just before 1200—from the rest of Islamic philosophy. Influences flowed from
the east to this western end of the Islamic world, but little flowed back again.
The later descendants of both the Muslim and Jewish intellectuals of Spain are
found to the north, across the religious frontier in Christendom. Although
subsequent Islamic philosophy continued in the east, a channel had diverged
which drained into another sea; once emptied, it disappeared, leaving the two
great realms of medieval philosophy, heirs of the Greek and eastern Mediter-
ranean culture, to their separate fates. The complex intellectual life at the time
of the Baghdad, Basra, and Nishapur centers was running out just as the
Spanish episode began. The last great eastern thinker, al-Ghazali, in the gen-
eration just before 1100, is most famous for his conservative attack, The
Incoherence of Philosophy. In Spain just the opposite was taking place, as
speculative philosophy flowered, and its greatest representative, Ibn Rushd
(Averroës), delivered his rejoinder to al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Inco-
herence.
Spain was a high point not only for Islamic philosophy but also for the
Jews; virtually all the innovative Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages were
from Spain, or closely tied to its networks. In addition to this double upsurge
of creativity, there is another structural anomaly about Spain: as we examine
the network charts, we find here the only connection between important Jewish
and Muslim philosophers. And by way of the translators at Toledo, there is a
connection to the network of Christian philosophers based in northern France:
from Gundisallinus to Adelard of Bath and Gerard of Cremona of the schools
of Chartres and Laon. This is the only place where we find an explicit link
between the networks of Figures 8.1 through 8.5 and Figures 9.1 through 9.6,
and the Jews center the chain. The period of greatest creativity in Spain was
also the most cosmopolitan.
It was here that the scientific and mathematical texts of the Greeks and the
Hindu-Arab algebra and number system were transmitted north; it was here
too that Aristotle was revived, with such revolutionary effect on Christian
philosophy after 1200. We should resist the habit, however, of seeing this
period as nothing more than a transmission belt for ancient knowledge. There
is a sociology of what is translated and how it is understood; intellectual history
in such times cannot be reduced to a slow-moving empiricism whereby texts
rather than things are the objects which are gradually perceived.
The Social Construction of Aristotle in Medieval Spain
The social process of importing ideas constructs the meaning of what is being
conveyed; and not only importing but exporting ideas can stimulate such
construction. The strongest instance of this is the so-called rediscovery of
Aristotle. But Aristotle’s texts were not lost. In the earlier Middle Ages, Aris-
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^429