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Maimonides in His World
While the great medieval philosopher, theologian, and physician Maimonides is acknowledged as a leading Jewish thinker, his intellectual contacts with his surrounding world are often described as related primarily to Islamic philosophy. Maimonides in His World challenges this view by revealing him to have wholeheartedly lived, breathed, and espoused the rich Mediterranean culture of his time. Sarah Stroumsa argues that Maimonides is most accurately viewed as a Mediterranean thinker who consistently interpreted his own Jewish tradition in contemporary multicultural terms. Maimonides spent his entire life in the Mediterranean region, and the religious and philosophical traditions that fed his ...
Andalus and Sefarad
An integrative approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus Al-Andalus, the Iberian territory ruled by Islam from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was home to a flourishing philosophical culture among Muslims and the Jews who lived in their midst. Andalusians spoke proudly of the region's excellence, and indeed it engendered celebrated thinkers such as Maimonides and Averroes. Sarah Stroumsa offers an integrative new approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus, where the cultural commonality of the Islamicate world allowed scholars from diverse religious backgrounds to engage in the same philosophical pursuits. Stroumsa traces the development of philosophy in Musli...
Freethinkers of Medieval Islam
This book studies the phenomenon of freethinking in medieval Islam, as exemplified in the figures of Ibn al-R wand and Ab Bakr al-R z . It reconstructs their thought and analyzes the relations of the phenomenon to Islamic prophetology and its repercussions in Islamic thought.
Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society
The interaction between Muslims and the other religious denominations of the Middle East in the period 620-1020 is the subject of this volume. This is arguably the single most important issue in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, since the Muslims were initially a minority in the lands that they had conquered and so had to reach some modus vivendi with the various religious communities in their realm. Fifteen articles by leading scholars shed light on this process from a number of different perspectives: historical, conceptual, legal, social and theological. An introduction both gives an overview and examines possibilities for future research. The period under study is demarcated at one end by the Prophet Muhammed (d. 632) who, as the Qur’an tells us, had to deal with Jews, Christians and polytheists. At the other end lies the great legal/political thinker Manardi (d. ca. 1020), by whose time the Middle East had become substantially Islamicised.
Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled
Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled unearths forgotten texts that once belonged to the library of the Karaite community in Cairo. Consigned to oblivion for centuries, many of these manuscripts were sold in the second half of the nineteenth century to the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, where they remained inaccessible to most scholars until the end of the Cold War. The texts from the Karaite library cover a remarkable spectrum of medieval literary genres and scholarly disciplines, spanning works by Jewish, Muslim and Christian authors, in both Hebrew and Arabic. As such, they provide unique access to an otherwise lost body of literature from the medieval Islamicate worl...
The Barāhima’s Dilemma
When debating the need for prophets, Muslim theologians frequently cited an objection from a group called the Barāhima – either a prophet conveys what is in accordance with reason, so they would be superfluous, or a prophet conveys what is contrary to reason, so they would be rejected. The Barāhima did not recognise prophecy or revelation, because they claimed that reason alone could guide them on the right path. But who were these Barāhima exactly? Were they Brahmans, as their title would suggest? And how did they become associated with this highly incisive objection to prophecy? This book traces the genealogy of the Barāhima and explores their profound impact on the evolution of Isla...
Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience
The papers in this volume were delivered at the first international colloquium by the Jacob Taubes Minerva Center for Religious Anthropology at Bar Ilan University, held in February 1995. Concepts of Self, Soul and Body are so close to the physiological layers of life that we may imagine them to be biological as well; but in fact, they are social constructs, and a source of fundamental metaphors for the classification of experience. They thus help organize the world, at the same time as they express basic human identity. They vary from culture to culture and can productively be compared and contrasted from one setting to another. We intend these papers to be a test case of the benefit to be gained from attention to Religious Anthropology.
Interpreting Maimonides
Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) was arguably the single most important Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, with an impact on the later Jewish tradition that was unparalleled by any of his contemporaries. In this volume of new essays, world-leading scholars address themes relevant to his philosophical outlook, including his relationship with his Islamicate surroundings and the impact of his work on subsequent Jewish and Christian writings, as well as his reception in twentieth-century scholarship. The essays also address the nature and aim of Maimonides' philosophical writing, including its connection with biblical exegesis, and the philosophical and theological arguments that are central to his work, such as revelation, ritual, divine providence, and teleology. Wide-ranging and fully up-to-date, the volume will be highly valuable for those interested in Jewish history and thought, medieval philosophy, and religious studies.
An Anxious Inheritance
An Anxious Inheritance examines the role of the ever-expandable category of "non-Muslims" in early Islam. It demonstrates how the Qur'an functioned as both a script to understand them and as a map to classify them, and this category's role in shaping (Sunni) orthodoxy. This orthodoxy was considered natural, but in fact it was based on retroactive back-projections. Non-Muslims and the "wrong" kinds of Muslims became integral to understanding what true religion was not and what it should be. These non-Muslims were rarely real individuals or groups; rather, they functioned as textual foils that could be conveniently orchestrated, and ultimately controlled, to facilitate self-definition.
New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations
This work revisits the millennia-old Jewish-Christian encounter by providing a nuanced understanding of its challenges as well as presenting new perspectives on hitherto neglected areas of cultural, religious, and social interchange and influence.
