Andarsene o restare. La lettura unitaria di Moses Narboni del Regime del solitario e dell’epistola di Ḥayy ibn YaqẒĀn

Since decades, scholars are reconstructing, according to a critical approach, the cultural convergence between Judaism and Islam during the Middle Ages: a relationship that has been kept alive in what is defined as the Islamic context of medieval Jewish thought. The way Muslim and Jewish thinkers received and interpreted classical political philosophy through al-Fārābī’s reading of Platonic Laws – which provides the hermeneutical key to rationalize a law-giving prophecy – has sparked a centuries-old debate on the legitimacy of the philosophical understanding of revelation, both in Islamic societies and in Jewish communities. Did this claim of legitimacy represent a pre-modern form of intellectual dissidence? In these pages we will try to answer this question through Moses Narboni’s unitary commentary on two key texts for understanding the relationship between individual and the society in the Judeo-Islamic Middle Ages: Ibn Bājja’s Governance of the Solitary, and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥ ayy ibn Yaqẓān.