went on to become the most important philosophers of their respective relig-
ions. It is unlikely, however, that they ever met. Maimonides left Córdoba with
his family in 1148, fleeing the Almohad conquest; he would have been 13 years
old, Ibn Rushd 22. Nevertheless, the parallels between their intellectual trajec-
tories are strong, and this is explicable by their common context. During the
next 17 years, Maimonides moved from place to place in Spain, ending with
a short stay in Fez before moving to Egypt in 1165, where he eventually became
court physician. At a minimum he must have been in the network of the most
eminent teachers of medicine, which he would have had in common with Ibn
Tufayl and Ibn Rushd—especially Ibn Zuhr (46) at Seville. It seems inconceiv-
able that in accumulating intellectual capital during his travels he would not
have been in the Jewish communities at Toledo, Seville, or Granada—and
thereby in the cosmopolitan networks of those places as well.^31 As the Muslim
centers came under increasing political pressure from reactionary regimes, the
Jewish centers became ever more important for cosmopolitans of all faiths.
They become the nodes where the several chains cross, the structural key to
creativity.
The Religion of Reason
As Jewish philosophy reached its peak after 1100, Muslim philosophy in Spain
simultaneously burst into high creativity. There is an intergenerational chain
of important philosophers: Ibn Bajja at Saragossa, Seville, and Granada; his
admirer Ibn Tufayl at Seville, Córdoba, and Fez; and in turn his protégé Ibn
Rushd at Córdoba, Fez, and Seville, who became famous as the great Averroës.
All of them were concerned with the reconciliation of philosophy and faith,
which for them was also a political problem owing to the intermittent dangers
of persecution from the Malikite literalist jurists so often dominant in the
Muslim states. In this respect the Jews had more freedom, since they lacked
state power and hence the means of coercing the non-orthodox; the Jews
(especially Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Zaddiq) appear to have led the way toward
universalization. Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd were, moreover, state
officials—viziers, judges, or court physicians—and were intimately aware of
the vagaries of power.
Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel sets out their typical strategy. In a set-
ting foreshadowing Robinson Crusoe (and which might have inspired Defoe,
through a Latin translation in 1671; see Windelband, [1892] 1901: 317), Ibn
Tufayl depicts a boy growing up in solitude on an uninhabited island, who by
sheer reason arrives at a philosophical conception of the universe. This consists
largely of the Neoplatonic hierarchy: the Forms of things, the soul, the world
spirit, finally culminating in an ecstatic vision of God beyond words and con-
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^441