Akhtar's book focuses on the relationship between government and religion in the Middle East and the Maghreb. He addresses this question through the lens of the debates among scholars in Cordoba and Baghdad on legal authority, in the context of rivalry between the three caliphates of the time: Abbasid of Iraq, Fatimid of the Maghreb and Egypt, and Umayyad of al-Andalus. He is particularly interested in the relative importance of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic legacies in the field of political theory, and consequently examines how Hellenistic thought was integrated into the politics, ethics and theology of the Islamic period. Akhtar shows, among many of the book's merits, how intellectual developments around Greek and Greek–Arab philosophy and the debates to which they gave rise emerged in the political field.
The project is ambitious: to revisit the idea that philosophy disappeared from Islamic educational curricula from the thirteenth century onwards, to show how the heritage of philosophers of antiquity was selectively integrated into various currents of Islam; and how it was gradually “Islamicized” between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. Akhtar bases the central thesis of his book on the interaction between circles of knowledge and those of power: scholars belonged to the elites close to the court, they served the leaders from whom they received stipends, but they were also in contact with the urban population. Moreover, when the ideas they developed were perceived as dangerous or threatening to the ruling prince's legitimacy, they were persecuted and their writings destroyed. While these elements are well known, Akhtar's merit is that he has highlighted the political implications of the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic heritage in the context of caliphal rivalries.
As for the argument itself, the author shows how scholars of ḥadīṯ and theologians of kalām used the writings of Baghdad's Aristotelians, because for many scholars, aspects of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy were a key element of their identity in the tenth–eleventh century. Because Ismailism inspired the development of a powerful and politically threatening caliphate – the Fatimid caliphate of Kairouan (909–969), and later Cairo (969–1171) – the influence of Neoplatonic ideas in learned circles was perceived as dangerous. Indeed, Sunni scholars perceived the Shiite theories of the advent of a semi-messianic leader (mahdī) as the synthesis by Ismaili theologians of Greek–Arab psychological doctrines relating to inspired knowledge and celestial intelligence. In the eleventh century, the messianic dimension of the Fatimid conception of an imam-philosopher, that is, a sovereign claiming greater religious authority on a Platonic basis than any of the earlier Abbasid caliphs had ever claimed, provoked virulent criticism from Sunni scholars (Part I). Later criticisms (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) against Sufi metaphysics focused less on the approach of philosophical doctrines than on the esotericism of their hermeneutics and on the valorization of an “interior” meaning (bāṭin), sometimes very far from the “exterior” meaning (ẓāhir). According to Akhtar, the shared interest in esoteric hermeneutics which was the basis of Fatimid caliphal claims in the Maghreb in the tenth century – hence the name bāṭini given to the Fatimid caliphate and Ismailis in general – explains the political implications of the controversy.
The detailed study of the works of Ibn Masarra (d. 319/931), Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), al-Ġazālī (d. 505/1111), and Abū Bakr b. al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148) in the book's first part, and those of Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141), Ibn Qasī (d. 546/1151), and Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 580/1185) in the second, allows Akhtar to present the destinies within Islamic thought of Aristotelian-Avicenian logic on the one hand, and Platonic, Neo-Platonic and Plotinian cosmology and psychology on the other.
The second part of the book argues that the existence of a significant number of Ibn Masarra's disciples from the tenth to twelfth centuries would reveal that Ibn Masarra's project to bring scholars, philosophers, and mystics closer was still widespread. Thus, in chapter 4, Akhtar shows that, in the thirteenth century, Greek–Arab philosophy was absorbed into the Islamic sciences through the incorporation of Aristotelian-Avicenian logic into the methodology of Muslim theologians (and in particular into jurisprudence) on the one hand, and the flexible integration of the conclusions of Platonising cosmology and psychology into mystical writings on the other. The weakening of Fatimid influence allowed the emergence of a Platonising semi-messianic political movement, this time not within Ismaili circles, but among metaphysical mystics. Ibn Qasī's revolt in al-Andalus in 1144 and his mystical treaty are analysed in chapter 5. The Almohads, studied in the last chapter, through Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān, were to achieve the integration of Aristotelian logic within Sunni theology on the one hand, and that of Platonising conceptions in mysticism and the cult of saints, that spread in the Maghreb during the “centuries of faith” on the other. It is regrettable that Halima Ferhat's work Le Maghreb aux xiie–xive siècles: les siècles de la foi (Casablanca, Morocco: Wallada, 1993), is not cited in the bibliography.
While the three names of Córdoba, Cairo, and Baghdad are mentioned in the title of the book, the treatment of these knowledge centres is not equal: the only scholars mentioned belong to the systems of thought that were developed in the Abbasid East and in Umayyad al-Andalus, and the Almoravid and Almohad West. Fatimid Cairo is not studied per se but is treated only as an explanatory counter-model. It is therefore a Sunni point of view that is developed, contrary to what the mention of Cairo in the title might suggest. In addition, of the seven thinkers studied, only one, al-Ġazālī, is oriental. However, his presence in Akhtar's book is due to the major role his writings played in the West in the twelfth century. Thus the perspective of the book is decidedly centred on pre-modern Western Sunnism. This very “Western” orientation of the book is confirmed by the absence of references to Makram Abbès's books on al-Māwardī (Islam et politique à l’âge classique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009; and ʿAlī Ibn-Muḥammad al-Māwardī and Makram Abbès, De l’éthique du prince et du gouvernement de l’État. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015) or the articulation of religion and politics in the classical period of Islam despite the fact that these studies deal with the same issues as Akhtar's, with a similar approach to the texts, yet from a Middle Eastern perspective.
In conclusion, the reviewer can only praise the author for the very pedagogical and didactic nature of his presentation of the philosophical and mystical analyses of the thinkers he chose. The subject is complex, but its treatment is clear. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that he ignored some French works that could have usefully completed the bibliography and references. Apart from this criticism, Akhtar's book is excellent. This review reflects unfortunately only very partially the finesse of the author's analyses, erudition, knowledge of the sources, as well as the relevance of his remarks, not to mention his brilliant contextualization of the philosophical debates and their implications for the political field.
