CHAPTER 9
£Academic Expansion as a Two-Edged Sword:
Medieval Christendom
Medieval Christian philosophy builds on the same ingredients as Muslim
philosophy: the politicized, socially activist monotheism of Judaism, together
with imports of sophisticated abstractions accumulated across many genera-
tions in the intellectual community of the Greeks. The intellectual fields of
Christendom and of Islam go through much the same structural conflicts. The
important differences between medieval Islam and Christianity are quantita-
tive, not qualitative, matters of weight and timing rather than intellectual
substance. Islam and Christianity do not exemplify the divergence of East and
West; both are equally West, as we can see by comparing the truly divergent
intellectual orbit demarcated on the east by Buddhism and Brahmanism. The
long-term trajectory of Islam is, so to speak, the bad dream of the West; it is
what Christendom would look like in recent centuries if theological conserva-
tives had become entrenched, along with a routinized scholasticism challenged
only by poetic mystics.
Consider the factional history of Islamic intellectual life across its first 18
or 20 generations. As the spaces of the intellectual field are first filled in (the
period 800–900 in Figure 8.1), there emerge four main factions: (1) rational
theology, kalam; (2) scriptural traditionalists, hadith, the special province of
lawyers; (3) importers of Greek (and to some extent Hindu and Babylonian)
science, logic, and philosophy; and (4) Sufis: ascetic religious virtuosi at first,
later developing an anti-ritualistic mysticism (see Figure 9.1).
Then comes a round of realignments and consolidations: The AshÀarites
compromise between kalam and hadith (1 2). The ShiÀite faction of political
theology develops its own doctrine, the hidden Imam (this might be considered
1a, a rival version of rational theology); and this amalgamates in turn with the
imported science and Neoplatonist–Neo-Pythagorean hierarchical cosmology
in the doctrine of the Brethren of Purity (1a 3). The philosophical high point
comes with further amalgamations in the next generations: Ibn Sina combines
the now-declining tradition of kalam with the Neoplatonism and logic of Greek
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