Muslim and Jew by Aaron W. Hughes

Author:Aaron W. Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Maimonides, the individual who is generally considered to be the arch-rationalist of premodern Jewish thought, also picks up these themes. We see them at work, for example, in what is sometimes referred to as the “Sufi” chapter in his philosophical magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed. In this chapter, which some believe he originally intended to conclude his Guide,45 Maimonides provides his famous parable of the palace.46 Therein he writes:

The ruler is in his palace, and all his subjects are partly within the city and partly outside the city. Of those who are within the city, some have turned their backs upon the ruler’s habitation, their faces being turned another way. Others seek to reach the ruler’s habitation, turn toward it, and desire to enter it and to stand before him, but up to now they have not yet seen the wall of the habitation. Some of those who seek to reach it have come up to the habitation and walk around it searching for its gate. Some of them have entered the gate and walk about it in the antechambers. Some of them have entered the inner court of the habitation and have come to be with the king, in one and the same place as him, namely, in the ruler’s habitation. But their having come into the inner part of the habitation, it is indispensable that they should make another effort; then they will be in the presence of the ruler, see him from afar or nearby, or hear the ruler’s speech or speak to him.47

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