I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

Moses Maimonides, often considered the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, was born in Córdoba and spent most of his life in Fès and Cairo – all major centres of the Islamic Golden Age, whose beautiful architectural monuments still stand today. (His life in Fès and Cairo also makes him a major figure in African thought.) Muslim rulers did not always treat him well; he left Córdoba for Fès because the new Almohad caliphate kicked out non-Muslims. But the Muslim worlds of Fès and Cairo still nourished him to write some of the most lasting works of Jewish theology and philosophy, harmonizing Hebrew scholarship with Aristotle. His work drew deeply on that of Muslim Aristotelian philosophers like ibn Sīnā. Maimonides was so much a part of the Islamic world that his most famous work, the Guide to the Perplexed, was written in Arabic – Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic that was written in Hebrew script. But from the perspective of mutual support between Jews and Muslims, perhaps more interesting still was Maimonides’s son.

The Religion 101 version of Sufism is that it is the main mystical Muslim movement. When I took a course in South Asian Islam from Ali Asani, he noted how Sufis had often been particularly receptive to non-Muslim traditions. I asked “Were there ever people who identified as Sufi but not Muslim?” Asani said that such people existed now, among New Age practitioners, implying that this was a new phenomenon of the 20th century. But a later course on monotheism and ethics from Jay Harris proved that implication wrong. In Harris’s introduction to Maimonides’s thought, he briefly mentioned that Maimonides’s son was – a Jewish Sufi. (He paused to add for emphasis: “There were such things.”)

All this is way out of my own specialty areas. I was delighted to find recently that the leading expert on Abraham Maimonides, Moses’s Sufi son, is Elisha Russ-Fishbane, whom I knew briefly in grad school (and presumably studied with Harris). I hazily recall a conversation I had with Russ-Fishbane about how he, a very pious Jew, had been dating a similarly pious Muslim, and they could not make it work – not for any political reason, but simply because the obligations imposed by their traditions were so different. But that clearly didn’t stop him from looking deeply into the points of contact between the two traditions – which are, after all, both Semitic traditions, from the same part of the world, both monotheistic, both deeply concerned (as Christianity is not) with a scripture that provides legal obligations.

But back to Abraham Maimonides, as Russ-Fishbane describes him in a fascinating interview. Like his father, Abraham wrote in Judeo-Arabic. Like others of his era, he did not see his mysticism and his father’s philosophical rationality as opposed; they supported each other, built on each other.

Abraham Maimonides thought that the Judaism of his day was at a spiritual low point which could be revived through Sufi or Sufi-like practices: he proposed making Jewish prayer more like the Muslim (for example, washing beforehand, and facing Jerusalem). He emphasized piety (hasidut): the term that would later give its name to Hasidic Judaism, and meant a striving to become prophets. In turn, “Prophecy in its pietist context was a decidedly individual objective and (in so far as glimpses of it were attained by the pietists) played itself out primarily in individual experiences” – what we would now call mystical experiences. What hasidut meant in practice was the kinds of Sufi practices – solitary meditation, chanting in worship – that could lead one to higher inner states of consciousness (maqāmāt). The devotee could receive an illumination, a radiant glimpse of reality beyond the senses. (In this goal Abraham was not so far from his Aristotelian father: “For both men, the path to enlightenment was intellectual contemplation, during which the intellect was purified of its worldly sensation in order to catch a glimpse of the divine reality.”)

This Maimonides spoke highly of Islamic monotheism, and thought that living in the Islamic world influenced Jews to positively maintain the purity of their faith. In Russ-Fishbane’s words:

His proof was to compare Jewish faith in Islamic lands with that in Christendom. While no Jew anywhere in the Islamic world, he chided, would dare question the fundamentals of the faith for fear of being the object of ridicule, a number of Jews in Europe did fall prey to spurious beliefs, under what he considered the less than salutary influence of Christianity in its anthropomorphic thinking.

So while a talmudic law (hukkot ha-goyim) prohibited Jews from imitating the ways of the gentiles, Abraham Maimonides interpreted this as meaning only idolaters – which Muslims were not. Moreover, “Muslims and Christians pray and give charity, and no Jew would ever dream of banning such activities simply because they are also gentile practices. Why, he asked, should it be any different when considering practices like prostration and kneeling that were no less authentically Jewish than they were Islamic?”

Abraham Maimonides’s Sufi pietist movement – perhaps unfortunately – did not last. The Hasidism we know today is something very different, without the clear Sufi influence. But he gives us a fascinating glimpse of a world that once was, and may have multiple lessons for both Jews and Muslims today – and maybe even for the rest of us.