Persecution and the Philosophical Minority: Leo Strauss and the Medieval Social and Historical Reality

In a seminal article first published in 1941, Leo Strauss argued that, responding to the political atmosphere hostile to philosophy, philosophers in the medieval Islamicate world, both Muslims and Jews, developed the art of esoteric writing. Paradoxically, Strauss’s approach, which advocated sensitive, nuanced readings of the medieval philosophical texts, largely ignored the different nuances and shades of social and historical settings in which these texts were composed. This article explores the context and background of the Arabic medieval philosophers’ esoteric writing, the diverse kinds of persecution with which they had to contend, the difference between Jews, Christians and Muslim philosophers in this regard, and the lasting effect that these differences had on the history of philosophy.