Islamic Philosophy
1.
Greek Philosophy—The Islamic texts
concerning Greek philosophy, or Hellenistic philosophy, in the beginning were
held in a philosophical school’s library located in Haran, northern Iraq, in
both Greek and Syriac languages. During
the prosperous period of the Abbasid Dynasty when the caliph ordered that the
texts be translated, in order learn about Greek heritage and it satisfy his
curiosity about Greek knowledge of the sciences and civil administration, to
see what might be useful to Muslims in the Abbasid dynasty during approximately
750-830 AD. This was mainly in response
to the criticism of the legitimacy of Islam by Christians and Jews, who
themselves escaped scrutiny by use of Greek philosophers who had tried to
analyze and perhaps reconcile the nature of Judeo-Christian thought with a
Greek philosophical counterpart. It is
important to understand that the underpinnings of the Islamic philosophical
traditions are preceded from a millennium of Greek thought and philosophy. The texts translated during the period that
Islamic philosophy saw its birth were tainted with the conquering of all of the
surrounding lands around the Mediterranean Sea by the Roman Empire and an
influx of the religion that the Romans brought with them—Christianity. Concordantly, paganism and splashes of other
polytheistic pseudo-religions were scattered around the Roman territories, and
as is consistent with the pragmatic nature of the Roman conquest system, many
of the elements of the previous religion of paganism were simply integrated
into the new craze of Christianity, that if left unchecked, could threaten the
foundations of the empire itself. Greek
philosophy and science was undoubtedly influenced by this dramatic change in
the religious and political landscape, and the reflection of this change can be
seen in the philosophical texts that were acquired and translated by the
Muslims and their subsequent areas of use.
Greek philosophy, for the purpose of understanding Islamic philosophy,
can be summarized in the works of a few outstanding men who forever changed the
landscape of logical thought and processes, namely, Aristotle and Plato, and to
a lesser degree the works of the philosopher Galen.
2.
Aristotle—Aristotle is perhaps the most widely
known and studied philosopher that has ever existed. He is known as the “First Teacher” and the
“Master of Logic” to Muslims, and has had a major impact on the areas of
philosophy, science, metaphysics, law, mathematics, among many others. Aristotle wrote many works on philosophy and the
sciences, the most notable that was used by Islamic philosophers being his work
entitled Metaphysics. The teachings of
Aristotle were so highly prized that he was given the name “The First Teacher”,
and was revered slightly under the level of the prophets and Jesus. However, it is important to note that the
texts Muslims translated that were attributed to Aristotle were sometimes
incomplete, or not even his work—which was especially the case in the work The
Theology of Aristotle, which was erroneously attributed to him in the title but
was written by Plotinus, and was his work Enneads. According, some of the major works that
define Aristotelian thought such as his Poetics, his works on law, and others
were not in the collection, meaning that Muslims at the time had a very
corrupted idea of the works of one of the most influential figures of Islamic
philosophy.
3.
Plato—Plato is perhaps the most influential
philosopher during the infancy of Muslim philosophy, as many of the first
Islamic philosophers adopted his teachings, starting a neo-Platonist revolution
that would sweep across the minds of Muslim philosophers and theologists, and
have a much greater affect than a simple philosophical commentary to the
Islamic religious text, the Qur’an. This
revival occurred during the 3rd century AD by Plotinus and it was especially
influential on Islamic thought. Plato was
also the teacher of the famous Aristotle, and Plato, himself, learned from
Socrates. Some of the contributions of
Plato include his works on ethics and morality, law, mathematics, science,
astronomy, and cosmology. In addition to
this, Plato founded the first ever institution for higher learning in Athens,
Greece, called the Academy.
4.
Neo-Platonism—Neo-Platonism refers to the movement in Islamic
philosophy where Muslim philosophers revived the ideas of Plato to use as a
foundation for their philosophy. Neo-Platonism is a fusion of Greek
thought from the Hellenistic period with Middle Eastern thought and theology.
Some of the ideas that were held by many neo-Platonists were Plato’s view
of Creation and his theory on the transmigration of souls, as well as the five
spheres of the heavens and his affinity and study of numbers, shapes and
geometry of the natural world--sometimes known as the Platonic solids.
Neo-Platonism saw a revival in the Middle East among Muslim philosophers
during the time of Ptolemaic Alexandria in the 9th century AD, and as early as
the 3rd century AD.
5.
Abu ‘Ali Al-Husayn Ibn ‘Abd Allah Ibn Sina—Ibn Sina was the
most famous Muslim philosopher, and his popularity even gained him a Latinized
name to help people in the West to identify him, which was Avicenna. Besides philosophy, Ibn Sina was also an
extremely famous physician, debatably just as famous for his work in medicine as
in his work in philosophy, although he had no formal medical training or any
medical teachers of any kind. In fact,
Ibn Sina was known to have taught medical science and procedure to a number of
the leading physicians of his day, when he was only sixteen years old. He was also well versed in all of the
sciences, and in fact had them mastered, by the age of eighteen and published
his first philosophical book at the age of twenty one. While his family was greatly influenced by
Ishmaili propaganda, Ibn Sina formally rejected their principles and instead
adopted his own style of philosophy and morals which he wrote about and taught
throughout his lifetime. He was able to
master these sciences through his great intellect and notable memory, and
gained access to the written material needed to teach himself through
libraries—one of which, the library of the Samanid princes, because he cured a
member of the aristocracy of Khurasan from a life-threatening illness.
6. Al-Farabi—Al-Farabi was the
first Muslim philosopher to really break through the barrier of needing
explicit contextual verification of using philosophy from the Qur’an. Before Al-Farabi, any philosophical notion
that would even be considered by many Muslim scholars had to have specific
reference in the Qur’an in order to be accepted. This led to the only philosophical tenets
that could be accepted to be very vague and extremely fundamental, and without
any room for interpretation or explanation, other than by expounding on it
through the Qur’an. Al-Farabi wrote many
works that attempted to reconcile the philosophical works of Aristotle and
Plato, being the founder of neo-Platonists, including a commentary on the work
of Aristotle entitled Metaphysics, which was used to help teach other highly
revered Muslim philosophers in both his time and after his death who benefited
from his vast understanding of logic and the Greek interpretation of logical
principles and the logical process.
Al-Farabi was also the first Muslim political philosopher, and his
political works focused around the goal of attaining happiness which he felt
could only be achieved through the political system Plato outlined called the
“virtuous city”.
7.
Virtuous
City—The “virtuous city” was
an idea of Plato’s that the Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi used in his Islamic
political philosophy when he began reviving Plato’s philosophies in the 9th
century in the neo-Platonist movement. He felt that man was a political
animal that could not achieve happiness alone, and it was only through the
formation of a “virtuous city” could man achieve happiness. Al-Farabi
theorized that this city must be constructed so that there is a political
system put into place that allows for the development of happiness. Here,
happiness refers to the soul’s separation from the physical body, and that this
“happiness” is the goal of all humanity.
8.
Transmigration
of souls—Transmigration of
souls is a concept of Plato’s that postulates that the soul can be transmitted
to another body once the soul’s original body dies. This concept is
similar to the Eastern concept of reincarnation, however it differs in that the
soul that Plato describes never loses its own identity, whereas reincarnation
postulates that when the soul has entered into a new host body, it’s memories
and identity are “reborn” with the new body, allowing the two to form a
symbiotic relationship that fosters a joint growth in the soul and the body as
each matures through experience and time. One could understand the
concept of transmigration better with an analogy derived from a Chinese proverb
that states: “Consider a cup of tea, if I were to drop this cup on the
floor it would break. Even though the vessel that houses the tea is
broken, the tea is still tea; it has just taken another form because the
cup/vessel that held it no longer binds it to a specific form. If the tea
were to be picked up somehow and poured into another cup, the tea would still
remain the same time, only the vessel would have changed.” If one would
think of the tea as a person’s soul, this would shed light onto the difference
in the two concepts. Plato’s transmigration theory is analogized here as
the tea that remains the same, simply changing the container that holds it.
There are no changes made it to, and even though the cup could be said to
go through a process of change, the tea itself has not changed at all.
9. Abu Yusef Yaqoub Ibn
Ishaq Al-Kindi—Al Kindi, shown to the right, is known as the father of Islamic
philosophy. He is known for his
assertion of recognizing that philosophy, as well as many of the sciences, as a
search for truth; and that truth, no matter where it comes from or who teaches
it, cannot be condemned because of its origins.
His search for truth led him to study many things during his lifetime,
and through his study he became an accomplished philosopher, mathematician,
astronomer, physician, geologist, and musician.
Al-Kindi believed that philosophy was the highest level of understanding
our existence and the existence of all created things that we could ever
possibly hope to achieve, and that philosophy revealed “the knowledge of the
essence of things, insofar as it is possible for man.” Al-Kindi was a supporter of causality, which
many other Muslim philosophers rejected and found blasphemous, and believed
that in order to find truth we must seek out and understand the cause of the
event in question to ever be able to properly understand the event’s essence, meaning,
and connection to the natural world.
Al-Kindi also made invaluable contributions to mathematics and the field
of mathematical metaphysics and theory, some of which come from his argument
against the eternity of the world. He
used the concept of infinity to actually disprove the notion of eternity or the
quality of an object to be eternal through mathematics and postulated that no
object or body can be eternal that possesses any type of quality or quantity of
itself, rather than objects may only possess the potentiality for being
eternal. His theories on this and other
philosophical concepts through which he used mathematics to argue for or
against have had a immeasurable impact on the field of mathematics and logic,
and the use of logical processes to prove mathematical theories.
10.Revelation—Revelation in this context refers to the spiritual or philosophical
awakening one experience after a lifetime of intense periods of study, prayer,
and reflection, which can be likened to the experience of attaining
enlightenment. It is a common concept in Middle Eastern thought and it is
believed that once one achieves this state of revelation that the soul can be
released from the body. The debate among
Islamic philosophers was whether revelation and philosophy are compatible, or
whether either revelation or philosophy was needed to attain happiness and
release the soul from the body.
11.Abu Bakr al-Razi-- Al-Razi rejected Al-Kindi’s attempt to
reconcile philosophy and revelation, and instead taught that philosophy itself
was a sufficient means of releasing the soul from the body. In place of
the truth gained from revelation, al-Razi believed that one could attain truth
and morality through reason. But perhaps the most interesting and
controversial Hellenistic ideology that al-Razi held to were the ideas of Plato
regarding the Platonic view of Creation and the transmigration of souls.
Plato, as with many of his students and other Greek philosophers,
believed that numbers held a special significance in nature and that many
principles and truths about the world around us and about the Creator could be
discerned more accurately by understanding their fullness by which number was
ascribed to each natural phenomenon or metaphysical occurrence or ideal.
12.Platonic View of Creation— The Platonic view of Creation is a philosophical
theory developed by Plato. He believed
that the world was formed from eternal truths or principles, for which there
are five—five being the number of higher knowledge and understanding—which are
the Creator, matter, time, space, and the soul. The idea is to think of
these principles as “eternal truths” instead of the Creator as an entity or
person, and matter as “the truth that all things are made up of different parts
of the same basic parts of matter” instead of the physical interpretation of
matter, and likewise with the other three eternal truths.
13Brethren of Purity—The Brethren of
Purity were a Ishmaili secret society of Muslim philosophers that believed that
knowledge of the divine could be best understood by the use of numerology, and
that other philosophical methods and ideals not connected to a numerological
interpretation would only hinder the person from learning real truth, and that
when viewed from their perspective one could see clearly without making false
assumptions and committing oneself to them before understanding the larger
picture—a mistake that could not be made with the help of mathematics. The believed that mathematics and the numbers
that the science manipulates have not only quantitative properties, but also
physical, metaphysical, spiritual, and even ethical connotations that must be
properly studied and understood under the realm of neo-Pythagorean thought and
processes. They believed that philosophy
in general would lead to the understanding of a hidden reality, known as batin,
but that without proper use of mathematics to study and describe the philosophy
one could not attain true knowledge of the soul, and therefore could not attain
truth about God. To the left is a
diagram of a cosmological hierarchy, similar in nature to Plato’s cosmological
diagram of the heavenly spheres, and connections can be made across specific
lines and within circles to discern important concepts of the physical
universe.
14.Hanbalites—The Hanbalites came
to the forefront of the Islamic philosophical debate after the immense
controversy over the “Divine Speech” being a “created accident”, as proposed by
the Mu’tazilites. It was led by its
founder Ahmad Ibn Hanbal who contended that the Qur’an was the word of God and
was created by God and was eternal. Each
group that arose during this period had a majority of their philosophical focus
on the debate of the creation and eternal nature of the Qur’an. This was because the philosophy that was
supported by the current caliph became the religious norm, and those who
opposed the authority of the caliph were dealt with legally by the regime in
power at the request of the caliph.
During the period that Ahmad Ibn Hanbal proposed his theory on this matter;
the caliph had him thrown in jail because he had already supported another
theory contrary to the Hanbalites. It
was not until his death and his subsequent successor caliph Mutawakkil came to
become caliph was Ibn Hanbal released from prison, because Mutawakkil luckily
supported the Hanbalite viewpoint.
Because of the violent controversy over this matter of the Qur’an’s
nature, philosophers such as the Hanbalites had to return to explicit textual
references to their philosophies, as it had been done in the advent of Muslim
philosophy in an attempt to subvert persecution and imprisonment.
15.Mu’tazilites—The Mu’tazilites
were a philosophical group that preceded the Hanbalites and had sparked the
controversy over the nature of the Qur’an itself, bringing to light a number of
other philosophies and philosophical groups that either tried to support to
contradict Mu’tazilite philosophy through explicit reference in the Qur’an or
by implicit ideology of the nature of Allah and the concepts of eternity and creation. They were founded by a Muslim philosopher
known as Wasil ibn Ata and his principle that the Qur’an was created, but not
eternal. This viewpoint was supported by
the current caliph, caliph al-Ma’mun who went as far as to incite an
inquisition amongst the judges and other officials that had decision-making
power to profess the ideology of the creation of the Qur’an. One of the principles that is on the same
level as the controversy over the Qur’an was the idea that all men, no matter
what sin they have committed, should no longer be considered infidels for
committing a very serious sin, and instead they should be all grouped together
into one group, simply sinners, or fasiq. This was important concept of the time,
because a religious system that did not consider a degree of sin was not
established until much later when the Catholic church began to lose power and
some sects of Protestants began to profess this belief—although it was first
proposed even before Islam in the early Christian church and in the writings of
the Christian apostle Paul. Some of the
more interesting things that developed in philosophy in response to the
Mu’tazilites were the idea that God was not bound by anything, even morality;
which led to a plethora of other principles that sparked many different
philosophical movements with their own ideas about what God was and was not
bound to, in addition to the many other basic philosophical ideas that had
began to pile up at this point in Muslim philosophy. Concordantly, many groups emerged that only
differed on one or two key ideas, but held most, if not all, of the other
tenets of other philosophical orders as truth.
16.Ash’arites—The Ash’arites were
a philosophical group that began, once again, as a response to the Mu’tazilites
and the Hanbalites in order to try and reconcile both of their beliefs into one
system. Its founder was a Mu’tazilite
named al-Ash’ari during the turn of the 10th century AD. Like many of the other philosophical groups
of this time and the decades preceding them, they maintained that al-Ash’ari
was also visited in a dream, this time by Muhammad, and told that the Islamic
community was in disarray due to the misunderstanding of philosophies and the
subsequent in-fighting amongst Muslim believers, and that he had to promote the
truth in order to take control over the Islamic community. Some of the beliefs that the Ash’arites
theorized were that God is all-powerful and that God’s attributes were distinct
from his essence, the latter of which was an attempt to answer the query over
whether or not there existed co-eternal attributes in God, or if co-eternal
attributes could exist simultaneously at all.
They agreed and adopted some of the Mu’tazilites tenets, such as the use
of reason, but rejected the idea that a man can create his own actions. This was proposed on the perception that a
person creating his own acts cannot logically be, because this would contradict
their belief in one God, since the person creating anything would liken him to
God. The viewpoint allowed for an
alternate theory of free will, without violating the tenets of the Hanbalites. One interesting theory that they proposed was
that God continually created and recreated everything in existence in every
moment, and that something ceased to exist whenever God chose not to recreate
it.
17.Qadar—Qadar is the Islamic word that means
“free will” and it is thoroughly debated amongst Muslim philosophers during the
8th and 9th centuries. The issue of free will was
brought to the forefront during the reign of caliph ‘Abd al-Malik who proposed
the question to the Muslim philosopher and supported of free will named Hasan
al-Basri, “How can God punish people if they have no control over their
actions?”. This question revealed a huge hole in the logic of determinism,
or rather for determinists that also believe in a God that will ultimately
punish humanity for their deeds while they were alive on the earth. This
issue was further extended when a group of Muslims who held this belief came
together and formed a group called the Qadaris. The reason for the
formation of the group was to challenge the aristocracy of the Umayyad dynasty,
who claimed that the right to rule the people was given, or rather
predetermined, by God, and therefore could not be challenged. This
obviously would shake the foundations of Umayyad aristocracy whom had ruled
unchallenged on this sole principle, and it also put into question the
legitimacy of the rule of the next generation of their family.
18.Sadr al-Din
Muhammad/Mulla Sudra—Mulla Sudra was known to his followers as the
“foremost among the theosophers”. His
life and works began during the Safawid period in Persia, where he was born in
1571, and his influence was far reaching for the next three and a half
centuries, although many have never heard his name, even amongst other Muslim
countries. After an extensive education
due to his wealthy family, Mulla Sudra showed intellectual promise in many
areas, but was interested and especially excelled in the areas of metaphysics
and philosophy. He moved to Isfahan, the
capitol of Persia at the time, to continue his studies in the philosophical
sciences. After his studies in Isfahan,
Mulla Sudra retired to live a life of seclusion in a small village where he
worked extensively on self-purification in an attempt to reach a revelation and
happiness in order to free his soul from its mortal bonds. After fifteen years of living and studying in
this manner, it is said that Mulla Sudra reached a point where he had an
epiphany, and was able to see, in his mind’s eye, the theoretical concepts that
he had learned about and taught in the years preceding his seclusion. This ability to “see”, led him to establish a
sect of philosophy known as Illuminationism, which postulates that all things in
reality depend on the diffusion of light.
Allah, referred to as the Light of Lights, commands creation into being
by speaking “Be.”, and Mulla Sudra used this concept to further argue his
theories on infinity by stating that even the created things by the Light of
Lights were not themselves eternal or infinite, stating that all created
things, or things that possess quality or quantity, will eventually or already
have passed away, and are therefore not eternal.
19.Ishraqiyya—Ishraqiyya, otherwise known as Illuminationism, is the branch of Muslim philosophy founded by Mulla Sudra which contends that the diffusion of light is the necessary condition for the reality of the physical world. The diffusion of light refers to the property of physical objects to scatter light in differing directions, once the light hits the object, which allows humans to see the object. Based on the physical properties of the object’s surface, the diffusion of the incident light can be scattered or focused to differing degrees. After the philosophies of al-Ghazali, which vehemently opposed the works of Ibn Sina, other neo-Platonists, and philosophy as a whole in regard to their connection to religion and the interpretation of religious texts, Illuminationism was founded in order to contend with the rising supporters of al-Ghazali and others that he inspired, such as Ibn Taymiyya and the Literalists—which nearly killed the entire Islamic philosophical movement. The idea that the world is composed of differing amounts of light and purities of light, and its opposing force, darkness, was a metaphysical idea in nature that closely resembled the tenets of Sufism. In fact, it is said that Aristotle himself appeared in a dream to an Illuminationist and revealed to him that Sufis were the only true philosophers.
20.Sufism—Sufism is the sect of Islam that is primarily denoted by its
practice of mysticism and practitioners of this Islamic system are known as
Sufis. Sufism first gained a legitimate
following during the Umayyad Dynasty in response to the caliphate’s increasing
secularism. Sufism first had its
entrance on the philosophical stage during the advent of Illuminationism, or
Ishraqiyya, in which the philosophies of previous Muslim thinkers was
integrated into the Sufi traditions and beliefs in order to reconcile the two
into a coherent whole. It is said that
Aristotle appeared to al-Suhrawardi and told him that Sufis were the only true Islamic
philosophers.
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