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al-Andalus

In al-Andalus two philosophers wrote on how the one who knows lives among those who do not. Ibn Bājja (died 1138) wrote The Governance of the Solitary (Tadbīr al-mutawaḥḥid), governance being “the ordering of actions to an end”. Those “who stumble upon a true opinion that does not exist in the city or the opposite of which is believed in the city … are called Weeds”; in imperfect cities “the happy … will possess only the happiness of an isolated individual”, and “These individuals are the ones meant by the Sufis when they speak of the ‘strangers’ … having travelled in their minds to other stations”. His aim was practical: “We intend to discourse here about the governance of this solitary man … just as the doctor states how the isolated man in these cities should manage himself in order to be healthy”. The solitary “must associate with those who pursue the sciences”, or “emigrate to the ways of life in which the sciences are pursued—if such are to be found” (tr. Berman).

Ibn Ṭufayl (died 1185) wrote the philosophical tale Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān in answer to a friend who had asked for “the secrets of the illuminative [or oriental] philosophy referred to by … Ibn Sina”. He set two ways of knowing side by side, “taste (dhawq)” and “theoretical perception, which results from syllogistic reasoning”, and compared them to a man born blind who knows a city by his other senses and, his sight restored, finds “nothing … different from what he has believed it to be”, but with “a greater lucidity and clarity, and an exalted pleasure”. He warned against resting on the books: “Do not think that the philosophy that reached us in the works of Aristotle, Abū Nasr, and in [Avicenna’s] Healing is sufficient.” The story ends with Ḥayy finding that the Law’s teachings are similitudes of what he saw, failing to teach the islanders, and concluding that “all wisdom, guidance to the right path, and good fortune reside in the utterances of the apostles of God … nothing else is possible”. Of his own writing Ibn Ṭufayl said: “we have not left whatever secrets we confided to these pages without a thin veil and a delicate curtain, which is easy to break by those worthy of doing so” (tr. Atiyeh).

Jewish authors worked within this tradition too, reading al-Fārābī in the Arabic. Maimonides wrote that the Andalusian Jewish scholars “followed the teachings of the philosophers” and “did not adopt any of the methods of the Mutakallemim”. His Guide of the Perplexed states its reader and its purpose: “The object of this treatise is to enlighten a religious man who has been trained to believe in the truth of our holy Law … and at the same time has been successful in his philosophical studies. Human reason has attracted him to abide within its sphere … Hence he is lost in perplexity and anxiety”. Its primary object is “to explain certain words occurring in the prophetic books”, and a knowledge of “Logic and Natural Philosophy” is indispensable to it. In the parable of the palace, “so long as you are engaged in studying the Mathematical Sciences and Logic, you belong to those who go round about the palace in search of the gate”; “those who have succeeded in finding a proof for everything that can be proved … are in the palace” (III.51, tr. Friedländer).