Standing in the way of the philosophers were the jurists. The philosophers emphasized the role of reason and looked to Aristotle and Plato
for guidance on how to interpret the Quran. The jurists ranged from those who accepted only the most literal understanding of holy texts to those who embraced a limited amount of interpretation based on the early schools of law. The philosophers and the jurists disliked each other, and their disputes occasionally turned lethal. By the eleventh century, the traditions were deadlocked; neither side had managed to eliminate the other, much to their mutual frustration.
Just before Maimonides was born, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali of Baghdad attempted to resolve the apparent split between philosophy and theology. He embraced the methods of the philosophers in order to prove the supremacy of faith. Al-Ghazali was as essential to the evolution of Muslim theology as Thomas Aquinas was to the development of Catholicism. His brilliance was to synthesize science, philosophy, mysticism, and law. He had drunk deeply at the well of each. He became a scholar of Aristotle and sat at the feet of Sufi masters learning the mystical traditions. He then delved into the arcana of Muslim law, analyzed how the traditional schools interpreted the Quran, and absorbed dense and lengthy canons of jurisprudence.
After years of study, al-Ghazali composed a series of treatises that marked the apex and the end of a certain type of Muslim scholarship. In his quest to answer unresolved questions, al-Ghazali drew definitive conclusions, and among them was that both philosophy and mysticism were flawed. Only submission, the Quran, love of God, and respect for the law could lead a believer to live a proper life. While philosophy, science, reason, and mysticism each had something to offer, none was sufficient as a path to the truth. According to al-Ghazali, the philosopher risked turning the human intellect into a god, while the mystic often came close to worshiping his own soul rather than submitting to God’s will. Al-Ghazali was urbane and sophisticated, but he was also, in the end, a conservative. Worried that Muslim societies had lost direction and purpose, he tried to find a new formula that would restore the pure, powerful faith of the Prophet and the companions.
Using the tools of the philosopher in order to discredit many of the claims of philosophy, and embracing the path of the mystic while rejecting many of the beliefs of mystics, al-Ghazali developed a complex system with a simple core: God is all-powerful, and Islam is the true path. He made mysticism respectable, but at a price. He insisted that all Muslims, mystic or not, were bound by the Quran. The path of
the Sufis did not give them the right to live outside the law. The same principle applied to philosophy. Reason and intellect could never take priority over the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet.
In his own time, al-Ghazali was respected, but after his death, he was sanctified. The questions that he asked ceased to be asked, and Islamic philosophy began to ossify. It was said that after al-Ghazali, the door of interpretation
(ijtihad)
closed. For centuries after Muhammad, there had been active debates about the true meaning of the Quran and the hadith, about the proper tools of interpretation and the way one could approach God. But after al-Ghazali, debate was discouraged. Islamic law and theology became more rigid, and schools became repositories of received wisdom rather than generators of new ideas.
Men like Maimonides, who lived more than a generation removed from al-Ghazali, still probed, but whether as a direct result of al-Ghazali’s influence or not, they began to recede from the world. They did not reject philosophy, but they narrowed their audience. They divided reality into outer truth and hidden truth. The outer truths could be learned by the masses, but the inner truths were for the select. These attitudes transcended religious differences. Maimonides was Jewish, but he had more in common with Muslim and Christian scholars than he did with most Jews. Regardless of creed, scholars and mystics shared a sensibility; they asked similar questions and employed similar methods to find answers.
Where Maimonides probed the gulf between man and God, others attempted to close the gap, and no one did so more poignantly than the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Arabi. In a world replete with brilliant minds and passionate seekers, Ibn Arabi was among the most brilliant and the most passionate. He confronted the ancient human dilemma of loneliness. Why, he wanted to know, was there such a distance between God and his creation? Was mankind forever doomed to the excruciating pain of separation from God? That plaintive question had been asked by Jewish scholars ever since they had begun to interpret the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, and it had been a central concern of early Christian monks and mendicants. Ibn Arabi, however, drew on centuries of Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Muslim learning to arrive at a unique conclusion: man’s separation from God was a product not of God but of man’s limited ability to perceive the truth. A more aware mankind
would realize that the gulf was an illusion, and that God and man were as close as two could be without being one.
Ibn Arabi wrote almost as extensively as Maimonides. Like the Jewish sage, he was born in Spain but then traveled for years before finally settling in the Near East, in Damascus. In his work, he touched on most major areas of human knowledge, but unlike so many others, he expressed a new idea. The distance between man and God was not real, he claimed. Duality was not real. Instead, creation is defined by unity, and by the unity of man and God above all. God created man as a mirror in which to view himself and his creation. Throughout history, there had been a “Perfect Man,” who embodied that unity. All of the prophets and the great Sufi saints had been emanations of the Perfect Man, and the path of the mystic was to emulate them.
Ibn Arabi’s style was metaphorical, elliptical, esoteric, and challenging. He fused the Greek concept of Logos, which was at the center of the New Testament gospel of John, with Muslim-Greek philosophy. He added to the mix Sufi wisdom, which sometimes used words as guides and sometimes used language to mislead the uninitiated. Embedded in his work was a bare, unadorned statement about every believer: “God is the mirror in which you see yourself, as you are His mirror in which he contemplates His names.” In the primordial unity of being, man is God’s way of seeing himself and God’s way of knowing himself.
How ironic that twelfth-century Andalusia, ruled as it was by a dynasty with a numbingly narrow ideology, nurtured some of history’s most profound thinkers about man and God. Even more ironic that a dynasty that tried to cleanse Islam produced thinkers who were the product not just of Muslim diversity but of multiple cultures. Ibn Arabi, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides stood at the apex of more than fifteen hundred years of human civilization, some of which was Muslim, much of which was not. We will never know if they could have thought what they thought and written what they wrote had they been steeped only in their own traditions. We do know that they were immersed in Greek, Latin, and Arabic scholarship and that they drew on that accumulated wisdom not to write polemics but to explain the meaning of life. And we know that they deployed their intellect and channeled their passion not to attack but to illuminate. They walked the path of love and compassion, and served as guides to seekers trying to find their way to God.
And none more than Maimonides. With his days filled by his medical duties, he lived a busy life, and his descriptions of his routine as doctor to the royal family in Cairo do not convey the sense that he loved his day job. “My duties to the Sultan are very heavy,” he wrote. “I am obliged to visit him every day, early in the morning; and when he or any of his children, or any of the inmates of his harem, are indisposed, I do not quit Cairo, but stay during the greater part of the day in the palace.” Then, when he returned home late in the day, he usually found his house full of Jews, Christians, and Muslims seeking his counsel for ailments both physical and spiritual. At the close of the day, he was so spent that he barely had time for his writing and his studies.
Yet this was the same man, weary from his long hours, who was able to write
Guide for the Perplexed.
In it, he divided the world into those who can learn the inner truths and those who cannot. “It is not the purpose of this treatise to make its totality understandable to the vulgar or the beginner in speculation,” he announced in the introduction, “nor to teach those who have not engaged in any study other than the study of the Law—I mean the legalistic study of the Law.” It was a treatise for philosophers and for seekers. It was a guide for those who were advanced in learning yet still had unanswered questions. It was a map drawn by a master for those who had glimpsed behind the curtain separating the learned from the vulgar, who had started on the path but found themselves confused and uncertain.
Maimonides believed that there were truths that the masses could grasp and messages that any common man could hear and that there were truths accessible only to the learned, the wise, and the religious. In time, hidden truth became the foundation of the Jewish mystical tradition. The study of the kabbalah, which probed the inner meanings of the Torah and the Jewish holy texts, flourished in late medieval Spain and owed a considerable debt to the legacy of Maimonides. Though he would have been uncomfortable with the degree to which later kabbal-ists turned away from the world, he too believed in a hierarchy of truth and in the notion that only a select few are qualified to see God’s plan in all of its glory.
Maimonides was a seeker who rejected the notion that all are created equal. The democratic side of Islamic and Jewish mysticism said that all believers could establish a personal, intimate relationship with God— provided they were willing to walk the long and arduous road. But as
articulated by Maimonides and men like Ibn Arabi, there was also an elitism, which said that the world is inherently corrupt and that the true path is open only to those pure and wise enough to take it.
The consequence of these attitudes for Judaism was an increasing disengagement from society. The consequence for Islam was a growing unwillingness to engage new ideas. While the Jews of Spain may not have been able to prevent their marginalization by Muslim and Christian rulers, the Muslims of North Africa and the Near East suffered from the shift away from creative thought and away from grappling with the contentious questions that had been part and parcel of the Mediterranean world since the days of Plato and Aristotle. As the majority turned to orthodoxy and a minority turned toward a dynamic but secretive mysticism, Muslim culture in the Arab world slowly began to wither.
As for Maimonides, he died as he had lived: a pious man, who in spite of his erudition and willingness to learn what there was to learn, identified himself as simply a child of Abraham in long exile from his home. He believed that the Jews of Spain and the Near East had brought their fate upon themselves, because of the sins of their forefathers, and that their subjugation to the Arabs had been foretold by the scripture. He prayed throughout his life that God would allow the Jews one day to return and enter the Temple in Jerusalem once again, and until that day, he prayed that Jews would learn from their exile and, through love of God, be forgiven.
Had he been asked if his life demonstrated the possibility of coexistence between Islam and Judaism, Maimonides would almost certainly have said no. From his vantage, Jews under Muslim rule were constrained in what they could do and dependent on the sufferance of their rulers. Identified as he was with his tribe, he could hardly have felt otherwise. But even a wise individual is not always the best guide to his own life. As we have seen, Maimonides was not just a Jew. He was steeped in multiple cultures and a product of all of them. In much the same way, Ibn Arabi believed himself to be a Sufi seeker, but he too was the product of diverse cultural streams. The beauty, intensity, and sophistication of their visions were the result ofthat diversity. They represented the juxtaposition of religious traditions, whether they realized it or not. They were and are a testament to what is possible.
The intellectual and spiritual creativity of these men appeared to be in vivid contrast to the Almohad dynasty that ruled southern Spain. But
on closer examination, even the Almohads were less rigid than history has made them. Their creed called for a return to the unadorned piety of Muhammad, yet they looked to logic and reason to defend their vision. “It is by necessity of reason that the existence of God, Praise to Him, is known,” went one line of the Almohad
Doctrine of Divine Unity.
They took a hard line against the philosophical tendency to interpret the Quran in terms of analogies and had contempt for the notion that God had human characteristics. “Minds have a limit at which they stop and which they do not exceed,” and when people attempt to explain the inexplicable, they tend to latch on to “anthropomorphism,” which was, according to the Almohads, “absurd.”
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In essence, the simple piety of the Almohads was not so simplistic. They drew on the same philosophical tradition that supported Mai-monides and Ibn Arabi, even though they arrived at radically different conclusions. Both the Almohads and the Almoravids are rightly seen as early versions of what would later evolve into “Islamic fundamentalism.” But their history shows that there was nothing unsophisticated about them. They were not ignorant country rubes. They knew the intellectual and spiritual terrain just as well as their adversaries, and they proffered a vision of Islam that relegated interpretation and human reason to small supporting roles and elevated the literal text of the Quran above everything. They saw the intellectual fancies of the elite as decadence, and they saw decadence as weak. But in spite of themselves, they shared more with those elites than they wished to acknowledge, and their success was not a function of military prowess alone. Only a few thousand Almohads and Almoravids settled in Andalusia, yet they managed to rule. They tapped a dormant chord of unease, a belief among the Muslims of Spain that the growing power of the Christians was a reflection of God’s displeasure. It was the same alarm that Jewish prophets had sounded from time immemorial—that the strength of the enemy was God’s punishment for communal sins.