language, which is accepted by both Christians and Muslims as the basis of
their own religions (Sirat, 1985: 86–87, 97–131; Husik, 1969: 114–196).
This split between the philosophical positions and this fideist critique
predictably gave rise to an intermediate position. Ibn Daud, who migrated from
Lucena to Toledo in the Almohad invasion, was a cosmopolitan with reserva-
tions (Pelaez de Rosal, 1985: 137). He aided Christian translators and wrote
a history of Latin Christendom in Hebrew, as if in an explicit effort to open a
wider world for his coreligionists (EP, 1967: 4:267). At the same time, Ibn
Daud was concerned to reconcile philosophy and faith, and attacked Ibn
Gabirol’s stance as heterodox to the Jewish faith and as bad philosophy (Husik,
1969: 198). Responsive to the new situation of Jewish nationalism and the
rejection of the older cosmopolitan position, Ibn Daud promoted a purified
version of Aristotle against the Neoplatonists. Ibn Daud’s strategy of using
Aristoteleanism to support a middle position combining both particularistic
faith and universalistic philosophy was the same one Moses Maimonides
would pursue at the end of the century, thereby making himself the dominant
Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. This was the stance that became
Averroism.
The Cosmopolitan Network
We should visualize a single community of philosophers and scientists com-
prising Muslims, Jews, and Christian translators, gradually coming together in
Spain.
These were the centuries of the Reconquista (see Figure 8.5). The Christians
had held the corner of Spain around Barcelona and the mountainous northern
regions of Léon and Navarre since the 800s. After 1010, the caliphate of
Córdoba disintegrated into petty principalities, and these began to be eaten up
by feudal Christian lords driving down from the north. The geopolitics is
patchy and episodic. Toledo, the major city in central Spain, was captured in
- By 1120, the Christians were nibbling at the principality of Saragossa
in the east, near Barcelona. Around 1170, they had taken all of the northern
half of Spain and were beginning to push into the Muslim heartlands of the
south. There were two waves of counter-conquest on the Islamic side: the
Almoravids in the 1090s, who swept northward into the power vacuum from
Morocco and temporarily reestablished the caliphate; and again the Almohads,
who did the same a generation later from the 1140s through the 1160s.
The religious atmosphere across these decades alternated between fanaticism
and tolerance. On the Muslim side, rulers wavered between militant orthodoxy
and patronage of the cosmopolitan philosophers. The war policy instituted by
the fanatical Almohads who took Córdoba in 1149 was conversion or death
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^437