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About the thinkers
The Intellectual Encounters library eventually will contain works by most major thinkers of the medieval Islamic world. We have begun with the following three thinkers and plan to add writings by additional thinkers on a continual basis.
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Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (c. 1055–1111)
By Frank Griffel
Al-Ghazali was one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunni Islam. He was active at a time when Sunni theology had just passed through its consolidation and entered a period of intense challenges from Shiite Isma'ilite theology and the Arabic tradition of Aristotelian philosophy (falsafah). Al-Ghazali’s activity led to a re-assessment of falsafah, Sufism, and Shi'ism within the Muslim tradition. In all three cases, al-Ghazali rejected the most extreme manifestations of these movements—i.e. those that were most distant from a Sunni understanding of orthodoxy—but he tolerated the less extreme ones and effectively integrated moderate falsafah and Sufism into mainstream Sunni Islam.
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Yahya ibn 'Adi (893-974)
By Sidney H. Griffith
Yahya ibn 'Adi, a ‘Jacobite’ Christian, was the leading Aristotelian intellectual in Baghdad in the third quarter of the tenth century. He was a contemporary and friend of the bio-bibliographer of Baghdad, Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-Nadim (d. 995), and a younger contemporary of the Jewish scholar, Saadiah Gaon (882-942). Yahya was a student of the ‘Nestorian’ Christian logician, Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d.940) and the Muslim philosopher, Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870-950), many of whose doctrines he promoted. Yahya in turn was the teacher of a number of famous students, both Muslim and Christian, all members of the Baghdad school of Aristotelians, who paved the way for the major philosophers of the next generation in the world of Islam, Ibn Sina (d. 1037), al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and even Maimonides (d. 1204). A prolific writer, Yahya produced logical and philosophical works, along with an impressive list of titles in theology as well as a list of inter-religious, apologetic and polemical tracts. Yahya championed the public cultivation of reason ['aql] and right behavior [adab] for the sake of the commonweal.
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Moses Maimonides (1136 [or 1138] -1204)
By Sarah Stroumsa
Also known as the RaMBaM (=Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), or "The Great Eagle".
Jewish thinker, legal scholar, community leader and physician.
A philosopher deeply immersed in the contemporary philosophical thought, both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic. His career developed around the Mediterranean, from al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) to Egypt, through Fez, Acre and Jerusalem. His intellectual horizons embraced the cultures of Mediterranean basin, including both contemporary religious and philosophical thought and past legacy.
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