  In considering Maimonides on politics and prophecy, one might also consider Leo Strauss’ emphasis on the significance of the divide between revelation and reason in Maimonides, and his connection of Maimonides along these lines to an ancient tradition that he sees as exemplified in Plato’s Laws and as continued in Islamic philosophical tradition in such thinkers as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. There is scholarly debate about how to read Strauss, how to understand Strauss’ final sense of revelation’s status vis-à-vis reason, and, as such, how to understand Strauss’ final understanding of Maimonides’ own brand of rationalism (all of which is made more difficult by debates over whether—and if so, where and to what extent and to what end—Strauss himself utilizes the esoteric writing strategies that he attributes to Maimonides and to his Islamic predecessors). The details and debates aside, we might simply note that Strauss strongly places Maimonides into a Platonist-into-Islamic tradition of political philosophy with implications for the way Maimonides understands prophecy, religion, law, and the relationship between revelation and  reason.[27] 