Al‐Kindī, Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Ishāq (800?- 870’s?), is widely considered the founder of the Arabic philosophical tradition. Al-Kindī was born in either Basra or Kufa. He spent his career in Baghdad, then the capital of an Islamic empire known as the Abbasid caliphate. All three cities are today in Iraq.
Al-Kindī was the head of a circle of scholars who translated ancient texts. Their work helped science and philosophy become widely accepted in the Arabic-speaking world and later in Europe. Al-Kindī also used his colleagues’ translations as a basis for his own writings, which introduced many disciplines into Arabic. Al-Kindī wrote well over 200 texts on a vast range of subjects, including mathematics, medicine, astronomy, optics, psychology, and music, as well as swordmaking and gemstones. He invented the frequency analysis method of cryptography. This method involves deciphering a coded message by identifying letters or patterns in the code that occur a similar number of times to letters or words in noncoded language.
Al-Kindī sought to study Greek thought, to complete what the ancients had left unfinished and to surpass their work. He was particularly interested in the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Euclid. Aristotle provided the inspiration for al-Kindī’s most important work, On First Philosophy.
In the Abbasid caliphate, many philosophers worked in Baghdad, but they faced dangers. Rivals within the Baghdad court competed for imperial favor, sometimes using translated Greek philosophical and scientific works in their disputes. Under Caliph al-Muʿtasim, who ruled the caliphate from 833 to 842, al-Kindī enjoyed favor and tutored one of the princes. But rival scholars persuaded a later caliph, named al-Mutawakkil, to have al-Kindī beaten and confiscate his library. Eventually, these scholars fell out of favor themselves, and al-Kindī’s library and reputation were probably restored sometime before his death.
