For all the attention Jewish pietists in medieval Christendom (and their followers and successors down to the present) have lavished upon Bahya ibn Paquda and the twelfth century Hebrew translation (Hovot ha-levavot by Judah ibn Tibbon) of his Duties of the Heart (Al-Hidaaya ilaa faraa'id al-quluub), one would scarcely know Bahya as an eleventh century Andalusi Jew, devotional poet, and rabbinic judge who wrote in Arabic. Diana Lobel's A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart rescues Bahya from the seemingly exclusive place his Franco- German admirers reserved for him in translation and outside his own cultural milieu.
As the title of her book indicates, Lobel identifies Bahya as a characteristic Jewish religious intellectual in a Muslim society who found himself in deep conversation with Islamic thought and its religious sensibility. Her analysis of the contours of a Sufi-Jewish dialogue thus speaks to Bahya's own inner dialogue between the devotee of Islamic mysticism on the one hand and the Jewish traditionalist on the other as much as it provides evidence of the Jews' close encounters with Sufi terminology and concepts under the orbit of Islam. Lobel's subtitle is also instructive: it signals that for Bahya and others like him such as Solomon ibn Gabirol (also associated with 11th century Saragossa) philosophy and mysticism did not represent completely distinct paths for making sense of the world and the individual's place in it in relation to God. Rather mysticism and philosophy are seen as continuously rubbing up against one another, interacting dialectically and ultimately overlapping.
Recent readers have taken Duties of the Heart variously as a book of Jewish ethics, social criticism, or ascetic teaching, thereby isolating different strands of its discourse from the work as a whole. A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue stands apart as the first English language monograph devoted to Duties of the Heart and it makes a defining contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Bahya's distinctive place in Andalusi Jewish letters. As in her previous study of Judah Halevi's religious thought (the similarly entitled Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi's Kuzari, 2000) Lobel shows herself to be equally adept in Jewish and Islamic studies, in Arabic and Hebrew, and in the corresponding discourses of philosophical and mystical, particularly Sufi thought.
Lobel's Ibn Paquda is himself steeped in competing and overlapping intellectual traditions. Although he too is immersed in his sources, Bahya's unique contribution to Jewish thought lies in the creative uses to which he puts his Jewish and Muslim predecessors and contemporaries in interpreting biblical and rabbinic materials. For example, Lobel identifies the complex ways in which Bahya harkens back to select elements of Sacadia Gaon's (10th century) Muctazila-inspired dialectical theology and anticipates Moses Maimonides' (12th century) views on the necessity yet limitations of an intellectual approach to knowing, serving and loving God. So too Ibn Pauqda's emphasis on the significance of direct religious experience, awareness of divine presence, and the mutuality governing the relationship between believer and God (the individual's love of God and God's love for the individual) lays the groundwork for much of Judah Halevi's devotional orientation. At the same time Lobel shows how Ibn Paquda draws freely upon the sources of various classic Sufi masters such as Sulami, Abuu Nucaym, Qurayshii, and Muhaasibii. Citing a critical insight of Sarah Stroumsa, Lobel shows that it was precisely Ibn Paquda's situation as a Jewish outsider that enabled him to develop an eclectic approach to religious thought, to cite Muslim sources of various schools and spiritual and intellectual orientations selectively, and to adopt terms and concepts with discrimination for his own particular purposes.
Duties of the Heart is divided into ten chapters or "gates" as Bahya calls them following Sufi convention, beginning with "divine unity" (tawhiid) and culminating in the "true love (mahabba) of God." Ibn Paquda identifies the "duties of the heart"--inner devotional religious experience--in complementary but not entirely oppositional terms to "the duties of the body (or limbs)," that is, the often mechanical and unthinking performance of the believer's external religious obligations. For the most part Lobel eschews leading the reader through Bahya's exposition of each of the these stages of inner devotion which she characterizes as "aspect(s) of integrated spiritual life." Instead she organizes her discussion of Bahya's thinking around the most important philosophical, theological and devotional themes, concepts and problems addressed in Duties (for example, the nature of creation; the One; what actually can be said about God; and the nexus of constant awareness of God and reverence for and love of the divine). In each instance Lobel elucidates Bahya's thinking by situating him in relation to his Jewish and Muslim sources and identifying the position he occupies in relation to thinkers with divergent theological, philosophical and mystical views. Lobels' Ibn Paquda thus proves to be infinitely more complex and richer a thinker than virtually any of the previous studies on Duties of the Heart might suggest. Indeed, one hesitates to reduce him to a set of labels at all. Bahya proves to be something of a rationalist for whom philosophy is the "foundation of spiritual life" because it purifies understanding and corrects the misapprehensions to which human beings so readily fall prey. His orientation is decidedly Neoplatonic in keeping with the preferred philosophical discourse of the eleventh century and its emphasis on the soul and the soul's relation to its ultimate, sublime Source. So too, Ibn Paquda is a moderate ascetic and surely a mystic. Yet he stands apart from other devotees in exercising extreme, nearly complete restraint in depicting the relationship between the individual and God without turning to the language of erotic love.
Throughout her study Lobel illustrates the power of philology in the best sense. Her critical ear for the nuances and history of Arabo- Islamic terminology (ikhlaas [whole-hearted devotion/purification] and [muraaqaba [heightened awareness] are among the most significant terms discussed) enables her to probe the deep structural penetration of Sufi ideas in the work of Jewish thinkers and seekers. To put it another way, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue traces the process by which Arabo-Islamic conceptual frames are imported into Judaism through shared use of the Arabic language.
The other great strength of her scholarship involves Lobel's uncommonly fine balancing of synchronic and diachronic methods of research. When she is not dissecting the meaning of words and terms she takes the reader from the ninth century to the twelfth and back even as she leads us from the Muslim East to the Muslim West, reinforcing our sense of a cultural unity that transcended geo- political divisions. That is, because she approaches reading Duties of the Heart as a religionist as well as a philosopher strictly speaking, Lobel is keenly attuned to the historical dimension of the work and its place in the cultural and intellectual history of the Jews of al-Andalus and all of Islam.