Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 146 - Philosophy's Reign in Spain - Andalusia.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Philosophy's Reign in Spain, Andalucía. What do the following words have in common? Alcohol, saffron, coffee, hashish, and artichoke. Well, they could all be elements in a night to remember, or perhaps a night to try to forget. But what I have in mind is that they all come to us from Arabic. I've mentioned before my favorite of all etymologies, which is that the word giraffe comes from the Arabic zirafa. Not far behind is one I more recently learned about. The word arsenal derives from the Arabic phrase dar as-sinah, meaning house of manufacture, in other words the place where you make weapons. So rumors that arsenal comes from the old French for second best team in north London turn out to have been spread by nefarious Tottenham fans, as if there were any other kind. These are only a few of the English words that derive from Arabic. Some others practically contain all of world history in them. For instance orange, which came into Arabic from Sanskrit via Persian, or guitar, which has the same origin as the word zither, namely the Greek kithara. This passed into Arabic as kithar, thence into Spanish as gitarra, and then finally into English through French. Notice the intermediary role of Spanish there, which isn't a unique case. Words like adobe, aubergine, and tuna passed into our language from Arabic thanks to Spanish or Catalan. And here's my favorite example that stayed in Spanish. In Arabic, the word for until is hatta, which became hasta, as in hasta la vista, baby. Well, I say it stayed in Spanish, it did make the occasional foray into the Austrian dialect of English spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, the number of Arabic-based words in English is as nothing compared to what we can find in Spanish. If you learned only the words that come from Arabic, you could probably do pretty well on a Spanish vocabulary exam. Next time you're near a Spanish dictionary, leaf through the words starting with al. Many of these come from Arabic and have kept the Arabic definite article al as a first syllable. We've seen this before, with the etymologies of the words alchemy and almagest, the title of Ptolemy's work on astronomy. The presence of all this Arabic in the Spanish language is, of course, due to the fact that the Iberian peninsula was mostly under Muslim rule for several centuries. They arrived in a year that will be easy to remember for American convenience store patrons, 7-Eleven. Here I can't resist telling a legend mentioned by Richard Fletcher in his book Moorish Spain. It said that the kings of the Christian Visigoths had a tower sealed with many locks. When each king came to power, he would add another lock, until there were 27 of them keeping safe the secret inside. Finally, a king could not restrain himself and had the locks opened. Inside he found paintings of Arab warriors on horseback and a scroll that said, It was an event worthy of a good legend. This former Roman province, the birthplace of no less a philosopher than Seneca, was taken by the Visigoths in the 5th century. Protected by the straits of Gibraltar to the south and the Pyrenees to the north, the Christian Visigothic kingdom survived nicely until the Muslim invasions of the early 8th century. This was not simply the westernmost part of the Arab conquests that saw so much territory fall into the hands of Muslim rulers. The bulk of the invading force that conquered modern day Spain and Portugal were Berbers who had been channeled into the conquest by Arab Muslims. It would take centuries of gradual conversion until Muslims would be the dominant religion in Iberia or Al-Andalus as it was called in Arabic, hence our word Andalusia. The new territory did not play a major role in the politics of the Islamic world until the year 756. This was the time when the Abbasid Caliphate supplanted the Umayyads as rulers of the Muslim lands in the east. The Umayyad Abd al-Rahman managed to escape to the west and set up a last outpost for his otherwise defunct caliphate in Cordoba. The Umayyad Calas would rule Andalusia from that city for generations, but in 1031 the last of them was deposed, the final outcome of a general collapse of central authority on the peninsula. In place of the western caliphate, Andalusia saw the rise of the so-called Taifa kings, rulers of individual cities and small territories. Taifa is another Spanish word that comes from Arabic. It derives from the word for faction, emphasizing the fractured condition of political power in this period. We've seen how the imperial agenda of the Abbasids led to the Greek Arabic translation movement, but in this case, the rise of smaller mini-states seems to have been the spark for intellectual development, as regional princes competed to gather intellectuals at their courts. We especially see developments in medicine during the 11th century, the time of the Taifa kings. In the next episode, we'll be looking at a thinker from the first half of the 11th century by the name of Ibn Hazm. But for historians of philosophy, the really crucial period starts at the end of this century, with the coming of yet another invasion from Morocco. The way was unwittingly paved by the Christians. There was constant threat of military conflict, and not infrequently actual conflict, between Muslims and Christians along the border of the two realms in northern Spain. Christian successes led the Taifa kings to seek support from northern Africa, and the Berber group known as the Almoravids was only too happy to help. Have you ever invited a guest over and had trouble getting them to leave? Then you know how the Taifa kings felt. Taking themselves as a military arm of the Caliphate in faraway Baghdad, the Almoravids re-established a centralized authority in Andalusia. But they would rule for less than a century. Starting in the middle of the 12th century, they were in turn replaced by yet another Berber power invading from Morocco. They bore the annoyingly similar name of Almohads. The earlier group, the Almoravids, take their name from a religious retreat, or ribat, and were thus called in Arabic al-muraa bithun. The new arrivals, the Almohads, are in Arabic al-muwa hidun, from the Arabic wahed, meaning one. These were the latest defenders of God's oneness, or tawhid. Inspired by an unstoppable religious fervor, the Almohads eliminated the Almoravids, first in Morocco and then in Andalusia. Hasta la vista, baby. The Almohads are one of the few powerful groups in the earlier history of Islam that might merit comparison with modern-day fundamentalists. It will be worth our while to say something about their origins and ideology, because they dominated Andalusia starting about 1170 and for almost 200 years, with important consequences for the history of philosophy. Eventually, their star would fall too, not because of still another Berber invasion, but because of the Christians. After taking Andalusia away from the Almohads bit by bit, the Christian reconquest will be almost complete by 1252, with only an outpost of Islamic dominion remaining in the far south until 1492. But before the reconquest, the Almohads held Andalusia during the lifetimes of such thinkers as the Aristotelian commentator of Veroes, the mystic Ibn Arabi, and the towering figure of Jewish thought, Maimonides. The Almohad movement was founded by a Berber named Ibn Tumart, a strict and charismatic religious leader who came from the mountains in Morocco. From there, he traveled to the east, where he supposedly met Al-Ghazali. In any case, Al-Ghazali seems to have influenced Ibn Tumart's thought. He had chosen a moment of great upheaval for his journey. The city of Jerusalem had recently been taken, and its people massacred with a staggering display of violence by the Christian armies of the First Crusade in the year 1099. Perhaps fired by his experiences in the tumultuous east, Ibn Tumart returned to his native land and gathered supporters around him. Like the prophet Muhammad, he received a kind of religious mission while meditating in a cave. He emerged not with a revelation like that of the prophet, but with a righteous cause. And by his followers as the Mahdi, or savior, Ibn Tumart set out to undermine Almoravid power and culture in Morocco. He mocked what he saw as the effeminacy of these desert Berbers, the men wearing veils like women should do. He broke up wedding parties and smashed musical instruments. He railed against hypocrisy and injustice. He claimed it was more important to depose the Almoravids than to fight the Christians. He was, in other words, seriously bad news, at least from an Almoravid point of view. All of this sounds like it would be pretty bad news for philosophy, too. Humorless, self-righteous religious zealots aren't known for their encouragement of innovative intellectual inquiry. Yet there was something of a rationalist streak within the Almohad ideology. Their name, with its allusion to God's oneness, is only one sign that they were concerned to strip religion down to its fundamentals. For Ibn Tumart, the basic truths of Islam are present to each human from the day of birth. Here, he follows a famous saying of the prophet, that every child is born with a natural aptness for right belief. It is his parents that make him a Jew, a Christian, or a pagan. As we'll see in a few episodes, this idea that society corrupts our natural ability to discover the truth about ourselves, and, above all, about God, will be dramatically represented in a fable written by the Andalusian Muslim thinker Ibn Tufail. In this tale, a child finds itself alone on an uninhabited island, and manages to become a philosopher through independent investigation and reflection. The author Ibn Tufail had links to the Almohad rulers, and it seems likely that the story is meant at least to fit with, if not to promote, the Almohad religious ideology. What if there was good news for philosophy, there was also bad news. Before the coming of the Almohads, Andalusia had been host to a cultural flowering among Jews, who often wrote in Arabic. Maimonides was only the greatest of many significant philosophers and scientists who represented Andalusian Jewry. Back in the 11th century, the time of the Ta'ifah kings, the thinker Ibn Gabirola was espousing Neoplatonism with an enthusiasm and intellectual sophistication not seen in Judaism since Isaac Israeli in the 9th century. Under the Almoravids, we can point to Judah Halevi, a critic of philosophy, who adopted within Judaism something like the posture of Al-Ghazali in Islam. He takes us almost up to the middle of the 12th century, dying in 1141. The next decades would be a high point for Jewish thought, with several podcast episodes worth of figures appearing around the time of the transfer of power from the Almoravids to the Almohads. Which brings us to the bad news. The Almohads had little or no tolerance for members of other faiths, and coerced Jews to convert on pain of exile. This triggered a kind of diaspora within the Jewish diaspora, with the expulsion of long-existing communities of Jews from Spain. So came to an end the celebrated Convivencia, in which members of all three faiths were quite literally living together in this westernmost of all the Islamic lands. There had already been Jews on the peninsula before the coming of the Muslim armies back in the 8th century, and for centuries Jews and Muslims had lived together peacefully in Andalusia. Christians too were in the mix. These were the so-called Mozarabs, the Iberian Christians who lived and often flourished under Muslim rule. The Convivencia brought with it the sharing of ideas and debate across religious divides. The debating aspect is memorably captured at the beginning of Judah Halevi's book Kuzari, which depicts a king choosing between the teachings of philosophy, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Spoiler alert, he converts to Judaism. The more positive side is especially evident in the Jewish appropriation of ideas from Muslim thinkers. Averroes in particular was embraced by the Jews, as his sophisticated commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Hebrew and even made the subject of further commentaries. This is one example of how philosophy in Andalusia developed independently and in very different ways from what was happening far away in the eastern lands of Iraq and Persia. We could say something similar about the religious movement embodied by the Almohads. The geographical remoteness of Morocco and Spain allowed for Ibn Tumad's idiosyncratic teaching first to gain a foothold and then to achieve political dominion. Andalusian philosophy is likewise a world unto itself, something dramatically illustrated by the relatively weak impact of Avicenna in Spain. In 12th century Andalusia, Avicenna was known to some extent, but he had nothing like the influence he was already having in the east. In fact, Ibn Tufail, the Muslim thinker of Andalusia, most friendly to Avicenna, admits that he has not been able to read many Avicennan writings. Even more striking is the relative neglect paid by Jewish thinkers to Avicenna. They were far more inspired by the stricter Aristotelianism of Al-Farabi and in due course of Avarawis. The coming of the Almohads, in any case, disrupted the harmony between the faiths that had been the norm in Andalusia. We shouldn't exaggerate the harmony, of course. For one thing, remember that there was almost constant conflict with the Christian powers to the north of Muslim-held territory in Spain, and there were episodes of violence against Jews within Andalusia before the coming of the Almohads, for instance a pogrom in Granada in 1066. But broadly speaking, until the Almohad conquest, Andalusia was a place where Jews could flourish, building numerous synagogues, and wielding social and political influence. Jewish scholars were valued by Muslim rulers and served as esteemed members at court, often valued for their expertise in medicine, much as we saw with Avicenna himself. After the Almohads, by contrast, many Jews fled to the Christian-held territory in Spain, or to other lands entirely. Maimonides himself decamped with his family to Jerusalem and then to Cairo. Some expatriates went to southern France, creating a new context for philosophy. For it was especially there that we see works of philosophy and science being translated from Arabic into Hebrew, an important step since the Andalusian Jewish scholars had been able to read Arabic natively, whereas Jews living in Christendom could usually work only with Hebrew or Latin. Averroes's works were crucial in this new translation movement, whereas Avicenna's works were hardly translated into Hebrew at all. His ideas were still known, but usually indirectly, and only because they had been used by authors like Maimonides. In covering the spread of Jewish philosophy into medieval Europe, I'll have to step beyond the official borders of this series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world. But it seems obvious that I should discuss the so-called Maimonidean controversy that raged among European Jews in the 13th century after I've discussed Maimonides himself. More generally, I want to take this opportunity to give a full picture of the development of medieval Jewish philosophy, since it mostly occurred in Andalusia or responded directly to texts written there. As I've said before, this doesn't mean separating off Jewish philosophy as if it were some kind of isolated phenomenon. Rather, I think of Andalusian philosophy in its entirety as a tradition within the larger tradition of philosophy in the Islamic world. I've already explained some reasons why Andalusian thought is so distinctive. There was the specific context provided by Almoravid and then Almorhad culture. There was the geographical remoteness of this region from the Islamic heartlands, where philosophy was developing in very different ways. And of course, there was convivencia itself, the cultural and intellectual interchange between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. One significant result for historians of philosophy is the fact that Spain became a major center for the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy and science from the Arabic into the Latin language. Sometimes with the collaboration of Jews and Muslims, Christian translators like Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gunda Salinus took advantage of the multicultural setting of Toledo to produce Latin versions of works by such authors as Aristotle, al-Kindi, Isaac Israeli, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Gavirol. Thanks in part to these translations from Arabic, the course of philosophy in Latin Christendom was fundamentally changed. We'll have a chance to look at that process much later when we are looking at Latin medieval philosophy. For the forthcoming episodes, though, I'm going to avoid getting too far into the Latin context apart from an interview episode which will be devoted to the translations themselves. Instead, I'm going to focus on the ideas put forward by Muslim and Jewish thinkers, often in dialogue with one another. Here, one of the most interesting developments, far less known to historians of philosophy, is within mysticism. I already mentioned that Andalusia could boast of being the home of the great mystic Ibn Arabi, albeit that from there he traveled to the east just like Ibn Tumart and Maimonides, two men who wouldn't enjoy appearing in the same sentence. The Sufi teachings of Muslims like Ibn Arabi influenced the mystical Jewish tradition known as Qabbalah, some of whose texts were also produced in Spain. Thus, the situation with mysticism mirrors to some extent the situation with Aristotelian philosophy. Here we have Jewish thinkers taking ideas from Muslim thinkers and showing how they could be woven into long-standing Jewish intellectual traditions like Torah commentary, in the case of the philosopher Maimonides, or like mystical Judaism, in a work like the Zohar. I'm going to start, though, with something more specific to the religion of Islam. It's a topic I've brushed up against several times in previous episodes, Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh. This is a good time to look at the question of whether Islamic legal discussions have anything of value to offer the historian of philosophy. After all, the most prominent Muslim in the Andalusian tradition, a verroes, was a jurist as well as an Aristotelian philosopher. One of his most widely read works, the decisive treatise, is actually a legal judgment on the status of philosophy in the Islamic faith. By the 11th century, which is where I'll be starting to look in detail at developments in Spain, the main schools of jurisprudence have had time to emerge and establish themselves. In fact, you could argue that I'm slightly overdue to look at this phenomenon. But I wanted to wait until we reached next week's subject, an outstanding thinker of the 11th century named Ibn Hazm. His many-sided output will show us the range of intellectual activity that was already possible in 11th century Andalusia, with his contributions not just to jurisprudence, but also literature and philosophy. We'll also be getting into the previous legal tradition a bit as we consider the earlier development of the juridical schools and how the search for legal principles led scholars to sail into some rather philosophical waters. So join me next time as we go to law school, or rather schools, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi min alaikum.