[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 07.11.15 Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue (Brann)]

Wed May 7 20:12:27 CDT 2008

Can people pass this along to the Spanish and Jewish SCA mailing lists, if
they haven't seen it?
Thanks.

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: TMR 07.11.15 Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue (Brann)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Mon, November 19, 2007 5:20 pm
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lobel, Diana. A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in
Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 376. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-3953-9.

    Reviewed by Ross Brann
         Cornell University
         rb23 at cornell.edu

For all the attention Jewish pietists in medieval Christendom (and
their followers and successors down to the present) have lavished upon
Bahya ibn Paquda and the twelfth century Hebrew translation (Hovot
ha-levavot by Judah ibn Tibbon) of his Duties of the Heart
(Al-Hidaaya ilaa faraa'id al-quluub), one would scarcely know
Bahya as an eleventh century Andalusi Jew, devotional poet, and
rabbinic judge who wrote in Arabic. Diana Lobel's A Sufi-Jewish
Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the
Heart rescues Bahya from the seemingly exclusive place his Franco-
German admirers reserved for him in translation and outside his own
cultural milieu.

As the title of her book indicates, Lobel identifies Bahya as a
characteristic Jewish religious intellectual in a Muslim society who
found himself in deep conversation with Islamic thought and its
religious sensibility. Her analysis of the contours of a Sufi-Jewish
dialogue thus speaks to Bahya's own inner dialogue between the
devotee of Islamic mysticism on the one hand and the Jewish
traditionalist on the other as much as it provides evidence of the
Jews' close encounters with Sufi terminology and concepts under the
orbit of Islam. Lobel's subtitle is also instructive: it signals that
for Bahya and others like him such as Solomon ibn Gabirol (also
associated with 11th century Saragossa) philosophy and mysticism did
not represent completely distinct paths for making sense of the world
and the individual's place in it in relation to God. Rather mysticism
and philosophy are seen as continuously rubbing up against one
another, interacting dialectically and ultimately overlapping.

Recent readers have taken Duties of the Heart variously as a
book of Jewish ethics, social criticism, or ascetic teaching, thereby
isolating different strands of its discourse from the work as a whole.
A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue stands apart as the first English
language monograph devoted to Duties of the Heart and it makes
a defining contribution to our understanding and appreciation of
Bahya's distinctive place in Andalusi Jewish letters. As in her
previous study of Judah Halevi's religious thought (the similarly
entitled Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of
Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi's Kuzari, 2000) Lobel shows
herself to be equally adept in Jewish and Islamic studies, in Arabic
and Hebrew, and in the corresponding discourses of philosophical and
mystical, particularly Sufi thought.

Lobel's Ibn Paquda is himself steeped in competing and overlapping
intellectual traditions. Although he too is immersed in his sources,
Bahya's unique contribution to Jewish thought lies in the creative
uses to which he puts his Jewish and Muslim predecessors and
contemporaries in interpreting biblical and rabbinic materials. For
example, Lobel identifies the complex ways in which Bahya harkens back
to select elements of Sacadia Gaon's (10th century) Muctazila-inspired
dialectical theology and anticipates Moses Maimonides' (12th century)
views on the necessity yet limitations of an intellectual approach to
knowing, serving and loving God. So too Ibn Pauqda's emphasis on the
significance of direct religious experience, awareness of divine
presence, and the mutuality governing the relationship between
believer and God (the individual's love of God and God's love for the
individual) lays the groundwork for much of Judah Halevi's devotional
orientation. At the same time Lobel shows how Ibn Paquda draws freely
upon the sources of various classic Sufi masters such as Sulami, Abuu
Nucaym, Qurayshii, and Muhaasibii. Citing a critical insight of Sarah
Stroumsa, Lobel shows that it was precisely Ibn Paquda's situation as
a Jewish outsider that enabled him to develop an eclectic approach to
religious thought, to cite Muslim sources of various schools and
spiritual and intellectual orientations selectively, and to adopt
terms and concepts with discrimination for his own particular
purposes.

Duties of the Heart is divided into ten chapters or "gates" as
Bahya calls them following Sufi convention, beginning with "divine
unity" (tawhiid) and culminating in the "true love
(mahabba) of God." Ibn Paquda identifies the "duties of the
heart"--inner devotional religious experience--in complementary but
not entirely oppositional terms to "the duties of the body (or
limbs)," that is, the often mechanical and unthinking performance of
the believer's external religious obligations. For the most part Lobel
eschews leading the reader through Bahya's exposition of each of the
these stages of inner devotion which she characterizes as "aspect(s)
of integrated spiritual life." Instead she organizes her discussion of
Bahya's thinking around the most important philosophical, theological
and devotional themes, concepts and problems addressed in
Duties (for example, the nature of creation; the One; what
actually can be said about God; and the nexus of constant awareness of
God and reverence for and love of the divine). In each instance Lobel
elucidates Bahya's thinking by situating him in relation to his Jewish
and Muslim sources and identifying the position he occupies in
relation to thinkers with divergent theological, philosophical and
mystical views. Lobels' Ibn Paquda thus proves to be infinitely more
complex and richer a thinker than virtually any of the previous
studies on Duties of the Heart might suggest. Indeed, one
hesitates to reduce him to a set of labels at all. Bahya proves to be
something of a rationalist for whom philosophy is the "foundation of
spiritual life" because it purifies understanding and corrects the
misapprehensions to which human beings so readily fall prey. His
orientation is decidedly Neoplatonic in keeping with the preferred
philosophical discourse of the eleventh century and its emphasis on
the soul and the soul's relation to its ultimate, sublime Source. So
too, Ibn Paquda is a moderate ascetic and surely a mystic. Yet he
stands apart from other devotees in exercising extreme, nearly
complete restraint in depicting the relationship between the
individual and God without turning to the language of erotic love.

Throughout her study Lobel illustrates the power of philology in the
best sense. Her critical ear for the nuances and history of Arabo-
Islamic terminology (ikhlaas [whole-hearted
devotion/purification] and [muraaqaba [heightened awareness]
are among the most significant terms discussed) enables her to probe
the deep structural penetration of Sufi ideas in the work of Jewish
thinkers and seekers. To put it another way, A Sufi-Jewish
Dialogue traces the process by which Arabo-Islamic conceptual
frames are imported into Judaism through shared use of the Arabic
language.

The other great strength of her scholarship involves Lobel's
uncommonly fine balancing of synchronic and diachronic methods of
research. When she is not dissecting the meaning of words and terms
she takes the reader from the ninth century to the twelfth and back
even as she leads us from the Muslim East to the Muslim West,
reinforcing our sense of a cultural unity that transcended geo-
political divisions. That is, because she approaches reading Duties
of the Heart as a religionist as well as a philosopher strictly
speaking, Lobel is keenly attuned to the historical dimension of the
work and its place in the cultural and intellectual history of the
Jews of al-Andalus and all of Islam.

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net