AN ALMOHAD “FUNDAMENTALIST”? 75
am he who prefers to address that single man by himself, and I do
not heed the blame of those many creatures.^95The difference between the Kashf and the Guide is partly due to the dif-
ferent audiences for which they are intended (as well as to the different
place of these books in the literary corpus of the two authors). Maimo-
nides directs his work to people with some philosophical training,
whereas the Kashf is directed to a larger public. The closing paragraph of
Averroes’ Decisive Treatise bows to the Almohad ruler and fl atters him;^96
and, in what appears to be a second recension of the Kashf, he wriggles
in an obvious effort to placate the Almohads.^97 The Almohads, however,
were no phi losophers, and were not considered as such by Averroes.^98
As far as the phi losopher Averroes was concerned, the Almohad elite
was also a nonphilosophical public. Maimonides, on the other hand,
wrote for people with philosophical aspirations and with some philo-
sophicaltraining, people like his own student whom he treated as “one
out of thousands” and who could be trusted with philosophical chapter
headings.
The disagreement between Averroes and Maimonides is not only so-
ciological and theological (that is, who should be taught and how much),
but also hermeneutical (that is, what is the meaning of the exoteric level
of the text, the zahir). Maimonides distinguishes the zahir from the batin,
the inner, esoteric, and true meaning of the text. Nevertheless, as his in-
troduction to the Guide shows, he is convinced that already the zahir of
the text allows for various interpretations, and the correct interpretation
is never the physical, material, or anthropomorphic one. Like Saadia be-
fore him (and perhaps in his wake),^99 Maimonides includes in the term
zahir contextual and theological considerations. Maimonides’ understand-
ing of the term allows him to say that everyone should be taught the
noncorporeality of God, without claiming that everyone should be taught
the hidden meaning (batin) of the text.
(^95) Dalala, 11; Pines, 16.
(^96) See Averroès, Discours décisif, 170; D. Urvoy, Averroès. Les ambitions d’un intellectuel
musulman (Paris, 1998), 59.
(^97) M. Geoffroy, “Ibn Rušd et la théologie almohadiste: une version inconnue du Kitab al-
kašfan manahigˇ al- adilla dans deux manuscrits d’Istanbul,”Medioevo 26 (2001): 346– 50;
idem, “A propos de l’almohadisme d’Averroès: l’anthropomorphisme (tagˇsim) dans la sec-
onde version du Kitab al- kašfan manahigˇ al- adilla,” in Cressier et al., Los Almohades,
853–94; Stroumsa, “Philosophes almohades?,” 1148– 49.
(^98) See Ivry, “The Utilization of Allegory in Islamic Philosophy,” Interpretation and Alle-
gory, 153– 80, and note 171; see also Averroes’s Commentary on Plato’s Republic, ed.
E. I. J. Rosenthal (Cambridge, 1966), 82 (trans. 211).
(^99) I owe this observation to Zeev Elkin. For Saadia’s contextual understanding, see, for in-
stance,Kitab al- amanat wa’l-itiqadat, ed. Y. Qafih (Jerusalem, 1970), 7: 223– 24.