spilled over into border clashes with surrounding states; then it fell heir to a
geopolitical vacuum owing to the mutually destructive wars of the Byzantine and
Persian empires (Lapidus, 1988: 38–43). There was little effort initially to convert
conquered peoples, and outside of Arabia, most Muslim cities had very large
non-Muslim populations. The reversal of this religious policy began to pick up
strength after 900.- Jewish philosophers are ranked relative to one another, separate from the ranking
of Muslim philosophers. Hence it is not implied that Saadia ben Joseph is of the
same order of importance in this intellectual field as his most dominant Muslim
contemporaries. - I refer to him by his Latin name, Rhazes, to distinguish him from Fakhr al-Din
al-Razi (Fakhruddin Razi), who lived eight generations later. - Rescher (1964). Aristotle’s had been a logic of classes, the Stoics’ a logic of
propositions. The Baghdad school recovered these from Galen and from Aris-
totelean commentaries and extended their scope. The nature of possibility was
debated. Matta and al-Farabi developed conditional syllogisms; al-Farabi dealt
with general and particular predication and the quantification of predicates. He
and Yahia ibn-ÀAdi took up from Alexandrian logic the question of universals, and
attempted to reduce Aristotle’s 10 categories to substance and various species of
accidents. - This was not necessarily due to al-AshÀari personally. There are indications that
his position was already laid out in the previous generation by al-Qalanisi (74 in
Figure 8.1), a moderate rational theologian among the hadith literalists; during his
lifetime he was as famous as al-AshÀari. The latter’s fame resulted from a retro-
spective reinterpretation by his lineage two generations later of its own origins
(Watt, 1973: 287–288, 311); by the time of al-Baqillani, there was a vehement
polemic against MuÀtazilites as well as against Christians and Jews, and al-AshÀari’s
public break with the MuÀtazilites made him an appropriate emblem of their
distinctiveness. Once again we see that it is the lineage and its conflicts more than
the individual which generates intellectual fame; and the structural crunch of
intellectual attention deprives credit from someone like al-Qalanisi while giving it
to another like al-AshÀari. - Wolfson (1976: 355–454; 1979). Davidson (1987) emphasizes that arguments for
creation based on the impossibility of traversing an infinity go back to the Christian
critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus, while arguments for God as the unmoved
mover come from Aristotle. Philoponus was being cited by the Muslims by the
time of al-Farabi in the early 900s; in the mid-800s al-Kindi was making arguments
very similar to those of Philoponus (Davidson, 1987: 92–95, 106). Yet the early
MuÀtazilites’ proofs emerged a generation before this, and some of them (such as
Abu-l-Hudhayl’s) are not obviously dependent on Philoponus; even those which
are similar may have come from the kalamites’ own discussions of divisibility and
atomism. In any case, the issues did not become important for the Muslims out of
passive imitation of the Greeks. Greek philosophy had been only marginally
concerned with the existence of God in anything approaching a religious sense.
Aristotle’s unmoved mover is unrelated to Providence, creation, or immortality.
984 •^ Notes to Pages 407–413