III
In Dalālat
al-Ḥā'irīn (The
Guide of the Perplexed),
of which a Latin version, based on a
Hebrew transla-
tion, was known to Christian
scholastics early in the
thirteenth century, Moses Maimonides (d. 1204)
dis-
cussed the occasionalist atomism of
kalām, criticizing
it mainly on the
metaphysical level. Averroës (Ibn
Rushd; d. 1198), in his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The In-
coherence of
“The Incoherence”), answered Ghazali's
Tahāfut, quoting almost all of it; a Latin
translation
of Averroës' work was first made in the
fourteenth
century. These translations have raised the question of
a
possible Islamic influence on parallel criticisms of
causation in Europe,
particularly that of Nicolaus of
Autrecourt (d. 1350) whose writings
suggest acquaint-
ance with Maimonides'
account of Islamic atomism.
For the history of the concept of causation in
Islam,
however, Averroës' Tahāfut
is of special interest. In
this and other shorter works Averroës
was attempting
to check the spread of Ash'arism, particularly in North
Africa and Muslim Spain. The attempt, however, was
abortive, and
Aristotelian causal theory, though it con-
tinued to be held in Islam, remained on the defensive.
