A Muslim's Commentary to Maimonides' Guide

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was intended for an exclusively Jewish audience. It does not convey any polemics against other faiths; but the specific Scriptural issues which Maimonides discusses in detail are of interest only to those for whom the Hebrew Bible is the sole scriptural authority. Nonetheless, not a few Muslim and Christian intellectuals were eager to read what the “Great Eagle” had to say on issues such as the world’s creation, which were of great importance to them.

Maimonides approached the question of the world’s creation “in time” with great care. Aristotle, the main authority in scientific matters for most medieval philosophers, appeared to reject creation. His view was that the cosmos, in exactly the same form and obeying exactly the same laws, always has been and always will be. Jews, Christians, and Muslims for the most part found this view unacceptable, believing as they did in an all-powerful God, for whom Creation was the most impressive, and astounding work, but certainly not the only work, or miracle, of which He was capable.

However, rejecting Aristotle was no easy matter for someone who believed in rational discourse and who was as committed to scientific inquiry and logical reasoning as he was to traditional and revealed teachings. Ultimately Maimonides argued that Aristotle never claimed to have proven that world had existed for eternity, and was not created; he may have tended to think so, but he never claimed to have a demonstration that it is true. To most scholars, this is a problematic reading of Aristotle. It did allow Maimonides to maintain creation without throwing away Aristotle. and along with him, just about all the science of his day.

Maimonides opens the second part of his Guide with a concise presentation of Aristotelian physics in the form of twenty-five principles or laws which all agree upon; all of this is a preparation for the controversial twenty-sixth principle, the eternity of the universe, which Maimonides will reject. However, his twenty-five rules were such an elegant and concise presentation of the physics of the day that they took on a life of their own. These rules circulated independently of the Guide and invited commentary and expansion.

One long and rich commentary was written by Muḥammad bin Abī Bakr al-Tabrīzī, who flourished in the thirteenth century, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Iran, This was the time of the Mongols, when Islam was no longer the religion of the rulers, and a certain amount of interfaith tolerance and cooperation was in vogue. We do not know exactly how the Guide came to al-Tabrīzī’s attention. However, we do know that he studied under a certain Quṭb al-Dīn al-Miṣrī, along with Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, a great astronomer and one of the leading intellectuals of his day.

Al-Tabrīzī’s commentary had only a limited circulation among Muslims. Somehow a copy or copies made their way westward, where they found a much wider readership. His commentary was studied by Jews both in the original (transcribed into Hebrew letters) and in Hebrew (two different translations were made). Ḥasdai Crescas, the great Jewish philosopher who flourished in the early fifteenth century, depended heavily upon al-Tabrīzī for his understanding of Aristotelian physics, a physics that he, Crescas, criticized severely.

In a paper published a few years ago, I argued that al-Tabrīzī made some of the innovations of Avicenna accessible to European readers—but that Crescas, for whatever reasons, did not follow up on these leads. (“No Reagent, No Reaction: The Barren Transmission of Avicennan Dynamics to Hasdai Crescas,” Aleph 12.1 (2012), 161-188.) Much work remains to be done on al-Tabrīzī’s commentary.

(the image is from on the Hebrew translations of al-Tabrīzī’s commentary, in MS Mantua 41)