Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Christian Doctor of the Faith of the Caliphs

 

Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Christian Doctor of the Faith of the Caliphs

His eyes were red and his molars stiffened when he received the message to appear before the Caliph after Maghrib. The message to confront him would only lead him to an impossible situation for him. Three months earlier, Caliph Mutawakkil ordered him to make the deadliest poison that could be made at that time. In return, the Caliph would shower him with so many gold coins.

A request that he could not accept and could not refuse. Rejected means punishment, accepted means breaking the oath. As a doctor and a staunch Nestorian Christian, he never commits heinous acts such as making poison to kill others. Many times he politely declined the request by saying he needed time to learn to make poison, because all his life he had only learned to make medicine. But time and time again the Caliph raised the offer of wages and urged him.

That night Hunayn ibn Ishaq went to the palace of the tenth Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty. In front of the rulers of the Islamic world, he flatly refused the request. He also emphatically said that the duty of a doctor like himself is to dedicate his entire life to seeking treatment and healing, not finding ways to kill and destroy lives.

Hunayn, that night, loudly spoke before the Caliph about medical ethics. He chose to be thrown into prison and tortured rather than having to betray the ethics of a doctor. It is said that, according to sahibul saga, Caliph Mutwali was impressed by Hunayn's determination and trusted him as his personal doctor.

Hunayn ibn Ishaq was a doctor and translator of the most brilliant Greek manuscripts at that time. That said, he was trusted by Caliph al-Mamun as the head of the Baitul Hikmah translation bureau. He speaks four languages, Arabic, Syriac, Greek, and Persian. During his tenure, he succeeded in translating major works which later greatly influenced the development of science in the Islamic world, such as Aristotle's Metaphysics. From these translations, Arab scientists were able to access and develop the knowledge that Greek scientists had developed in the past. Not only as a translator, Hunayn also wrote a number of books on medicine.

In his youth, Hunayn ib Ishaq studied medicine from Yuhanna ibn Masawaih, a Nestorian Christian doctor who became the Caliph's personal physician. At that time he often found his teacher dissecting the monkeys sent by Khaifah al-Mu'tashim for his research.

The two Nestorian Christian doctors have become an inseparable part of the glorious past of the Islamic world of science, which is often revered, admired, and repeated as the golden age.