well as in Persia and the Middle East (see Figure 8.3 and its key.) Again there
were few institutional points of intersection among rival groups. The Sufi
orders were largely based on lay members and thus compatible with other
pursuits. The madrasas tended to become permeated with Sufism, which took
the edge off the mysticism and subordinated it to traditionalism and law. The
madrasas ended by producing a type not unlike the Confucian gentry, oriented
to government and propriety but preserving a tinge of Taoist mysticism for
their private lives.
The Spanish episode, which was a temporary break in the later Muslim
stagnation, recapitulates the early creative structure. Córdoba and Toledo
provided the focus for interconnected networks. Cordoba as the center of the
western caliphate contained the legal, theological, and secular court networks
characteristic of Baghdad of an earlier period. The balance existed for a
relatively short time. As early as 950, the caliph had imported a huge library
from the east, competing with the eastern caliphate for prestige as a center of
learning, and patronized Jewish scholars as a cosmopolitan counterweight to
Muslim religious factions. The conservative side was also strong; law was
monopolized by the Malikites, the most literalist and anti-innovative of the
law schools, being opposed even to waqf foundations, which in the east had
been used to endow madrasas (Makdisi, 1981: 238). Politics swung between
pro- and anti-secular learning. For a few generations after 1050, the balance
of networks broke into creativity. Network density was enhanced while Toledo
was a base where Christian translators, Jewish religious intellectuals, and Arab
scientists intermeshed. The Christian reconquest, which took this great city
from the Arabs in 1085, at first added pluralism to the networks rather than
destroying them. We find intellectuals of all three faiths moving about, stimu-
lating one another around the twin hubs, Toledo and Córdoba. Other cities
and their schools fed into these networks: Almería, Seville, Granada, Lucena,
all close to Córdoba in the south. After 1200, the structure was lost. Córdoba
fell to the Christians in 1236; the Jewish-Arab networks were no longer linked;
the translators moved on to Italy. Its structural bases gone, the Spanish golden
age was over.
Which type of stagnation characterizes the later age of Islam? In some
respects there was a loss of cultural capital (Stagnation A). Ibn Rushd’s great
achievement in freeing Aristotle from Neoplatonism, as well as his own con-
structive philosophy, were largely unknown in the east (Fakhry, 1983: 275).
MuÀtazili rational theology was driven out as well. Insofar as there was
adulation of the classics (Stagnation B), it was in the realm of the religious
texts of Islam, and in a narrow aspect of philosophy, the studies of logic which
became incorporated as adjuncts to legal argument in the madrasas. Even here
there was some movement, as commentaries and supercommentaries were
512 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths