I don’t want for the time being to weigh in on the horrible present battle in Israel and Palestine, save to supply my condolences to anybody whose family members are harm by its horrors. I salute these on both facet who’re nonetheless striving, within the midst of all of it, for a world the place each Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. However I do not know get there; if there’s a method, it’ll require the advanced and troublesome work of diplomats and politicians greater than philosophers, and ones who know that scenario much better than I do. What I hope I can supply at the moment is merely a little bit of historic perspective. That’s: most of us alive at the moment have solely identified a world the place Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at one another’s throats. But it surely wasn’t at all times that method.
The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the eighth to thirteenth centuries, are sometimes thought of the Muslim golden age, the place Muslim societies have been the envy of the world for his or her civilizational achievements from poetry to drugs. Twentieth-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal seemed again with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they’d fallen from it underneath British colonialism.
What’s much less regularly famous is that that period was additionally a Jewish golden age.
Moses Maimonides, typically thought of the best of all Jewish philosophers, was born in Córdoba and spent most of his life in Fès and Cairo – all main centres of the Islamic Golden Age, whose stunning architectural monuments nonetheless stand at the moment. (His life in Fès and Cairo additionally makes him a significant determine in African thought.) Muslim rulers didn’t at all times deal with him nicely; he left Córdoba for Fès as a result of the brand new Almohad caliphate kicked out non-Muslims. However the Muslim worlds of Fès and Cairo nonetheless nourished him to put in writing a few of the most lasting works of Jewish theology and philosophy, harmonizing Hebrew scholarship with Aristotle. His work drew deeply on that of Muslim Aristotelian philosophers like ibn Sīnā. Maimonides was a lot part of the Islamic world that his most well-known work, the Information to the Perplexed, was written in Arabic – Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic that was written in Hebrew script. However from the attitude of mutual assist between Jews and Muslims, maybe extra fascinating nonetheless was Maimonides’s son.
The Faith 101 model of Sufism is that it’s the primary mystical Muslim motion. Once I took a course in South Asian Islam from Ali Asani, he famous how Sufis had typically been notably receptive to non-Muslim traditions. I requested “Had been there ever individuals who recognized as Sufi however not Muslim?” Asani mentioned that such individuals existed now, amongst New Age practitioners, implying that this was a brand new phenomenon of the Twentieth century. However a later course on monotheism and ethics from Jay Harris proved that implication flawed. In Harris’s introduction to Maimonides’s thought, he briefly talked about that Maimonides’s son was – a Jewish Sufi. (He paused so as to add for emphasis: “There have been such issues.”)
All that is method out of my very own specialty areas. I used to be delighted to search out not too long ago that the main professional on Abraham Maimonides, Moses’s Sufi son, is Elisha Russ-Fishbane, whom I knew briefly in grad faculty (and presumably studied with Harris). I hazily recall a dialog I had with Russ-Fishbane about how he, a really pious Jew, had been relationship a equally pious Muslim, and so they couldn’t make it work – not for any political motive, however just because the obligations imposed by their traditions have been so totally different. However that clearly didn’t cease him from wanting deeply into the factors of contact between the 2 traditions – that are, in spite of everything, each Semitic traditions, from the identical a part of the world, each monotheistic, each deeply involved (as Christianity is just not) with a scripture that gives authorized obligations.
However again to Abraham Maimonides, as Russ-Fishbane describes him in a fascinating interview. Like his father, Abraham wrote in Judeo-Arabic. Like others of his period, he didn’t see his mysticism and his father’s philosophical rationality as opposed; they supported one another, constructed on one another.
Abraham Maimonides thought that the Judaism of his day was at a religious low level which may very well be revived via Sufi or Sufi-like practices: he proposed making Jewish prayer extra just like the Muslim (for instance, washing beforehand, and going through Jerusalem). He emphasised piety (hasidut): the time period that might later give its title to Hasidic Judaism, and meant a striving to turn into prophets. In flip, “Prophecy in its pietist context was a decidedly particular person goal and (in as far as glimpses of it have been attained by the pietists) performed itself out primarily in particular person experiences” – what we might now name mystical experiences. What hasidut meant in observe was the sorts of Sufi practices – solitary meditation, chanting in worship – that might lead one to greater interior states of consciousness (maqāmāt). The devotee may obtain an illumination, a radiant glimpse of actuality past the senses. (On this objective Abraham was not so removed from his Aristotelian father: “For each males, the trail to enlightenment was mental contemplation, throughout which the mind was purified of its worldly sensation with a view to catch a glimpse of the divine actuality.”)
This Maimonides spoke extremely of Islamic monotheism, and thought that residing within the Islamic world influenced Jews to positively preserve the purity of their religion. In Russ-Fishbane’s phrases:
His proof was to match Jewish religion in Islamic lands with that in Christendom. Whereas no Jew anyplace within the Islamic world, he chided, would dare query the basics of the religion for worry of being the article of ridicule, a variety of Jews in Europe did fall prey to spurious beliefs, underneath what he thought of the lower than salutary affect of Christianity in its anthropomorphic considering.
So whereas a talmudic regulation (hukkot ha-goyim) prohibited Jews from imitating the methods of the gentiles, Abraham Maimonides interpreted this as which means solely idolaters – which Muslims weren’t. Furthermore, “Muslims and Christians pray and provides charity, and no Jew would ever dream of banning such actions just because they’re additionally gentile practices. Why, he requested, ought to or not it’s any totally different when contemplating practices like prostration and kneeling that have been no much less authentically Jewish than they have been Islamic?”
Abraham Maimonides’s Sufi pietist motion – maybe sadly – didn’t final. The Hasidism we all know at the moment is one thing very totally different, with out the clear Sufi affect. However he provides us a captivating glimpse of a world that when was, and should have a number of classes for each Jews and Muslims at the moment – and possibly even for the remainder of us.
