History of Islamic Philosophy

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Oliver Leaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136780431
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Islamic philosophy has often been treated as being largely of historical interest, belonging to the history of ideas rather than to philosophical study. This volume successfully overturns that view. Emphasizing the living nature and rich diversity of the subject, it examines the main thinkers and schools of thought, discusses the key concepts of Islamic philosophy and covers a vast geographical area. This indispensable reference tool includes a comprehensive bibliography and an extensive index.

I

Religious, intellectual and cultural context

CHAPTER 1

The meaning and concept of philosophy in Islam

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

In the light of the Qur’an and Hadith in both of which the term hikmah has been used,¹ Muslim authorities belonging to different schools of thought have sought over the ages to define the meaning of hikmah as well as falsafah, a term which entered Arabic through the Greek translations of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. On the one hand what is called philosophy in English must be sought in the context of Islamic civilization not only in the various schools of Islamic philosophy but also in schools bearing other names, especially kalam, ma’rifah, mill al-fiqh as well as the awail sciences, not to speak of such subjects as grammar and history which developed particular branches of philosophy. On the other hand each school of thought sought to define what is meant by hikmah or falsafah according to its own perspective and this question has remained an important concern of various schools of Islamic thought especially as far as the schools of Islamic philosophy are concerned.

During Islamic history, the terms used for Islamic philosophy as well as the debates between the philosophers, the theologians and sometimes the Sufis as to the meaning of these terms varied to some extent from one period to another but not completely. Hikmah and falsafah continued to be used while such terms as al-hikmat al-ilahiyyah and al-hikmat al-mutaaliyah gained new meaning and usage in later centuries of Islamic history, especially in the school of Mulla Sadra. The term over which there was the greatest debate was hikmah, which was claimed by the Sufis and mutakallimun as well as the philosophers, all appealing to such Hadith as “The acquisition of hikmah is incumbent upon you and the good resides in hikmah.”¹ Some Sufis such as Tirmidhl were called hakim and Ibn Arabl refers to the wisdom which has been unveiled through each manifestation of the logos as hikmah as seen in the very title of his masterpiece Fusus al-hikam? while many mutakallimun such as Fakhr al-Dln al-RazI claimed that kaldm and not falsafah was hikmah,^A Ibn Khaldun confirming this view in calling the later kaldm (kaldm al-muta’akhkhirin) philosophy or hikmah)

Our discussion in this chapter is concerned, however, primarily with the Islamic philosophers’ understanding of the definition and meaning of the concept of philosophy and the terms hikmah and falsafah.⁶ This understanding includes of course what the Greeks had comprehended by the term philosophia and many of the definitions from Greek sources which were to find their way into Arabic sometimes with only slight modifications. Some of the definitions of Greek origin most common among Islamic philosophers are as follows:⁷

1 Philosophy (alfalsafah) is the knowledge of all existing things qua existents (ashya’ al-mawjudah bi ma hiya mawjudah)?

2 Philosophy is knowledge of divine and human matters.

3 Philosophy is taking refuge in death, that is, love of death.

4 Philosophy is becoming God-like to the extent of human ability.

5 It [philosophy] is the art (sind’ah) of arts and the science (Him) of sciences.

6 Philosophy is predilection for hikmah.

The Islamic philosophers meditated upon these definitions of falsafah which they inherited from ancient sources and which they identified with the Qur’anic term hikmah believing the origin of hikmah to be divine. The first of the Islamic philosophers, Abu Ya’qub al-Kindl wrote in his On First Philosophy, “Philosophy is the knowledge of the reality of things within people’s possibility, because the philosopher’s end in theoretical knowledge is to gain truth and in practical knowledge to behave in accordance with truth.”⁹ Al-Farabl, while accepting this definition, added the distinction between philosophy based on certainty (al-yaqiniyyah) hence demonstration and philosophy based on opinion (al-maznilnah),¹⁰ hence dialectic and sophistry, and insisted that philosophy was the mother of the sciences and dealt with everything that exists.¹¹

Ibn Slna again accepted these earlier definitions while making certain precisions of his own. In his ‘Uyiin al-hikmah he says “Al-hikmah [which he uses as being the same as philosophy] is the perfection of the human soul through conceptualization [tasawwur] of things and judgment [tasdiq] of theoretical and practical realities to the measure of human ability.”¹² But he went further in later life to distinguish between Peripatetic philosophy and what he called “Oriental philosophy” (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyyah) which was not based on ratiocination alone but included realized knowledge and which set the stage for the hikmat al-ishraq of Suhrawardl.¹³ Ibn Slna’s foremost student Bahmanyar meanwhile identified falsafah closely with the study of existents as Ibn Slna had done in his Peripatetic works such as the Shifa, repeating the Aristotelian dictum that philosophy is the study of existents qua existents. Bahmanyar wrote in the introduction to his Tahsil, “The aim of the philosophical sciences is knowledge of existents.”¹⁴

Ismā’īlī and Hermetico-Pythagorean thought, which paralleled in development the better-known Peripatetic philosophy but with a different philosophical perspective, nevertheless gave definitions of philosophy not far removed from those of the Peripatetics, emphasizing perhaps even more the relation between the theoretical aspect of philosophy and its practical dimension, between thinking philosophically and leading a virtuous life. This nexus, which is to be seen in all schools of earlier Islamic philosophy, became even more evident from Suhrawardi onward and the hakim came to be seen throughout Islamic society not as someone who could only discuss mental concepts in a clever manner but as one who also lived according to the wisdom which he knew theoretically. The modern Western idea of the philosopher never developed in the Islamic world and the ideal stated by the Ikhwan al-Safa’ who lived in the fourth/ tenth century and who were contemporary with Ibn Slna was to echo ever more loudly over the ages wherever Islamic philosophy was cultivated. The Ikhwan wrote, “The beginning of philosophy (falsafah) is the love of the sciences, its middle knowledge of the realities of existents to the measure of human ability and its end words and deeds in accordance with knowledge.”¹⁵

With Suhrawardi we enter not only a new period but also another realm of Islamic philosophy. The founder of a new intellectual perspective in Islam, Suhrawardi used the term hikmat al-ishraq rather than falsafat al-ishraq for both the title of his philosophical masterpiece and the school which he inaugurated. The ardent student of Suhrawardi and the translator of Hikmat al-ishraq into French, Henry Corbin, employed the term theosophie rather than philosophy to translate into French the term hikmah as understood by Suhrawardi and later sages such as Mulla Sadra, and we have also rendered al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah of Mulla Sadra into English as “transcendent theosophy”¹⁶ and have sympathy for Corbin’s translation of the term. There is of course the partly justified argument that in recent times the term “theosophy” has gained pejorative connotations in European languages, especially English, and has become associated with occultism and pseudo-esoterism. And yet the term philosophy also suffers from limitations imposed upon it by those who have practised it during the past few centuries. If Hobbes, Hume and Ayer are philosophers, then those whom Suhrawardi calls hukama are not philosophers and vice versa. The narrowing of the meaning of philosophy, the divorce between philosophy and spiritual practice in the West and especially the reduction of philosophy to either rationalism or empiricism necessitate making a distinction between the meaning given to hikmah by a Suhrawardl or Mulla Sadra and the purely mental activity called philosophy in certain circles in the West today. The use of the term theosophy to render this later understanding of the term hikmah is based on the older and time-honoured meaning of this term in European intellectual history as associated with such figures as Jakob Bohme and not as the term became used in the late thirteenth/nineteenth century by some British occultists. Be that as it may, it is important to emphasize the understanding that Suhrawardl and all later Islamic philosophers have of hikmah as primarily al-hikmat al-ilahiyyah (literally divine wisdom or theosophia) which must be realized within one’s whole being and not only mentally. Suhrawardl saw this hikmah as being present also in ancient Greece before the advent of Aristotelian rationalism and identifies hikmah with coming out of one’s body and ascending to the world of lights, as did Plato.¹⁷ Similar ideas are to be found throughout his works, and he insisted that the highest level of hikmah requires both the perfection of the theoretical faculty and the purification of the soul.¹⁸

With Mulla Sadra, one finds not only a synthesis of various earlier schools of Islamic thought but also a synthesis of the earlier views concerning the meaning of the term and concept philosophy. At the beginning of the Asfar he writes, repeating verbatim and summarizing some of the earlier definitions, ‘falsafah is the perfecting of the human soul to the extent of human ability through the knowledge of the essential reality of things as they are in themselves and through judgment concerning their existence established upon demonstration and not derived from opinion or through imitation”.¹⁹ And in al-Shawahid al-rubiibiyyah he adds, “[through hikmah] man becomes an intelligible world resembling the objective world and similar to the order of universal existence”.²⁰

In the first book of the Asfar dealing with being, Mulla Sadra discusses extensively the various definitions of hikmah, emphasizing not only theoretical knowledge and “becoming an intelligible world reflecting the objective intelligible world” but also detachment from passions and purification of the soul from its material defilements or what the Islamic philosophers call tajarrud or catharsis.²¹ Mulla Sadra accepts the meaning of hikmah as understood by Suhrawardl and then expands the meaning of falsafah to include the dimension of illumination and realization implied by the ishraqi and also Sufi understanding of the term. For him as for his contemporaries, as well as most of his successors, falsafah or philosophy was seen as the supreme science of ultimately divine origin, derived from “the niche of prophecy” and the hukama’as the most perfect of human beings standing in rank only below the prophets and Imams.²²

This conception of philosophy as dealing with the discovering of the truth concerning the nature of things and combining mental knowledge with the purification and perfection of one’s being has lasted to this day wherever the tradition of Islamic philosophy has continued and is in fact embodied in the very being of the most eminent representatives of the Islamic philosophical tradition to this day. Such fourteenth/twentieth-century masters as Mlrza Ahmad AshtiyanI, the author of Ndma-yi rahbardn-i dmiizish-i kitdb-i takwin (“Treatise of the Guides to the Teaching of the Book of Creation”); Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Assar, author of many treatises including Wahdat ctl-wujiid (“The Transcendent Unity of Being”); Mahdi Ilahi Q...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Transliteration and style
• Introduction
• Introduction
• Religious, intellectual and cultural context
• The meaning and concept of philosophy in Islam
• The Qur'ān and Hadīth as source and inspiration of Islamic philosophy
• The Greek and Syriac background
• The Indian and Persian background
• Early kālam
• The transmission of Greek philosophy to the Islamic world
• Sunni kalām and theological controversies
• Twelve-Imām Shi'ite theological and philosophical thought
• Ismā'īlī philosophy
• Islamic humanism in the fourth/tenth century
• Early Islamic philosophers in the East
• Al-Kindī
• Al-Fārābā
• Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā' al-Rāzī
• Al-'Amiri
• The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ḷafā')
• Ibn Sīnā
• Ibn Sīnā's “Oriental philosophy”
• Ibn Miskawayh
• Al-Ghazzālī
• Islamic philosophers in the Western lands of Islam
• Ibn Masarrah
• Ibn Bājjah
• Ibn Ṭufayl
• Ibn Rushd
• Ibn Sab'īn
• Ibn Khaldūn
• Philosophy and the mystical tradition
• Introduction to the mystical tradition
• ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī ana the intellectual climate of his times
• Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī: founder of the Illuminationist school
• The Illuminationist tradition
• Ibn ‘Arabī
• The school of Ibn ‘Arabī
• Later Islamic philosophy
• Khwājah Naṣīr aI-Dīn al-Ṭūsī: the philosopher/vizier and the intellectual climate of his times
• From al-Ṭūsī to the School of Iṣfahān
• Mīr Dāmād and the founding of the “School of Iṣfahān”
• Mullā Ṣadrā His life and works
• Mullā Ṣadrā His teachings
• Shah Walīullāh
• The Jewish philosophical tradition in the Islamic cultural world
• Introduction
• Jewish philosophy in the Islamic world
• Saadiah Gaon al-Fayyumi
• Ibn Gabirol
• Judah Halevi
• Maimonides
• Gersonides Levi ben Gershom
• Judaism and Sufism
• Jewish Averroism
• Philosophy and its parts
• Metaphysics
• Logic
• Epistemology
• Political philosophy
• Literature
• Language1
• Science
• Mysticism
• Ethics
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Later transmission and interpretation
• Medieval Christian and Jewish Europe
• Modern Western philosophy
• The poetic medium A case study
• Islamic philosophy in the modern Islamic world
• Persia
• India
• Pakistan
• The Arab world
• Egypt
• Turkey
• South-east Asia
• Interpretation of Islamic philosophy in tne West
• Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy
• Henry Corbin His work and influence
• Islamic philosophy in Russiaand the Soviet Union
• The possibility of a philosophy of Islam
• Bibliography
• A guide to bibliographical resources
• General introductions to Islamic philosophy: Oliver Leaman
• Index of names