A Judge Defends Philosophy Against the Theologians

Before Averroes was a philosopher read across two civilizations, he was a working judge from a family of judges, trained in the Maliki school of Islamic law that his grandfather had once headed as chief judge of Cordoba. That legal training shaped the argument of his Decisive Treatise, a short but pointed work responding to a real dispute in Almohad intellectual life over whether philosophical reasoning, associated with the study of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, was permissible under Islamic law at all. Averroes argued it was not only permissible but obligatory for those capable of it, holding that reasoned demonstration and revealed scripture, properly interpreted, could never truly contradict each other since both ultimately point to the same truth. His longer Incoherence of the Incoherence answered the influential theologian al-Ghazali directly, defending philosophers against al-Ghazali's earlier charge that key philosophical positions, including the eternity of the world, amounted to unbelief. Averroes's standing at court did not protect him from the same tensions he wrote about, late in his life a shift in Almohad politics toward stricter religious orthodoxy led to his temporary exile to Lucena and the public burning of some philosophical texts at Marrakech and elsewhere, though he was recalled to the court at Marrakech shortly before his death in 1198, suggesting the reconciliation he argued for in theory was never fully secured in his own lifetime.