In this compact and readable volume, Sarah Stroumsa provides a learned and comprehensive depiction of Muslim and Jewish intellectual history in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. The book concentrates primarily, though not exclusively, on the tenth–twelfth centuries, taking Ibn Masarra (d. 931) and Averroes (d. 1198) as the foci of a detailed discussion of a greatly diverse group of Muslim and Jewish thinkers with vastly diverging views of philosophy, religion, law, politics, and the life of the mind. This book also treats a great number of lesser-known Andalusian thinkers, such as the tenth-century Massarians Khalīl al-Ghafla and Abū Bakr Yaḥyā Ibn al-Samīna, the ninth–tenth century jurists ʿAbd al-Aʿlāb b. Wahb, Muḥammad b. Abī Burda, and Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Hārūn, who encountered some forms of Muʿtazilite thought, the eleventh-century Karaite Abūʾl-Ṭaras, the eleventh–twelfth-century Hebrew poets, Qamūna bint Ismaʾil and Baruch Ibn al-Balia, the tenth–eleventh-century neo-Platonists, Maslama al-Qurṭubī and Isaac Ibn Ghiyyāth, and the twelfth-century philosophers and physicians, Abū al-Ṣalt of Denia, Mālik Ibn Wuhayb, and Abū Jaʿfar al-Dhahābī. Stroumsa weaves her account of these thinkers into accounts of the better-known thinkers of medieval Anadalus, including not only Ibn Masarra and Averroes, but Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Baḥya Ibn Paqūdah, al-Baṭalyawsi, Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Moses Maimonides. In so doing, Stroumsa portrays Jews and Muslims of the period as sharing many intellectual sources and sharing in some of the same intellectual streams, even while maintaining religious and cultural independence.

Stroumsa's approach draws not only on the primary works of the thinkers themselves, but also on historical accounts, both medieval and modern, of the thinkers and their intellectual milieu. Thus, Stroumsa cites numerous Arabic or Hebrew historians and historical accounts, including those of Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1063), Ibn Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī (d. 1070), Abūʾl-Faḍl al-Dimashqī (d. 1175), Abraham Ibn Daud (d. c. 1180), Ibn Ṭumlūs (d. 1223), and ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī (d. 1250). Yet Stroumsa does not always take these historians at face value, and often questions their reliability. The best example of this is in the extensive discussion of al-Marrākushī's account of the meetings between Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes, and the Caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf. After one meeting between the Caliph and Ibn Ṭufayl, the latter suggests that Averroes take up commentary writing (pp. 134–41). Before dismissing these meetings as likely never having taken place, Stroumsa translates al-Marrākushī's account into English, presents the different interpretations scholars have made of the account, compares the timelines of when it could have taken place to the likely timelines of Averroes’ commentary writings, and shows that even if it did take place it would have most likely been only incidental to Averroes’ literary and philosophical intentions. Stroumsa's approach here and with the other historians throughout the book is a model of how to approach this kind of evidence.

Stroumsa also provides fascinating accounts of the history of the scholarship of Andalusian philosophy, describing how accepted opinion has changed over the last 100+ years and not hesitating to suggest news way of evaluating known evidence. This is apparent in the detailed discussion of Iberian Karaism (pp. 73–7); Stroumsa is aided by a large number of scholarly attempts to understand how many and what kind of groups in Andalus could have been considered Karaites, while guiding the discussion towards the conclusion that the Muʿtazilite legal school was influential on Andalusian Karaites and therefore that Muʿtazilism was known and somewhat influential on the Iberian Peninsula.

In general, Stroumsa provides rich accounts of legal theories and political concerns that guided or prevented philosophical trends. Thus, we learn that the thought of Ibn Masarra and early turns to Neoplatonism may have been stymied by political fear of the spread of Fatimid ideology or Ismailism. Later in the book, she describes Almohad ideology in some detail, showing that it is not philosophy proper, as understood by Ibn Bājja or Averroes, but that it encouraged the kind of textual interpretation that appealed to those philosophers and Maimonides. Indeed, she shows that many aspects of Maimonides’ legal and interpretative approach may have been guided by Almohad methods of classifying laws by roots and principles. When taken together with the connection between Muʿtazilism and Iberian Karaism, one gets the sense that Jewish approaches to legal reasoning in Andalusia were greatly influenced by Muslim counterparts. Still, this is only part of the story. The Rabbinate legal school of Andalusia was quite developed before Maimonides, and its connection to Islamic methods still awaits full characterization.

One of the greatest strengths of the volume lies in its short outlines of the various programmes of study of mystical, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Almohad thinkers and how these curricula relate to the various works produced. Stroumsa meticulously demonstrates that the Almohad curriculum for elites and doctors was not, strictly speaking, philosophical; indeed, it seems to have avoided any physics or metaphysics entirely. Neoplatonists and Aristotelians, she shows, both began their curricula with logic. But while the latter continued with strict adherence to Aristotle's text and to commentaries on them, the former took a more literary approach, preferring a method of inquiry highly coloured by the Arabic literary adab tradition. Many Neoplatonists were particularly influenced by the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity or the occult sciences of the Ismailis. Such influence is likely behind the theories of emanation adopted by Ibn Masarra, al-Baṭalyawsi, and others. Yet aside from a few brief remarks about the Arabic Plotinus and Proclus (pp. 118, 120), the connection between Andalusian Neoplatonism and the classical sources of Neoplatonism is not clarified. Stroumsa does, however, provide a detailed summary of recent research on pseudo-Empedoclean theories, which she associates with “deviant Neoplatonism” (pp. 115–20).

Overall, this is an immensely rich and informative book which will give beginner and advanced reader alike a comprehensive view of the central primary sources of the Andalusian intellectual tradition and the study of this tradition from the Middle Ages until today.