ABSTRACT
Leo X to translate the Koran. In addition, the state employed teams of scholars who translated
manuscripts that supported the state’s infrastructural and colonizing projects, including texts in
optics, astronomy, and physics as well as religion and literature. As Bloom points out, the ‘trans-
lation of Persian, Greek, and Indian works into Arabic became a regular state activity’ in the
Abbasid empire (Bloom, 2001, p. 117). Likewise, translation of Indian Buddhist manuscripts
helped Chinese dynasties to consolidate power in central Asia (Lewis, 1999); translation of
Chinese Buddhist manuscripts served to build an island-wide hegemony for seventh-century
Japanese kings (Piggott, 1997); and translation of Sanskrit and other world languages would
become central to the Orientalist projects of European states (Said, 1979). By the tenth centuries,
when any one of the largest libraries in Christendom contained a few thousand volumes, med-
ieval Islamic empires had accrued vast collections. The numbers are worth noting: 10,000
volumes in the tenth-century Baghdad Abbasid library; 400,000 in the Andalusian Umayyad
library of the caliph al-Hakam (r. 961-976), and half a million in the library of the African
Fatimid caliphate of al-Amin (Bloom, 2001, pp. 118-122). It should be no surprise, therefore,
if sixteenth-century Europeans suffered from and were motivated partly by ‘imperial envy’ in
their relations with Islamic states, as MacLean (2007a) argues.
