VIA IMPUGNANDI IN THE AGE OF ALFONSO VIII: IBERIAN-CHRISTIAN KALĀM AND A LATIN TRIAD REVISITED

On June 1, 1213, the year before Alfonso VIII died, Mark of Toledo, a canon of that city and accomplished Arabist, composed a preface for his Latin versions of a handful of short texts by Ibn Tumart, founder and Mahdi of the Almohad movement. Stressing (quite rightly) that Ibn Tumart’s religious thought had a strongly rationalist quality—he “well achieves his goal of proving . . . that God is one, the first and the last”—and suggesting (quite wrongly) that he was thus not truly a Muslim, but a philosopher who “believed in no religion (lex),” Mark urged his