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thought, and a cultural efflorescence, which found few if any rivals outside
tenth- to twelfth- century Andalus—note especially the purist effort by Ibn
Rushd (Averroes; d. 1198) to reinstate in commentary mode the Aristote-
lian/Farabian scientific outlook as the foundation of all understanding, after
Ghazālī’s and Ibn Sīnā’s rereadings; and the influence achieved by the Jewish
philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204) of Cordoba. From Toledo began the
mainly Christian project of translating the Qurʾān and Arabic philosophical
texts into Latin. But the former served mainly for launching ignorant
polemics,^57 while the latter (along with James of Venice’s renderings of the
Greek Aristotle) fertilized thirteenth- century scholasticism, but were not
seen by most Muslims as representative of their civilization, and anyway were
vigorously resisted, as in the 1277 Parisian ban on doctrines derived from
Aristotle (notably the eternity of the world) and his Arabic students such as
Avicenna and Averroes (e.g., emanation). At the other end of Christendom
the Syriac Renaissance—represented preeminently by the polymath Gregory
Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), whose Candelabrum has been compared to his con-
temporary Aquinas’s Summa theologica—was of short duration and perhaps
too tributary to Islamic scholarship, especially Ibn Sīnā.^58 Looking at other
non- Muslim spiritual or intellectual syntheses achieved over the last millen-
nium, whether in Renaissance Florence (in the shadow of the Ottomans!) or
the salons of Enlightenment Paris frequented by Gibbon, or the secular uni-
versities of contemporary Europe and America, we can say that none has
been in a position to encounter Islam as a known quantity, far less as a re-
spected interlocutor. Those, especially in early modern Europe, who did
achieve critical distance from all three monotheisms were more likely to
spend their energies polemicizing “de tribus impostoribus” than actively pur-
suing truth through reason. This cliché too probably arose not far from
tenth- century Baghdad, since where else could one ironize Moses, Jesus and
Muhammad impartially?^59 We still have a way to go before we replicate the
wide- ranging discussions which occurred in that far- off place.
Pisa/The Latin West
If, then, the First Millennium makes so much sense, does it make nonsense of
other periodizations? The answer is a clear negative. I have already empha-
57 H. Bobzin, ““A treasury of heresies”: Christian polemics against the Koran,” in S. Wild (ed.), The
Qur’an as text (Leiden 1996) 157–75; but on the stereotypes prevalent in this field of scholarship, see also
D. Weltecke, “Emperor Frederick II, “Sultan of Lucera,” “friend of the Muslims,” promoter of cultural
transfer,” and K. Skottki, “Medieval Western perceptions of Islam and the scholars,” in J. Feuchter and
others (eds), Cultural transfers in dispute (Frankfurt 2011) 87–106, 107–34.
58 Teule and others (eds), Syriac Renaissance [3:89]; cf. H. Takahashi, “The reception of Ibn Sīnā in
Syriac,” in D. C. Reisman (ed.), Before and after Avicenna (Leiden 2003) 250–81.
59 S. Stroumsa, Freethinkers [7:42] 217; G. Stroumsa, New science [1:7] 138–39.