Peace Be Upon You (23 page)

While the crusading movement continued to flourish for more than a century in Europe, Jerusalem was not threatened again by Western Christians. In 1204, the armies of the Fourth Crusade, transported by the Venetian fleet, took a detour and landed at Constantinople. The city was ransacked and terrorized by Western armies whose purported goal had been the liberation of the Holy Land. The fury with which the Fourth Crusaders, a combination of Frankish and German nobles, attacked the bastion of Eastern Christianity had been building for many years. Ever since Alexius Comnenus sent the First Crusade on its way, resentment of Byzantium had grown. The Venetians also coveted Byzantine wealth and influence over the commercial sea lanes of the Mediterranean.
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Saladin died soon after Richard’s departure, and his sons set up a dynasty that dissipated in a remarkably short amount of time. His heirs were everything he was not: despotic, hedonistic, undisciplined. The subsequent Mongol invasion that destroyed the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 would have continued on to Cairo and perhaps across North Africa had it not been for the slave army of Mamelukes who had first supported and then overthrown the sybaritic sons and grandsons of Saladin in their palaces in Cairo. The Mameluke army stopped the Mongols at the battle of Ain Jalut near Nazareth in 1260, and the horsemen never again threatened the Near East.

The Egypt of the Mamelukes was a stable, prosperous state, linked by trade to the West and the East thanks to a thriving merchant class of Jews, Christians, and Muslims of all denominations. The Franks and Germans understood the importance of Egypt, and the later Crusades of the thirteenth century targeted Egypt in the belief that it was the strategic key to Jerusalem. These attempts failed. Egypt easily repelled the armies of Europe, and Cairo was untouched.

The relative safety of Cairo was a magnet, and among the many it attracted was a Spanish Jew from Córdoba who arrived with little more than his clothes and a few books after fleeing from the violence and chaos that was then engulfing Andalusia. Having seen his homeland overrun by Berber armies from Morocco and his city, Córdoba, once again consumed by flames, he made his way across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Had he remained in Córdoba, he may never have written what he did, or learned what he learned. But because he was welcomed at the court of Saladin, he thrived, burdened with a deep sadness but driven by an intellectual hunger. Saladin’s most significant legacy for Islam is the capture of Jerusalem. Without intending to, he also shaped the evolution of modern Judaism, when his chamberlain in Cairo hired a Jewish refugee, Moses Maimonides, to be a court physician.

M
OSES MAIMONIDES
was not a shy man. He knew his own heart, and he minced few words. He was not modest, and he did not suffer fools. His goal was at once lofty and simple: he wanted to illuminate the darkness and banish doubt and ignorance in order to help the enlightened seeker. “I am the man,” he stated, “who when concern pressed him and… he could find no other device by which to teach a demonstrated truth other than by giving satisfaction to a single virtuous man while displeasing ten thousand ignoramuses—I am he who prefers to address that single man by himself… I shall guide him in his perplexity until he becomes perfect and he finds rest.”

Maimonides wrote these words in the preface to his magnum opus,
Guide for the Perplexed.
He was by then an old man who had seen more of the world than he had ever intended or ever wished. He had been born in 1135 in Córdoba, a city that may have been a shadow of its former greatness but remained a beacon of culture. He was the child of a judge and descended from scholars and rabbis, and from the time he could talk, he was initiated into the family business. But when he was barely a teenager, Andalusia fell under the control of yet another puritan dynasty from Morocco, the Almohads, who like their Almoravid predecessors emerged from Marrakesh and expanded in wave after wave until they inundated southern Spain.

The Almohads considered themselves reformers who would use the Quran as the foundation for law and justice, but like many puritans, they conveniently ignored passages of scripture that did not fit their worldview.
Though the Quran insists on respect and tolerance for the People of the Book, the Almohads were openly hostile to the Christians and Jews who populated the cities of southern Iberia. They placed restrictions on them, many of which were purely symbolic but nonetheless humiliating. In some areas, Jews and Christians were punished for wearing certain types of clothing, and unlike the Muslim rulers whom they supplanted, the Almohads did not welcome Jews or Christians into their courts.

Finding life uncomfortable and pathways to advancement closed, the family of Moses Maimonides left Córdoba and moved to Fez, in the heart of Almohad Morocco. At first glance that looks like a dubious decision, but Almohad rule in the Moroccan heartland may have been less restrictive than it was in the newly conquered and still insecure cities of Andalusia. The Almohads were not blessed with friendly chroniclers, and they were denigrated as narrow-minded tribesmen with no ear for music and no eye for culture. Later Jewish sources depicted the Almohads as fanatics bent on exterminating Iberian Judaism. When they conquered Morocco, they dealt harshly with anyone who did not embrace their brand of religion, including other Muslims and Jews. But Jewish accounts may also have been colored by “a narrative of persecution,”
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which inclined Jewish writers to portray diaspora Judaism as a series of tests and trials similar to the tribulations suffered by the Jews in the Old Testament after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.

Maimonides rejected the cataclysmic, melodramatic interpretation of the Jewish experience. After a period in Fez, he traveled across North Africa, often by ship, and settled briefly in Palestine. But Palestine, divided between warring Christian and Muslim princes, was inhospitable, and Maimonides and his family relocated to Cairo, where he would spend the rest of his life. His family’s commercial enterprises blossomed in Egypt, and his brother proved to be an adept and flexible merchant who increased the family’s fortunes. Maimonides, fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, absorbed the learning and culture of the Mediterranean world and evolved into a philosopher whose advice was sought by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. He was a voluminous writer, a voracious reader, and a generous teacher, and he had only scorn for those who preferred to play the victim. The world was not kind, and it was foolish, he believed, to expect otherwise. Equally foolish, in his
view, was to bow one’s head and accept punishment and oppression. God had given man ingenuity and choice, and thus the tools to survive and thrive.

In fact, one reason that Maimonides and his family may have been able to relocate to Fez was that they converted to Islam. In the long history of relations between the faiths in Spain, false conversion was common. The Almohads were unusually harsh toward nonbelievers, and the advantages of converting were obvious. No one can see into the heart of another, and recognizing that simple truth, persecuted religious minorities developed a practice known in Arabic as
taqiyya.
Translated literally as “dissimulation” or even “diplomacy,”
taqiyya
was in essence a prudent form of faking it. Early Shi’ites had done the same thing under hostile Sunni rule, and some Jews and Christians in Spain decided that, faced with hostile Muslim rulers, the pragmatic thing was to pretend to be Muslim and practice their own faith in private and in secret.

Maimonides had no patience for those who took a purist line and advocated martyrdom and death rather than survival. Defending martyrdom, he said, was “long winded foolish babbling and nonsense.” In his view, temporary conversion was acceptable, though it was best if those who did so eventually moved somewhere that would allow them to practice their rites openly.

Though he was certain that no one can know God’s will, the goal, for Maimonides, was to live a philosophical life, dedicated to understanding God’s wisdom and helping others do the same. He had grown up in an environment that nurtured philosophy. The rabbinical tradition handed down to him by his father encouraged questioning and demanded intellectual rigor, and twelfth-century Andalusia teamed with singular minds who continued to fuse the legacy of the Greeks with the theology of Islam. Though it was a Muslim society, Jews and Christians were supporting characters who played vital roles in translating and interpreting the texts of the ancients. While Jewish scholars had distinguished themselves as astronomers and as commentators on the Old Testament, Maimonides evolved into much more than a brilliant Jewish philosopher and became one of the great synthesizers of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish wisdom.

For much of his life, he was acutely aware that he was an exile. Wandering defined him, and wandering taught him. “Every righteous and intelligent person will realize that the task I undertook was not
simple…. In addition, I was agitated by the distress of our time, the exile which God decreed upon us, the fact that we are being driven from one end of the world to the other. Perhaps we have received reward for this, inasmuch as exile atones for sin.” He feared that the fact that he was an exile might lower his status and lead others to take him less seriously. But rather than accept that fate, he turned the fear into fuel. He was an exile from his home; Jews had been exiled from their Holy Land; and mankind was in exile from God. Instead of passively accepting his fate, he used his exile, and it became his spark.

His output was extraordinary, even in an age of thinkers and philosophers who routinely wrote thousands of pages on all aspects of human existence. Maimonides composed lengthy treatises on the Torah, Talmud, and the Mishnah; he carried on correspondence with Jews and learned men throughout the Muslim world; he delved into mathematics, astronomy, and medicine; and he crowned his career with his magisterial synthesis of philosophy and theology,
Guide for the Perplexed.

THE MYSTICS AND THE LAW

AS A DOCTOR
at the court of Saladin, Maimonides won the trust of the ruling class. Like Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Maimonides’ erudition and meticulous approach to diagnosing and treating the ills of the human body made him an invaluable servant to Muslim rulers. Medicine was not yet a distinct branch of knowledge. It was instead an amalgam of philosophy, science, mysticism, and theology. Anyone who wanted to be counted among the learned needed to have working familiarity with each of those, as well as fluency in Arabic and Latin, at the very least. A physician’s study began with the ancients: Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle. It may seem odd that Maimonides, who began his formal study of medicine only late in his life, became a court physician with such a flimsy medical background. But in that day and age, he was qualified to be a doctor for one unimpeachable reason: he knew about as much as any man could know.

Though many of his treatises focused on Jewish law and scripture, he frequently wrote in Arabic. That was one of the languages he learned as a child, and it was the language of scholarship throughout the Muslim world and much of the Mediterranean. His fluency allowed him to
absorb the works of the most prominent philosophers in the Arab-speaking world, and he built on what they had created.

Maimonides was not the first Jewish scholar to use the methods of Greek and Arab thinkers to unlock the keys to Jewish scriptures, but he was surely among the most masterful. He moved easily between the rabbinical tradition and the writing of Muslim scholars. The eleventh and twelfth centuries in Persia and the Near East saw a flourishing philosophical tradition that continued what had begun in Baghdad and Iraq centuries earlier. Over time, however, the arguments became more arcane, to the point where only those immersed in the corpus could understand the references and relate to the questions. Andalusian thinkers also contributed to the debates, especially Ibn Rushd, who was known in the West as Averroës and who like Maimonides had been born in Córdoba but unlike him carved out a niche as a court intellectual under the puritanical Almohads.

While this fraternity of Arabic-speaking philosophers differed greatly in their actual answers, they shared common questions: What was the role of human reason in explaining the world? To what degree could men rely on their intellect to unveil God’s plan, and how much should they look to faith and belief instead? Could the intellect act as a conduit to the truth, or was it a distraction that would keep man from God? Maimonides lived at a crucial juncture when the balance shifted decisively in the direction of faith over reason, belief rather than philosophy, and heart over mind.

Philosophers such as Averroës and the Persian Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) were themselves suspicious of pure philosophy. They believed that reason had a place in explaining God’s wisdom but only in conjunction with theology and faith. Much of what they wrote was esoteric. Thousands of pages were consumed by questions such as: How eternal is eternity? Was the universe created by God “in time” or before time itself was created? Does God have foreknowledge of all details of human history and action, or simply access to all details but no advance knowledge? Unless one had spent long years steeped in these issues, the references and the logic were difficult if not impossible to follow. But threading through the esoterica was a portentous debate about the proper relationship between reason, free will, and faith.