In the research on speculative thought in the medieval Islamicate world, the division into schools of thought is conventional. The present paper examines the philosophical scholastic scene of the medieval Islamicate world, seeking to evaluate the place of Jewish thinkers in it. It will first clarify what is meant by the term ‘school of thought’, then offer a brief overview of the medieval Muslim schools of thought, and finally examine the presence of such schools in the Judeo-Arabic tradition, within the Islamicate world as well as in its afterlife beyond it.

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Sarah Stroumsa is the Alice and Jack Ormut Professor Emerita of Arabic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She taught in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She served as the Vice-Rector of the Hebrew University from 2003 until 2006, and as Rector from 2008 until 2012. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is a laureate of the Humboldt Research Award, a holder of the Italian Order of Merit, and a recipient of the Leopold Lucas Prize.

Her area of academic focus includes the history of philosophical and theological thought in Arabic in the early Islamic Middle Ages, Medieval Judaeo-Arabic literature, and intellectual history of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain. Among her published books in English: Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rāwaādī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999; Paperback edition 2016); Maimonides in his World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University, 2010; Paperback edition 2012) and Dāwūd al-Muqammaṣ, Twenty Chapters (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2016).