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What happened to Ibn Rushd's (d. 595/1198) legacy? Who are his disciples? What did they write, and where are their treatises? Is not there a school of Ibn Rushd in the Islamic world similar to the one known as the Latin Averroism? These are some of the questions that Fouad Ben Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at Dar el-Hadith el-Hassania Institute for Higher Islamic Studies in Rabat, Morocco, attempts to answer through editing, commenting on, and introducing a text of logic, for the first time as an entire text, that was written by one of Ibn Rushd's direct students, Abu 'l-±ajjaj Yusuf b. MuNammad b. Tumlus (d. 620/1223). The book is entitled Ibn Tumlus (Alhagiag Bin Thalmus d. 620/1223), Compendium on Logic (al-MuEtacar fi al-ManUiq).
To recognize the significance of this work, it should be contextualized within the framework of post-classical Islamic intellectual history and the reception of Ibn Rushd in the Islamic world. Ernest Renan's Averroès et l'averroïsme, published in 1852, was one of the earliest scholarly works to discuss aspects of the history of Islamic philosophical thought and its impact on the European Renaissance. Despite the important contribution the book made to Islamic studies in Western languages, it had significant negative effects on these studies as well, which lingered for more than a century. Two main points in Renan's work that are directly related to Ben Ahmed's book are 1) that Islamic philosophy after Ibn Rushd “Averroes” could be dismissed, and 2) that Ibn Rushd had a long line of Christian and Jewish students in Europe for more than four centuries, while being completely ignored by the people of his own religion.
Renan's claims contributed to the reluctance of Western scholars to study the period following Ibn Rushd's death, which was described as a period of decline or stagnation. Due to this narrative of decline, this period, which is known in studies of Islamic intellectual history as the post-classical Islamic period, received insufficient academic attention and was described as a period in which nothing original was produced that deserved to be studied.
In spite of the increasing number of Western academic studies that now seek to explore post-classical Islamic intellectual history, Ibn Rushd's legacy remains understudied. Thus, Ben Ahmed's edition of an entire...