Andalus And Sefarad: On Philosophy and its History in Islamic Spain by Sarah Stroumsa

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 3, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com SARAH STROUMSA, ANDALUS AND SEFARAD: ON PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY IN ISLAMIC SPAIN (PRINCETON, NJ; OXFORD: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019) The traditional account of the history of philosophy in Muslim Spain begins in the late tenth century. According to the eleventh-century chronicler Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī, it was then that the Umayyad Emir of Cordoba al-Ḥakam II ordered that books on ‘the ancient sciences as well as the modern ones’ be brought from Baghdad, Egypt, ‘and other places in the East’, in the hope of reaping the fruits of the ‘Abbasid-sponsored translation movement for Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. This well-known episode from Islamic history, Sarah Stroumsa reveals in Andalus and Sefarad, her recent study of philosophy in Muslim Spain, has a lesser known yet equally important Jewish coda. When the prominent Jewish physician and political advisor Ḥasday ibn Shaprut ‘attached himself to al- Ḥakam’, the same Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī wrote, ‘he used his good offices to bring whatever he wanted of the writings of the Jews in the Orient’. As Stroumsa observes, ‘It requires little imagination to appreciate that the same ships that brought the books ordered by the caliph also carried those ordered by his vizier, and that when the ships arrived at the docks, for example in Seville, their literary cargo was not divided strictly according to religious affiliation.’ Stroumsa sees this story as emblematic of the history of Andalusian philosophy. Jewish and Muslim philosophy and theology in the Iberian Peninsula, she proposes, ought to be viewed ‘as components of a common intellectual history and as stages in a continuous trajectory’. Written with a clarity befitting a scholar of Stroumsa’s expertise, Andalus and Sefarad is a masterful demonstration of how to think about the history of Andalusian philosophy in this ‘integrative’ way. The influence of Islamic traditions on medieval Jewish thinkers living under Muslim rule and writing in Arabic is well-known. It has long been accepted, for instance, that Judah Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval times and author of the famous Arabic theological treatise known as the Kuzari, drew on the Sunni Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī’s critique of Aristotelian philosophy and the Neoplatonic ideas of the Ismaili Shia. In her previous book, Maimonides and His World (2009), Stroumsa herself demonstrated that the 316 BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU great Jewish philosopher and legal authority Moses Maimonides, author of the Judeo-Arabic classic The Guide of the Perplexed, was influenced by the ideas of the Almohad dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain in the twelfth century. If ‘Islamicate’ Jewish thought is fairly well-known (to use the concept coined by Marshall Hodgson for that which is culturally if not religiously Islamic), far less so is the impact of Jewish thought on Islamic philosophy, and it is here that Andalus and Sefarad comes into its own. In chapter one we learn that the tenthcentury Muslim Neoplatonist of Cordoba Ibn Masarra, the first Andalusian philosopher of note, was influenced by Jewish speculation on the mystical significance of the letters of the alphabet and the symbolism of the divine throne. In the following chapter, we discover that the books and ideas of the rationalist Mu‘tazilite school of Islamic theology were introduced into alAndalus by Jewish Karaites, scripturalists who rejected rabbinic authority, and who, unlike their opponents the Rabbanites, usually wrote their Arabic works in Arabic, rather than Hebrew, characters, making them accessible to Muslims as well as Jews. While this is all very interesting, Stroumsa’s aim is not merely to show that the direction of influence went from Jews to Muslims as well as Muslims to Jews. Nor is it to substantiate the romantic if rather anachronistic notion of medieval al-Andalus as a site of interfaith convivencia. Rather, Stroumsa aims to demonstrate how the same philosophical traditions and ideas continuously circulated among adherents of the two religions in what...