  (a) It is not possible to cover every aspect of Maimonides' Islamic philosophical heritage (even if we restrict ourselves to the aforementioned text traditions) in a format of this sort; one might certainly speak of other Islamic writers whose works arguably influenced Maimonides. To best do justice to this topic, I will proceed in what follows by selecting instructive and representative bits of primary text from Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed (henceforth, Guide), and comparing them with ideas from the aforementioned texts. In this way, readers will be helped to see a selection of continuities in philosophical tradition between five important Islamic text traditions and Maimonides. By proceeding in this way, I additionally hope to have supplied readers with appropriate Arabic philosophical resource materials for further study. It might be noted too that given my current goal of facilitating as much active engagement on the part of as wide a range of readers as possible, I have limited the cited Arabic texts in this study to those that are currently available in English translation.