ABSTRACT
The complicated interplay between the theological and the philosophical traditions in the lands of Islam reaches its climax in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. At the beginning of this period, Ghazâlî brings together the two traditions both in conflict and in harmony, because he is at once the fiercest critic of Avicenna and the person most responsible for reformulating kalâm along Avicennian lines. The most important developments in philosophy in Arabic of the following decades took place in the far Western part of the lands of Islam – Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) and the adjacent part of North Africa (the Maghrib) which was united with it under the Almohads. A distinctively Andalusian way of studying and practising philosophy had grown up among both Islamic and Jewish thinkers. Its most accomplished and daring proponent among the Muslims, Averroes, elaborated a type of purified Aristotelianism which would have immense influence on Latin and Jewish philosophers, although almost none in Islam. At the same time he engaged in a prolonged reflection on the compatibility between Islam and philosophy, which resulted in a harmonization more radical than Ghazâlî’s. Among the Jewish thinkers, Maimonides devoted himself to a tortuous reflection on the relations between his ancestral faith and his favoured Aristotelianism which would loom behind successors up to and beyond the time of Spinoza.
