Ibn Kammuna

Origins and early life

Sa'd ibn Mansur Ibn Kammuna was born in Baghdad in the early thirteenth century into a Jewish family — 'certainly born into a Jewish family', the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, and, by the way later writers speak of him, a Jew to the end of his life, whatever legend has said of a late conversion.

Work and career

A physician and an oculist by profession, he lived through the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 and flourished under the Ilkhans, when the fall of the caliphate briefly loosened the hierarchy of the faiths, and he became one of the most important philosophers of his century in the Islamic world: a correspondent of the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the author of a system of his own in The New Wisdom, and the commentator whose exposition of Suhrawardi's Intimations shaped the reception of the Illuminationist philosophy for centuries — a Jew, that is, whom the Muslim philosophical tradition counts among its own.

In 1280 he wrote the book for which he is remembered, the Examination of the Inquiries into the Three Faiths: a comparison of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, each presented through its own claims and its own scriptures and each subjected to the same rational questions, the first work of comparative religion in the medieval world written in a spirit of critical fairness — with, as this fiche records, a defense of Judaism at its heart and questions about the Prophet that Muslim readers found intolerable.

In 1284 a mob in Baghdad demanded his death; the governor had him smuggled out of the city hidden in a leather box, and he died the same year at Hilla, where his son held office. Muslim polemicists answered his book for three hundred years; modern scholars have restored it.