ABSTRACT
In the year 597/1201, about five years before St Albertus Magnus and some twenty-three years before St Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) were born, far from Lauingen in Swabia and far from the castle of Roccasecca near Naples, a kindred soul of these two great medieval philosophers was born in the city of Ṭūs in the eastern province of Khurasan in Persia. Khwājah Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (597/1201–672/1274) would live simultaneously with St Albertus Magnus and St Thomas Aquinas and share much of their theological and philosophical concerns – and then some more. He would serve in the court of a world conquerer, witness the destruction of Baghdad and the downfall of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, found one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the form of a teaching observatory, contribute massively to all major branches of Islamic philosophy and then die in exactly the same year that St Thomas Aquinas died, some six years before the death of St Albertus Magnus. Had their respective faiths and languages and their opposing locations around the dividing lines of the Crusades permitted it, the two Christian and one Muslim philosopher would have found much, much indeed, to talk about and to discuss. And the three of them would have had much to learn from yet another philosopher, their senior by almost a century. Khwājah Naṣīr was three years old when the eminent Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) died in Cairo. These four represented the peak of philosophical activity in the three Abrahamic religions at that time. Ruling over their minds with almost the same intensity as the Old and 528the New Testaments and the Qur’ān was the legacy of Greek philosophy and especially Aristotle.
