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CHAPTER
IV
CONTROVERSY BETWEEN IDEALISM AND REALISM
The Ash`arite denial of Aristotle's Prima Materia, and their views concerning the nature of space, time and causation, awakened that irrepressible
spirit of controversy which, for centuries, divided the camp of Muhammedan
thinkers, and eventually exhausted its vigor in the merely verbal subtleties of
schools. The publication of Najm al-Din Al-Katibi's (a follower of Aristotle
whose disciples were called Philosophers as distinguished from scholastic
theologians) Hikmat al-`Ain - "Philosophy of Essence", greatly intensified the
intellectual conflict, and invoked keen criticism from a host of Ash`arite as
well as other idealist thinkers. I shall consider in order the principal points
on which the two schools differed from each other.
A. The
Nature of the Essence
We have seen that the Ash`arite theory of knowledge drove them to hold that individual essences, of various things are quite different from each
other, and are determined in each case by the ultimate cause God. They denied
the existence of an ever-changing. primary stuff common to all things, and
maintained against the Rationalists that existence constitutes the
