THEOLOGICAL CONTEXT 29
on the content of the curriculum, whereas Maimonides’ text is more phe-
nomenological and more outspokenly judgmental. But both advance the
view that, in shaping the Christian approach to philosophy, religious
considerations were predominant. Both also suggest that these Christian
religious considerations were closely related to po litical ones, and that
such scholarly- religious decisions were manipulated by “Christian kings,”
that is, the state. Although Maimonides speaks of both Syriac and Greek
Christianity, the special place he grants John Philoponus is in line with
Farabi’s concentration on the Alexandrian Academy.^19
As Dimitri Gutas has shown, Farabi’s Discourse is related to a com-
plex of other, longer summaries that tell the story of the crystallization of
the medical curriculum in Alexandria.^20 In Farabi’s Discourse, however,
there is a signifi cant shift in the text’s tenor. What Gutas describes as
Farabi’s “fi ne- tuning the transmitted or translated texts to make them
more explicit,” is in fact the point where Farabi introduced his anti-
Christian bias into the received narrative. Maimonides belongs in this
complex precisely because he distills Farabi’s “philosophical” narrative
of its original medical context, thus allowing us a clearer view of its anti-
Christian tenor.^21
According to Maimonides, the Christians continued to exert their in-
fl uence on the study of philosophy after the Muslim conquest:
When thereupon the community of Islam arrived and the books of
philosophers were transmitted to it, then were transmitted to it those
refutations composed against the phi losophers. Thus they found the
kalam of John Philoponus, of Ibn Adi and of others with regard to
these notions, held on to it, and were victorious in their own opin-
ion in a great task they sought to accomplish.^22The Christian phi losopher Yahya ibn Adi (d. 974) appears in this pas-
sage, like John Philoponus, as a Christian mutakallim who had an un-
healthy infl uence on the emergence of Muslim kalam. The sentence as it
is includes a fl agrant anachronism; living in the fourth Islamic century,
(^19) Farabi reacted particularly against Philoponus’s proofs for the creation of the world. See
Mahdi, “Alfarabi against Philoponus,” esp. 233– 36; Badawi, Rasail falsafi yya, 17; see also
Pines, “Translator’s Introduction,” Ixxxv. Beyond this specifi c point, however, Farabi saw
Philoponus’s very approach to philosophy as dangerous.
(^20) D. Gutas, “The ‘Alexandria to Baghdad’ Complex of Narratives: A Contribution to the
Study of Philosophical and Medical Historiography among the Arabs,” Documenti e studi
sulla tradizione fi losofi ca medievale 10 (1999): 186– 87.
(^21) See S. Stroumsa, “Al- Farabi and Maimonides on the Christian Philosophical Tradition: a
Re-evaluation,” Der Islam 68 (1991): 263– 87; and compare Gutas, “The ‘Alexandria to
Baghdad’ Complex,” esp. note 6.
(^22) Guide 1.71 (Dalala, 122; Pines, 177– 78).