Subtle Insights Concerning Knowledge and Practice by Sa῾d ibn Mansur ibn Kammuna al-Baghdadi (review)

One of the interesting developments engendered by the challenge of modernity to tradition is a growing sense of common cause among the world’s major religions as they confront this latest and perhaps greatest threat to their existence. Humanity’s spiritual and metaphysical systems, embattled on a variety of fronts by the inroads of science, democracy, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism, have deployed similar methods in order to strike back: critiques of the theory of evolution; “scientific” proofs of the existence of God; denunciations of the moral relativism purportedly generated by positivism; and arguments to the effect that genuine feminism is to be found in scripture, or that democracy must be tempered by theocracy, or that ingesting forbidden foodstuffs is medically unhealthy. Western knowledge has become both nemesis and touchstone in the eyes of today’s faithful. Though it may not look possible at the moment, the common challenge faced today by the adherents of the various traditional faiths may soon become a unifying factor. The medieval version of this inescapable menace-cum-preeminent criterion was Greek wisdom. The exponents of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and, to a lesser extent, other faiths such as Zoroastrianism and Hinduism were forced to deal with what had long since become the near-universal benchmark for intellectual legitimacy: Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Neoplatonism, among other Greek philosophies. Here, too, a certain camaraderie among otherwise mutually antagonistic confessions was produced by the omnipresent necessity to grapple, and simultaneously find favor, with the self-same “rational” system. Comparable answers to the questions proffered by demythologized Hellenism were suggested by luminaries of the three “Semitic” creeds, with illustrious thinkers from Sa῾adya Gaon and Maimonides, to Augustine and Aquinas, to al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, together with hundreds of others taking on the Peripatetic (and Hermetic) adversary/master in ways familiar to, and derived from, one another.

This “collaboration,” or at least shared vocabulary, prepared the ground for the emergence of the figure of Ibn Kammuna (d. 1284), a Jewish physician and philosopher of Baghdad whose oeuvre included the more well-known Tanqiḥ (“Re-examination”), a comparison of the three Abrahamic faiths Y. Tzvi Langermann, a first-rate Israeli Arabist, has applied his impressive linguistic and translation skills, combined with his wide-ranging erudition in the field of medieval Muslim philosophy, to another of this somewhat elusive author’s productions, the Nukat Latīfa. This is a sui generis text, in that Ibn Kammuna attempts a neutral, as it were generic, discussion that is designed to sit well with adherents of any of the three monotheisms. One of Langermann’s major contributions as a commentator is his elucidation of the subtle methods by which Ibn Kammuna navigates between the idiosyncrasies of Torah, New Testament, and Qur’anic worldviews, or perhaps more specifically, those of each religion’s scholastics, in order to offend no one and influence all. It is interesting to observe that Ibn Kammuna does not always succeed at this. At one point he discourages the accumulation of wealth in order to hand it down to one’s children. I am not aware of any such stricture in Judaism, or even in Christianity, but in Islam we have an explicit tradition from the mouth of the Prophet mitigating the “anti-hoarding” verse and specifically permitting such accumulation for purposes of inheritance. Ibn Kammuna is evidently urging a supererogatory, not to say Ṣufī, outlook on this subject.

The work is divided into two sections: (1) ῾ilm or knowledge, concerned with fundamental, metaphysical questions of “is,” and (2) ῾amal or practice, concerned with derivative, quotidian questions of “ought.” In the first section Ibn Kammuna tackles issues ranging from proofs of the existence of God and theories concerning the nature of this being as the “Necessary Existent”; to epistemological questions of what amounts to reason versus...