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Back in Alexandria, Halevi was accused before the Islamic court of withholding money entrusted to him on behalf of a Jewish apostate in order to coerce the apostate to return to Judaism; Halevi escaped punishment thanks to legal maneuvering and powerful friends. Soon thereafter he embarked, but had to wait on board six days before the winds permitted him to sail. A letter from al-Andalus arrived, notifying Halevi that another member of the Ibn Ezra family had decided to travel east; Halevi deposited a valuable piece of cloth with a friend to be held for this relative’s arrival. Halevi’s ship sailed on May 14, 1141; letters written later that year permit the inference that he reached Palestine and died shortly thereafter.

The chapter studies four poems in which Halevi, still in al-Andalus, describes his longing for and vision of the Land of Israel. Among these poems is Halevi’s most famous poem, the Ode to Jerusalem. It is interpreted as speaking not, as usually understood, on behalf of the people as a whole, but as the voice of an individual who, toward the end, becomes the spokesman of a small, elite group of Zion’s true devotees.

This chapter assesses al-Andalus as a focus for Jewish identification, noting Jacques Derrida's comparison of al-Andalus to Yiddish as a portable home. By way of Gil Anidjar's Our Place in al-Andalus, it explores the experience of place, showing how al-Andalus can refer to a spatiotemporal context not defined on a map of European Spain. This experience of al-Andalus comes from a place already located as past centuries ago, and the chapter highlights this pluperfect in parallel to Derrida's sense of loss in an urban Algeria where Ladino was no longer commonly spoken years before his birth. This received language of sadness and loss produces a version of mourning and utopia different from the spatial notions of home advocated by either Zionists or assimilationists in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance, pointing instead to a time and place whose boundaries are uncertain by conception, embodying a language that embraces such uncertainty without discomfort.

This introductory chapter provides a background of al-Andalus. Within the Islamic world, “al-Andalus” (Islamic Spain) constituted a distinct cultural unit with its own unique characteristics. The borders of this territory changed over time, following the advance of the Christian conquests. Toward the end of the second/eighth century, al-Andalus covered most of the peninsula (today's Spain as well as Portugal), while in the eighth/fifteenth century, the shrunken Emirate of Granada alone, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, remained in Muslim hands. This book's period of interest extends mainly from the tenth to the sixth/twelfth century, when Jews living under Islam in the Iberian Peninsula played a significant cultural role, and when philosophy flourished in al-Andalus. The philosophy and theology that were produced in this cultural unit developed as a continuation of speculative thought in the Islamic East and remained in constant dialogue with it. Yet the philosophical and theological works of Andalusian authors are not servile replicas of Maghreban or Eastern sources. They have a distinctive character that, while showing their different sources, displays their originality and their Andalusian provenance.

This chapter discusses the earliest manifestations of systematic philosophy in al-Andalus, as well as their religious and political context. The second half of the tenth century was a watershed in Andalusian intellectual history. The story of this turning point is twofold. The first part relates to the introduction of sciences to al-Andalus, while the second relates to the censorship of philosophical and scientific books. The censorship of books was accompanied by the persecution of their readers, which drastically limited, and sometimes paralyzed, the Muslim practice of philosophy as it was prevalent at the time: Neoplatonic as well as mystical philosophy. Yet these restrictions were applicable to Muslims alone. Jewish thinkers, inspired by the same suspect sources, continued to develop the same sort of forbidden philosophy. Consequently, it is these Jewish thinkers who are prominent in the history of philosophy in al-Andalus in the eleventh century; and it is also they who served as custodians of the forbidden lore until better times. The chapter also studies Ibn Masarra, who is commonly considered to have been the first independent Andalusī Muslim thinker of local extraction.

This chapter examines the theological and legal scene of al-Andalus. In the medieval Islamicate world, the development of philosophy was tightly linked to religion and religious thought. As such, theology and law are constitutive of the study of medieval Islamicate philosophy. Moreover, theological and legal schools were often more precisely delineated than philosophical ones, and individual allegiance to them tended to be more clearly identified, or at least was expected to be so. The chapter then considers two Muslim schools—the one theological (the Muʻtazila), the other legal (Ẓāhirism)—and their possible manifestations among contemporary Andalusian Jews, both Karaites and Rabbanites. The Muʻtazila, whose adherents were known as “the proponents of divine unity and justice,” firmly upheld the primacy of the intellect as a divine gift to humanity. They also believed that the revealed text-that is, the Qur'ān-which is also a divine gift, cannot possibly contradict the ordinances of the intellect, as one divine gift cannot counteract the other. With these presuppositions, the Muʻtazilites set out to harmonize the two divine sources of knowledge: the intellect and the Qur'ān. Meanwhile, the Ẓāhirites relied on two primary sources: the Qur'ān and the ḥadīth.

This chapter focuses on Andalusian philosophers. Philosophers, in al-Andalus as elsewhere in the medieval Islamicate world, were committed to what can be called “the philosopher's life,” namely, the unremitting effort to attain human perfection. At the same time, as intellectuals integrated into their own societies, they could significantly shape their communities' cultural, communal, and even political profiles. Philosophers in al-Andalus truly shared a common philosophical tradition. Jews and Muslims alike read scientific and philosophical works translated from Greek into Arabic, as well as books by earlier Muslim and Christian thinkers. Being a small minority within their respective religious communities, and sharing the same education, interests, concerns, and ideals, philosophers constituted, in some ways, a subculture of their own. While they lived fully within their own religious community and adhered to the boundaries between it and other religious groups, they were acutely aware of the commonality of philosophy. The chapter then evaluates the philosophical curriculum which guided the advancement of students to become philosophers, as well as the friendships formed between philosophers. It illustrates the inherently elitist nature of the philosophers' life qua philosophers.

This chapter analyzes how the attraction to Neoplatonism unfolded in al-Andalus in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries. Until the middle of the twelfth century, philosophy in al-Andalus was almost entirely dominated by Neoplatonism. It ranged from mystical philosophy and Sufi-inspired pietism, via compositions dedicated to the occult, to comprehensive, sometimes highly abstract Neoplatonist systems. In itself, this Neoplatonist near-monopoly in al-Andalus is hardly surprising: different shades of Neoplatonism were also prevalent in the Islamic East in this period. Remarkable, however, are the relative parts played by Muslims and Jews in Andalusian philosophy. Within the overarching Andalusian Neoplatonism, one can clearly detect a two-pronged development, the two branches of which progress in the same direction. They do so, however, at a drastically different pace and with different levels of self-confidence. Thus, beginning with Isaac Israeli in the tenth century, Jewish philosophy emerged in an uninterrupted vigorous tradition. In contrast, since Ibn Masarra in the first half of the tenth century, Muslim al-Andalus witnessed a decidedly sporadic growth of Neoplatonism, one that alternately ducked and surfaced. It was the political map of al-Andalus, and the different ways it impacted on Muslims and Jews, that determined this difference.

This chapter explores the remarkable phenomenon of twelfth-century rigorous Andalusian Aristotelianism. In the early twelfth century, the philosophical map of al-Andalus was dramatically redrawn. Along with what can only be described as the blossoming of Islamic philosophy after its constrained state in the previous century, one notices a significant shift to an orthodox version of Aristotelian philosophy. The thought of the Eastern Aristotelians was sprinkled with un-Aristotelian elements. Largely in response to Platonizing authors, especially Avicenna, Andalusian falāsifa explicitly identified with the Peripatetic tradition, and strove to strengthen the authority of Aristotle and his commentators. This stricter version of Aristotelianism, which makes its debut with Ibn Bājja under the Almoravids, was further crystalized under the Almohads by philosophers such as Averroes and Maimonides. The chapter also considers “the Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy.” The term “Andalusian Revolt” was first coined in 1984 by Abdelhamid Sabra in his discussion of astronomical theories that attempted to dethrone Ptolemy's astronomy from its almost unquestioned authority.

This concluding chapter explains that the twelfth century represented the high watermark of philosophy in al-Andalus. Although the thirteenth century saw some remarkable manifestations of Neoplatonic mystical philosophy, the Aristotelian school had no significant succession after Averroes within the borders of al-Andalus. However, the legacy of Arabic Andalusian philosophy, both Muslim and Jewish, continued to thrive in the Iberian Peninsula. The chapter then looks at the transmission of Arabic philosophy from al-Andalus to Christian Spain. After the Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085, Christian Spain witnessed a growing interest in philosophy and science. This interest was expressed in a large-scale effort to translate philosophical texts from Arabic. A significant part of the task of transmitting Arabic philosophy to the Christians fell to the Jews, many of whom found refuge from Almoravid and Almohad persecution in Christian territory, and some of whom had converted to Christianity. Even more important is their role in preserving the Arabic texts themselves, as well as the scholarly tradition attached to them.

This chapter examines the case of the first Almoravid amir, Yusuf ibn Tashfin (r. 1061–1106), a Lamtuna Sanhaja Berber, and the way that genealogy can legitimise political authority. More specifically, it considers how Yusuf ibn Tashfin claimed an Arab genealogy that drew on a textual heritage shared by Muslims in the East and the West. It begins with a discussion of the Almoravids and the role they played in the expansion and defence of Islam in the Islamic West; they controlled a territory, West Africa, where Islam was disseminated, as well as another region, al-Andalus, where it was necessary to defend the religion against the advances of the Christian kings from the north. The chapter then provides an overview of al-Andalus before looking at the origins of the Berbers, and in particular their relationship to the tribe of Himyar. It also analyses how genealogy enabled Yusuf ibn Tashfin to address his problems related to political and religious legitimacy.

This chapter examines the case of the Nasrids of Granada in late Muslim Spain. In his biographical dictionary al-Ihata fi akhbar Gharnata, the Andalusi scholar Ibn al-Khatib (d. 776/1374) emphasises the genealogical links of Arab families in Granada in his day with those of ancestors dating from the conquest period. At the same time, the dynasty's genealogy connects through an ancestor to Prophetic times. These prestigious genealogical roots placed the Nasrid kingdom in a solid position to counteract its Christian and Maghribian rivals. Ibn al-Khatib's material focuses on the conquest and on those Muslims who were the first to enter the Iberian Peninsula, that is, the Arab conquerors. This chapter looks at Nasrid elites in Granada and their Arab ancestors among the conquerors. It also describes al-Andalus, considered to be an island surrounded by the sea and by Christians, and at the time of the Nasrids in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries was inhabited by Arabs who took pride in their ancestry linking them to Arabia and Syria.

This introduction lays out the argument that an exploration of Muslim mobility and diversity across Asian history can help identify coercive dimensions that are often elided in dominant modern visions of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Starting with a discussion of the role that images of the premodern Muslim kingdom of al-Andalus in Spain have played in Muslim memory as a marker both of nostalgia and loss, the introduction then transitions to Asia. Specifically, the chapter traces how Islamic ideas of pilgrimage, migration, and learning shaped imaginaries of movement and of ‘opening’ frontier space defined as much by agonistic confrontation as by accommodation. These conceptual reflections build upon references to particular histories and historiographies of cosmopolitanism - including debates on the Indian Ocean, Sufism, religious ‘conscience’, and the global ‘umma’. Finally, this discussion sets the stage for the volume chapters to follow on coercion, asymmetrical power relations, and cosmopolitanism across diverse Asian Muslim societies.

Chapter 4 analyses how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired knowledge about the Roman West. Loosely speaking, they accessed the history of the Roman West in retrospect, working backwards from Byzantium to Republican Rome. In spite of Arab involvement in the Roman Empire, the earliest Arabic-Islamic images of the empire were confined to experiences with Byzantium in the century preceding the rise of Islam. The Arabic-Islamic expansion and the assimilation of Oriental Christian knowledge gave rise to the earliest systematic expositions of Roman history and the development of an early standard narrative that only occasionally contained details about the Roman West. Access to Latin sources in al-Andalus of the ninth and tenth centuries introduced new information about the western dimension of the Roman Empire. Initially restricted to Western Muslim scholars, this knowledge gradually diffused to the Middle East where it became part of late historiographical compendia.

Chapter 5 analyses how Arabic-Islamic scholars approached the history of the Visigoths. Before the Muslim invasion, the Arabic-Islamic world had little knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula and its Visigothic ruling elite. Consequently, the earliest depictions of the Visigoths were written from the conquerors’ perspective. Because early Andalusian scholars mainly looked to the Middle East for orientation, Visigothic history only began to arouse their curiosity after a regional identity had emerged in Muslim al-Andalus. Thanks to the disclosure of important Latin sources, Andalusian scholarship of the ninth and tenth centuries acquired a thorough overview of Visigothic history that was assimilated by Middle Eastern scholars in the following centuries. In the Muslim West, however, Visigothic history lost appeal in the face of the expanding Iberian Christians’ claim to the Visigothic heritage. Thus, a heritage gained was largely lost as a consequence of geopolitical changes in the Western Mediterranean.