Resume Buku Islamic Philosophy From Its Origin To The Present

PART 1. ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY AND ITS STUDY

Chapter 1: The Study of Islamic Philosophy in the West in Recent Times: An Overview

The study of Islamic philosophy has had a long history not only in the Islamic world itself but also in the West. By ‘philosophy’ we understand al-falsafah or al-hikmat al-ilåhiyyah of the traditional Islamic sources as defined in the chapters that are to follow. In the common parlance of European languages, ‘philosophy’evokes the idea of something having to do with general principles, governing reasoning laws, conceptual definitions, the origin, and end of things, and still to some extent wisdom, and one speaks not only of pure philosophy but also of the philosophy of art, religion, or science. falsafah as a separate discipline has been inextricably related to many aspects of their development. It is this second aspect that belongs to any integral treatment of the study of Islamic philosophy and that in fact calls for an interdisciplinary approach that should bear much fruit in the future.

The various Western approaches to the study of Islamic philosophy include first of all the Christian scholastic tradition cultivated mostly by Catholic scholars. Altogether the approaches of the scholars in the two groups and their background was modern Europan philosophy and not Christian or Jewish  scholasticism which already mentioned have important similarities in that most of them drew in different degrees from traditional Christian and Jewish philosophy and theology, which themselves possessed certain basic common features with Islamic thought and of course with each other.

In addition to all the groups cited so far, who were mostly part of or connected in one way or another to the Western intellectual scene, the twentieth century, especially in its middle decades, produced also numerous Muslim scholars and a few non-Muslims from the Arab.

World. A number of others whose writings are only now becoming known in Europe and America.5 But a great deal more effort must be made to make the works of Muslim scholars on Islamic philosophy known to the West and to facilitate genuine cooperation between Eastern scholars and those in the West whose field of interest is Islamic philosophy.

During the last few decades of the twentieth century a number of events took place that caused a new chapter to be written in the history and methods of study of Islamic philosophy in the West. Also during these decades, the philosophical scene on the European

Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world began to part ways more sharply than before with existentialism and phenomenology becoming dominant on the Continent and analytical. The last decades of the twentieth century were also witness to the gradual penetration into and interaction with Western philosophy of the living Islamic philosophical tradition. The field of the study of Islamic philosophy in the West has become as a result a much more extensive one than it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Despite conceptual perspectives held by many Western scholars that are not acceptable by those who belong to the Islamic intellectual tradition and who live within its framework, Western scholars of Islamic philosophy have made some notable contributions to this field of study. From the late nineteenth century onward, a number of Western scholars began to edit Arabic and Persian philosophical texts critically as such major series as the Bibliotheque Iranienne of the Institut Franco- Iranien directed by Henry Corbin bears witness. The knowledge of Islamic philosophy in the West would not of course be possible outside the small circles of scholars of Islamic languages without translations of basic texts into European languages. As already mentioned, this effort to make works of Islamic philosophy available in English has been joined by a number of Islamic scholars as well as a number of Christian Arabs during the past few decades. And again there are a number of scholars of Islamic background who have made important translations into French and German.

What is needed for Islamic philosophy is something like the Loeb Library for Greek and Latin texts where the text in the original appears on one side of the page and the English translation on the opposite page. The history of philosophy in the modern sense began in the West in the nineteenth century following certain philosophical developments, especially in Germany.

It is of great interest in the context of the present book to note that in most of these traditional histories of Islamic philosophy, the idea that philosophy was related at the beginning to prophecy has been confirmed and emphasized, and it has been asserted that hikmah began with the prophet Idr\s identified with Hermes. The works in Arabic on the history of Islamic philosophy often contain many insights and analyses not found in the works of European scholars, but the model of most of these works remained to a large extent the histories written by Western scholars. This is especially true in their conception of Islamic philosophy as terminating with Ibn Rushd, to which Ibn Khald¨n came to be added as a kind of postscript.

Since those defining years of the 1960s, a number of histories have appeared by Western scholars with greater awareness of the integral Islamic philosophical tradition. Finally, in the 1990s Routledge requested that Oliver Leaman and I edit a major two-volume work on the history of Islamic philosophy, which would also include a section on Jewish philosophy as part of their general series on the history of philosophy. In the chapters that follow we shall be discussing both philosophical questions and the ideas of particular Islamic philosophers and schools of philosophy seen from the point of view of the Islamic philosophical tradition itself.

Chapter 2: The Meaning and Role of Philosophy in Islam

The Islamic revelation possesses within itself several dimensions and has been revealed to humanity on the basic levels of al-islهm, al-¥mهn, and al-i÷sهn (submission, faith, and virtue) and from another perspective as al-Shar¥‘ah, al-T• ar¥qah and al-،aq¥qah (the Law, the Path and the Truth). to understand the real role of “philosophy” in Islam we must consider Islam in all its amplitude and depth, including especially the dimension of al-،aq¥qah, where precisely one will find the point of intersection between “traditional philosophy” and metaphysics and that aspect of the Islamic perspective into which sapientia in all its forms has been integrated throughout Islamic history.

For our own part, we must begin by making the basic affirmation that if by philosophy we mean secularized philosophy as currently understood in the West, that is, the attempt of people to reach the ultimate knowledge of things only through the use of their own rational and sensuous faculties and cut off completely from both the effusion of grace and knowledge made available through prophecy and revelation as well as the light of the Divine Intellect, then such an activity is peripheral in the Islamic intellectual universe. Moreover, if one takes the whole of the Islamic world into account, including the Persian, the Ottoman, and the Indian parts of it, one certainly cannot call Islamic philosophy a transient phenomenon that had a short-lived existence in a civilization whose intellectual structure did not permit its survival

Having established the existence of Islamic philosophy as a distinct type of traditional philosophy, we must now probe into its meaning and definition. This fact is especially true of the later period of Islamic history when in most of the Arab world falsafah as a distinct school disappeared, and the intellectual needs corresponding to it found their fulfillment in kalهm and doctrinal Sufism. A more general treatment of the meaning of philosophy in Islam would have to include Sufism, kalهm, u„¶l, and some of the other Islamic sciences as well, but as already mentioned, these lie outside the boundaries of the present discussion, which concerns only falsafah or ÷ikmah as these terms have been understood by the traditional Islamic authorities themselves.

To understand the meaning of Islamic philosophy it is best to examine the use of the terms falsafah and ÷ikmah in various traditional sources and the definitions provided for them by the Islamic philosophers themselves. Different Muslim authorities have debated as to what ‘÷ikmah’ means in such verses and sayings, and many theologians such as Fakhr al-D\n al-Raz\ have identified it with kalهm rather than falsafah. definition of falsafah, the first of the great Muslim Peripatetics, al-Kind\, writes: “Philosophy is the knowledge of the reality of things within man’s possibility. The master of Peripatetics, Ibn S\na, adds another element to the definition of ÷ikmah and relates it more closely to realization and perfection of the being of man when he writes: “،ikmah is the perfecting of the human soul through the conceptualization of things and the judgment of theoretical and practical truths to the measure of human capability.

Having surveyed the meaning of philosophy through the eyes of some of its major expositors and supporters, a few words must now be said about the different forms of “opposition” to it, before turning to its role and function in Islam. The criticism made by certain Sufis of falsafah and their influence upon its development was like the transformation brought about by the alchemist through the presence of the philosopher’s stone.

During the early period, which is also the formative period of the Islamic intellectual sciences, falsafah performed a central role in the process of the absorption and synthesis of the pre-Islamic sciences and the formulation of the Islamic sciences. In any case during early Islamic history the cultivation and the development of the sciences would have been inconceivable without falsafah. The meaning of ‘÷ak¥m,’ which denotes at once a physician, scientist, and philosopher, is the best proof of this close connection. Also during this early period when Islam made its first contacts with the arts and sciences of other civilizations, falsafah played an important role in enabling the Muslims to integrate the pre-Islamic sciences into their own perspective. Its role on the formal level complements that of Islamic esoterism, whose insistence on the universality of revelation on the supra-formal level made possible a positive encounter with other religions and traditions.

One must always remember the important role of falsafah in early Islam in providing the appropriate intellectual background for the encounter of Muslims with the arts, sciences, and philosophies of other civilizations.

The official position accorded to falsafah in the curriculum of the Islamic universities varied greatly from land to land and period to period, depending upon theological and political factors of a complex nature, which we cannot analyze here. The Islamic sciences, both the intellectual and transmitted, had by now become already elaborated and were following their own course of development. Peripatetic philosophy, moreover, had reached an impasse, as seen in the far-reaching attacks.

In the western lands of Islam, after Ibn Rushd falsafah ceased to exist as an independent and rigorously defined discipline, with a few exceptions in the Arab world such as Ibn Sab‘\n and Ibn Khaldun.

In conclusion and in summary it can be said that falsafah in Islamsatisfied a certain need for causality that exists everywhere amongcertain human types, provided the necessary logical and rational tools for the cultivation and development of many of the arts and sciences, enabled Muslims to encounter and assimilate the learning of many other cultures, in its reactions with kalهm left a deep effect upon the latter’s future course, and finally became wed to illumination and gnosis, thus creating a bridge between the rigor of logic and the ecstasy of spiritual union, while influencing in some cases the expression of gnostic teachings themselves.

Chapter 3: Al-Hikmat al-Ilahiyyah and Kalam

When we speak of al-÷ikmat al-ilهhiyyah we do not mean simply the ilهhiyyهt of the works of Muslim Peripatetics such as Ibn S\na and Ibn Rushd, nor the ÷ikmah to which some of the theologians such as Fakhr al-D\n Raz\ refer as being synonymous with kalهm. Rather, we mean that blend of rational philosophy, illumination, gnosis, and the tenets of revelation that formed into a synthesis after Suhraward\ and to a large extent, thanks to him, that reached its peak with S•adr al-D\n Sh\raz\ and his students.

In the history of the struggle and reciprocal influence between falsafah and kalهm in Islam, we can, for the sake of the present discussion, distinguish five periods:

1.  The earliest period, from the beginning to the end of the third/ ninth century, when the Mu‘tazilite school was dominant in kalهm, and falsafah was passing through its period of genesis and early development with such figures as Aranshahr\ and al-Kind\ and his students.

2.  The period from the end of the third/ninth to the fifth/eleventh century, from the rise of Ash‘arite theology and its elaboration to the beginning of the gradual incorporation of certain philosophical arguments into kalهm by Imam al-!aramayn al-Juwayn\ and his student al-Ghazzal\.

3.  The period from al-Juwayn\ and al-Ghazzal\ to Fakhr al-D\n al- Raz\ and including Ab¨˘l-Fatپ} al-Shahrastan\, that is, from about the fifth/eleventh century to the seventh/thirteenth century.

4.  From the seventh/thirteenth century to the tenth/sixteenth century a more peaceful relationship existed between falsafah, which now included the newly established school of Illumination or ishrهq, and kalهm.

5.  From the tenth/sixteenth century to modern times when in the Shi‘ite world, following the full development of al-÷ikmat almuta‘ هliyah by Mulla S•adra, philosophy seen as al-÷ikmat alilهhiyyah began to eclipse kalهm to the extent that Shi‘ite kalهm soon ceased to occupy the important position it had held earlier and became marginalized.

During the last two periods in question the opposition of the followers of al-÷ikmat al-ilهhiyyah to kalهm, and especially to the kalهm of the Ash‘arite school, did not disappear and even grew, as far as Shi‘ite philosophers were concerned. The followers of al-÷ikmat al ilهhiyyah considered the methods of kalهm as being illegitimate, but the problems with which it dealt as being of vital importance.

The tendency toward a synthesis between ÷ikmat-i ilهh¥ and kalهm especially in its Shi‘ite form but also including Ash‘arite kalهm became even more accentuated in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. With Mulla S•adra the new relation between kalهm and al-÷ikmat al-ilهhiyyah, which had been developing since the seventh/thirteenth century, reaches a new peak and the summit of its development.

Although a defender of Shi‘ite kalهm, Lah\j\ did not extend his approval to all schools of kalهm. The famous theologian Taftazan\, like Ibn Khald¨n, distinguished between the kalهm of the mutaqaddim¥n or “ancients” and the muta˘akhkhir¥n, “those who came later,” but identified the first with the Mu‘tazilites and the second with the Ash‘arites. It is important to note that while Lah\j\ was a notable authority on kalهm, he was also deeply rooted in both Sufism and al-÷ikmat alilهhiyyah, although he hid to some extent his attachment to his master’s teachings.

Shi‘ite kalهm soon became eclipsed completely in Persia with the revival of ÷ikmah, especially of the school of Mulla S•adra at the end of the twelfth/eighteenth and beginning of the thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. Two of the sons of Lah\j\, M\rza Ibrah\m and M\rza !asan, were also authorities in both kalهm and ÷ikmah. As for the Sunni world, the al hikmat al-ilهhiyyah tradition did not take root in the Arab world except in Shi‘ite circles in Iraq, so the question of its relation to kalهm in that world does not arise until Jamal al-D\n Asadabad\, known as al-Afghan\, revived the study of falsafah in Cairo in the late thirteenth/nineteenth century.