to unbelievers. But only a few years before, the nationalistic Jewish philosopher
Judah Halevi had been a court physician at Córdoba; and again in 1169 the
caliph himself, when Ibn Rushd was introduced by his companion and physi-
cian Ibn Tufayl, raised metaphysical questions and invited Ibn Rushd to pro-
duce a definitive commentary on Aristotle. The pendulum could swing back
just as easily; Ibn Bajja was reputedly poisoned by his enemies at the Morrocan
court at Fez, and Ibn Rushd was exiled in 1195, then called back into favor.
On the Christian side, the Crusader mentality of the warriors gave way
surprisingly easily to the movement within the church to learn from the Arabs.
Toledo, recaptured in 1085, continued to have a largely Arab-speaking popu-
lation, including a large community of Jews. The bishop of Toledo established
his school for translation around 1125–1150; among other things, it produced
a Latin translation of the QurÁan. And in the period of political chaos, with
“party kingdoms” on both sides, there were even occasional diplomatic alli-
ances between Christian and Muslim states against their local enemies (Pelaez
de Rosal, 1985: 69–72). Jews frequently acted as diplomatic intermediaries.
The Muslim intellectual community at first was much less cosmopolitan.
In fact, the Malikite jurists who dominated in the Islamic west were hostile to
kalam and Sufism, let alone falasifa and non-Muslims. For this very reason,
the factional lineup was different than in the Muslim east. Both MuÀtazilites
and AshÀarite theologians of any significance are missing from the Spanish
networks, and neither Sufi innovators nor rank-and-file Sufi movements nor
the ShiÀite sects have much prominence there. This leaves more room, under
the law of small numbers, for divergences within the remaining positions.
Significant intellectual development began among the Spanish Muslims in the
late 900s in the religiously neutral topics of science, primarily in medicine and
pharmacy, as well as astronomy and mathematics. The material base of this
development was created by the patronage of caliph ÀAbd-ar-Rahman III and
his successor al-Mansur, who built a great library at Córdoba around 960 in
a bid to overshadow the prestige of the rival ÀAbbasid caliphate, now declining
in the east. Paralleling developments at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad two
centuries before, the accumulation of texts and work in science began first,
before autonomous philosophical creativity would emerge five generations
later. It was at ÀAbd-ar-Rahman’s court that the great Jewish patron of intel-
lectuals, the medical doctor Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, became an important official
(Pelaez de Rosal, 1986: 62–76). The Jewish intellectuals were at the core of
the Spanish world from the beginning.^25
With the fall of Toledo and the development of intellectual networks in
northern France during the early 1100s, Christian translators appeared in
Spain looking for scientific texts of the Greeks, Arabs, and Jews alike. Now
we find both Jewish and Muslim philosophers connected to the scientists; in-
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^439