We may trace the same development at the level of the material institutions
of intellectual life. Originally kalam theologians and the hadith lawyers repre-
sent splits within the same base: they are all teachers at the mosques, where
new factions can form when a leader withdraws from a circle with his followers
to another pillar. The Sufis are distinctive at first because they base themselves
not in the mosque but outside: they are street preachers or religious exemplars;
later when their orders devoted to tariqah, the way of mystical life, become
routinized (in the Weberian sense), they acquire their own specialized meeting-
houses. The imports of philosophy and science are treated as secular, which
means that they are never allowed into the mosque; they depend on patronage
of the courts and the wealthy, and on secular careers of doctors and astrono-
mers or astrologers.
The height of the battles between kalam and hadith takes place between
900 and 1100 over what kinds of teachings are to be allowed in the mosques.
This conflict is resolved toward the latter date with the founding of madrasas,
specialized schools with their own buildings and endowments. Al-Ghazali, who
appears in the founding generation of the madrasas (and at the most famous
madrasa of the capital), puts together the orthodoxy which becomes the
curriculum of these schools. In other words, Sufism eventually is brought into
the intellectual coalition in the madrasas, although it keeps expanding its
independent external bases too. Philosophy, however, is excluded; its decline
must be largely due to the fact that it can no longer compete for intellectual
attention, based on scattered and episodic lay supports, once an organized
school system exists. Only logic, split off from philosophy, is allowed into the
madrasas’ curriculum; but on its own it survives only as a stagnant scholasti-
cism.
Again I have left the Spanish episode of 935–1200 to one side, encapsulated
as it was from the history of Islamic life in eastern Islam. Here the structures
are more like the early period in the east: madrasas do not exist; the Sufi orders
are weak; hadith is dominated by the most conservative school, the Malikites,
and rational theology (whether MuÀtazilite or AshÀarite) has no important
representatives. Instead the cosmopolitan community is especially strong. The
Jews are in close contact with both Muslim and Christian intellectuals, and
all share a cosmopolitan interest in science. Among the Jews, the Neoplaton-
ism of the Greek philosophical importers becomes expanded into a universal-
istic religion of reason, and this acquires followers among the Muslims as
well; this is a synthesis of (1) rational theology in its Jewish branch and (3)
Greek imports. Jewish scriptural conservatives—the rabbinical equivalent of
(2) hadith—respond by a nationalist attack on cosmopolitanism. This sets the
stage for a sophisticated compromise by Ibn Daud and above all Maimonides,
who repudiate the Neoplatonic religion of reason and elevate instead a purified
Aristoteleanism which they harmonize with religion. Averroës on the Muslim
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^453