THEOLOGICAL CONTEXT 31
was phenomenological. For Maimonides, Yahya ibn Adi, like John
Philoponus before him, was part of the tradition of Christian kalam, the
tradition of harnessing philosophy to the needs of religion.
In other words, Maimonides was aware of a group of people like
Yahya ibn Adi, that is, Arab Christians whose occupation was falsafa.
He, however, considered them worthless as a school of philosophy. For
him, they were only a modern version of the Christian mutakallimun.
Yahya ibn Adi did not shun theology, and his contribution to Chris-
tian theology in Arabic is signifi cant, but he was also a student of Farabi,
and certainly did not regard himself as a mutakallim: in fact, his depic-
tion of the mutakallimun is as scathing as that of Maimonides.^27 Farabi’s
relations with his Christian colleagues in Baghdad, however, were com-
plex, and there are reasons to believe that he left Baghdad because of the
tension between them.^28 As we have seen above, Maimonides probably
drew his view of pre- Islamic Christian philosophy and its infl uence on
Muslimkalam from the writings of Farabi. It is quite possible that in his
attitude to contemporaneous Arab Christian philosophy Maimonides is
also dependent on Farabi, although, on this point, the scarcity of the evi-
dence precludes any defi nite conclusion.
According to Maimonides, with the spread of Islam, the Muslims, too, in
their turn, adopted philosophical tools and endeavored to give a philo-
sophical garb to their religion. We should also note Maimonides’ convic-
tion that
all the statements that the men of Islam— both the Mutazila and the
Ashariyya—have made concerning these notions are all of them opin-
ionsfounded upon premises that are taken over from the books of
the Greeks and the Syrians who wished to disagree with the opin-
ions of the phi losophers.^29According to Maimonides, then, it was Christian kalam that fathered
Muslimkalam. To Christian kalam the Muslims added their own touch
(^27) See AbuHayyan at- Tawhidi,al-Muqabasat, ed. Hasan al- Sandubi (Cairo, 1929), 224.
On Yahya ibn Adi, see J. L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Re naissance of Islam: The Cultural
Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden, New York and Köln, 1992), 104– 39; S. H. Griffi th,
The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam
(Princeton and Oxford, 2007), 122– 25.
(^28) This point was convincingly argued by Muhsin Mahdi, in an unpublished lecture titled
“Al-Farabi and Abbasid Po litical Order.” The lecture was delivered in March 1995 at the
Israel Academy of Sciences in Jerusalem, as the annual Shlomo Pines Memorial Lecture. See
also E. K. Rowson, A Muslim Phi losopher on the Soul and Its Fate: Al-Amiri’s Kitab al-
Amadala l-abad (New Haven, 1988), 2.
(^29) Guide 1.71 (Dalala, 122; cf. Pines, 176).