Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Averroës’ Search” begins one afternoon in twelfth-century Andalusia, in the shady Cordovan home of Ibn Rushd, later known in Europe as Averroës. The philosopher is at an impasse in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics: two words, “tragedy” and “comedy,” are everywhere in the Greek but opaque to the Arab, who has no notion of dramaturgy. At a dinner party that evening, the subject of poetry comes up again: a guest argues that the Bedouin verse of pre-Islamic times, the foundation of Arabic literature, is obsolete for poets living in sophisticated cities like Córdoba. When the sixth-century poet Zuhayr compared destiny to a blind camel, the metaphor was arresting; now it seems absurd. The philosopher disagrees. He argues, in perfectly Aristotelian fashion, that poetry deals in universals: its purpose isn’t to amaze but to invent figures understandable by everyone. (Borges’s sly implication seems to be that the powerful yet clumsy camel, against whom all human struggle is doomed, points toward an Arabic translation of “tragedy,” even if Ibn Rushd doesn’t realize …