Free For Lust of Knowing by Robert Irwin Page B

book. Certainly the book is pervaded by Arab themes and in it Lull makes explicit his admiration for Sufism: Blanquerna remembered that ‘a Saracen related to him that the Saracens have certain religious men, and that among others are certain men called Sufis, who are most prized amongst them, and these men have words of love and brief examples which give to men great devotion’. Lullseems to have absorbed the Sufi practice of meditating on the names of God and turned it into a Christian devotional practice. At the time that he wrote
Blanquerna
, Lull believed that missionary work and disputations were Christendom’s best hope of defeating the Islamic menace and he was hostile to the idea of further Crusades. In
The Art of Contemplation
Lull argued, among other things, that going on crusade was a bad idea, for if God had approved of the Crusades they would have been more successful in the past. Elsewhere in
Blanquerna
, the Sultan of Egypt expresses sarcastic surprise that Christian Crusaders should seek to imitate the violent ways of Muhammad, rather than the peaceful preaching of Christ and his Apostles.
    There is no space here to outline the contents of the rest of Lull’s two hundred-odd writings, though many of them shed light on his various opinions about Arabs and his proposals for dealing with the menace of Islam. With the possible exception of Ricoldo da Monte Croce, no medieval European thinker appears to have been more familiar with Arabic literature and thought. Lull found much to admire in it. Apart from his passion for Sufism, he praised the beauty of the Qur’an and he claimed that Muslims lived longer than Christians because their diet and clothing were more sensible. Even so, he was adamant that the Muslim religion was false and its followers damned. Averroism was a particularly reprehensible Muslim doctrine and during his final stay in Paris Lull penned several attacks against Averroism and the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle. He seems to have regarded Averroism as the heart of Islam’s evil and the Averroist idea of the two truths as being particularly damnable. It is likely that Lull’s special hostility owed a lot to his early reading of al-Ghazali, the leading critic of Averroes in the Islamic world.
    Though Lull had first put his faith in missionary endeavour, after the fall of what was left of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to the Muslim Mamluks in 1291, he came round to the view that force was also necessary and a new crusade was indeed desirable. (However, Lull maintained that a knowledge of Arabic would be just as necessary for the Crusader as it was for the missionary.) In a late work,
The Disputation with Hamar the Saracen
, Lull expressed anxiety that Christendom was facing the double menace of Islam and the Mongols. A third of the Mongols had already converted to Islam. Moreover,the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt was successful in recruiting Christian renegades and a third of his army consisted of such men. This treatise was written in prison in Bougie, Algeria. In 1295 Lull had become a Franciscan tertiary (that is to say, he became attached to the preaching order, while still remaining a layman). Thereafter, he went three times on preaching missions to North Africa, courting martyrdom in doing so, for anyone who sought to convert Muslims from their faith was liable to the death penalty. On his third visit he achieved his ambition and he was stoned to death by a mob in 1315 or 1316.
    The prolific and diversely talented Lull is perhaps best known for his
Ars Magna
, a treatise that describes a kind of medieval hand-operated computer. It consisted of a revolving wheel with letters on it signifying abstract principles. The rotation of its circles could be made to demonstrate the existence of God and the truths of Christian dogma and Lull seems to have hoped that a Muslim would only have to see it in operation in order to become converted. He was a genius whose writings are full