The background of philosophic interest in Islam is found in the earlier phases of theology. Islamic philosophy emerged from its theological background when Muslim thinkers began to study this foreign tradition, became competent students of the ancient philosophers and scientists, criticized and developed their doctrines, clarified their relevance for the questions raised by the theologians, and showed what light they threw on the fundamental issues of revelation, prophecy, and the divine law. He insisted that a purely human knowledge of all things is possible, through the use of various scientific devices, learning such things as mathematics and logic, and assimilating the contributions of earlier thinkers. In principle, however, this very same knowledge is accessible to human beings without divine aid, even though “human” knowledge may lack the completeness and consummate logic of the prophets’ divine message. Before the 11th century the Jews faced little persecution, lived among Christians, and even pursued the same occupations as Christians. No such separation is observable in the philosophy developed in the Islamic cultural context and written in Arabic: Muslims, Christians, and Jews participated in it and separated themselves according to the philosophic rather than the religious doctrines they held.

Muslims, on the other hand, possessed neither the historical status of Jews nor their place in salvation history (the course of events from Creation to the Last Judgment). You like what I’ve done with the place? Their power was immeasurably greater than that of human beings, and they had the ability to live almost indefinitely, to survive fatal wounds, to be in more than one place at once, to affect people in visible and invisible ways, and so forth. The pandemic has led to the cancellation of religious activities and in-person services around the world, but few people say their religious faith has weakened as a result of the outbreak. The two disciplines were related, because both followed the path of rational inquiry and distinguished themselves from traditional religious disciplines and from mysticism, which sought knowledge through practical, spiritual purification. The existence of a “supernatural” way to this knowledge in which all these requirements can be dispensed with was acknowledged by al-Kindī: God may choose to impart it to his prophets by cleansing and illuminating their souls and by giving them his aid, right guidance, and inspiration; and they, in turn, communicate it to ordinary human beings in an admirably clear, concise, and comprehensible style.

Reflection on the two kinds of knowledge-the human knowledge bequeathed by the ancients and the revealed knowledge expressed in the Qurʾān-led al-Kindī to pose a number of themes that became central to Islamic philosophy: the rational-metaphorical exegesis of the Qurʾān and the Hadith; the identification of God with the first being and the first cause; creation as the giving of being and as a kind of causation distinct from natural causation and Neoplatonic emanation; and the immortality of the individual soul. Devoting most of his writings to questions of natural philosophy and mathematics, al-Kindī was particularly concerned with the relation between corporeal things, which are changeable, in constant flux, infinite, and as such unknowable, on the one hand, and the permanent world of forms (spiritual or secondary substances), which are not subject to flux yet to which human beings have no access except through things of the senses. You might even say, “I didn’t put much effort into this,” but know that God can take the small things you do wholeheartedly and bless them abundantly. Heralded by a series of pogroms in both Europe and the Middle East carried out in the course of the First Crusade, a deeper and more widespread anti-Judaism came to characterize much of European history after 1100. There also emerged in this period what some historians have termed “chimeric” anti-Judaism, the conception of the Jew not only as ignorant of spiritual truth and stubbornly resistant to Christian preaching but as actively hostile to Christianity and guilty of ugly crimes against it, such as the ritual murder of Christian children and the desecration of the consecrated host of the mass.

Yet Christians also believed that it was necessary for the Jews to continue to exist unconverted, because the Apocalypse, or Revelation to John, the last book of the Christian Bible, stated that the Jews would be converted at the end of time. The saints, far from dying, are believed to reach the zenith of their spiritual life on this occasion. According to their account of his doctrines, he was totally opposed to authority in matters of knowledge, believed in the progress of the arts and sciences, and held that all reasonable human beings are equally able to look after their own affairs, equally inspired and able to know the truth of what earlier teachers had taught, and equally able to improve upon it. Christians believed not only that the Jews had misunderstood Scripture, thus justifying the Christian reinterpretation of Jewish Scripture, but that all of Jewish Scripture had to be understood as containing only partial truth. Many offerings have been found associated with this shrine, containing sacrifices of water animals and artifacts such as jade objects, which were related to water, sea, fertility, and the underworld. To reinstate the draft, Congress would have to pass appropriate legislation, and the president would have to approve that legislation.