Quotes from Dimitri Gutas

Even after the Hellenistic empire of Alexander's successors was supplanted by that of the Latin-speaking Romans, the usual linguistic development – the language of the empire imposing itself on cultural activities – did not take place, and even philosophers whose mother tongue was not Greek did philosophy not in Latin but in Greek.

To be sure, there were attempts at translating the philosophy that was written in Greek into other languages – the presumed intention being to implant it in the cultures of the target languages – but such attempts, in the end, did not produce the intended results.

Certainly the most significant of [the political, social and ideological currents playing a role in the development of philosophical texts in Arabic] was the development of Islamic theology and the intense debate among the various groups and individuals about its eventual orientation.

Intellectual life in the caliphal court just before and after the Abbasid revolution (750), during which time Ibn al-Muqaffa was active, revolved around questions of what we would now call rationalism – that is, questions of verifiability of information beyond the claims of revealed religions which necessarily, and notoriously, contradicted each other.