Averroes and the Umma of Philosophers

Averroes enjoyed wide acclaim in cultural milieus other than his motherland. This fact is often acknowledged with regard to its amplitude but not to its root causes related to Averroes’ posture as a philosopher. An enthusiast of Aristotle and secular science, Averroes defended perhaps more vigorously than any others his assumption that philosophy can and should be accomplished independent of religious creeds. The universalism implicit in this stance, involving the dismissal of all confessionalism or parochialism, paved the way for Averroes’ cross-cultural afterlife while, at the same time, maintaining that philosophy is the genuine embodiment of Islamic law: uneducated Muslims are to their intellectual peers like diminished philosophers, much as Jews and Christians are like diminished Muslims. As such, all humans make up one community of inchoate-to-accomplished philosophers such as the religion of Islam has established for the whole of humankind.