Unusually, the Islamic writers regarded Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics as part of his logic.77 His Rhetoric was thus taken rather more seriously than it later was in the European Middle Ages; al-Farabi, the early leader of the Aristotelian school in the ninth century, is said to have read the Rhetoric two hundred times and written seventy books on it.78 (The cavalier attitude to figures evident here is arguably one of the obstacles to the development of a mathematical theory of probability.)
