AN ALMOHAD “FUNDAMENTALIST”? 83
As mentioned above, the Almohads were depicted in earlier modern
scholarship as what are popularly called today “fundamentalists.” To the
extent that the Almohads’ propensity for “fundamentals” allows us to
use, tongue in cheek, this outdated term of opprobrium in its contempo-
rary sense, we can also see Maimonides as a “fundamentalist.” Like the
Almohads, and under the direct infl uence of their powerful model, Mai-
monides looked for usul in several senses: authoritative primary sources
(as opposed to secondary sources); laws in their broader formulations (as
opposed to the “branches” dealing with par ticular cases); and funda-
mental beliefs. Already David ben Judah Leon could call Maimonides
“shorshi,” a Hebrew word that, as suggested by Moritz Steinschneider,
translates the Arabic usuli.^126 By giving the “fundamentals” pride of
place in his thought, Maimonides closely followed the Almohad para-
digm. His astounding ability to cast the Almohad revolution in Jewish
terms allowed him to incorporate this paradigm seamlessly in his works.
Through these works, the creative originality of the Almohads fed into
Jewish medieval thought.
(^126) See M. Steinscheider, Jewish Literature (London, 1857), 310, quoted in J. Faur, Studies
in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah: The Book of Knowledge (Jerusalem, 1978), 9n41 [He-
brew]. I owe this reference to Joseph David. As noted by Faur, Maimonides himself uses the
termusuli only to denote the mutakallimun, and probably not in a laudatory sense.