Two men born in Cordoba twelve years apart went on to shape philosophy in three religions, and both careers were determined by the same event. The Almohads took the city in the middle of the twelfth century and ended the arrangement under which Jews and Christians paid a tax and kept their religion. Maimonides' family left, moving through Iberia and Morocco before settling in Egypt, where he became a physician, head of the Jewish community and the author of the Mishneh Torah, a complete restatement of Jewish law, and the Guide of the Perplexed, which sets out to reconcile that law with Aristotelian philosophy for a reader already troubled by the conflict.
Ibn Rushd stayed and prospered under the same dynasty. He served as judge in Seville and in Cordoba, was physician to the caliph, and produced commentaries on nearly the whole of Aristotle at three levels of detail. His Decisive Treatise argues that philosophy is not merely permitted but obligatory for those able to do it, and that where a demonstrated conclusion conflicts with the plain sense of scripture the scripture is to be read allegorically. His reply to al-Ghazali's attack on the philosophers is a line by line rebuttal titled the incoherence of the incoherence.
Late in life he fell from favour, his books were burned and he was banished. His work then had a stranger afterlife than either man could have expected: translated into Hebrew and Latin, he became simply the Commentator to the schoolmen of Paris, and Latin Averroism was condemned there while his influence in Arabic faded.