side follows the same path: combining the cosmopolitanism of the scientific
networks with the conservatism of his lineage of Malikite jurists, he too
excludes traditional kalam and replaces philosophical Neoplatonism with a
new cosmopolitanism of Aristotle. Structurally, one might say that in Spain
the cosmopolitan Greek import sector (3) has the field so much to itself that
it splits into factions that never existed in the more beleaguered intellectual
space to the east.
Compare now the factional skeleton of Christendom. The initial ingredients
are the same as in Islam: (1) rational theology, (2) pious scripturalists, (3) Greek
imports, and (4) mystics of direct religious experience. Many of the same
tendencies and conflicts are acted out. The Sufi virtuosi, prostrating themselves
at every step on the pilgrimage to Mecca or sitting on their rooftops for hours
staring at the sun, have their exact counterpart among Christian ultra-ritualists
and ascetics. Saint Peter Damiani, who called pagan philosophy the work of
the devil, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who attacked Abelard and the other
rationalists in the name of faith and spiritual discipline, are structurally similar
to the Hanbalite theologians who incited mobs to attack the kalamites in the
streets of Baghdad and Damascus. Ibn Sina piles up arguments and distinctions
in a fashion foreshadowing Christian scholasticism at its most assiduous, and
the madrasas exhibit the disputations and the routinized curricula that would
characterize the universities.
What differs is not the conflicts but their long-term outcomes. Controver-
sies of heresy and church councils condemning philosophers’ doctrines become
almost a routine part of Christian intellectual life. But although texts are
burned and doctrines prohibited, the overall pattern does not give any special
weight to the conservative scripturalists. The standpoint from which heresy is
judged slips further and further into the terrain of technical philosophy for six
or eight generations. It is as if Christendom were full of Ibn Sinas and al-
Ghazalis repeatedly pushed to make use of the conceptual weapons of their
opponents, each time driving the controversy to a new level of sophistication.
If the outcomes are different, it is because the factional alliances take a
different pattern. Within Christendom, (1) kalam, or rational theology, and (3)
Greek imports are not initially split, institutionally and intellectually. Indeed,
they begin as the same faction. The combination had already been made by
the Patristic writers of the 300s c.e., especially Saint Augustine, whose works
were taken as the major source of theological orthodoxy. Islamic kalam, by
contrast, had its own institutional base (the mosques) and several generations
of building its own networks and ideas before Greek falsafa was imported in
strength; and the imports were admitted only fractionally into its base. To be
sure, in later Christendom too the successive waves of Greek imports tended
to come loose from the existing theological orthodoxy, and to some extent they
454 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths