January 2018
The Andalusian Philosophers (Cairo )
by Abdelrashid Mahmoudi
Written by an Egyptian poet, novelist and essayist, The Andalusian Philosophers is an innovative essay that deals for the first time with three major philosophers in Muslim Spain, namely Ibn Baja (Avimpace), Ibn Tufayl () and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) from one particular angle, namely the alienation of philosophy and philosophers in (Muslim) society. Condemned in the Muslim East for heresy, philosophy is now vindicated, in what was in fact a last ditch stand, by the three Andalusian philosophers. Their endeavour was all the more remarkable in that each one of them engaged in that fight in his own original way. Ibn Baja who was inspired by Plato, devoted to the subject a treatise on what he called the management of solitude, describing how a philosopher could best manage his affairs and accomplish his mission in a hostile environment by either immigrating or isolating himself his own society. Ibn Tufayl on the other hand wrote a symbolic fable, in which he portrayed what amounted to be an extreme case of philosophers’ alienation. This is the story of a human baby found somehow in an uninhabited island, where he was adopted by a deer and brought up among wild animals, and yet managing through his observation of natural phenomena in the light of reason to reach the highest level of knowledge, piety and wisdom. When he finally came in contact with human beings, who happened to be a community of believers, presumably adepts of Islam, he was rejected and forced to beat retreat to his original island. Finally, there came Averroes, whose arrival on the scene inaugurated a new chapter of exceptional importance in the history of ideas. He refused his predecessors’ pessimistic and escapist views on the fate of philosophy. He decided instead to wage an open and all out war against the enemies of reason, with a view to consolidating philosophy’s leading status in the City. This heroic stance lead unfortunately to what was called Averroes’ ordeal. He was condemned as a heretic, exiled and had his works burnt down. Luckily, however, the bulk of his oeuvre was transmitted to Medieval Europe in a Latin translation. In this second exile, Averroes was glorified for a while by some as the Grand Commentator (of Aristotle), but was finally reviled and diabolised by the church authorities: and it was this bad reputation which came to dominate the European intellectual scene for centuries. At this point in the story of the Andalusian philosophers, there arise some inescapable questions: why was Averroes condemned for what he had put forward as an account of Aristotle’s views? Why was he held responsible for these views, assumed to be reprehensible? How was it that the grand commentator came to be viewed as the devil incarnate and pushed back into a dark corner of the European collective memory? Why was he never completely rehabilitated even in the modern age of reason?By studying these questions in depth, The Andalusian Philosophers purports to show that in spite of European hostility to Averroes his influence runs deep in modern Western philosophy. He was, so the argument goes, the first to raise, in an acute form, two fundamental issues, namely the existence of individuals and the independence of science. Apart from being a story about the persecution of philosophers and their different ways of coping, the book demonstrates, by means of a thorough and well-documented investigation of Averroes’ fate in Europe, how intercultural antagonisms do not necessarily preclude mutual enrichment.
