteorological concepts as they relate to plants, including the planets and constellations, the sun and moon, the lunar phases indicating seasons and rain, anwa, and atmospheric phenomena such as winds, thunder, lightning, snow, and floods. The book also describes different types of ground, indicating which types are more convenient for plants and the qualities and properties of good ground.
Al-Dinawari quoted from other early Muslim botanical works that are now lost, such as those of al-Shaybani, Ibn al-Arabi, al-Bahili, and Ibn as-Sikkit.