Parens, Joshua.  “Escaping the Scholastic Paradigm: The Dispute between Strauss and His Contemporaries about How to Approach Islamic and Jewish Medieval Philosophy,” in Encountering the Medieval in Modern Jewish Thought, 203–227, eds. Aaron Hughes and James Diamond. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012.

Overview: Shows how disputes over the interpretation of Alfarabi are linked to the larger issue of the difference between Christian and Judeo-Islamic thought.

Excerpt:

“At first it might appear to be a mere accident that many of the same contemporary Jewish scholars who studied medieval Jewish thought also studied medieval Islamic thought. It is not sufficient to account for the interest of the same scholars in medieval Judaism and Islam, however, by observing that so many of the towering figures of medieval Judaism, such as Saadya Gaon, Yehuda Halevi, Maimonides, wrote in Arabic. The thesis of this chapter is that other special affinities betwen Judaism and Islam led to the special interest of Jewish scholars in Islam. Yet in much of the scholarship by early twentieth-century Jewish scholars of Islamic and Jewish thought, it became tempting to ignore those affinities and lump Islamic and Jewish thought together with Christian thought under the broad rubric of monotheism. And because Christian Scholasticism had been so extensively studied, it became tempting to draw paradigms and methods of interpretation from Christian scholarship on Scholasticism. The question then arises whether contemporary scholars should study medieval Jewish and Islamic thought under the large shadow cast by Scholasticism. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss insisted that scholars should cease regarding Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy “as counterparts of Christian scholasticism.” Although Strauss does not openly criticize specific colleagues, I intend to show that Strauss was engaged however diplomatically in a dispute with most of his contemporaries over how to read medieval Jewish and Islamic thought – contemporaries who tended to read Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophy in light of Christian Scholasticism. … In contract, Strauss argues that although Christian Scholasticism engages in such [a “religious philosophy”] synthesis, Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy, as it was originated by Alfarabi, does not.”

Online:
Academia.edu