I said to him one day: If the soul has such immortality that allows it, after death, to apprehend from the outside the state of [material] beings, then let us promise each other that if you die before me, you will contact me, and if I die before you, I will contact you. He agreed, and I urged him not to forget his promise … Then I saw him in a dream, sitting outside a mosque, in an enclosure within its courtyard, wearing new white clothes of fine fabric. I said to him: ‘You Doctor, didn’t we agree that you will come to tell me what you found out?’ So he laughed and turned away. I grabbed him by the hand and said: ‘You must tell me what you found out, and what happens after death!’ He said: ‘The universal joined the universal, while the parts remained in the part.’ I understood that he was speaking of himself, alluding to the fact that the universal soul returned to the world of the universals, while the partial body remained in the part, which is the earthly center.
These are the words that Jamāl al-Dīn Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 431/1248), a devout Muslim sage from the city of Aleppo, wrote about his friend Joseph ben Yehuda of Ceuta (d. 623/1226), a Jewish scholar and disciple of Maimonides. Al-Qifṭī’s words, which were mentioned by Sarah Stroumsa in her acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Lucas Leopold Prize, testify not only to the close friendship that developed between the Muslim scholar and the Jewish one while they both lived in Aleppo. They also attest to a shared conceptual environment, to similar dilemmas and doubts, and to a unique intimacy that allowed them to communicate, in their lifetime and even after death, about such weighty philosophical questions as the fate of the soul. This kind of connection, stated here in the first person, opens a window onto the possibility of recognizing the mutual bonds, the reciprocal relations, and the exchanges of gestures and knowledge that occurred between Muslims and Jews—in the Levant, but also far away from there across the Islamic world. Such ties were not the only form of contact between Jews and Muslims—as well as contact between these two and Christianity—in the pre-modern world, but they were a firm and valid form of communication, and played a formative role in the formation and evolution of the various religions and in the movement of knowledge that characterized the Middle Ages.
This is a festschrift in honor of Sarah Stroumsa, an eminent scholar, a close friend and colleague, who through the years has embodied and advanced the possibility of collaboration across borders. It is presented to her by scholars who have had the privilege of collaborating with her in one way or another, in work on the study of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, the intercultural contact and migration of knowledge in the Islamic world, and many other topics. Over the course of an illustrious career, that is still ongoing, Sarah has shown generosity, diligence, and a dedication to cultivating the fields of research in which she works, to mentoring young researchers, and to establishing collaborations that enable the creation of communities of knowledge that bring together representatives of different disciplines, from varied geographical and intellectual spheres and from different stages along the academic path. This book features new studies written by members of the multi-faceted, ever-growing community of Sarah’s collaborators, friends, and students.
The articles in this book were written in some cases with an emphasis on the historical approach, and in others with an emphasis on philosophical methodology, by authors working in a wide range of disciplines, including the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their various facets, philosophy, literature and theology, hermeneutics, the study of manuscripts in the Muslim world, the reception of pre-modern sources, and varied forms of the study of history—intellectual, social, institutional, legal, history of the book and the history of science and technology. The studies that appear herein are all in English but were written by authors who also regularly write in many languages other than English, among them Hebrew, Arabic, German, French and Spanish, and who hail from all corners of the world—Israel, Palestine, Egypt, the United States, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and more. With all of them, Sarah has forged a professional and personal connection, in writing and in meetings face to face.
The book is divided into seven sections, designed in relation to the central areas and themes of Sarah’s research. In many studies, Sarah addressed the history of the relations between religion, knowledge, and society across the Islamic world in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian contexts, from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the various changes, incarnations and manifestations they have known since then (the section History, Society and Religion). Over the years, Sarah developed an integrative approach to the study of the transformation of ideas among Jews and Muslims, beginning with an understanding of the place and unique intellectual affinities of the earliest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, Dāwūd ibn Marwān al-Muqammaṣ (Dāwūd ibn Marwān al-Muqammiṣ and his ʿishrūn maqāla, 1983), who was based in the Levant, and continuing all the way through to her monograph Andalus and Sefarad (2019), which traces the development of a reciprocal philosophical culture in the Iberian peninsula among Muslim and Jewish scholars (the Andalus and Sefarad section). Sarah’s studies place a special emphasis on the links between Maimonides and Muslim thought and culture, and on the responses that his work evoked among some of his closest students and his sharpest opponents already during his lifetime, and beyond. This scholarly focus, which is evident already in Sarah’s early book on The Beginnings of the Maimonidean Controversy in the East (1999) and which reached a pinnacle in the book Maimonides in His World (2009), is reflected in the Maimonides and the Maimonidean Dynasty section of this book. One of Sarah’s methodological innovations, which has to do with understanding the multiplicity of dimensions involved in the movement of knowledge across communal boundaries, is the idea of a “whirlpool effect.” The image of the whirlpool also captures the special challenge of identifying the vectors of this movement and deciphering the elements that make it up, since ideas in motion are like colorful drops that fall into a whirlpool and are immediately carried away by the current, coloring the body of water into which they have become integrated and changing their own color in the process. Inter-cultural motions and contacts of this sort are presented in the studies that appear in the section of this book titled The Whirlpool at Work. Ever since her doctoral thesis, and in dozens of later studies, Sarah’s writing has been characterized by a mastery of the technical philosophical terminology of various movements and schools of thought in the Islamic world, and an ability to follow the steps of the philosophical argument with precision and care. These are crucial features for scholarly writing in the area of the history of philosophy, the discipline to which belong the studies that appear in the section Philosophy in the Islamicate World and Beyond. Throughout her years of work, Sarah took part in shaping the community of scholars who are active in the broad field of the Intellectual History in the Islamicate World, which encompasses such varied fields of knowledge as theology, philosophy, literature, hermeneutics and law, and various bodies of knowledge, such as the Rabbanite, Karaite, Sunnī, Muʿtazilite and Shīʿite literature. A section of the book is devoted to this subject. Finally, modern scholarship, too, is the result of historical processes, encompassing various figures, institutions, disciplines, and categories. It has been shaped by a multitude of potentials, by paths taken and not taken. Sarah’s preoccupation with the history of scholarship and the annals of its reception is expressed, inter alia, in her methodological criticism of one-dimensional scholarship that ignores the reciprocal relations between cultures, and in the effort—in which Sarah participated—to compile Shlomo Pines’ Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy (1996) and to revisit his legacy as the English translator of The Guide of the Perplexed. Studies in this vein appear in the book’s final section, Modern Scholarship and Scholars.
This festschrift was made possible by the efforts of many people. Guy Stroumsa was committed to this project from the moment the idea was born. Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Sebastian Günther were generous and supportive, first in offering a home for the book in the series they edit at Brill, “Islamic History and Civilization,” and then in their assured accompaniment of the manuscript and their good advice. Camilla Adang generously helped us give the book its name. The copyeditors Valerie Joy Turner, Hanna Siurua, and Pamela Lankas worked efficiently and diligently on preparing the various articles and giving the book a unified style. Yotam Schremer also helped us in preparing the manuscript, with speed and intelligence. The book’s publication was supported throughout by the generosity of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ.
And above all, this book would not have been possible without the willingness and dedication of the contributing authors to share with us the fruits of their research. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work on the book, to learn from the thought-provoking papers, to come into fertile intellectual contact with old friends and forge new connections throughout the process. To our great sadness, Josef van Ess, who wished to contribute, was denied the opportunity and we were denied the privilege. May his memory be a blessing. Finally, we thank Sarah, from the bottom of our hearts, in our names and in the names of the contributing authors, for many years of diverse research, unflagging support, sharp criticism and faithful advice, and we wish her many good and pleasant years of blessed work.
Omer Michaelis and Sabine Schmidtke