Such ambitions are always overreaching, but Ibn Rushd’s nevertheless had
a certain basis in contemporary realities. The cosmopolitan world of the
Islamic Neoplatonists was indeed collapsing, and the rational theologians had
had their day; Ibn Rushd himself was virtually the last significant constructive
Muslim philosopher. And yet there was a basis for his vast emotional energy,
a region in which he could tacitly feel the prospects of success. This was not
to be in the Muslim world, where Ibn Rushd had no disciples, and where
indeed the originals of most of his texts were lost.^35 It was the cosmopolitan
community of Spain that made possible his philosophy. It is not Ibn Rushd
who is known as a great philosopher but Averroës. He could not, of course,
have known that his works would be translated into Latin 30 years after his
death and produce a shock wave in Christendom a generation after that.
Perhaps he was aware that he was being read by the Jews in the late 1100s,
and was admired by Maimonides and his circle (Fakhry, 1983: 274–275).^36
Among Jewish philosophers he was even more influential than Maimonides;
whereas Maimonides was most famous among the ordinary Jewish religious
public, the intellectuals tended to use Averroës as a vantage point from which
to understand The Guide for the Perplexed (EP, 1967: 4:269).
The structural field which produced Ibn Rushd’s creative energy and trans-
formed him into the renowned Averroës was an unusually wide one. The field
of forces which centered on Toledo at the time of the translators, with tentacles
as far north as Chartres and Paris, charged up a current whose outcomes were
Averroës’s vision and the reemergence of Aristotle beside the long-dominant
philosophical Neoplatonism.^37
After Ibn Rushd’s death in 1198 and the departure of Maimonides, Spanish
intellectual life rapidly fell apart. The Christians came down through the passes
to defeat the Moorish army on the southern plain at Los Navos de Tolosa in
- By 1236 Córdoba had fallen, followed by Seville in 1248. The Muslims
survived until 1492 cooped up in the mountain enclave of Granada. There
were no more networks of Muslim philosophers or scientists in Spain, nor in
the states surviving in the Maghrib. It is emblematic that the young Ibn ÀArabi
attended Ibn Rushd’s funeral before departing for the east; already this last
representative of the Spanish intellectual lineage was abandoning rational
philosophy in favor of a theosophical reconciliation with revealed religion.
The Jews too were leaving, this time disappearing from the Islamic intel-
lectual world for good. Maimonides’s translators and disciples, especially the
several generations of the Tibbon family (49 and 56 in Figure 8.5, 12, 15, and
24 in Figure 9.5), had moved north into southern France. The Jewish commu-
nity now saw battles between Maimonidists (who were often also Averroists)
against rabbinical traditionalists, and more generally a split between univer-
salistic philosophy and nationalist particularism. The most famous philosopher
to emerge from this orbit was Levi ben Gerson, in contact with the papal court
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^445