NADÍM. Abulfaraj ibn Ishâk of Baghdad, known as Ibn abi Ya'kùb al-Nadim (ob. 995 a.d.), is the author of one of the most interesting works in Arabic literature, the Fihrist, or “list of the books of all nations that were to be found in Arabic,” with notices of the authors and other particulars, carried down to the year 377 a.h. (987-88 A.D.). A note in the Leyden MS. places the death of the author eight years later. Of his life we know nothing; the name Nadim belonged to a distinguished family of Persian origin. The oldest Arabic scholars, of whose works comparatively little has been preserved to us, had a much wider range of interest than their successors. Even then Islam and the Korân were the centre of all study; but curiosity was not limited by religious scruples; men were eager to know the wisdom and the literature of all nations and sects; the free thought which was afterwards so sternly suppressed in the reaction of orthodoxy towards the close of the 9th century lifted men above narrow prejudices. The work of Al-Nadim gives us a complete picture of the most active intellectual period of the Arab empire. He traces the rise and growth of philology and belles-lettres, of theology, orthodox and heretical, of law and history, of mathematics and astronomy, of medicine and alchemy; he does not despise the histories of knights errant, the fables of Kalila and Dinina, the facetiae of the “boon companions,” the works of magic and divination. But to us no part of his work is more interesting than his account of the beliefs of sects and peoples beyond Islâni. Here, fortunately, still more than in other parts of his work, he goes beyond the functions of the mere cataloguer; he tells what he learned of China from a Christian missionary of Najrân, of India from a ...