The last important outbursts of philosophical creativity came from critics
of this syncretizing establishment. Ibn Taymiyah at Damascus in the early
1300s was a Hanbali fundamentalist of the old style. He attacked rational
argument and denied that a Muslim could be a philosopher or practice logic.
This seems anachronistic, since by now there had been little prominent Islamic
philosophy for generations. But Ibn Taymiyah was especially attacking the
speculative Sufism which was becoming the respectable orthodoxy of the
schools, especially the illuminationism of Ibn ÀArabi and Quth al-Din al-Shi-
razi. Why his position should have emerged at Damascus and in this generation
becomes visible in the key to Figure 8.3: Syria along with Egypt had become
a center for what remained of logic and science since the disintegration of the
Seljuk Empire in the 1100s, especially with the Mongol sack of Iraq in the
mid-1200s. The tide of foundations of Sufi orders was at its height, with three
founded in Taymiyah’s lifetime. Pressures for religious uniformity were grow-
ing. The last Crusader states had been conquered in 1291, and the long-stand-
ing Christian population under Islamic rule in Syria was finally converted.
Taymiyah was a voice of traditionalism and intolerance. But he also was
part of the dynamics of the intellectual field, structurally motivated to punch
holes in the accepted intellectual dogmas of the schools. He produced an acute
criticism of every component of syllogistic logic (Fakhry, 1983: 316–318).
Definitions give no knowledge of what they define; self-evident propositions
leave their own basis hanging in air; the syllogism is based in universals, but
it is useless because all being is particular. Taymiyah’s doctrines resemble those
of William of Ockham, but they had none of Ockham’s revolutionary effect
on his intellectual community. Whereas in Christendom the networks at this
point of debate were at their point of maximal density, Taymiyah was isolated,
and the creative impulse of his conservative opposition resulted in nothing.
Two generations later, in the late 1300s, there was one more upsurge of critical
thought. Ibn Khaldun is best known for his universal history, a harbinger of
sociology, a secularism which kept its distance from theology and metaphysics.
In the preface to his great work, Ibn Khaldun criticizes the rote learning of
logic in the madrasas. Here we find again arguments like Ibn Taymiyah’s (and
Ockham’s) rejecting the syllogistic arguments of the schools, excluding phi-
losophy as useless, and advocating induction from empirical reality. But Ibn
Khaldun worked in Algeria, remote from the intellectual centers;^20 indeed, the
central networks no longer existed. Without significant structural ties of his
own, Ibn Khaldun’s critique was without consequences for Islamic philosophy.
Spain as the Hinge of Medieval Philosophy
It has been possible to bracket the golden age of Spanish philosophy—the five
generations bounded by Ibn Gabirol after 1035 to Maimonides and Averroës428 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths