History of Islamic Philosophy [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

of adequately interpreting or justifying the linguistic usages of the Qur'an and
the Traditions. Even study of literature, and particularly pre-Islamic poetry,
appears to have been stimulated by the desire to find a venerable basis in
ancient usage for the many unfamiliar terms or idioms in the Qur'an and the
Traditions.

The canonical text of the Qur'an was finally fixed
during the reign of the third caliph, Uthman (644-656), and in honor of him the
authorized version of the Qur'an ever since has been called "Musaf Uthman".[2] A few minor refinements of a purely grammatical
and orthographic nature were made in the tenth century. The Traditions, on the
other hand, circulated orally for almost two centuries, and in consequence a
vast amount of apocryphal material was added to what must have been the original
core. By the middle of the ninth century, however, elaborate criteria for
sifting this material were developed and compilations of "sound" or canonical
Traditions were made, the best known and most authoritative of which is that of
al-Bukhari (d. 870).[3]

As one might expect, the greatest scholars of the
early period were primarily linguists or exegetes who addressed themselves to
the study and analysis of the texts of the Qur'an and the Traditions, on the one
hand, or the interpretation of the juridical aspects of Scripture and their
application to concrete cases, on the other. The first function was discharged
by the commentators and Traditionists, and the second by the jurisconsults (fuqaha'), upon whom also devolved, in
the absence of an organized teaching authority in Islam, the task of doctrinal
definition as well.

The criteria for settling juridical or even
doctrinal problems by the early jurisconsults were often purely linguistic or
textual. However, there soon arose a class of scholars who were willing to
permit the use of analogy (qiyas) or
independent judgment (ra'y) in doubtful matters, especially when a specific
textual basis for a decision could not be found in Scripture. Of the four major
legal schools into which Muslim jurisprudence eventually crystallized, the
school of Abu Hanifah (d. 767) and that of al-Shafi'i (d. 820) were much more
liberal than the two rival schools of Malik b. Anas (d. 795) and Ahmad b. Hanbal
(d. 855).

The implications of this bipolarity for the
subsequent development of scholastic theology (Kalam) are not far to seek. The
conservative "people of Tradition," as the Malikites and the Hanbalites are
generally called, tended to repudiate the use of any deductive method. Their
position is best epitomized by the comment of Malik on the Qur'anic reference to
God's "sitting upon the throne" (Qur'an 7:54 and 20:5). "The sitting," he is
reported to have said, "is known, its modality is unknown. Belief in it is an
obligation and raising questions regarding it is a heresy [bidah]."4[4]

This somewhat narrow approach to the questions
raised by the study of Qur'anic texts could not long withstand the pressures of
the times. There was first the inevitable confrontation of Islam with paganism
and Christianity, both at Damascus and at Baghdad, and the numerous tensions it
generated. Second, there were the moral and legal questions raised by the gloomy
picture of God's overwhelming supremacy in the world as depicted in the Qur'an,
and its bearing on the responsibility of human agents. And there was finally the
necessity of safeguarding what one may call the unity of the Islamic view of
life, which could not be achieved without a systematic attempt to bring the
conflicting data of revelation (in the Qur'an and the Traditions) into some
internal harmony.

The attempt to grapple with these complex problems
is at the basis of the rise and development of Islamic scholastic theology. A
good deal of the work of the earliest theologians consisted in the rebuttal of
the arguments leveled at Islam by pagans, Christians, and Jews. Significantly,
the early Mutazilite doctors are often commended for their defense of Islam
against the attacks of the Materialists (al-Dahriyah) and the
Manichaeans.[5] Indeed, heresiographers explicitly state that
scholastic theology arose as a means of buttressing Islamic beliefs by logical
arguments and defending them against attack.[6]

Within the confines of Islam itself, discussion
began to center by the seventh century around the questions of divine justice
and human responsibility. Authorities report that a cluster of early theologians
engaged in the discussion of the problem of free will and predestination (qadar), an issue generally recognized as
the first major one broached by the early theologians. The Mutazilah, who
continued this line of speculation, asserted the freedom of the individual on
the one hand and the justice of God on the other. And although they naturally
supported their positions by quotations from the Qur'an, their general tendency
was to advance arguments of a strictly ethical or rational character in support
of these positions.

Moreover, the anthropomorphic passages in which
the Qur'an abounded made it imperative to resort to some process of allegorical
interpretation in order to safeguard the immateriality and transcendence of God.
Here again the Mutazilah were undoubted pioneers. The Qur'anic references to
God's "sitting upon the throne," as well as the possibility of seeing Him on the
Last Day," (Qur'an 75:22, etc.), are interpreted as allegories for the divine
attributes of majesty or royalty on the one hand, or the possibility; of
contemplating Him mystically on the other.[7]

The proper prosecution of discussions of this kind
naturally called for a high degree of sophistication, which, prior to the
introduction of Greek philosophy and logic, was rather difficult, if not
impossible. Scholastic theology therefore gave the Muslims, as it had (given the
Christians of Egypt and Syria centuries earlier, the incentive to pursue the
study of Greek philosophy.

Not much progress was made in that direction
during the Umayyad period (661-750). The Umayyad caliphs, especially during the
first few decades of their rule, were concerned primarily with the consolidation
of their political power and the solution of the numerous economic and
administrative problems which governing a vast empire raised.

However, souls thirsting after knowledge were not
altogether wanting even during this period. We might mention, as a striking
instance, the Umayyad prince Khalid b. Yazid (d. 704), who appears to have
sought consolation in alchemy and astrology for his disappointed claims to the
caliphate. According to our most ancient sources, Khalid provided for the first
translations of scientific works (medical, astrological, and alchemical) into
Arabic. Nevertheless, the development of philosophy and theology in Islam is
bound up with the advent of the Abbasid dynasty in the middle of the eighth
century. Interest in science and philosophy grew during this period to such an
extent that scientific and philosophical output was no longer a matter of
individual effort or initiative. Before long, the state took an active part in
its promotion and the intellectual repercussions of this activity acquired much
greater scope. Theological divisions, growing out of philosophical controversy
or inquiry racked the whole of the Muslim community. Caliphs upheld one
theological view against another and demanded adherence to it on political
grounds, with the inevitable result that theology soon became the handmaid of
politics. As a consequence, freedom of thought and conscience was seriously
jeopardized.

A fundamental cause of this development is, of
course, the close correlation in Islam between principle and law, the realm of
the temporal and the realm of the spiritual. But such a development required the
challenge of foreign ideas and a release from the shackles of dogma. This is
precisely the role played by the of Greek ideas and the Greek spirit of
intellectual curiosity, which generated a bipolar reaction of the utmost
importance for the understanding of Islam. The most radical division caused by
the introduction of Greek thought was between the progressive element, which
sought earnestly to subject the data of revelation to the scrutiny of
philosophical thought, and the conservative element, which disassociated itself
altogether from philosophy on the ground that it was either impious or
suspiciously foreign. This division continued to reappear throughout Islamic
history as a kind of geological fault, sundering the whole of Islam. As a
result, throughout Muslim history reform movements have not been marked by a
great degree of release from authority or dogma or a quest for the
reinterpretation or reexamination of fundamental presuppositions in the realms
of social organization, theological discussion, or legal thought. Instead, like
the reform of al-Ashari (d. 935) in the tenth century, that of Ibn Taymiya (d.
1327) in the fourteenth century, or that of Muhammad Abdu (d. 1905) in the
nineteenth century, they were marked by a deliberate attempt to vindicate the
old, Traditionist concepts and assumptions of the earliest protagonists of
Muslim dogma, the so-called good forebears, (al-salaf al-salih) of the Muslim
community.

One lasting consequence of the introduction of
Greek philosophy and the Greek spirit of inquiry, however, was that the
"Traditionism" of early theologians and jurists, such as Malik b. Anas, was no
longer tenable in its pure or original form. The great Asharite "reformers"
committed, as they were to the defense of orthodoxy against heretics and free
thinkers, could no longer do so without recourse to the weapons which their
rationalist opponents had borrowed from the Greeks. It was as though most of
Greek dialectic could no longer be exorcised without recourse to the formula of
exorcism which it had itself enunciated in the first place.

Moreover, the, varying degrees of allegiance to
Greek philosophy and logic not only gave rise to the diverse theological schools
of thought, but generated the more distinctly, Hellenic current of ideas, which
we shall designate as the Islamic philosophical school.

The rise and development of this school is the
primary concern of the present history. Scholastic theology will be discussed
only in so far as it absorbed, reacted to, or by-passed Islamic philosophy. To
theology might be added another movement whose relation to philosophy has also
fluctuated between the two poles of total endorsement or total
disavowal-mysticism or Sufism.
Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience,
which grows in turn out of man's overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of
nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and
emotion to this experience. The mystical experience, it is often claimed, is
distinct from the rational or the philosophical, and, less often, it is said to
be contrary to it. But, whether it is distinct or not, it can hardly be
irrelevant to man's rational or philosophical aspirations; since it allegedly
leads to the very object which reason seeks, namely, the total and supreme
apprehension of reality. In fact, the history of Muslim mysticism is more closely bound up with that of
philosophy than other forms of mysticism have been. The mysticism of some of the
great Sufis such as Ibn Arabi (d.
1240 ), culminated in a grandiose cosmological and metaphysical world-scheme,
which is of decisive philosophical significance. Conversely, the philosophical
preoccupations of some philosophers, such as Ibn Bajjah (d. 1138) and Ibn Tufayl
(d. 1185), led logically and inevitably to the conception of mystical experience
(designated "illumination") as the crowning of the process of reasoning.

The beginnings of the Islamic philosophical school
coincide with the first translations of the works of the Greek masters into
Arabic from Syriac or Greek. We might accept as credible the traditional account
that scientific and medical texts were the earliest works to be translated into
Arabic. The Arabs, as well as the Persians, who contributed so abundantly to the
scientific and philosophical enlightenment in Islam, are a practical-minded
people. Their interest in the more abstract aspects of Greek thought must have
been a subsequent development. Even the Christian Syrians, who paved the way for
the introduction of the Greek heritage into the Near East shortly before the
Arab conquest in the seventh century, were interested primarily in Aristotelian
logic and Greek philosophy as a prelude to the study of theological texts. These
were not only written originally in Greek, but also were rich in logical and
philosophical terms that previously had been unknown to the Semites. In addition
to scientific and medical works, collections of moral aphorisms ascribed to
Socrates, Solon, Hermes, Pythagoras, Luqman, and similar real or fictitious
personages appear to have been among the earliest texts to be translated into
Arabic. The Arab accounts of Greek philosophy abound in such apocryphal
literature, whose exact origin is sometimes difficult to ascertain. It might be
assumed that it was the affinity of these writings to belles lettres (adab) and their literary excellence
which insured their early vogue among the elite. Translators had naturally to
depend upon the generosity of their aristocratic or wealthy patrons, who, even
when they affected interest in other than the purely practical disciplines of
astrology or medicine at all, were content with this species of ethical and
religious literature, which was cherished and disseminated partly as a matter of
social refinement and partly as a matter of moral edification. Interest in the
more abstract forms of ancient, especially Greek, learning was bound to follow
in due course, however. First, the translators themselves, having mastered
skills required for translating into Arabic more practical works, proceeded next
to tackle works of a greater speculative interest, and eventually to induce
their patrons to provide for their translation. Secondly, the theological
controversies had reached such a point of sophistication by the end of the eighth century that the
old weapons were no longer sufficient for the defense of orthodoxy, which had
now been given the authority of the state. Abstract philosophy was further
popularized through the personal idiosyncrasies of such men as the Umayyad
prince Khalid b. Yazid, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (d. 833), and the Persian
vizier Jafar the Barmakid (d. 805), who,
had acquired more than a conventional zeal for ancient learning in its
Persian, Indian, and Babylonian forms in general, and its Greek and Hellenistic
forms in particular.

The greater translators, most of whom were
Syriac-speaking Christians, of the unorthodox Nestorian and Monophysite
communions, were, not mere translators or servile imitators of Greek or other
foreign authors. Some of them, such as Hunain (d. 873) and Yahia b. Adi (d.
974), are credited with a series of important scientific and philosophical
works. Hunain's interests seem to have been chiefly medical and scientific,
whereas Yahia seems to have been more interested in theological and
philosophical questions. To a famous pupil of his, Ibn al-Khammar (d. 940), is
ascribed a treatise on the Agreement of
the Opinions of the Philosophers and the Christians, which belongs to the
same literary lineage as the parallel treatise of the Muslim philosophers (such
as Ibn Rushd, d. 1198) who dealt systematically with the questions of reason and
revelation in their works.

The works of those early translators were on the
whole compilations which lacked originality. They contained ideas that had been
gleaned at random from the works they had translated. The first genuine
philosopher to write in Arabic was al-Kindi (d. ca. 866), a contemporary of the
great Hunain.'Like the rest of the Arab philosophers and expositors, he differed
from the Christian translators in two important particulars: his religion and
his total ignorance of Syriac or Greek, the two chief languages of the times,
besides Arabic. It is surprising that even the greatest admirers of Greek
philosophy such as Averroes, lacked even a perfunctory knowledge of Greek. The
chief reason appears to have been the contempt of the Arabs for all foreign
tongues, which, seems to have spread like an infection, even to non-Arabs of the
most bigoted type. Some philosophers, it is true, chose to write in their native
tongues, in addition to writing in Arabic, as is illustrated by Ibn Sina's and
al-Ghazali's Persian writings. This was probably a gesture of nationalist
loyalty, not the manifestation of a genuine desire for a polyglot erudition or
distinction.

As a result of their total ignorance of Greek,
those philosophers tended to be less slavish in their interpretation of Greek
texts, if a trifle less exact, than the early Greek commentators, such as
Themistius and Alexander. Being Muslims by faith, they were naturally anxious to
justify their interest in the pagan philosophers of antiquity. Indeed, almost
from the beginning it was standard for the orthodox to reproach all those who
"looked into the books of the [Greek] philosophers"[8] -even presumably when they did not understand
them. Such theological preoccupation was a distinctive feature of the
development of Islamic philosophy. Al-Kindi, the first genuine philosopher, was
more than a philosopher with a theological bent; he was to some extent a
theologian with an interest in philosophy. We might say that al-Kindi still
stands on the borderline of philosophy and theology, which the later philosophers tried more
boldly, perhaps, to cross. How far they succeeded in so doing and how far it was
possible for them to span the distance separating Islamic belief from Greek
speculative thought will be seen in later chapters. But it might be mentioned at
this stage that al-Kindi's theological interests did act as a safeguard against
the total submersion of religious belief in the current of abstract
philosophical thought, and the total subordination of the supernatural light of
faith to the light of reason -a devastating temptation which Islamic philosophy
could not ultimately resist. For the subsequent "illuminationist" trend in the
history of Islamic philosophy amounted precisely to this: the vindication of the
right of reason to scale the heights of knowledge unaided and to lift the veil
of mystery which shrouded the innermost recesses of reality. The ultimate goal
of reason, according to Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufayl, and others, is
"contact" or "conjunction" (ittisal)
with the universal mind or active intellect, not the enlightenment which the visio Dei promises, by admitting the
soul graciously into the company of the elect, who are blessed with
understanding. In this respect, it is clear that the Islamic philosophers remain
true to the Greek ideal, in its exaltation of man and its faith in his boundless
intellectual prowess and his ability to dispense altogether with any
supernatural light.

This is the sense in which Islamic philosophy can
be said to have followed a distinctive line of development which gave it that
unity of form which is a characteristic of the great intellectual movements in
history. We should, however, guard against the illusion that the course of its
development was perfectly straight. Some of the most fascinating Muslim
thinkers, such as al-Nazzam (d. 845), al-Razi (d. 925), and al-Maarri (d.
1057), fall outside the mainstream of thought in Islam. Their dissident voices
lend a discordant note to an otherwise monotonous symphony. The difficulty of
expounding their thought with any degree of completeness is bound up with its
very nonconformist character. Islam did generate such dissentient and solitary
souls, but it could not tolerate or accept them in the end. The historian of
Islamic thought cannot overlook them, however, without distorting the total
picture.

Chapter
Seven

The
Interaction of Philosophy and Dogma

I The Eclipse of Theological
Rationalism

As we mentioned earlier, the
rise of Scholastic theology in the middle of the eighth century was the outcome
of a new spirit of inquiry, which the introduction of Greek philosophy in the
Muslim world had sparked. In some cases, however, the interaction of philosophy
and dogma resulted in a gradual cleavage between the two. The systematic
philosophers, like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, tried hard to lessen the effect of
such cleavage by emphasizing the areas of agreement and the common concerns of
philosophy and dogma. Some, such as al-Kindi, went so far as to espouse the