Thread by @luminatus1

We in the Jewish community sometimes forget how much we owe Islam.
It was the great Islamic theologians and thinkers — among them al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) — who recovered the classical tradition of philosophy,

rabbisacks.org/the-road-less-…

It was the great Islamic theologians and thinkers — among them al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) — who recovered the classical tradition of philosophy, leading the West out of the Dark Ages.

Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers in the past 1,000 years, was also deeply indebted to them. Throughout his masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed, he is in constant dialogue with the Mutakallimun, or the Muslim Kalamists.

Even his great religious law code, the Mishneh Torah, was inspired by Sharia codes.
Maimonides, in turn, influenced Christian thinkers like Aquinas.
Thus, both Judaism and Christianity are deeply indebted to the thinkers of Islam.

Furthermore, Maimonides’ son, Rabbi Abraham, felt a deep kinship with Islamic mystical traditions. Speaking personally, I learned much from Ibn Khaldun, who is sometimes described as the world’s first sociologist.

His insights into the processes of social decline remain deeply relevant to the West today.

Some years ago, I wrote an article in The London Times telling the story of how Averroes became the first person to make a religious argument for freedom of speech

He influenced the 16th-century Jewish sage, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who quotes him on the subject. John Milton, a Christian writer, made the same point in his 1644 defense of free speech, Areopagitica.

Two centuries later, secularist John Stuart Mill reiterated the argument in his 1859 classic, On Liberty. I found it moving how first a Muslim, then a Jew, then a Christian, then a secular humanist, came together to agree on the importance of free speech & the dignity of dissent

Today, however, all religions face a challenge. The world is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Meanwhile, societies in the West are abandoning the religious ethic that once made them great.
The dominant culture in Europe today is secular, consumerist, individualist and

consumerist, individualist and relativistic, offering little by way of moral guidance, and still less in terms of a sense of the sacred

Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In that sense, ours is a cynical age