Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages

8. Saracen Philosophers Secretly Deride Islam

 8  SaracenPhilosophersSecretlyDerideIslam The Dominican Giordano da Pisa (1260–1311), in one of the sermons of his Quaresimale fiorentino, tries to convince his listeners that all wise men, in all places and times, have rejected earthly delights and sought out intellectual and spiritual pleasures. In the course of his sermon, he makes the following remarks: Of all of the philosophers who were great philosophers, I mean those who were right and important philosophers, none of them could love the things of the world; they damned the law of the Saracens as it was, since they [the Saracens] look to earthly delights. And if one were to ask: “Are there not philosophers among them?” I answer that there were: Avicenna was a Saracen and was a philosopher, and he mocked their law and ridiculed it. And if there is any philosopher or great wise man, they themselves make fun of their own law and mock it.1 For Giordano, Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ) was not a true Muslim. Because he was a philosopher, he saw through Muslim law and ridiculed it. What makes the “Saracen law” irrational, for Giordano, is its emphasis on “earthly delights ”: Giordano no doubt has in mind (in the tradition of medieval Christian polemics against Islam) Muslim polygamy and in particular Muslim notions of a paradise replete with eating, drinking, and lovemaking. True wise men can only despise such pleasures, Giordano asserts, and thus they deride Muslim law. There are several interesting things about this passage. First, the Florentine Dominican makes this point not in a work of anti-Muslim polemics, 114 / Sons of Ishmael or even a sermon about the errors of the religious Other, but in a sermon stressing how wise men reject the pleasures of this world (a familiar trope not only in Christianity but also of course in stoic and neoplatonic philosophy , not to mention Sufism). He is anticipating a counterargument from his listeners who may know (he seems to think) two important facts: Muslims “look to earthly delights” and many wise men (philosophers and scientists) are Muslims. Giordano seeks to affirm the first of these ideas and to vigorously deny the second. In order to do so, he maintains that Muslim philosophers are in fact not really Muslims—that they reject and deride their own law. He cites Avicenna as the best known of these philosophers. We do not have to look far to see where Giordano got these ideas: from Riccoldo da Montecroce, a Dominican at the same convent in Florence, who had spent years in Baghdad learning Arabic, studying the Qur’ân, and vainly trying to convert Muslims. We will look at Riccoldo’s arguments at the end of this chapter. What interests me now is that Giordano felt a need to include this in his sermon: clearly the existence of Muslim philosophers and scientists, and their imperviousness to the “rational” polemics of Dominican missionaries like Riccoldo, rankled. In order for the Christian to affirm that his religion is “rational,” Islam (and Judaism) must be demonstrably “irrational”—and therefore he could not acknowledge the existence of philosophical minds among their adherents. This chapter explores how several twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors dealt with what became a major intellectual problem: could one affirm (or even try to prove) the rationality of Christianity? If so, why do so many apparently rational and learned people reject its truth? These two centuries saw a tremendous flow of scientific and philosophical texts from Arab to Latin. Those who read and admired these texts knew that their authors were not Christian. They also struggled to believe that their own Christian religion was rational. Out of this struggle came the need to present the religious other, Jew and Muslim, as irrational. This problem is, of course, not unique to Christianity, nor is it limited to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have often had to contend with the conflicting claims of reason and revelation, grappling with the difficult relations between scripture and classical philosophy and science and between rival religious traditions. The Bible and Qur’ân both contain passages that describe God in anthropomorphic terms: references to God’s hand and throne, to his walking, talking, or expressing human emotions or needs. God does not really have a hand, so when the Saracen Philosophers Secretly Deride Islam / 115 Qur’ân speaks of “God’s hand,” it is in fact, for theologian Fakhr al...