Download PDF | Aaron W. Hughes - The Texture of the Divine_ Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought- (2003).
289 Pages
Introduction
THE QUARREL BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE, INTELLECT AND imagination, according to Socrates in Book 10 of the Republic, is ancient and virulent. In its most severe representation, philosophy and literature are seen as occupying opposite ends of a continuum. Philosophy is about all that is unchanging, universal, and permanent; the purview of literature, on the other hand, is about the fickleness of specific characters making specific choices in response to localized contexts. Yet such a characterization is ultimately a false one because it ignores the finitude and specificity of our existence. Moreover, it does not adequately fit with the historical record of philosophy. Despite the criticisms of Socrates, we have never witnessed the construction of an impermeable border separating these two modes of discourse. Indeed, even Socrates’ transcriber, Plato, did not hesitate to turn toward the mythic and the poetic to make a philosophical point. Literature and philosophy utilize two different languages that ultimately allow access to the same world.
The study that follows explores some of the various points of intersection between these two languages: the relationship between form and content, the attempt to textualize the ineffable, and the use of poetic images for philosophical purposes. In calling attention to these features, I attempt to recreate a paradigm of understanding that turned not only on the intellect, but also on the exercise of the imagination and the emotions. This paradigm gave priority to the perception of particular people and particular situations over abstract and analytical argumentation. Rather than regard this paradigm as irrational or prone to vagueness, many saw it as an important way to speculate about God and the divine world. This study examines the broad theme of the relationship between philosophy and literature within the rich intellectual and cultural landscape of medieval Judaism and Islam. It argues that the key to understanding this relationship comes from both the imagination and aesthetics. Each of these is ultimately concerned with specifics and with articulating how such specifics lead to a proper understanding of universals.
To make my argument, I focus on a set of philosophical texts written in a highly literary style. These treatises, which combine philosophy, poetry, and allegory, recount the journey of a protagonist through the ascending layers of the universe, with each segment of the journey described in literary as opposed to scientific terms. Each journey culminates in the imaginative apprehension of God, with the protagonist gazing into the divine presence. These texts are not only beautiful literary and poetic works; they also provide important insights into medieval philosophy and mysticism. If one of the main themes of this study is that of the convergence between philosophy and literature, an equally important one is to show how a minority appropriates and thinks with the narratives of a majority culture. Such appropriation is not simple translation, but often involves adaptation and cultural hermeneutics. Even though the new narrative may share certain affinities with the original, it nonetheless must begin to confront and address the various intellectual, social, and cultural concerns of the minority group. If not, why not simply read the original?
As a case study, I explore some of the ramifications of what happens when a Jew (who spoke and wrote Arabic) living in Muslim Spain decided to take over an Arabic narrative and the various processes by which he went about this. My study, unlike many devoted to medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, does not deal solely with ideas, but also seeks to bring to light the various concerns of cultural and religious identity. In examining these narratives within the history of both medieval poetics and philosophy, my goal is to demonstrate that Jewish and Islamic philosophy when approached in new ways can yield new critical insights. For instance, the iconographic and mythic dimensions of philosophy, and the ritualistic and visionary aspects of Neoplatonism, are often ignored or downplayed in studies of this type of philosophical literature. My goal is to bring such features into the conversation to see how they can help us reframe some of the traditional assumptions of the field. In thus re-orienting the traditional approach to medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, I hope to provide a different vantage point from which to illumine the beauty, timelessness, and multidimensionality of but one aspect of medieval Jewish and Islamic civilization.
The data I use to enter into this discourse consist of various H. ayy ibn Yaqz.a¯n (lit. “Living, the Son of Awake”) narratives written in medieval Jewish and Islamic thought.1 In particular, I focus on three versions:2 the famous Arabic texts by Avicenna (980–1037) and ibn T.ufayl (ca. 1116–1185),3 and the less well-known Hebrew text of Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164).4 All three are highly literary accounts that offer elaborate descriptions of the structure of the universe and the changing role of the individual within it.5 All three texts poetically describe the protagonist’s intellectual and mystical ascent, and all culminate in the protagonist’s imaginative apprehension of the divine. Although studies have examined each of these as individual texts, there has yet to be an analysis of the entire cycle. Since all of the texts share a similar set of literary and philosophical assumptions, my contention is that they are not ad hoc creations, but represent a distinct genre. My analysis grounds these texts in a particular historical moment, showing how they represent, locally, the intersection of the various cultural, intellectual, poetic, and aesthetic trajectories of medieval Islamicate civilization.6 What follows is devoted to offering a fresh interpretation of these texts.
Previous studies have shown diverging opinions about how to classify them. Some regard them as nothing more than philosophical primers and, thus, of no real intellectual importance; yet others see them as the epitome of medieval philosophical speculation, an attempt to offer an “Eastern” alternative to the standard Aristotelian system. The direction of my study, The Texture of the Divine, differs from both of these approaches by making the argument that these treatises provide important insight into two traditionally marginalized aspects of medieval Islamicate philosophy: the imagination and aesthetics. Traditionally, the overwhelming interest of historians of medieval Islamicate philosophy has been in metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. These grand themes are sounded often by many of the philosophers themselves in their explicit condemnation of the imaginative faculty: “imagining is no more than the mind’s projection of images belonging to sense objects no longer present.”7 Similar strains reverberate among innumerable historians of Islamic and Jewish philosophy who, to cite but one recent example, argue that “imagination and reason represent two distinct levels of consciousness and, therefore, two distinct thinking processes.”8
The result has been the almost ubiquitous denial of the imagination within the medieval philosophical enterprise. If philosophy is about the august contemplation of divine and ephemeral truths, the imagination becomes the faculty that has the potential to undermine this activity, thereby corrupting the individual and banishing him or her to the dreamy obfuscations of mysticism. Aesthetics is part and parcel of the imagination. By aesthetics I mean a theory of beauty that is primarily interested in delineating the pleasure that arises in the soul of an individual upon viewing an object or hearing a poem or harmony. This pleasure, according to the medieval Islamicate philosophers, occurs because physical beauty (often defined in terms of order and harmony) is regarded as participating in a higher order. Such a theory, of course, had its origin in Plato’s theory of beauty,9 which made its way into medieval thought through the conduit of Plotinus. But the thinkers who are the subject of this study did not simply copy this discussion; on the contrary, they created their own discourse to address specific monotheistic concerns. One of the key features of medieval aesthetics is that it was not simply about artistic sentiment, but rather was inseparable from ontic concerns. The beauty to be found in an object or heard in a harmony pointed beyond itself, thereby situating the object or harmony within an ontological hierarchy.
Aesthetics thus takes on an important role in directing the soul of the individual to its true home in the celestial world. Both aesthetics and the imaginative faculty concern themselves with the particulars of sense perception and how the structure of the sensual world reveals the immateriality of the divine world. The medieval philosophers worked within an intellectual framework in which the only way to grasp something was to abstract a formal structure encased within a material substratum. Although knowledge is not about sensual particulars, the latter become necessary because they function as prolegomena to all understanding. Within this context, the divine world is taxonomically unique because it does not conform to the materiality of this world. The divine world is essentially closed to sense perception and, thus, to intellection. The only way in which the individual can apprehend the divine world is by means of experiencing it, not just by describing it in terms of something else. This is why the imagination is so important to the philosophical enterprise: it is the faculty that is ultimately responsible for the creation of images or symbols that capture certain perspectives of the divine’s ineffability. The imagination now becomes the primary vehicle whereby the individual grasps that which exists without matter.
Aesthetics fits into the puzzle because it is primarily concerned with how concrete particulars reflect a universal and spiritual beauty. Like the imagination, aesthetics is concerned with delineating how the incorporeal is experienced in terms of the corporeal. Both the imagination and aesthetics revolve around the interface between the visible and the invisible, the particular and the universal, and the transcendent and the ephemeral. The intimate relationship between the imagination and the role of aesthetics is, in turn, related to a much larger theme that runs throughout the religious civilizations of Islam and Judaism. This theme is, for want of a better term, the “monotheistic paradox” between God’s absence and presence.10 On the one hand, both of these traditions regard God as completely other, a deity who is unsusceptible to any sort of iconic or corporeal representation; yet, on the other hand, humans have a basic need to encounter God’s presence in order to ascertain His providence at work in their lives.11
Even if the theological traditions of both Islam and Judaism wanted, often with unintended and awkward consequences, to have the best of both worlds, the Islamicate philosophical tradition was extreme in its negative theology and the need to protect God’s complete uniqueness.12 This has led some to argue that whereas “Greek culture” and understanding is defined by its emphasis on the visual, “Semitic culture” is primarily defined by its aurality.13 Such civilizational reifications, which were particularly in favor at the beginning of the twentieth century, are thankfully becoming rarer today. The unfortunate by-product of such assumptions, however, still remains. It rises to the surface in the claim that both Islam and Judaism are somehow devoid of the visual,14 especially when it comes to the visualization of the divine. It is beyond the parameters of this study to offer a history of this visual representation of the divine in Islam and Judaism. Nevertheless, the tension between the iconic and the aniconic, visualization and the prohibition against such an act, created a series of reverberations in the authors who are the subject of this study. This tension will essentially form the basis of what follows.
This study seeks to situate the H. ayy ibn Yaqz.a¯n cycle against the broader backdrop of medieval aesthetics. In particular, it investigates the historical origins, intellectual moorings, and philosophical implications of these texts. Accordingly, I argue that these three tales and the way they incorporate both the imagination and aesthetics are not unique. On the contrary, they are indicative of a larger though much neglected aspect of medieval Neoplatonism; namely, the importance of beauty and the notion of visualizing or imaginatively apprehending it. Where appropriate, I show how these three treatises and their denouements relate not only to Neoplatonism but also to the larger corpora of the authors concerned. These texts, I contend, are not ad hoc creations written by different authors in different temporal and spatial locations. Rather, they represent a distinct genre of medieval philosophical literature. This study, then, is an attempt to treat thoroughly the various problems associated with the imagination as they appear in a distinct group of texts. My major focus is on the imagination, for this faculty, occupying a distinct place in the psychic hierarchy, is the pivot around which revolve all the features I here discuss.
It is, for instance, the imagination that becomes the locus of vision that permits the initiate to experience and visualize the divine world. In many ways, this is paradoxical because the divine is regarded as incorporeal and that which does not possess spatial extension cannot physically be seen. Yet the function of the imagination is to provide three-dimensional extension to that which exists without body. It does this by taking the information that is stored from the individual’s sensual encounter with this world and projecting it on the spiritual world. As a result, the imagination ultimately becomes responsible for giving the transcendental an appropriate phenomenality. But this is not simply a translation of something ineffable into a communicable form. Rather, the imagination’s gaze is the main component of the experience. Here I am influenced by the work of Elliot Wolfson, the historian of Jewish mysticism, who argues What scholars have not always duly noted is that recourse to sensible images and symbols is part of the mystical experience itself and is not restricted to the description of an ineffable experience in oral or written communication. Mystical vision is such that the suprasensible world is experienced in sensory imagery and not simply described in terms of the sensible. . . . In traversing the barrier between the visible and spiritual worlds, the mystic experiences the latter in terms of the modalities of the former.
There is no passage in which the cognitive and epistemological categories of the sensory world are consumed by the fires of spiritual reality. On the contrary, those very conditions are upheld, for they allow for an experience of the divine matters that figure prominently in the mystical vision.15 This approach differs from typical treatments of mystical vision, which contend that the actual experience transcends all categories and that only after the individual has returned to his or her “normal” state does he or she search for the appropriate image to try to describe this otherwise ineffable experience.16 The utility of this new approach is such that the vision and its images now become the only phenomena by which the initiate can have access to the transcendent. In other words, the divine world is all but inaccessible without the various categories of everyday sense experience. This shift in emphasis now puts the imagination at the center of the visual experience. It becomes an active faculty whose main goal is to provide the initiate with the currency by which he or she experiences the otherwise ineffable. The primary function of the imagination is hermeneutical. It is responsible for presenting one thing (i.e., the spiritual) in terms of another (i.e., the sensual), thereby making the unknown known. The imagination is thus central to the initiate’s ability to visualize spiritual entities, including God, which would otherwise be unknowable because they are unavailable to sense perception. Although the major focus of this work is the imagination and its relationship to experience and aesthetics (chapters 3 through 5), the first two chapters seek to chart the various modalities and trajectories needed to understand this.
Chapter 1 in particular offers a “user’s guide” to the H. ayy ibn Yaqz.a¯n cycle. Here, I provide brief biographies of the three authors, in addition to giving synopses of their respective treatises. In so doing, I offer an overview of this genre that I have decided to call, for reasons to be elaborated in that chapter, the “initiatory tale.” What do these diverse texts have in common? How do they fit within both medieval Islamicate Neoplatonism and the larger corpora of these authors? There is a tendency to regard these tales in the secondary literature from one of two competing hermeneutical perspectives, what I here call the “minimalist” and the “maximalist.” The former regards these texts as nothing more than philosophical primers, whereas the latter contends that these texts are part of an amorphous “Oriental Wisdom.” I argue that both approaches ultimately prove unhelpful. In their stead, I opt for a reading that seeks to ground these texts in the intellectual categories of Neoplatonism that tended to blend so well with the rich religious and mythic vocabularies of monotheism. The second chapter builds naturally on the first in that it seeks to analyze certain features of Neoplatonism that bear specifically on these texts. I focus, in particular, on the crucial nexus between language and embodiedness.
One of the central paradoxes of Neoplatonism, one that the authors who are the subject of this study share, is that although Truth is outside of language, the latter becomes one of the few mechanisms we have at our disposal to contextualize the former. Within this context, and using the vocabulary of modern phenomenology, it is language that makes ontology possible since one of its primary goals is to articulate meaning and bring the ineffable to light. This gives way to a type of writing that is double-edged, one that seeks to conceal as it reveals. A large part of this paradox stems ultimately from the problem the body poses for Neoplatonism in particular and philosophy in general. The body, composed of matter and thus corruptible, is the main stumbling block in our quest for impermanence. Yet it is a feature that must be accounted for if the initiate is ultimately to transcend this world. For this reason, the body and the senses become important loci for philosophical activity. Indeed, the imagination uses the sensual data of human corporeality in order to give phenomenal expression to that which exists without corporeal extension. Rather than subscribe to the traditional assumption that the medieval philosophers denigrated the body and matter, I contend that they realized that they could not dispense with these features and, thus, used them as one of the primary means at their disposal to apprehend the transcendental. And it is precisely within this framework that we must contextualize the rich sensual descriptions of the initiatory tales. I am well aware that my discussion of Greek philosophy in this chapter is not particularly original. Despite this, my goal in discussing the Greek philosophers is twofold. First, I aim to show one of the two main sources whence the medieval philosophers derived their ideas.
(The other, of course, is the sacred scripture, either the Hebrew Bible or the Qurɔ a¯n, depending upon one’s tradition.) Second, I am not necessarily concerned with the “real Plato” or the “real Aristotle,” but rather with such figures as seen from the vantage point of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Islamicate world. From this perspective, the ideas of Plato or Aristotle were often intermingled through the prism provided by the Neoplatonic commentators of late antiquity. Chapters 3–5 represent the core of the study. In chapter 3, I focus particularly on the role and function of the imagination. This faculty represents something of a paradox in the history of Western philosophy. On the one hand, many follow Plato and condemn it as mistrustful, the part of our psyche that threatens ratiocination since it creates its own reality by making things absent appear as present, in dreams or even while one is awake. Yet, on the other hand, this ability to present the absent is also one of the imagination’s greatest virtues. In this regard, it now becomes the faculty responsible for representing the spiritual world in terms of the categories of the sensual one. Without the imagination, knowledge of the divine is impossible. We see this at work in Neoplatonism in general and in the treatises that are the subject of this study in particular, especially when it comes to the denouement of the philosophical quest. Without wanting to mystify or de-rationalize this denouement, it becomes readily apparent that these texts culminate in a vision of the divine wherein the initiate must see through his or her inner eye. This, I contend, is a code word for the imaginative faculty.
To begin the process of rehabilitating the imagination, I have found it useful to employ some of the terminology of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Within this system, the imagination now becomes the locus that allows the individual to experience modes of Being that are otherwise inaccessible. The imagination becomes the faculty that enables us to apprehend the transcendental by means of the phenomenality by which it shows itself. Images, the epistemological currency of the imagination, are not simple translations of the ineffable into three dimensions; in effect, they become part and parcel of the divine. To use the language of Heidegger, there can be neither logos nor an appreciation of it without phenomena. The H. ayy ibn Yaqz.a¯n cycle exploits this use of imagination not only in the initiate’s textual protagonist but in the reader as well. In effect, the reader is invited into the narrative and encouraged to experience the journey through the eyes of the protagonist. This role of a journey that includes (especially in the versions of Avicenna and ibn Ezra) encounters with sacred springs and all-consuming fires, culminating in a distinct telos, led me to conceptualize these narratives as symbolic rituals. In the fourth chapter, therefore, I examine these treatises from the theoretical perspective of ritual studies. In particular, I analyze these texts through the prism of the tripartite scheme developed by van Gennep and Turner, and nuanced by later theorists such as Grimes. Such an approach enables us to envisage these texts from the perspective of the history of religions.
For we see at work in them some of the classic paradoxes and tensions that are foundational to human experience, and that religion in general and ritual in particular seek to mediate: sacred and profane, pollution and purification, death and rebirth, ignorance and gnosis, mortality and immortality. By examining medieval texts from this disciplinary perspective, I hope to show how the philosophers who are the subject of this study cannot be neatly categorized. Furthermore, these texts are not simply about what we today call philosophy; rather, they are also concerned with the religious life and how it relates to human felicity. These authors used as many means, textual and supratextual, at their disposal to describe the quest of an individual to move beyond the inherited way of apprehending the world. The final chapter is devoted to the philosophical content of these three treatises. My main contention is that the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers developed aesthetics as a distinct sub-field of philosophy and that these texts represent the literary expression of this. Until now, historians of medieval literature have primarily studied this material.
I argue, however, that the analysis of such material needs to be viewed against the broader background of the history of philosophy. All of the medieval Neoplatonists worked on the Platonic assumption that anything beautiful in this world participated in and derived its harmony and order from a formal and celestial beauty. The subsequent result was the elucidation of an ontological relationship between intelligible and sensible beauty, in which the latter is necessary for the apprehension of the former. For these individuals, the only justifiable purpose of artistic enjoyment resided in the fulfillment of some basic psychological or noetic need that in turn could enable the individual to fulfill his or her true telos. As a result, the medieval philosophical conception of beauty was rarely treated as a distinct subject of philosophical inquiry. Rather, it was often subsumed within other discussions, particularly those relating to ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Despite this, all agreed that the philosophical importance of beauty resided in its centrality to the noetic development of the individual. Finally, I attempt to address why Avicenna, ibn Ezra, and ibn T.ufayl— all important philosophers in their respective traditions—would choose to write philosophical treatises in this literary form. What was it about this genre that provided them with something that more discursive prose could not?
THE COURTLY IDEAL IN MUSLIM SPAIN (AL-ANDALUS)
Since two of our three authors were born on Spanish soil and since its cultural and intellectual presence looms large in this study, let me devote the remainder of this introduction to a brief overview of both the Jewish and Muslim context there. Although what follows is certainly not meant to be exhaustive, it does seek to emphasize the main cultural and intellectual trajectories that form the backdrop against which much of the rest of my analysis takes place.
When the Muslims conquered Spain in 711,17 they brought with them the grandeur of Islamicate culture and civilization. In 929, the process of consolidation having reached its peak, Abd al-Rah. man III declared himself caliph and asserted his own legitimacy over the Abbasid caliphal court at Baghdad.18 By maintaining economic ties with Muslim lands from the East and North Africa, Spain (al-Andalus) became a true cosmopolitan center. Its capital, Cordoba, had more than seventy libraries, a factor that encouraged many great architects and scientists to settle there; the caliphs and rich patrons, in turn, established schools to translate classical philosophic and scientific texts into Arabic.19 Although the center at Cordoba gradually fragmented into a number of courts,20 the result was a rich intellectual, cultural, and social landscape that was grounded on the notion of adab, the polite ideal of cultured living that developed in the courts of medieval Islam.
The adı¯b (pl. udaba¯ b ) was defined by social graces, literary tastes, and ingenuity in manipulating language. Adab proved to be very attractive to the local population, many of whom adopted the ideals of Islamicate culture, including the use of Arabic.21 By the third Islamic century, there existed an oft-quoted saying that the adı¯b differed from the c a¯lim, scientist, in that the latter specialized in only one branch of knowledge (c ilm) whereas the former dabbled in various branches of knowledge.22
The adı¯b was someone who was intimately familiar with, and involved in, the courtly etiquette of Muslim centers of power. He was someone who both partook of and was supported by the lavish tastes and urbane lifestyle that the various courts— both in Andalus and in the East—offered. The udaba¯ b were a class who occupied a high social standing and produced a fairly uniform high culture despite the heterogeneous nature of the Islamic Empire.23 They were learned, wrote poetry, composed works of literary criticism, dabbled in philology and various other sciences, and read the latest philosophical treatises that made their way from the eastern domains of the empire. They tried to maintain a purity of diction and improvised on a set of stock literary motifs whenever a proper social situation arose.
This aesthetics had tremendous repercussions for all of those who found themselves within the cultural and intellectual orbit of Islam. Jews, in particular, were attracted to these themes. Subsequent contact with Islam led to ground-breaking developments in the areas of Jewish philosophy, Hebrew grammar, poetry, and poetics, to name but a few disciplines. As Jews assimilated Arabic paradigms of beauty, rhetoric, and eloquence, they began, as Ross Brann has documented, to translate them into autochthonous Jewish forms.24 This fusion of biblical and humanistic horizons created a rich, flexible vocabulary in which the Andalusi Jews expressed themselves. Although Jews lived for the most part on the margins of Andalusi society, they did not simply mimic the culture and values of the dominant culture.25
Simply to adopt these values would lead to assimilation of Jewish culture to its Arabo-Islamic model. On the contrary, the Jewish courtier class effectively lived in two competing worlds and served as the fault line between these worlds, producing a creative, though often tense and ambiguous, synthesis. For example, rather than simply write Arabic poetry, these Jews adopted Arabic prosody, yet composed poetry in Hebrew and with motifs that resonated with biblical imagery. In like manner, rather than jettison the biblical narrative, the Andalusi exegetes read the sacred text through the lenses that the new culture provided.26 As Jews learned Arabic and its various literary models, they nevertheless remained steadfast to their traditions. Unlike the Arab poets, the Hebrew poets not only wrote secular love poetry, but they composed sacred poetry (much of which comprises part of the Jewish liturgy to this day), wrote philosophical treatises, were often the religious leaders of their communities, and were the jurists who administered the religious law (halakhah). However, an underlying nationalistic framework linked all of these disciplines. This allowed the Andalusi Jewish philosopher-aesthetes to demonstrate the superiority of Hebrew over Arabic and, based on this, that of Judaism over Islam.
As a result, the Hebrew of the Bible, the language the Hebrew literati employed in their poetry—and, in the case of ibn Ezra with philosophy as well— became the aesthetic and rhetorical standards of the age.27 This led to a situation in which, as Dan Pagis noted, the Andalusi-Jewish poets modeled themselves on the biblical prophets.28 In drinking from the cultural stream of medieval Islam, Jews suddenly found themselves with a new discourse and rhythm with which to mine the depths of the religious life.29 The repercussions of this encounter were manifold. In expressing themselves in Arabic using the categories of Islam, the Jews internalized a culture different from their own. This did not just involve writing Hebrew poetry in a meter learned from the Arabs or composing philosophical treatises in Arabic. We need to be aware of a fundamental tension here: How did a group absorb both the cultural and the linguistic expressions of another group and still retain its own identity? How, then, do we understand the Andalusi-Jewish cultural expression?30 Is it a reflection of “the anxiety of influence”?31 Is it imitative?32 Or, should we situate it against a polemical background as Jews tried to overcome the ambiguities associated with their cultural, social, and linguistic assimilation of Arabo-Islamic ideals?33 Ross Brann has recently attempted to re-examine, correctly in my opinion, the traditional answers to such questions. He argues that the Andalusi-Jewish intelligentsia created a “discourse of power” by which they not only stressed their own superiority over other Jewish communities, but also subversively appropriated Arabic culture for their own ideological purposes.34
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the language the Andalusi-Jewish intellectuals spoke molded the questions that they asked, the categories they employed to answer such questions, and the answers they considered to be satisfactory or not. In the study that follows, I shall examine this in greater detail as it relates specifically to ibn Ezra’s H. ay ben Meqitz and its relationship to Avicenna’s Arabic text. In so doing, I will focus on the way in which Jews thought with the categories of Arabo-Islamic civilization and how they were able to participate in the pluralistic and multi-cultural Andalusi intellectual life. The year 1147 sounded a death knell to much of this way of life, for it marked the invasion of the puritanical Almohades into Spain from North Africa. This dynasty was determined to put an end to what they perceived to be the religious laxity that they witnessed among the Andalusian intellectual and courtier classes. They demanded, inter alia, the conversion of all Christians and Jews to Islam.35 It was during this period that many Jews left Spain: the majority went north to Christian territories.36
The Almohade invasion signaled the end of one of the most fascinating and eclectic eras of world history. This period in which Jews partook of Islamic culture and literature in al-Andalus was, in hindsight, relatively brief. Despite this brevity, however, it was a period to which later generations always looked and indeed continue to look back at with fondness. Although ibn Ezra spent only the first half of his life in Spain, he never fails to remind his readers that that is the place from which he came. The dynamic cultural and literary traditions that the Jews encountered and adopted as their own in Muslim Spain would live on even when its reality had receded to become nothing more than a distant memory. What follows is meant as a testament to the shared literary and philosophical categories of Judaism and Islam.
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