Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker

"I wanted to pick a book about a non-Muslim philosopher to make the point that philosophy in the Islamic world is not all by Muslims. The obvious person was Maimonides, because he was probably the most important Jewish philosopher ever. Stroumsa’s book is written for someone who is not necessarily an expert on Maimonides. It’s definitely something that experts should read but it’s something that you could read as an introduction to Maimonides as well. It’s not introductory in quite the same sense as McGinnis’s book on Avicenna, but it’s a well-rounded portrait of Maimonides as a thinker in his culture. Another thing that’s important about it is that it looks at both his work as a Jewish legal theorist and his work as a philosopher, so it gives you both sides of his output. Yes. I totally agree with her way of setting up the book though, because what she says is that we need to think about Maimonides from several different points of view—not just as a Jewish legal scholar, but also as someone who was responding to the culture of Islamic Spain where he was born, and who moved to Egypt because his family was chased out by anti-Jewish Muslim forces called the Almohads. She talks about how he responds to Almohad culture, despite having been chased out of Spain by them, and how he moves within an Islamic culture and responds to it, even as he was doing these pioneering works both in philosophy and in Jewish law. It’s a very well-rounded, rich picture of his thought. He was, like Averroes, born in the 12th century and lived until the 13th century. He died in 1204. Both Hebrew and Arabic. Absolutely. It’s interesting to think that he was Averroes’s contemporary. Stroumsa even argues, in the book, that he was aware of Averroes and that some of Averroes’s distinctive views about reason and religion are echoed in the work of Maimonides. One thing to realise about Maimonides and also Averroes is that, since they were from Islamic Spain, they came from a region which was marginal within the Islamic world. This was way out west, far away from the centres of power. To some extent, it seems that a distinctive and separate philosophical culture emerged in Spain and that culture was expressed by both Averroes and Maimonides, as well as by several other figures. Many Jewish figures worked in Spain. Stroumsa’s book is interesting and worth reading. There are a lot of good books about Maimonides, just as there are about Avicenna, but I thought it was worth singling this one out because the author really nails this point about Maimonides as a representative of a multi-religious Mediterranean cultur—hence the title of the book. He had different focuses in different works, but his most important philosophical work was called The Guide for the Perplexed . He said explicitly that the book was written for a Jewish reader—in fact, he even had a specific student in mind — but it was aimed at anyone who was in the predicament of this student, who is perplexed because he sees that there are tensions, or apparent tensions, between the Hebrew Bible and philosophy. You have to imagine someone who is a growing intellectual, maybe a young man. (I guess it would have been a man—Stroumsa mentions in the book that Maimonides said some really awful things about women. Sadly, there were no major female philosophers in the Islamic world until very recently.) A young man is learning the Torah, learning the Jewish Law, and then he gets exposed to Avicenna and Aristotelian philosophy. He thinks: ‘These don’t say the same thing at all. For instance, the Bible is telling me that the world is created and Aristotle is telling me that the world is eternal. What should I do?’ “A distinctive and separate philosophical culture emerged in Spain and that culture was expressed by both Averroes and Maimonides” Maimonides goes through the main points of tension and tries to resolve them for the reader. For example, he says that the Bible has very concrete descriptions of God as if He had a body, for one thing. He argues that no Jew should believe that God has a body because the argument against him having a body are too powerful. This, by the way, was very controversial. There was a later Kabbalistic thinker who said many good Jews have believed that God had a body, including better ones than Maimonides. The reason he says that is that Kabbalah often depicts God as if God had a body and describes the dimensions of his limbs. Maimonides also gets into the question of whether the universe was created or eternal. He has a famous argument—a sort of anti-argument argument—where he goes through the proofs for and against eternity, and he says that none of the proofs work one way or the other, so you can’t tell—except the Bible says that the world is not eternal, so you should believe that. He tries to eliminate philosophy’s ability to judge on that question. Yes, that’s right. But notice the implication that if there were a decisive argument from philosophy then you should believe that. So he’s not saying ‘forget philosophy, just believe the Bible.’ He’s saying: ‘philosophical arguments are indecisive here.’ There are other cases where he does think they are decisive. For example, like I said, he thinks you can prove that God doesn’t have a body, and so you are not allowed to interpret the Bible as if it says that God does have a body. You have to read those passages in a figurative or allegorical way. So, in fact, he’s being very rationalist because reason has the first go. It’s only if reason can’t figure it out that you then appeal to the Bible to settle the issue. Another issue that Stroumsa talks about is whether the body is resurrected after death, because this was a standard Jewish belief, and it’s very clear—and Stroumsa argues that it’s very clear—that Maimonides did not believe this. He got a lot of criticism for that and wrote a work defending himself and his teaching on the resurrection. So this is another case where it looks like you have a contrast between philosophy and religion. In this case, he goes with philosophy again. But, of course, he would say—just like Averroes—that the true understanding of religion is never in conflict with philosophy because philosophy demonstrates what’s true and, since religion is true, the two can’t come into conflict. If they’re in apparent conflict, you have to figure out where the philosophy leads, and then interpret the Bible accordingly."