for the Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987)
Islamic Philosophy
A traditional occidental theme is that the thinkers of Islam were mere synthesizers of Greek and other traditions (such as those of India and Persia) and made no original contribution to human thought. This simplistic view originates with the assumption that such work as that of Avicenna was the totality of Islam's philosophy: which in turn is understandable when it is realized what a profound effect Avicenna had upon the Schoolmen.
The importance of Avicenna's thought for the West cannot be overestimated. Both in its negative aspect, such as the necessity of everything, and its more sympathetic notions, it offered a stimulus to the West. It was par excellence a combination of Neoplatonism and Aristotle, transforming the One into a first mover from whom all existence ultimately sprang. For Christian thinkers it offered especial attraction in distinguishing God from His creatures in terms of being; in holding essence to be the foundation of all existence; in making the effect dependent for both its being and its movement on what was prior to it; and in regarding all knowledge as the result of illumination. (Leff 1958: 154 f.)
Characteristically, T. P. Hughes's massive Dictionary of Islam of 1885 (1964 edn., p. 452) baldly repeats: 'The whole philosophy of the Arabians was only a form of Aristotelianism tempered more or less with Neo-Platonic conceptions.' More recently this generalization has been challenged with great vigour by both Muslim and Western scholars.
The Arab conquest and occupation of eastern and western lands from the early 8th century produced intense intellectual activity in centres of learning as widely dispersed as Baghdad and Spain, Bukhara and Egypt. The study and exercise of traditional knowledge were directly linked to the Prophet's dictum, accepted with the force of law: 'Seek knowledge even unto China.' During much of the thousand years of the period known as the Dark Ages in Europe, the Islamic centres of learning were major agents for the preservation and transmission of accumulated knowledge, those of Spain especially being a magnet for Christian scholars. 'The Christian West became acquainted with Aristotle by way of Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and Algazel (Al-Ghazzali). Gundisalvus' own encyclopedia of knowledge relies in the main on the information he had drawn from Arabian sources' (Guillaume 1949: s.v. 'Philosophy and theology', p. 246).
Many Islamic theorists, including Al-Ghazzali, were even believed by European scholars of the time to be Christian divines. The widespread belief that the Arabian schools were the great source of wisdom was later replaced, particularly in Victorian thought, by the thesis that they were merely run by copyists of the Greeks. More comprehensive study from a wider perspective has indicated that original contributions began to appear as the period of translation of classics and the absorption of ancient teaching advanced, after the 8th century. Work published during the 20th century has increasingly asserted unexpected anticipations of relatively modern Western thought by the major Islamic philosophers, especially from the 9th to the 15th centuries.
Typically, M. S. Sheikh (1982: p. x and passim) has propounded themes in the systems of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Khaldun, and others as prefigurings of the ideas of Descartes (methodological doubt and cogito, ergo sum) and Spinoza (idealism), of Cartesian occasionalism, of Leibnizian pre-established harmony, of Kant (antinomies of pure reason and metaphysical agnosticism), Hegel (panlogism and the notion of the absolute), and Hume (denial of causality), of Bergson's creative evolutionism, and even of logicism and positivism. The Indian Muslim poet and thinker Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938) is the best-known Islamic philosopher of modern times.
In the Islamic world, in addition to the many customary preoccupations of philosophy as expressed in logic, ethics, method, knowledge, and political thought, there were also a vast number of exponents and schools of religious philosophy and metaphysics (seen as mysticism). Among the most important were the Islamic theologians and the Sufis. The works of the latter are today increasingly studied by both East and West in newer disciplines such as psychology and sociology.
From the comparative point of view, the picture of the Islamic contribution that emerges indicates the relative freedom of speculation within the culture, as contrasted with the somewhat more restricted categories of the West in the same epoch. This may be because Islam has never had a central ideological disciplinary institution which could succeed in imposing dogmatic authority over large populations for long periods of time, and because the door of reinterpretation of the limits of philosophical speculation has remained open, being the responsibility of the courts, in the absence of a priesthood.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography:
De Boer, T. J. (1961). The History of Philosophy in Islam. Trans. E. R. Jones
Guillaume, A. (1949). The Legacy of Islam.
Hashimi, A. Al- (1973). Islamic Philosophy and Western Thinkers.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Houtsma, W. T., et al. (eds.) (1908–38). The Encyclopedia of Islam and Supplement.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham.
Nicholson, R. A. (1966). A Literary History of the Arabs.
O'Leary, D. (1954). Arabic Thought and its Place in History.
Schacht, J., and Bosworth, C. E. (eds.) (1974). The Legacy of Islam (2nd edn.).
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Al-Kindi
(Abu-Yusuf YaʼQub Ibn-Ishaq)
(803–73).
The first Arab philosopher. Born at Al-Kufah, now in Iraq, of a southern Arabian family, he worked mainly in Baghdad. He attempted to combine the views of Plato and Aristotle, and his collation of the Theologia ascribed to Aristotle had considerable influence on philosophy and theology in both East and West until the time of St Thomas Aquinas.
Al-Kindi was a polymath, like almost all of the major Islamic philosophers: an optician, music theorist, pharmacist, and mathematician; he wrote 265 treatises, most of them now lost. He saw the universe as an architectonic whole, not as something to be observed piecemeal to discover causality. He asserted 'one of the most marked features of Islamic thought — the belief that there was only one active intellect for all humanity, and that every human soul was moved and informed by this separated active intellect' (Leff 1958). More of his work survives in Latin (such as in the translations by Gerard of Cremona) than in Arabic. One of his major scientific contributions was De aspectibus, on the Optics of Euclid, which influenced Roger Bacon. His works show that mensural music was studied in his culture centuries before it appeared in the Latin West.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Abdulwahab Emiri (1976). The Scientists of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Al-Farabi
(Muhammad Ibn-Muhammad Ibn-Tarkhan Ibn-Uzlagh Abu-Nasr Al-Farabi, or Alpharabius)
(870–950). The first great Turkic exponent of Islamic philosophy. Born in Farab, Sughd, now in Uzbekistan, he studied at Baghdad and taught as a Sufi at Aleppo, now in Syria. He states that he read Aristotle's De anima 200 times; he was certainly so well versed in it that he gained the Arabic title of Al-Muʼallim al-Thani — the Second Teacher (after Aristotle). The author of over a hundred volumes, he lived simply, taking employment as a night watchman so that he could work by the light of the lantern provided.
He harmonized Greek philosophy with Islamic thinking, thus continuing the work of Al-Kindi and preceding Avicenna; his considerations covered logic and rhetoric, geometry, psychology, and politics. Baron Carra de Vaux and others state that the logic of Farabi had a permanent effect upon the thought of the Latin Schoolmen.
Farabi believed that God exists as the only ultimate reality and unity, intermediary agencies successively producing the world as we know it through conventional avenues of perception. Human society he regards as emerging through two impulses: a social contract not unlike that later proposed by Rousseau, and an urge prefiguring the Nietzschean will to power. Society, for Farabi, realizes its perfection (the Ideal City) through a ruler who has become a divine agent, or alternatively by the administration of a group of wise men, each specializing in one subject. The capacity to be detached from objects and concerns enables a human being to go beyond familiar dimensions, transcending the ignorance produced by regarding secondary phenomena, such as time and space, as primary.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hammond, R. (1947). The Philosophy of Alfarabi and its Influence on Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Avicenna
(Abu ʼAli al-Hussein ibn-ʼAbdallah ibn-Sina)
(980–1037).
Islamic philosopher and eminent physician, born at Afshana, near Bukhara, called by the Arabs Al-Sheikh al-Rais, 'Chief and Leader (of thinkers)'. His Canon of Medicine was the standard work, in Europe as in the East, until the 17th century. He was a royal physician at the age of 17.
Avicenna's philosophy exercised, through 12th-century translations, a considerable influence upon Western thinkers, his major work being the eighteen-volume Book of Recovery, written in eighteen months. He follows Al-Farabi in ideas, though his work is regarded by scholars as more lucid, dealing with the distinction between necessary and possible being. Among the terms and concepts that he bequeathed to human thought is intentio (ma ʼqulat), the intellectually intelligible. His theme is that the entire universe is constituted of essences: all existing things have specific essences. 'A horse', he says, 'is a horse.' He holds that all the senses are secondary, being divisions of an inner sense, which is common to all. All reality as we know it derives from one ultimate, unitary reality: God — but not directly. There are agencies that, in a series of actions, cause the apparent differences between phenomena.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Wickers, G. M. (ed.) (1952). Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher.
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Ibn Hazm
(ʼAli ibn-Hazm, 994–1064)
A native of Córdoba, Spain, he was the first scholar of comparative religion, and Hitti (1951) characterizes him as anticipating theological problems only arising in Christian Europe in the 16th century. Guillaume (1949), in referring to this author of over 400 books, accepted in the West as the greatest scholar and the most original thinker of Spanish Islam (see Islamic philosophy), notes that he composed 'Europe's first Religions-geschichte and the first systematic higher critical study of the Old and New Testaments'. This is his Al-Fasl fiʼl-Milal wʼal-Ahwaʼ wʼal-Nihal (the Decisive Word on Sects, Heterodoxies, and Denominations), but he also wrote love poems. In The Necklace of the Dove he extols platonic love, and his romanticism is regarded as related to the Spanish–Arabian influence on the formation of the troubadour mentality.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Guillaume, A. (1949). 'Philosophy and theology'. In Arnold, T. (ed.), The Legacy of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
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Al-Ghazzali
(Imam Abu-Hamid Ibn-Muhammad Al-Ghazzali, or Algazel)
(1058–1111).
Born at Tus, Persia, originally a theologian and scholastic philosopher, and professor at the Nizamiyyah College in Baghdad, Ghazzali is known as Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam) and is one of Islam's greatest thinkers. He decided that ultimate truth could not be attained by intellectual means, and became a Sufi. He influenced all subsequent Sufic thought as well as many Western philosophers and theologians. His Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Sciences of Religion) is a classic which is widely believed to have had a great (some believe determining) effect upon Europe, through Latin and Hebrew translations, especially in his method of criticizing hypotheses and assumptions. Jehuda Halevi (in his Khazari) follows the Ghazzalian method as found in the remarkable Incoherence of the Philosophers, and the first Hebrew translations of the influential Maqasid al-Falasifah (Aims of the Philosophers) were made by Isaac Albalagh, c.1292, and by Judah ben Solomon Nathan, c.1340. The Dominican Raymund Martin (d. 1285) used Ghazzali's arguments in his Explanatio symboli apostolorum and Pugio fidei, continually quoting the devout Islamic thinker in support of Christian ideas. St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) also cites Ghazzali. Blaise Pascal, writing on belief in God, echoes Ghazzali's Ihya, Kimia, and other writings, while Pascal's theory of knowledge (in Pensées sur la religion) closely follows Ghazzali's book Al-Munqidh. Ghazzali's work is as widely studied today as it ever was.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Kamali, S. A. (trans.) (1963). Tahafat Al-Falasifah.
Shah, I. (1964). The Sufis.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
Watt, W. M. (1953). The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazzali.
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Ibn Bajjah
(Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Yahya ibn-al-Saʼigh, c.1106–38)
A major Islamic thinker, poet and musician, scientist, and mathematician, Ibn Bajjah was a forerunner of Averroës. Known to the Latin Schoolmen as Avempace, or Avenpace, he was born in Saragossa, Spain, and known in his lifetime as the prime exponent of Aristotelian thought after Avicenna. He follows Al-Farabi and his work greatly influenced Ibn Tufail. Averroës himself states that his own ideas of mind are derived from Ibn Bajjah. His ʼIlm al-Nafs (Science of the Soul) is the earliest text hitherto known that gives the gist of all the three books of the De anima of Aristotle, and he is known, among other things, to Western scholars for his theory of separate substances, which they adopted from him. In his Guide to the Solitary he deals with the soul's return to reality by detaching itself from matter.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
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Hakim Sanai
(or Khwajah Abu-al-Majd Majdud ibn-Adam Sanai, c.1046–?1141)
A native of Ghazna in present-day Afghanistan, he was a major Sufi teacher and author, acknowledged by Rumi as one of his inspirers. He wrote an enormous quantity of mystical verse, of which his Hadiqa (Walled Garden of Truth, 1131) is his masterwork and the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism. He taught that lust and greed, emotional excitement, stood between humankind and divine knowledge, which was the only true reality. Love and a social conscience are for him the foundation of religion; mankind is asleep, living in what is in fact a desolate world. Religion as commonly understood is only habit and ritual.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Sanai, Hakim (1976). The Walled Garden of Truth. Trans. D. Pendlebury.
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Fariduddin Attar
(abu-Talib/Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn-Abu-Bakr Ibrahim, ibn-Mustafa ibn-Shaʼban Farid-al-Din Attar, ‘The Druggist’ d. 1220/1230)
Born at Kadkan, near Nishapur, Persia, one of the major Sufi teachers, and acknowledged by Jalauddin Rumi as one of his inspirers, Attar wrote at least 30 books. The most famous is the classical Mantiq at-Tair (The Bird Discourse, or Parliament), thought by some to have influenced Chaucer in his Parliament of Fowls. A major authoritative compilation is his Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Recapitulation of the Saints), with biographies of Sufi teachers down the centuries, partially translated by A. J. Arberry. Also highly esteemed is his Pand-Nama (Book of Counsel) and the Asrar-Nama (Book of Secrets). The Ilahi-Nama he composed while working at his pharmacy, where he had 500 patients; and it was this work which he presented to Rumi when, as a small boy, he passed through Nishapur with his father in 1212. The Mantiq is an allegory of human psychological reactions to the problems encountered on the Sufi way, with each individual bird in turn displaying his hopes, fears, and inadequacies. The birds of the world have elected the hoopoe as their leader in the spiritual quest, and he has to deal with their reactions, in the manner of a Sufi teacher. The purpose of the journey is to seek the king of the birds, the immortal Simurgh (Persian homonym for 'thirty birds'). Ultimately the pilgrims reach the throne and find, when a curtain is drawn aside, that they are looking into a mirror: the collective (human) soul is seen to be the divine one, which differentiation conceals from ordinary consciousness.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Arberry, A. J. (trans.) (1966). Muslim Saints and Mystics: Selections from the Tadhkirat.
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IbnʼArabi
(Ibn Al-ʼArabi, Sheikh Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-ʼAli Muhyiuddin, called the Greatest Sheikh/Sheikh Al-Akbar/Doctor Maximus, 1164–1240)
He was born in Murcia, Spain, a descendant of the illustrious Arabian family of Hatim Tai, and died in Damascus. His work influenced Western thought and literature: for example, Asín Palacios and others have argued for textual copying by Dante in the Divine Comedy. He was a most influential Sufi teacher who wrote, according toJami, over 500 works, mostly in Mecca and Damascus; in 1234 he himself reckoned them at 298 volumes. About 90 are extant, mostly in manuscript. Ibn ʼArabi's Tadbirat (Managements) is an important manual of Sufi training. The Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels, or Phases, of Wisdom), written in 1230, is his best-known work. Each of its 27 chapters is named after a prophet or teacher and deals with the Sufi principles which that teacher is said to represent. He is associated with the doctrine of Unity of Being (Wahdat al-Wujud), which is characterized by his critics as pantheism. Although he claimed to have no master and to have been initiated into Sufism by Khidr, a spiritual being, A. E. Affifi (1939) places him firmly in the context of the Spanish Sufi thought of his time. His work constantly appeals to the Koran and traditions of Muhammad, though his interpretations are idiosyncratic. Two other major works are The Meccan Revelations and The Interpreter of Desires, both attacked by pietists as mere love poetry but successfully defended by the author as mystical allegories. By a curious tradition in the East, pious men sporadically assemble groups of students and charge them with the literary study of Ibn ʼArabi's works. The intention is either to exhaust their capacity for research, or for them to discover the authorities who state that Ibn ʼArabi's works are not meant to be understood but to produce bafflement. This realization, according to these Sufis, drives the students to seek the current living exemplar of the teaching who alone can explain the writings.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Affifi, A. E. (1939). The Mystical Philosophy of Muhiyid Din Ibnul Arabi.
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Jalaluddin Rumi
Oxford Companion to the Jalaluddin Rumi
(or Jalaluddin Muhammad Ibn Bahauddin Walad al-Khatibi al-Bakri al-Balkhi, 1207–73)
One of the greatest Sufis and a major Persian poet and thinker. Born of a royal and caliphial line of distinguished scholars in Balkh (present-day Afghanistan), he taught and died in Iconium (Konya, today Asiatic Turkey). His pen-name (literally 'of Rome' or 'the (eastern) Roman') was chosen, by poetic substitution cipher, because it represented both the town of his adoption and the Perso-Arabic word Nur ('light'). He acknowledges the Sufi masters Attar and Sanai as his 'two eyes', and they are undoubtedly his spiritual precursors. His major work is the Mathnawi-i-Maanawi (Poem of Inner Meaning), which was something like 40 years in the writing. His theme as a guide to mystical experience is that man in the ordinary state is cut off ('veiled') from higher perceptions by lower, usually emotional, stimuli. This state is often found in both the learned and the emotionalist: addiction to vice or to imagined virtue are both forms of idolatry, which cause 'veiling'. Teaching people to hate evil and covet sanctity is training in hatred and covetousness more than an approach to goodness or holiness. Bad things cannot be avoided, or good ones approached, he insists, by such crude and ignorant methods. The following major themes give an idea of his teaching.Conventional religious systems are secondary, imitative, and limited: 'Do not attach yourself to the brick of the wall — seek instead the eternal original.' A teacher is essential: 'Water needs a medium between it and the fire, if it is to heat correctly.' Laymen cannot evaluate mystical masters: ' "This ruin may seem a prosperous place to you: for me, the better place is on the King's wrist," said the Hawk. Some owls cried, "He is lying to steal our home!"' Sufi knowledge involves escaping from familiar dimensions: 'You belong to the world of dimension: but you come from non-dimension. Close the first "shop", open the second.' Knowledge of Objective Truth (God) is developed through love and self-knowledge: 'Ultimate Truth is reached by Love, that special love of which worldly love is a crude analogue: HE is within you!'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Nicholson, R. A. (1926). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi.
Shah, I. (1966). Special Problems in the Study of Sufi Ideas.
— — (1974). The Elephant in the Dark.
— — (1978). The Hundred Tales of Wisdom: Materials from the Life and Teachings of Rumi.
Whinfield, E. H. (1974). Teachings of Rumi.
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Ibn Khaldun
(Abu-Zaid Abd-al-Rahman ibn-Khaldun, 1332–1406)
Born in Tunis, he was one of the greatest Islamic scholars of Moorish Spain, Arab ambassador to Pedro the Cruel, judge, and professor of jurisprudence at Cairo. Author of the Muqaddima (Introduction), the first analysis of history by political and social pattern, Ibn Khaldun is regarded as the 'father of the science of history' and one of the founders of sociology. A Sufi by persuasion, he is buried in the Sufi cemetery near Cairo where he died.
Ibn Khaldun was an historian, politician, sociologist, economist, a deep student of human affairs, anxious to analyse the past of mankind in order to understand its present and future ... one of the first philosophers of history, a forerunner of Machiavelli, Bodin, Vico, Comte and Cournot (Sarton 1927–48: iii. 1262).
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Dawood, N. J. (ed.) (1967). The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Trans. F. Rosenthal.
Gellner, E. A. (1981). Muslim Society.
Sarton, G. (1927–48). Introduction to the History of Science (repr. 1975).
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Jami
(Mulla Nuruddin ?Abdurrahman ibn-Ahmad)
1414–92).
Jami, who was born in Jam, Khurasan, and died in Herat, modern Afghanistan, is often called the last great classical poet of the Persian language. He was a most prolific writer and a great scholar, as well as being a mystic of the Naqshbandiyya (Designers) School of Sufis. For him, God alone is absolute truth, and human duty is to reach this truth through love. In his Lawaʼih (Flashes) are the short utterances which encapsulate his teaching, while Nahfat al-Uns (Fragrances of Companionship) is a considerable work treating the lives of 611 male and female Sufi sages. His Silsilat al-Dhahab (Chain of Gold) resembles Sanai's Walled Garden, and his Baharistan(Land of Spring) may have been suggested by Saadi's Rose Garden. In personality he was remarkably straightforward and free from cant, and he expected this behaviour in others: the traditional Naqshbandi attitude. His sense of humour was remarkable. When he was on his deathbed and Koran readers had been brought in, he exclaimed: 'What is all this commotion — can't you see that I am dying?'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Browne, E. G. (1964). A Literary History of Persia.
Davis, F. H. (1967). Jami, the Persian Mystic.
