Insight Editions · No. 135
Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present
Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Seyyed Hossein Nasr surveys Islamic philosophy from its origins through contemporary schools, emphasizing prophetic foundations, major thinkers, metaphysics, and responses to modernity.
A study guide to Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
Argument Map
Chapter Map
| # | Chapter | Core claim |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Philosophy and Prophecy | Pythagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles were prophet-philosophers; so is Islamic philosophy |
| 1 | Study of Islamic Philosophy in the West | Medieval Latin, Orientalist and Corbin-style readings; the "end with Averroes" myth |
| 2 | Meaning and Role of Philosophy | Hikmah and falsafah; philosophy as wisdom tied to the Quran and the intellect |
| 3 | Divine Wisdom and Kalam | How hikmah absorbed theology, above all in Shi'ism |
| 4 | Existence and Quiddity | Five schools of ontology from Ibn Sina to Sadra |
| 5 | Post-Avicennan Philosophy and Being | The unity of being and the principiality of existence |
| 6 | Intellect, Reason, Intuition | 'Aql as the bond with the Divine; levels of knowledge |
| 7 | Framework for the History | Periods and schools beyond Ibn Rushd |
| 8 | Kalam, Philosophy, Spirituality | The three dimensions, from the Mu'tazilites to Suhrawardi |
| 9 | 'Umar Khayyam | An Avicennan philosopher-mathematician, not FitzGerald's skeptic |
| 10 | Azarbaijan and Shiraz | The "dark" centuries: Tusi, the Dashtakis, Dawani, Khafri; the road to India |
| 11 | School of Isfahan | Mir Damad, Findiriski, rival strands |
| 12 | Mulla Sadra | Seven doctrines of fully flowered prophetic philosophy |
| 13 | Isfahan to Tehran | The four hakims and the first meeting with the West |
| 14 | Islam and Modern Thought | Five traits of modernism; homo islamicus |
| 15 | Land of Prophecy Today | Survey of living prophetic philosophies; "the sun returns" |
Introduction: Philosophy and Prophecy
Modern culture sees philosophy and prophecy as opposites. Traditional civilizations did not, and where the traditional worldview survives it still does not. Nasr's book presents Islamic philosophy as philosophy in the land of prophecy: thought that has always worked under the sun of revelation.
Greek Philosophy Began in Prophecy
Even on the modern view that philosophy began in Greece, its founders were not rationalists.
| Figure | Prophetic side |
|---|---|
| Pythagoras | Said to have coined "philosophy"; a prophet-like founder of a religious community. Muslims called him a monotheist (muwahhid), some a prophet |
| Parmenides | "Father" of Western logic, yet, as Peter Kingsley shows, a seer. In his poem the Daughters of the Sun lead him to a goddess through incubation (lying utterly still until the soul rises). Inscriptions at Velia link him to Apollo the Healer and the healer-prophets; his teacher taught above all stillness (hesychia); the goddess sends him back as her messenger, which is what "prophet" originally meant |
| Empedocles | Poet, healer, sorcerer and self-declared prophet; his physics was written "to save souls" |
Two echoes of Islam stand out. The goddess calls Parmenides kouros, "young man", and Islam's spiritual chivalry (futuwwah, Persian javanmardi) is named from the word for youth, traced to 'Ali, who is also credited with founding Islamic metaphysics. And hesychia lives on in Orthodox Hesychasm. The West forgot Parmenides the seer, but Muslim historians of philosophy remembered the link: "philosophy issues from the niche of prophecy" (yanba' al-hikmah min mishkat al-nubuwwah).
What Prophecy Demands of Philosophy
- Levels of reality. Prophecy presupposes higher levels of being or deeper levels of consciousness (Buddhism stresses the latter). Scientism, which accepts only the corporeal world and ordinary awareness, must dismiss prophecy as hallucination.
- Law and ethics. Prophecy gives laws and morals that ethical, political and legal philosophy must address.
- Knowledge of reality. It claims knowledge of the Origin, cosmogony and cosmology, the soul, eschatology, time, space, form, causality and destiny, and an esoteric dimension of visions not meant for all.
Philosophy "has to philosophize about something". From the 17th century Western philosophy philosophized about modern science's picture of the world, becoming its handmaid from Kant to Anglo-Saxon logic. In traditional worlds, it philosophized about the realities revealed through prophecy. That does not reduce it to theology, unless philosophy is defined positivistically, in which case neither non-Western nor medieval philosophy exists. Take Pythagoras's "love of sophia" or Plato's "practice of death", which joins thought to spiritual practice, and there are many traditional philosophies, some still oral, as among Australian Aborigines and Native Americans.
Chapter 1: The Study of Islamic Philosophy in the West
The West has studied Islamic philosophy for nearly a thousand years, in three waves: medieval translation from Arabic, a second wave in the Renaissance, and modern scholarship from the 19th century on. Nasr surveys the third wave: who did the studying, what they achieved, and why most of them missed what the tradition says about itself.
Schools of Western Scholarship up to the 1960s
| School | Figures | Strength and limit |
|---|---|---|
| Catholic / Thomist | Gilson, De Wulf (Latin sources only); Massignon, Goichon, Gardet (knew Arabic) | Shared scholastic categories; Gilson and De Wulf cared mainly about Islam's role in Latin thought |
| Spanish Catholic | Asin Palacios, Cruz Hernandez, Gonzales Palencia; for science Millas-Vallicrosa, Vernet | Major work, mostly limited to Spain and the Maghreb |
| Jewish | Steinschneider, Munk, Goldziher, Wensinck, Wolfson, Vajda, van den Bergh, Pines, Kraus, Walzer | Rabbinical and scholastic roots; after the partition of Palestine many became less sympathetic interpreters |
| Modern-philosophical | Renan, Gauthier (Ibn Rushd as father of rationalism); Corbin (phenomenology, Heidegger, plus Gilson's medievalism); Marxists | Read Islamic thought through the Western school of the day |
| Philological orientalists | Many; later social-science readers | Careful editions, few meaningful interpretations; social scientists focused on political philosophy |
| Comparative | Izutsu, Ushida, Corbin, Gardet | Postwar, modelled on Indian and Far Eastern studies; potentially fruitful |
| Living tradition | Corbin, Gardet, Durand; in the East Nasr, Izutsu, Mohaghegh, al-Attas | Treats the ideas as true or false, answers modern seekers |
The last group matters most to Nasr. Western research spent its energy tracing historical influences and rarely asked what an idea meant to the person who held it. "Truth has no history" was almost never applied to Oriental thought, so Islamic philosophy looked like Greek philosophy in Arabic dress, and few important European thinkers came to it as philosophy.
Alongside them stood Muslim and Arab Christian scholars with modern training: Abd al-Raziq, Madkour, Afifi, Ahwany, Abu Ridah, Badawi, later Mahdi, Fazlur Rahman, Nasr, Arkoun, M. M. Sharif, and the Christians Anawati and Fakhry. In Persia the traditional masters kept the old way: Tabataba'i, Ashtiyani, Mutahhari, Ha'iri, Mohaghegh.
What Changed After the 1960s
- Vatican II: Thomism fades, though scholars like David Burrell continue. Rabbinical training also becomes rarer; Lenn Goodman and Oliver Leaman carry on Jewish scholarship.
- Philosophy splits: phenomenology and existentialism on the Continent, analytic philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world, deconstruction in both.
- Thanks to Corbin, Izutsu and Nasr, later Islamic philosophy wins a new generation.
- Muslim scholars teach in the West (Mahdi, Rahman, Falaturi, Ha'iri Yazdi, Nasr); Westerners study in the East (Landolt, Morris, Chittick, Cooper); then Ziai, Aminrazavi. McGill becomes a hub for Muslim students.
- Interaction with Western thought: Christian Jambet in France; analytic and semiotic work by Netton and Leaman; a British center and the journal Transcendent Philosophy under Gholam Ali Safavi.
The field is now large (see Hans Daiber's bibliography), but the chasm remains between Islamic philosophy as intellectual history, read through passing Western fashions, and as living philosophy concerned with truths above time. The same gap separates every traditional philosophy, every expression of the philosophia perennis, from modern thought, as Guenon, Coomaraswamy and Schuon insisted.
Real Contributions of Western Scholarship
- Cataloguing. Nearly all major Western libraries are catalogued (parts of the Vatican are an exception). In the Islamic world new manuscripts surface every year, even in Iran and Turkey, and India, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Mali hold much more. Sezgin and Daneshpazhuh used Western methods.
- Critical editions. Traditionally teachers corrected texts like the Shifa' orally as they taught; printing spread faulty texts. Corbin's Bibliotheque Iranienne and others trained Muslim editors. Yet no major Islamic philosopher has all his works critically edited.
- Translations. Far fewer than for Hindu or Buddhist texts. No complete English Shifa', Isharat, Tusi's commentary, or Asfar.
- Histories of philosophy, for good and ill (below).
Writing the History of Islamic Philosophy
Muslims wrote histories long before the West: the milal wa'l-nihal literature (al-Baghdadi, Ibn Hazm, al-Shahrastani), biographical works (Ibn al-Nadim, Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah, Ibn al-Qifti, Ibn Khallikan, Hajji Khalifah), and histories of philosophers (Shahrazuri, Ashkiwari, Tunakabuni), drawing on Theophrastus, Diogenes Laertius and Galen. Most affirm that hikmah began with prophecy, with the prophet Idris, identified with Hermes.
| Western 19th-20th c. | Traditional Islamic |
|---|---|
| Positivist historicism; calls it "Arabic" philosophy | Truth above time; philosophy rooted in prophecy |
| Ends with Ibn Rushd (Ibn Khaldun as postscript) | Continues to Mulla Sadra and beyond |
| A bridge from Greece to Latin scholasticism | A living tradition tied to the Quran |
| Schmolders, Munk, Carra de Vaux, O'Leary, Gauthier, Quadri; De Boer standard in Pakistan and India into the 1970s | Ibn Fatik, al-Sijistani, Shahrazuri |
Arab authors (Abd al-Raziq, Amin, Madkour, al-Alusi, al-Nashshar, Badawi; Christians Anawati, Fakhuri, al-Jurr) added textual detail but kept the Western model; Abd al-Halim Mahmud stood out for linking falsafah to Islam's inner teachings. Turkish (Ulken) and Pakistani (Saeed Shaikh) works did the same. Iqbal's Development of Metaphysics in Persia alone tried later philosophy, incompletely. Persia, where the tradition lived, cared least about history of philosophy, precisely because it held that philosophy is not its history; only recently did Halabi and Dinani write large histories.
- 1962: Nasr's Harvard lectures become Three Muslim Sages, a response from within the tradition, now translated into many languages.
- 1964: Corbin, with Nasr and Osman Yahya, writes the Histoire de la philosophie islamique for the Pleiade; Corbin later completes it alone (History of Islamic Philosophy).
- c. 1960: M. M. Sharif's Pakistani History of Muslim Philosophy; Nasr adds the later chapters. Useful, but composite.
- Later: Cruz Hernandez, Netton's Allah Transcendent, Fakhry's popular history (later editions add more, still thin on Persia and India).
- 1996: Nasr and Leaman, History of Islamic Philosophy (Routledge), historical and morphological, the most extensive bridge so far.
Chapter 2: The Meaning and Role of Philosophy in Islam
Before asking what philosophy did in Islam, Nasr asks which Islam and which philosophy.
Which Islam?
| Level | Triad 1 | Triad 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Outer | islam (submission) | Shari'ah (Law) |
| Middle | iman (faith) | Tariqah (Path) |
| Inner | ihsan (virtue) | Haqiqah (Truth) |
Orientalists erred by equating Islam with Law or kalam alone. Philosophy meets Islam at the level of the Haqiqah, where sapientia has always been integrated. And the whole dar al-islam, not one region, must be studied.
Which Philosophy?
| Secular philosophy | Traditional philosophy |
|---|---|
| Reason and senses alone, cut off from revelation and the Divine Intellect | Mind lit by the Divine Intellect and revelation, protected by a traditional world |
| Based on doubt | Based on certainty |
| "Mental acrobatics", baftan (weaving) | yaftan (finding, discovering truth) |
| Peripheral in Islam, a humanism with few minor instances | One of the richest traditions in the world, wedded to ishraq and 'irfan |
On the second definition, the title "philosopher" belongs to the falasifah, the hukama' and the 'urafa', and counting Persia, the Ottomans and India, Islamic philosophy was no short-lived episode. If there is Christian and Jewish philosophy, there is Islamic philosophy. Van Steenberghen noted that the scholastics called their work simply "philosophy", yet it was Christian. Classical Muslims likewise said al-falsafah, not "Islamic philosophy", just as they said al-din rather than al-islam, and the builders of the great mosques called their work simply "architecture". For members of a traditional civilization, their world was the world. Seen from outside, Chartres is Christian and the Alhambra Islamic, and Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi are Islamic philosophers.
For the later hukama', philosophy discusses the truths of revelation rationally, and the truth it reaches is an aspect of al-Haqq, a Divine Name. As for Philo, philosophy began as revealed truth: its chain goes back to Idris-Hermes, "Father of Philosophers", a claim deeper than any historical criticism could negate, paralleled by Jews and Christians who traced philosophy to Moses and Solomon.
Definitions From the Sources
"Hikmah" occurs twenty times in the Quran, most often cited: "He giveth wisdom unto whom He willeth, and he unto whom wisdom is given, he truly hath received abundant good" (2:269). Hadith: "The acquisition of hikmah is incumbent upon thee" and "Speak not of hikmah to fools". Theologians such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi read it as kalam; many others as the intellectual sciences, and Jahiz and Ibn al-Nadim already used it so.
- al-Kindi: knowledge of the reality of things within human possibility; truth in theory, conduct by truth in practice.
- al-Farabi: philosophy of certainty (demonstration, burhan) versus philosophy of opinion (dialectic, sophistry); "knowledge of existents qua existents", concerned with everything that exists.
- Ibn Sina: hikmah is the perfecting of the human soul through conceiving things and judging theoretical and practical truths.
- Ikhwan al-Safa': beginning, love of the sciences; middle, knowledge of realities; end, speech and action in conformity with it.
- Suhrawardi: the true sage joins theory and vision, the muta'allih ("God-like"); hikmah is the soul's being imprinted by spiritual truths. After him philosophy and spiritual realization marry.
- Safavid sages: the hakim exercises a prophetic function after prophecy has closed. Mulla Sadra reads "the scholars of my community are like the prophets of Israel" as the hukama'. Mir Findiriski: "The utmost extremity reached by the falasifah is the point of departure for prophecy."
- Mulla Sadra: perfecting the soul by knowing realities as they are, through demonstration not imitation, "to gain resemblance to the Creator"; man becomes an intelligible world mirroring the cosmos.
Three Kinds of "Opposition"
In a traditional civilization opposition is a creative tension inside a shared unity, not the war of schools with no common principles.
| Group | Position | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Jurists (Ibn Taymiyyah; Majlisi) | Guarded transmitted sciences on the exoteric level; Ibn Taymiyyah attacked logic while using it | Refused the esoteric dimension that alone integrates philosophy |
| Theologians | Ash'arites hostile, Mu'tazilites less; Isma'ili and Twelver kalam close to philosophy (Tusi's Tajrid) | Mutual shaping: kalam became philosophical (Juwayni, Ghazzali, Razi, Iji's Mawaqif, Dawani); Ibn Khaldun called later kalam a philosophy |
| Some Sufis | Rejected the "lesser truth" of Aristotelianism | Transformed philosophy into a wisdom wedded to gnosis |
| Reason as ladder | Reason broken |
|---|---|
| Ibn 'Arabi's school: Jili, Qunyawi; Ibn 'Arabi, "the Plato of his day", integrated Hermetic, Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic wisdom | Sana'i, Rumi, early Arab Sufi poets: love, never opposed to gnosis; the Mathnawi is "an ocean of gnosis" |
Some were both Sufi and philosopher: Suhrawardi, Dawud al-Qaysari, Shah Wali Allah.
Mir Damad: had reasoning been a wooden leg, Fakhr al-Din Razi would have no peer; "Thou hast not distinguished between intellect and fantasy."
Qutb al-Din Shirazi (18th c. Sufi of Shiraz): Rumi did not mean the Universal Intellect, "the guide upon all paths", but particular reason, mixed with fantasy and lacking "the light of the face of Joseph".
Sufi criticism acted like the philosopher's stone: it changed falsafah from a rational system with Islamic form into a wisdom wedded to illumination, still rigorous, and rescued it from the deadlock of Ibn Rushd's Aristotelianism, opening eight more centuries of life in the East.
The Role of Philosophy, Early Period
- Absorbing and synthesizing pre-Islamic sciences: logic, classification and method of the sciences. The hakim was physician, scientist and philosopher in one: al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and the anti-Peripatetics Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi and al-Biruni, who drove many new scientific ideas.
- Logic as a tool for grammar, rhetoric, hadith classification, the bazaar, and the geometry of architecture. In Islam logic is soteriological: it prepares the mind for contemplation.
- Meeting other civilizations: al-Kindi held truth is one, known through the same Universal Intellect as religion. Hermes as Idris, the Sabaeans as Hermetists, Greek sages learning from Solomon, interest in India and Persia. Later: Rashid al-Din's Chinese translations; Akbar's and Dara Shukuh's Sanskrit translations.
- Shaping kalam: the gap between al-Ash'ari or al-Baqillani and al-Razi, al-Iji or al-Jurjani is due solely to the struggle with falsafah.
- Satisfying the human need for causality in certain intellectual types.
After Ibn Rushd: Two Destinies
| Western lands (Arab, Maghreb) | Eastern lands (Persia, India, partly Ottoman) |
|---|---|
| Falsafah as a discipline ends, except Ibn Sab'in and Ibn Khaldun, until al-Afghani's 19th-century revival in Egypt | New schools from Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi; Ibn Sina revived by Tusi; apogee with Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra |
| Its substance lives on in kalam and in Ibn 'Arabi's commentators (Qunyawi, Jandi, Qaysari, Fanari, Sha'rani, Bali Efendi, Nabulusi) | Marriage of hikmah and 'irfan: masters who were both hakim and gnostic |
| Ash'arite kalam joined to Sufism | Hikmah gives Sufi metaphysics systematic form and is the gateway to Sufism for rational minds |
Chapter 3: al-Hikmat al-Ilahiyyah and Kalam
How did later Islamic philosophy relate to theology? Nasr shows a long arc: rivalry, mutual borrowing, synthesis, and finally, in Shi'ite Persia, philosophy taking over the job theology had been trying to do.
Five Periods of Falsafah and Kalam
- Period 1: kalam dominated by Mu'tazilites; falsafah begins with Iranshahri and al-Kindi. The Basra school still opposed philosophy.
- Period 2: Ash'arism rises; open hostility until Juwayni and al-Ghazzali begin adopting philosophical arguments. Best studied in the West by Munk, Horten, Anawati, Gardet and above all Wolfson; later van Ess, Burrell, Madelung.
- Period 3: Ghazzali's and Razi's critiques of Ibn Sina, yet each side absorbs the other. Philosophy takes up prophecy, the Divine Word, free will and Attributes; kalam turns philosophical. Ibn Khaldun noted thinkers who were both faylasuf and mutakallim. Ash'arite attacks still eclipsed Peripatetic philosophy in the East.
- Period 4: calmer, with Illumination now part of philosophy. Sunni masters of both (Jurjani, Dawani, Qaysari); in Twelver Shi'ism Tusi founds systematic kalam and his student 'Allamah al-Hilli is theologian and philosopher.
- Period 5: after Mulla Sadra, philosophy marginalizes Shi'ite kalam. In Sunni India hikmah, Ash'arite kalam and Sufism are integrated (Shah Wali Allah, Ashraf 'Ali Thanwi).
Right Questions, Wrong Method
The hukama' revered the Quran and Sunnah as much as the theologians did. Their charge was that kalam's problems were essential but its methods illegitimate. They saw themselves as the scholars who could actually do what the mutakallimun attempted: explain religion's intellectual content and answer the discursive mind.
| Figure | Stance toward kalam |
|---|---|
| Suhrawardi | Barely mentions kalam, yet treats its core issues (Attributes, soul, God's knowledge) in ishraqi terms |
| Nasir al-Din Tusi | Hakim and founder of systematic Shi'ite theology (Tajrid), but kept the two viewpoints in separate works |
| Qutb al-Din Shirazi | Suhrawardi's commentator, less interested in kalam |
| 'Allamah al-Hilli | Foremost theologian and hakim |
| Ibn Abi Jumhur, Haydar Amuli | Shi'ite theologians versed in hikmah |
| Dawani, the Dashtakis, Jurjani | At home in kalam, hikmah and 'irfan; combined both methods in one argument, the hallmark of the 14th-15th centuries |
Mulla Sadra's Verdict
No later philosopher knew Sunni and Shi'ite kalam better. Kalam is one of four pillars of his synthesis, beside Peripatetic philosophy, ishraq and 'irfan, and nearly every kalam problem reappears in the Asfar, sometimes praised, sometimes violently rejected. What matters most is his diagnosis of why kalam fails: the mutakallimun have not purified themselves enough for the intellect to see Divine Realities free of the carnal soul.
Lahiji: A Theologian Who Defined Philosophy
studied the
Asfar,
Shawahidand
Mabda' wa'l-ma'adwith Mulla Sadra himself, yet in the changed late-Safavid climate wrote on kalam and publicly leaned Peripatetic. His
Gawhar-i murad(Persian) and
Shawariq al-ilham(Arabic, on Tusi's
Tajrid) became authorities of Shi'ite kalam. He also wrote on logic, glossed Tusi's commentary on the
Isharat, wrote fine gnostic poetry, and stood close to al-Ghazzali on kalam and Sufism.
| Old kalam | New kalam | Hikmah | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aim | Defend the Shari'ah's statutes against other religions and rival sects | Explain the foundations of religion | Know the real nature of things; perfect the theoretical faculty |
| Premises | Well-known among believers | Well-known and evident to followers of the Shari'ah | Certain, self-evident, whatever the community thinks |
| Method | Dialectic (jadal) | Same subject as hikmah, weaker premises | Demonstration (burhan) |
| Knowledge? | Cannot yield ma'rifah | Only where its premises are certain | Yes; agrees with true revelation without depending on it |
He relabels Taftazani's "ancients/moderns" split: ancients = Sunni kalam (dialectic, against hikmah), moderns = Shi'ite kalam (demonstrative, in harmony with hikmah).
Swan Song of Shi'ite Kalam
His son Hasan Lahiji (d. 1709 in Qom), grandson of Mulla Sadra, wrote the Avicennan Zawahir al-hikam and A'inah-yi hikmat, and turned to kalam and ethics only after condemnation, never mentioning transcendent theosophy. His life marks late-Safavid hostility to hikmah and 'irfan, and also the last great Shi'ite kalam. Afterward came jurist-philosophers like Mulla Mahdi Naraqi, but no Hilli or Lahiji. The recent kalam-i jadid of Qom answers modernism, yet even there the hikmah tradition leads, as with 'Allamah Tabataba'i.
| Shi'ite Persia | Sunni India |
|---|---|
| Hikmah absorbed elements of kalam and then devoured and replaced it | Philosophized Ash'arite kalam survived distinctly inside grand syntheses |
| Mulla Sadra's school dominates from the late 18th c. | Shah Wali Allah's Hujjat Allah al-balighah; Thanwi, hakim, theologian and Sufi |
The Arab world had no hikmah tradition outside Shi'ite Iraq until al-Afghani revived falsafah in Cairo, and even then interest stayed with early philosophy. Ottoman Turks kept Avicennan and Suhrawardian philosophy alive and sought harmony with kalam.
Chapter 4: Existence and Quiddity, the Heart of Islamic Ontology
No question is more central to Islamic philosophy than wujud (Being and existence) and its relation to mahiyyah (quiddity, essence). For eleven centuries this pair shaped Islamic metaphysics and, through translation, Christian and Jewish thought. To grasp it is to grasp the foundation of the whole tradition.
Why Not Simply Aristotle?
Al-Farabi first treated the distinction fully and owed it to Aristotle. But its weight in Islam comes from the Quran: "His command, when He intendeth a thing, is only that He saith unto it: Be! and it is" (kun fa-yakun, 36:82). For homo islamicus the world is not wujud; it is not "an ontological block without fissure". The origin of the chain of being transcends the chain. Creation gave the distinction a new meaning: wujud is bestowed on quiddities.
- al-Farabi, Fusus al-hikmah: huwiyyah (actuality) distinct from mahiyyah.
- Ibn Sina, "philosopher of being": cornerstone in the Shifa', Najat, Isharat.
- Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (theologian) continues the debate; Suhrawardi builds a metaphysics of essence on Avicennan ground.
- Tusi, al-Hilli, even in theology; then Qutb al-Din Shirazi, Dashtaki, Ibn Turkah, Dawani.
- School of Isfahan: Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra; the Asfar is the fullest treatment of wujud in Islamic history.
- Lahiji, Fayd Kashani; Qajar revival (Nuri, Sabziwari, Mudarris Tihrani); India (Shah Wali Allah); still alive in Persia today.
The Two Questions
Traditional teachers start students with two questions about any thing: "Is it?" (hal huwa), answered by wujud or nonexistence, and "What is it?" (ma huwa), answered by mahiyyah.
| English | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Being | The Absolute, the Necessary Being (wajib al-wujud) |
| being | Universal concept covering all levels, creature and God |
| Existence | The first effusion, the Sacred Effusion (al-fayd al-aqdas) |
| existence | The reality of all things other than God |
Etymology: root wjd, "to find"; kin to wijdan (consciousness) and wajd (ecstasy). Persian hasti is cognate with "is". Since ex-sistere means standing out from a ground, God is, but does not exist. Later thinkers also separate mawjud (existent) from wujud as the act of existence: ens versus actus essendi.
The Distinction Itself
For Aristotle the world could not not exist, so the distinction mattered little. For Islam the world suffers ontological poverty (faqr): only God abides. The intellect separates wujud and mahiyyah not in the thing outside, which is one, but "in the container of the mind".
- Quiddity considered "in so far as it is itself" (min haythu hiya hiya) is the natural universal (Ibn Sina). It can have mental or external existence, but in itself it says nothing about either.
- Wujud is not a constituent (muqawwim) of any quiddity, as "animal" is of "man".
- Different causes: quiddity's causes are genus and difference; existence's are efficient and final causes and substratum.
- Ibn Sina did not start from two realities glued together. He started from one concrete existent and analyzed it.
Is Existence an "Accident"?
Razi, Ibn Rushd, and in the Latin West Siger of Brabant and even St Thomas read Ibn Sina as saying existence is an accident like the colour of wood. That fails: wood exists before it is painted, but what would a quiddity be "before" existence? If existent, regress; if not, nothing to receive it.
So: in the mind, existence is "added" to quiddity; in the external world, for the school of the principiality of wujud, it is quiddities that occur in wujud, as intrinsic limits that are nothing in themselves.
The Three Directions
| Quiddity in the mind | Name | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Can exist or not, no contradiction | mumkin (contingent) | man, horse, star; the "world of contingencies" |
| Must exist, or contradiction | wajib (necessary) | The One whose quiddity is wujud; only one |
| Cannot exist, or contradiction | mumtani' (impossible) | a partner of God; a quantity greater than the sum of its parts |
"Necessary Being" became a common name for God among theologians, Sufis, jurists and preachers. Mirza Mahdi Ashtiyani concluded after a lifetime that necessity is wujud itself.
Things in the world already exist, and Tusi wrote: "That which exists is as it should be, / That which should not exist will not do so." The answer: they are necessary through another (wajib bi'l-ghayr) but contingent in essence. God brings quiddities into the light of wujud, "covering them with the robe of necessity, while in themselves they remain forever in the nakedness of contingency."
Concept versus Reality of Wujud
Some schools treat wujud as a mere abstraction. Mulla Sadra's school distinguishes the concept (mafhum), most universal and best known, from the reality (haqiqah), most inaccessible yet most manifest, and for those of unveiling the only reality. Here philosophy and gnosis meet. Because this experience stayed present, Islamic thought saw things as acts of being, not inert objects, and escaped what French thinkers call la chosification du monde.
Unity, Gradation, Principiality
Mulla Sadra united al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, the critiques of Ghazzali and Razi, Suhrawardi's illumination, and the gnosis of Ibn 'Arabi and Qunyawi, threaded by the Quran, Hadith and the Imams. His metaphysics rests on three theses.
| Position | Figures |
|---|---|
| Allusions, ecstatic sayings (shatah) | Early Sufis |
| Explicit formulation | al-Ghazzali, Ibn Sab'in, Ibn 'Arabi's school: Qunyawi, Jandi, Tilimsani, Qaysari, Jami |
| Silent by choice | Abu'l-Hasan al-Shadhili |
| Opposed though a Sufi | Ibn Taymiyyah (a Qadiri) |
| Unity of consciousness (wahdat al-shuhud) | 'Ala' al-Dawlah Simnani; Ahmad Sirhindi in India, where this debate shaped religion, society and politics |
| Philosophers and theologians | Haydar Amuli, Ibn Turkah; keystone for Mulla Sadra |
Exoteric 'ulama' charged incarnationism and unbelief; orientalists said "pantheism" and "monism".
For Ibn 'Arabi's school only God has wujud at all. For Mulla Sadra, all beings are rays of the sun of Being, with no wujud of their own. His elaborate proofs aim to prepare the mind for tasting (dhawq), not to replace it.
| Principiality of quiddity | Principiality of wujud |
|---|---|
| Suhrawardi, Mir Damad: quiddities real, wujud only mentally posited (i'tibari) | Mulla Sadra (Ibn Sina and Tusi also counted here, though without unity and gradation) |
| "Essentialist" metaphysics | "Existentialist" metaphysics; Corbin's "revolution in Islamic thought" |
Sadra was first an essentialist and changed by divine inspiration. His proofs (unity of the external object, no gradation in quiddities) live on in Sabziwari's rhymed Sharh-i manzumah. Yet acceptance rests finally on experience, not argument.
The paradox: Sadra's view is called that of the Pahlavi or Khusrawani sages, a Suhrawardian name, because Suhrawardi gave light all the attributes of wujud, and Sadra's followers called the world a kathrah nuraniyyah, a luminous multiplicity.
The Structure of Reality
| School | View |
|---|---|
| Ash'arites | Reject the distinctions |
| Some philosophers | Accept the concept, deny its reality |
| Some Peripatetics | Wujud real but many separate realities |
| Dawani ("tasting of theosophy") | Only one reality, God |
| Mulla Sadra | All four distinguished; one wujud with grades, quiddities abstracted from it |
| Sufi metaphysics | One Reality; other things nothing in themselves, appear as its theophanies |
How does this avoid identifying world and God? Tusi's three considerations of quiddity, applied to wujud:
| Stage | For the philosophers |
|---|---|
| Negatively conditioned (bi-shart-i la) | God, pure transcendent Being, Source of all |
| Non-conditioned (la bi-shart) | Expansive wujud (al-wujud al-munbasit), the act of existentiation, the Sufis' "Breath of the Compassionate" |
| Conditioned by something (bi-shart-i shay') | The chain of being, "from the angels to the pebbles along the seashore" |
The Sufis go further: even "negatively conditioned" is a condition, so they identify God with non-conditioned wujud (Isma'ilis similarly). Both see a unity that transcends and is the multiplicity, a coincidentia oppositorum seen only by "the people of vision".
The Experience of Wujud
Man lives among existents yet yearns for unity. His nature is to transcend what he "is" to become what he really is; his acts and discipline intensify the act of wujud in him until the separate ego drowns in the ocean of Being.
Chapter 5: Post-Avicennan Philosophy and the Study of Being
Islam and the West started from the same Avicennan ground and then parted ways. In the West the experience of Being faded into a concept, and the concept finally disintegrated. In Islam philosophy moved closer to the ocean of Being itself until it became the systematic partner of gnosis.
| Late Western philosophy | Later Islamic philosophy |
|---|---|
| Wed to external experience and experiment: empiricism | Wed to inner, spiritual experience, finally of Pure Being |
| Vision of Being gives way to the concept "being" | hikmah dhawqiyyah, "tasted" wisdom; dhawq parallels Latin sapere, root of "sapiential" |
The Path of the Study of Being
- al-Farabi (Kitab al-huruf) and Ibn Sina (Shifa', Najat, Danishnamah-yi 'ala'i): masters of discursive philosophy (hikmah bahthiyyah) who fixed the framework: existence/quiddity and necessity/contingency/impossibility.
- 11th-12th c.: Ash'arite dominance. Kalam's voluntarism looked only at God's Will, one Quality among many, and ignored His Being, so it had little interest in what Suarez and Wolff later called "ontology".
- Suhrawardi: existence an accident, quiddity real, yet light carries everything others gave to wujud. To study being in him, study his whole doctrine of light.
- Ibn 'Arabi: metaphysics beyond ontology. The Principle stands above Being, and Being is its first determination (ta'ayyun). He linked existence to Divine Mercy and first set out the reality of wahdat al-wujud (the name probably from Ibn Sab'in and his students).
- Tusi revives Ibn Sina, now read through Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi. Qunyawi, 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani and Haydar Amuli (Naqd al-nuqud fi ma'rifat al-wujud) systematize gnostic ontology.
- School of Isfahan: a new opening chapter, "general matters" (al-umur al-'ammah), mostly on wujud; principiality of existence versus quiddity debated for the first time and projected back over all history.
- Nuri, Sabziwari, Mudarris (19th c.); Mirza Mahdi Ashtiyani, Kazim 'Assar (20th c.).
| Current | View |
|---|---|
| Mir Damad and students | Ibn Sina with a Suhrawardian colour |
| Mulla Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi | Close to Proclus: the Principle above Being and non-Being, totally discontinuous with the chain of existence |
| Mulla Sadra, Fayd Kashani | Turned Suhrawardi's essentialism into an existentialist metaphysics (Asfar, Shawahid, Masha'ir) |
Salient Features of Sadra's School
Quiddities are not realities to which existence is added; they are abstractions the mind makes from a particular limit of existence. The untrained eye sees the container; the sage sees the content, which is at once being (wujud), presence (hudur) and witness (shuhud).
- Reality is both being and knowledge, so "the more man is, the more he is able to perceive being".
- The universe is a series of presences (hadarat) that man penetrates to the extent that he is present.
- Above all stands the Principle (al-mabda'), giver of existence (al-mubdi'), the Non-Being that comprehends Pure Being.
- Its first determination is Being; its first effusion is at once Intellect and Universal Existence, the Sufis' "Breath of the Compassionate", the substance of creation.
- Particular existences are rays of that expansive existence (al-wujud al-munbasit, al-fayd al-muqaddas).
- Ibn 'Arabi counts these grades as the Five Divine Presences, from the Essence to the spatio-temporal world, yet all are the Presence of the One.
What It Means for a Human Life
| Modern existentialism | Later Islamic philosophy |
|---|---|
| Studies the existence of the individual | Studies Being, of which the individual is a mode |
| Existence a faltering flame put out by death | Death is a gate to more intense existence, natural or initiatic |
| Annihilation means extinction | fana' ends in baqa', subsistence in God, the most intense being; man becomes "never less than what he was but more" |
Understanding being is inseparable from inner discipline. "It is easy to perform this or that act, but it is very difficult simply to exist." Playing with concepts is easier than stilling the mind to see that "all things are plunged in God".
Chapter 6: Intellect, Reason and Intuition
How do we know? In a world where prophecy is the supreme source of knowledge, Islamic philosophers had to explain how human knowing relates to revelation, how we come to know God, and, unlike most Greeks, how God knows particulars. Nasr's aim here is narrower: to recover what "intellect", "reason" and "intuition" meant in Islam, since modern usage has emptied them.
The Vocabulary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| al-'aql | From 'ql, "to bind": the faculty that binds man to the Truth, to God, to his Origin. Both intellect and reason; the Quran praises intellection (ta'aqqul) again and again |
| al-'aql al-juz'i, istidlal | "Partial intellect", ratiocination: reason as the intellect's reflection on the mind |
| hads, firasah | Intuition: participation in a knowledge not merely rational yet never irrational |
| dhawq, ishraq, mukashafah, basirah, nazar, badihah | Tasting, illumination, unveiling, inner sight, contemplation, self-evidence: direct vision |
| 'ilm huduri / 'ilm husuli | Presential (immediate) versus representative / attained (conceptual) knowledge |
None of these opposes 'aql; they elaborate it on different levels. Thinkers who limited knowledge to reason alone stayed peripheral.
Five Perspectives
| Discipline | Role of intellect |
|---|---|
| Religious sciences | Revelation illuminates the intellect; faith is a "leap" inseparable from intuition |
| Fiqh | "Juridical reasoning", subordinate to revelation, as in Catholic jurisprudence; never confused with intellectus. Even Ibn Rushd kept the terms distinct in law and philosophy |
| Esoteric Quran commentary | Intellect as "particular revelation" (al-wahy al-juz'i), completed by "universal revelation" (al-wahy al-kulli) |
| Kalam | Ash'arite voluntarism: truth is what God wills; intellect reduced to human reason. Mu'tazilites, Maturidis, Twelvers give reason more room, without rationalism. Kalam protects the citadel of faith; it does not climb into it |
| Philosophy and gnosis | Where the full meaning of intellect and intuition, and a complete method of knowledge, are found |
Three Philosophical Schools
| Stage | State |
|---|---|
| Material / potential (bi'l-quwwah) | Intelligence in virtuality, in every human |
| Habitual (bi'l-malakah) | First intelligibles placed in the soul from above |
| Actual (bi'l-fi'l) | Intellect fully actualized in the mind |
| Acquired (mustafad) | Process completed |
| Active Intellect (al-'aql al-fa''al) | Universal, divine, beyond the individual; every act of cognition is its illumination, bestowing the form known |
Built on al-Kindi's and al-Farabi's treatises On the Intellect, Themistius and Alexander, with the Quran in view (Shifa', Najat, 'Uyun al-hikmah, Isharat).
The Peripatetics were not rationalists: the intellect itself is a luminous substance (jawhar) with levels beyond the individual. Ibn Sina denied Platonic ideas but stood nearer the realists than the nominalists, which is why Latin Augustinians rallied to him (the "Avicennizing Augustinians"). He also speaks of hads, intuition, resembling Aristotle's agchinoia (quick wit). As the intellect grows in universality it gains intuitive powers; metaphysics is known by intellectual intuition, a light that removes reason's boundaries, not a leap in the dark.
| Mashsha'i: hikmah bahthiyyah | Ishraqi: hikmah dhawqiyyah |
|---|---|
| Degrees of intellect with the Active Intellect's help | All knowledge is illumination by lights of the intelligible world |
| Intuition as the intellect's higher power | Even physical sight works because a light from the soul embraces the object; a logical concept is known by illumination when its form is present |
| No intellection without illumination, no true knowledge without tasting; adaequatio rei et intellectus (as in Augustine and Aquinas): each level of reality has its matching instrument |
The Knowledge of the Heart
The fullest meaning of intellect lies in ma'rifah, gnosis, at the heart of revelation and crystallized in Sufism. Quran and Hadith make the heart the seat of knowledge, and its sickness the cause of forgetting.
Masters taught that those who refuse to identify with the heart forfeit Paradise, which lies at its center ("The Kingdom of God is within you"). The eye of the heart ('ayn al-qalb, chishm-i dil) is a "third eye", the immanent intellect. The heart is not sentiment opposed to reason; it transcends the reason/emotion dichotomy. Losing operative gnosis is what eclipsed this idea in modern times.
Chapter 7: A Framework for the History of Islamic Philosophy
Part Three turns from ideas to history. In a tradition where what is said matters more than who said it, a new framework is needed, one that breaks with European histories ending at Averroes. Nasr outlines the periodization he built with Henry Corbin from 1962 and later refined in his Routledge history with Oliver Leaman.
Origins
Islamic philosophy arose in the 9th century from Muslims steeped in the Quran meditating on Greco-Alexandrian texts newly in Arabic. They held Greek philosophy itself to stem from prophecy (Idris-Hermes), and built a "prophetic philosophy" that in turn shaped Jewish and Christian thought. Quran and Hadith, and later the sayings of the Shi'ite Imams (above all for Mulla Sadra), were central sources. It is not Greek philosophy in Arabic but an independent universe of discourse.
The Periods
- Early Peripatetics (9th-11th c.): Aristotle + Neoplatonism + Islam.
- Isma'ili philosophy (8th-11th c. and after).
- Independent philosophers (10th-11th c.).
- Theologians against philosophers (11th-13th c.).
- Spain and the Maghreb (10th-14th c.).
- Suhrawardi and Illumination (12th c. on).
- Rapprochement of schools (13th-16th c.), centred on Shiraz.
- School of Isfahan, India, Ottomans (16th c. on), then the contemporary world.
| Figure | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Iranshahri | Said to be the first Muslim philosopher; only fragments survive |
| al-Kindi (d. c. 873), "Philosopher of the Arabs" | Philosopher-scientist; first to express Peripatetic thought in Arabic and to harmonize faith and reason; On the Intellect (De Intellectu), On First Philosophy. Students (e.g. al-Sarakhsi) mostly scientists |
| al-Farabi (d. 950), Khurasan | Often seen as the real founder; shaped philosophical Arabic; father of Islamic logic; founder of political philosophy (Virtuous City); harmony of Plato and Aristotle; first to systematize the emanation of ten intellects |
| Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani "the Logician" | Baghdad circle, logic; with al-Tawhidi, understudied |
| al-'Amiri | Extends al-Farabi; brings pre-Islamic Iranian ideas into political thought |
| Ibn Sina (980-1037) | Peak: Shifa', Najat, Isharat; necessity/contingency; chain of being with all three kingdoms; visionary recitals and "Oriental philosophy" (al-hikmah al-mashriqiyyah). Students like Bahmanyar need study |
| Figure | Position |
|---|---|
| Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi (Rhazes, d. c. 932) | Greatest physician after Ibn Sina; denied the necessity of prophecy; five eternal principles (Demiurge, Universal Soul, prime matter, Space, Time); attacked by Isma'ilis |
| al-Biruni (d. 1030) | Criticized Avicennan natural philosophy; introduced Hindu philosophy to Islam |
| Miskawayh (d. 1030) | First major philosophical ethics, Tahdhib al-akhlaq; Jawidan khirad (philosophia perennis) |
Theologians Against Philosophers
Under the Seljuqs (11th-13th c.) madrasahs taught kalam; in the East only Omar Khayyam stood out as a philosopher. Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), Shahrastani (d. 1153) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) wrote against the Peripatetics (and Isma'ilis).
| Ibn Sina, Ghazzali, Ibn Rushd | Ibn Sina, Razi, Tusi |
|---|---|
| Ghazzali: Munqidh, Maqasid al-falasifah (so the Latins thought him a Peripatetic), Tahafut: three charges, eternity of the world, God's ignorance of particulars, denial of bodily resurrection | Razi's Sharh al-isharat, Tusi's reply reviving Ibn Sina, Qutb al-Din al-Razi's Muhakamat judging between them |
| Ibn Rushd's Tahafut al-tahafut; mattered most in the West | More important for later Islamic philosophy, yet neglected by Western histories since Horten |
Ghazzali curtailed rationalism, he did not end philosophy.
Spain and the Maghreb
| Figure | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Ibn Masarrah (d. 931) | Sufi philosopher who began western Islamic philosophy; the Sufi link persisted except in Ibn Rushd |
| Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) | Jurist, early comparative religion; The Ring of the Dove on Platonic love |
| Ibn Bajjah (d. 1138) | Physics commentaries; Regimen of the Solitary: perfect state through individuals united with the Active Intellect |
| Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185) | Hayy ibn Yaqzan: inner illumination agrees with revelation; Hebrew at once, Latin only in the 17th c. as Philosophus Autodidactus |
| Ibn Rushd (1126-98) | "The Commentator"; chief judge of Cordoba; pious Muslim, not a free-thinker or double-truth theorist (Decisive Treatise); bigger in the West than in Islam |
| Ibn Sab'in (d. 1270); Ibn Khaldun (d. 1379) | Unity of being; philosophy of history (Muqaddimah) |
| Ibn 'Arabi (d. 1240) | Not a faylasuf, but among the greatest expositors of mystical philosophy anywhere |
Illumination, Rapprochement, Isfahan
The 13th-16th centuries, centred on Shiraz with Iraq and eastern Anatolia, bring the schools together: Tusi revives Ibn Sina and writes the Akhlaq-i nasiri; Qutb al-Din Shirazi joins Peripatetic and ishraqi; Ibn 'Arabi's school spreads via Qunyawi, Jandi, Kashani, Qaysari; Jurjani's philosophical kalam; Ibn Turkah (d. 1427), at once ishraqi, Peripatetic and gnostic.
Then the School of Isfahan: Mir Damad (d. 1631) and Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), whose transcendent theosophy unites mashsha', ishraq, 'irfan and kalam in the Asfar; taught in India, revived under the Qajars by Nuri, Sabziwari, Mudarris. Parallel Indian and Ottoman schools remain little known.
The Contemporary World
- al-Afghani, trained in Sadra's school in Persia, revives philosophy in Egypt; 'Abd al-Halim Mahmud, Shaykh al-Azhar.
- India-Pakistan: Iqbal; even Mawdudi translated parts of the Asfar into Urdu in his youth.
- Persia, despite some 'ulama': Ashtiyani, Tunakabuni; Qazwini, 'Assar, Tabataba'i; revival from the 1960s.
- Khomeini taught hikmah in Qom for decades; Mutahhari, philosopher, first head of the Revolutionary Council; in Iraq Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.
Chapter 8: Kalam, Philosophy and Spirituality
The longest chapter in the book surveys the three intellectual dimensions of any traditional universe: the theological, the philosophical and the gnostic, gnosis meaning knowledge that illuminates and liberates. Islam has all three, each with a thousand-year line of masters, but their weight and relations differ from Christianity's.
| Christianity | Islam | |
|---|---|---|
| Theology | Central; carries the deepest spiritual impulses (Dionysius' mystical theology, the Theologia Germanica) | kalam ("word"; Aquinas's loquentes) is less central: "establishing religious beliefs by giving proofs and dispelling doubts" |
| Gnosis | Marginal | 'irfan / ma'rifah, more central |
| Philosophy | Separated from theology, then secularized | Became al-hikmat al-ilahiyyah, which holds much of what the West calls theology |
Kalam: Origins
Tradition credits 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose Nahj al-balaghah holds the first rational proofs of God's unity. First-century disputes (faith and works, who is saved, the nature of the Quran, political legitimacy) and debates in Syria and Iraq with Christians, Mazdaeans and Manichaeans, plus Greek philosophy, pushed Muslims to build a rational defense. Early creeds, the Fiqh al-akbar and Wasiyyah linked to Abu Hanifah (d. 767), stress God's unity and power; later theologians urged every Muslim to master as many proofs of God as he could.
| Principle | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Unity (tawhid) | Rational transcendence; Attributes identical with the Essence, so God nearly an abstraction; hence the created Quran, their most contested thesis |
| Justice ('adl) | God acts for the best; objective good and evil apart from the Law; humans create their own evil and are responsible ("people of unity and justice") |
| Promise and threat | Severe: grave sinners and unbelievers go to hell; faith includes avoiding grave sin |
| Intermediate position | The Muslim sinner (fasiq) is between believer and unbeliever: a member of the community here, damned hereafter |
| Commanding good, forbidding evil | Morality as a social, not merely private, duty |
They built a "rational ethics"; al-Nazzam's leap (tafrah) for motion over infinitely divisible space and his latency and manifestation (all created at once, unfolding over time); Abu'l-Hudhayl's atomism, later Ash'arite.
Ash'arism
Al-Ma'mun's inquisition (mihnah) imposing Mu'tazilism provoked a backlash: Ahmad ibn Hanbal's followers accepted doctrine "without asking how" (bila kayfa). But the Quran's stress on 'aql needed an orthodox rational theology. Abu'l-Hasan al-Ash'ari (c. 873-941), a student of al-Jubba'i, turned at forty, perhaps after a dream of the Prophet, and announced in the mosque of Basra: "Lo! I repent that I have been a Mu'tazilite." He wrote over ninety works (al-Ibanah, Kitab al-luma', Maqalat al-islamiyyin). Juwayni called him a reconciler rather than a theologian.
| Issue | Ash'ari |
|---|---|
| Attributes | Real, but unlike human ones (against Mu'tazilites and anthropomorphists) |
| Vision of God | Possible on Judgment Day, without incarnation |
| Quran | Uncreated, though ink, paper, letters are created |
| Sinner | In God's hands: forgiven or punished temporarily (against Mu'tazilites and Murji'ites) |
| Intercession | The Prophet intercedes by God's permission |
| Free will | Voluntarism: God as all-powerful Will rather than the Reality that is and wills |
- al-Tahawi (d. 933, Egypt): "dogmatic" Hanafi theology. al-Maturidi (d. 944, Central Asia): more room for reason; all must seek God even apart from the Law. Ash'arism first popular only with Shafi'is.
- Later Ash'arites ("via nova", Ibn Khaldun): Juwayni (Irshad), al-Ghazzali (Iqtisad), Shahrastani (Nihayat al-iqdam), Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the most learned; peak in Iji's Mawaqif with Jurjani's commentary, still taught at al-Azhar with the more anti-philosophical Taftazani. Then Sanusi's popular creed, Dawani. Ibn Tumart, Ghazzali's disciple, carried it to the Almohad Maghreb.
- Modern kalam: Bajuri's manual (19th c.); Muhammad 'Abduh's Risalat al-tawhid revives Mu'tazilite theses; Mustafa 'Abd al-Raziq; Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Ameer Ali, Iqbal's Reconstruction. More apologetics and accommodation than preservation of tradition.
Despite its "anti-intellectualism", Ash'arism often married Sufism (al-Ghazzali; North African, Arab, Turkish and Indian masters), while other Sufis and the philosophers judged it inadequate for the Divine Names. Over time it took up philosophy's own questions: being and nonbeing, necessity and contingency, the one and the many. For those wanting to know God and not only obey, it was at best the walls of the city of knowledge: protective, but one must pass beyond them, to the city of which the Prophet said, "I am the city of knowledge and 'Ali is its gate."
Shi'ite Kalam
The Zaydis adopted Mu'tazilite kalam, keeping it alive in Yemen. Isma'ili theology and philosophy stayed close: Kirmani and Nasir-i Khusraw were more philosophers, Abu Hatim al-Razi and al-Mu'ayyad al-Shirazi more theologians. Common themes: the unknowable Deus absconditus, the intellect's inability to know the Essence, illumination by the Prophet and Imams, the celestial Adam, prophecy (nubuwwah) and initiatic power (walayah), ta'wil.
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 | Being and nonbeing, grades of being, quiddity, real horizontal causality: Avicennan, anti-Ash'arite |
| 2 | Substance and accidents; no atomism (bodies potentially, never actually, infinitely divisible); intellect and soul as immortal immaterial substances (Ash'arites: soul recreated at Judgment) |
| 3-5 | God, prophecy, imamology |
| 6 | Eschatology, metaphysical and symbolic |
It fixed the distinction between metaphysics in the general sense (sections 1-2) and in the specific sense (theology proper).
Afterward: Haydar Amuli (Sufi), Dawani (Sunni turned Shi'ite). Under the Safavids philosophy eclipsed kalam, though Sadra's students Fayd Kashani and Lahiji leaned to kalam. Under the Qajars the field passed to hikmah and usul al-fiqh; later Shi'ite "kalam" lives in theosophy, whose masters refused the name.
Philosophy Between Kalam and Sufism
Kalam guarded the citadel of faith and tried to subordinate 'aql; Sufism sought the inner meaning of revelation and activated the heart-intellect. Philosophy grew in constant dialogue with both. Some philosophers opposed kalam, some ignored Sufism, some were theologians, and many later ones were steeped in Ibn 'Arabi, arguably the most influential intellectual figure in the whole Islamic world for seven centuries.
Early Peripatetics in Depth
| Figure | Highlights |
|---|---|
| al-Kindi (d. c. 873) | 200+ treatises; truth reached by the intellect, distinct from reason, which is inner revelation framed by outer revelation (Gabriel); first chapter of faith and reason; classification uniting divine and human knowledge; shaped Arabic terminology; the Theology of Aristotle (Plotinus' Enneads) translated for him by Ibn Na'imah al-Himsi |
| al-Farabi (d. 950) | Turkish family, Persian milieu, Farab; Baghdad, then Damascus. Practising Sufi and composer (pieces still in Indian and Anatolian Sufi music); commented on all Aristotle's logic; Enumeration of the Sciences (De Scientiis) made him the "Second Teacher"; Accord of Plato and Aristotle; philosopher-king as prophet in the Virtuous City; Attainment of Happiness; Fusus al-hikmah, first synthesis of philosophy and gnosis, still taught in Persia |
| Yahya ibn 'Adi; al-Sijistani; al-Tawhidi | Christian student; Baghdad logic circle |
| al-'Amiri (d. 992) | Ethics; al-I'lam bi-manaqib al-islam, a unique philosophical defense of Islam |
| Miskawayh (d. 1030) | Tahdhib al-akhlaq; Jawidan khirad, sayings of Greek, Indian and Persian sages: the perennial philosophy genre (Ibn Fatik, Shahrazuri, Ashkiwari) long before Steuco and Leibniz |
Independent and Anti-Prophetic Thinkers
| Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi (d. 925/932) | al-Biruni |
|---|---|
| Great physician, musician, alchemist; wrote on the "tricks" of prophets; attacked by Abu Hatim al-Razi | Perhaps Islam's greatest scholar-scientist; catalogued Razi's works yet criticized his ideas |
| Five pre-eternal principles (Demiurge, Soul, matter, space, time), close to Nyaya-Vaisheshika; extended but indivisible atoms; quasi-Epicurean ethics; Philosophical Way of Life, Spiritual Physick | Exchange with Ibn Sina on natural philosophy; India, on Hindu philosophy of religion |
| Rejecting ta'wil, he turned alchemy into chemistry; an empiricist with no followers | Anti-Peripatetic yet in accord with prophecy, showing the diversity possible |
Isma'ili and Hermetic-Pythagorean Philosophy
Here philosophy is the inner truth (haqiqah) of religion. The Umm al-kitab stresses jafr (science of letters) and a cosmology of the number five. Systematic works: Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani's Kashf al-mahjub, Kirmani's Rahat al-'aql, Nasir-i Khusraw's Jami' al-hikmatayn comparing revealed and Greek wisdom.
- 1162: the "Grand Resurrection" proclaimed at Alamut; Isma'ilism draws near Sufism, claiming Sana'i, 'Attar, Qasim-i Anwar and Shahrastani; commentary on Shabistari's Gulshan-i raz; the Persian Tasawwurat attributed to Tusi.
- Yemen: Fatimid line to Idris 'Imad al-Din (d. 1468), then to India; the Alamut line became the Aga Khanid; an older eclectic tradition in Gujarat.
The 51 Epistles of the Ikhwan al-Safa' bind philosophy, cosmology and the sciences with Pythagorean number symbolism, from a broad Shi'ite background. Islam has an inner link with "Abrahamic Pythagoreanism", visible in its sacred art and in Andalusia in Ibn al-Sid of Badajoz's Book of Circles.
- Above Being stands the Originator (al-Mubdi'), beyond even the negation of being, the "Mystery of mysteries", maker of oneness who "monadizes" all beings.
- Being is His first act, the command "Be!"; the First Originated is the Word of God and First Intellect.
- Every being has a limit (hadd). First and Second Intellects are sabiq and tali, the Pen and the Guarded Tablet; on earth, the prophet and his heir, the imam.
- Drama in heaven: the Third Intellect, the Celestial Adam, tried to reach the Originator directly, fell into metaphysical idolatry, woke to find himself Tenth. The seven Intellects ("Seven Cherubim") measure his fall. Time is "retarded eternity", governed by the number 7: seven cycles, each with prophet and imam; Isma'il as seventh Imam.
- Ta'wil leads from outward (zahir, prophet) to inward (batin, imam); philosophy becomes the haqiqah at religion's heart.
The Western Lands of Islam
| Figure | Highlights |
|---|---|
| Ibn Masarrah (d. 931), Almeria school | Mystic-philosopher in the Cordovan Sierra; Tabsirah and a "mystical algebra" of letters; reconstructed by Asin Palacios. Pseudo-Empedoclean cosmology: Empedocles as a prophet-like first Greek sage; five substances (intelligible prime matter, Intellect, Soul, Nature, secondary matter); love and qahr (dominion). Influenced Ibn al-'Arif, Ibn Barrajan, Ibn 'Arabi ("spiritual matter"), Mulla Sadra, Ibn Gabirol |
| Ibn Hazm (d. 1063) | Zahirite jurist, anti-Ash'arite; al-Fisal, early comparative religion; Ring of the Dove, Platonic love after Ibn Dawud al-Isfahani and the Phaedrus |
| Ibn Bajjah (Avempace, d. 1138) | Vizier in Fez, died in prison; anti-Ptolemaic astronomy, critique of Aristotle's projectile motion; Regimen of the Solitary: the perfect state comes from inner union with the Active Intellect, not revolutions; the solitary is a stranger, like Suhrawardi's exile; unfinished |
| Ibn Tufayl (Abubacer, d. 1185) | Vizier, friend who set Ibn Rushd to comment on Aristotle; Hayy ibn Yaqzan |
| Latin Averroes | Muslim Ibn Rushd (Cordova 1126 - Marrakesh 1198) |
|---|---|
| Dante's "che'l gran comento feo"; author of "double truth"; symbol of rationalism (Renan); Latin Averroism; works survive mostly in Hebrew and Latin | Chief judge, pious, Shari'ah authority; one truth reached by religion for all and by ta'wil as philosophy for the able |
| His rejection of Ibn Sina's emanation, celestial souls and intellect theory banished the angels and helped secularize the cosmos | Tahafut al-tahafut answered Ghazzali point by point, with less impact |
- Ibn Sab'in (Murcia, d. c. 1270 in Mecca, death a mystery): pro-Shi'ite, of the Shawdhiyyah order; knew Junayd, Hallaj, Bayazid, Ghazzali and all the philosophers, faulting even Suhrawardi; doctrine of absolute Oneness, probably first to use "wahdat al-wujud"; knew Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism; master of the science of letters. Budd al-'arif; Sicilian Questions answering Emperor Frederick II, known to the Schoolmen.
- Ibn Khaldun (Tunis 1332 - Cairo 1406): Kitab al-'ibar and the Muqaddimah; founder of the philosophy of history and "science of civilization" (Vico, Hegel, Toynbee), shaped by Divine providence (mashiyyat Allah); critical of philosophers in a Ghazzalian way yet saddened by the sciences' decline.
Suhrawardi and Illumination
(Suhraward 1153 - Aleppo 1191) studied in Zanjan and Isfahan, entered Sufism, and was executed young after jurists opposed him. He restored the perennial philosophy,
al-hikmat al-'atiqah, as
theosophyin Boehme's sense: training the theoretical intellect plus purifying the heart, with
illuminationas the means. Forty-plus treatises: doctrinal ones in Arabic culminating in
Hikmat al-ishraq; visionary recitals in superb Persian (
On the Reality of Love,
The Chant of Gabriel's Wing).
| Greek stream | Persian stream |
|---|---|
| Hermes-Idris, Pythagoras, Plato ... ending with Aristotle; then Dhu'l-Nun, Sahl al-Tustari | The Khusrawani sages of Kay Khusraw; then Bayazid, Hallaj |
Both are divine; they unite in Suhrawardi within Islam, "the last and primordial religion". The "eternal dough" (al-khamirat al-azaliyyah), the sophia perennis hidden in every human, waits to be leavened. He names no historical chain: the real source is God and His Book, and he is the first major philosopher to quote the Quran extensively.
After him, wherever philosophy survived in Islam it was lived wisdom: the hakim had to be saintly, transformed by knowledge. Revived by Shahrazuri and Qutb al-Din Shirazi's commentary, read in Persia, Turkey and India to this day.
Between Suhrawardi and Isfahan
- Tusi revives Ibn Sina; his circle includes Qutb al-Din Shirazi and Dabiran-i Katibi (Hikmat al-'ayn); Athir al-Din Abhari's Hidayat al-hikmah, popular with Sadra's commentary.
- Afdal al-Din Kashani (Baba Afdal), Sufi, logician; Persian prose masterpieces; autology from self to Self: "he who knows himself knows his Lord".
- Ibn 'Arabi's school spreads; philosophical kalam grows; synthesizers: Dawani, the Dashtakis, Ibn Turkah; ground prepared for Isfahan's fusion of ishraq, mashsha', 'irfan and kalam.
Chapter 9: 'Umar Khayyam as Philosopher
Read through FitzGerald, Khayyam looks like a hedonist and skeptic standing against the land of prophecy. Read through his own philosophical treatises, he is an Avicennan philosopher, a great mathematician, and a man drawn to Sufism. Nasr sets out to give the "philosopher of the world" back to Islamic philosophy.
The Problem of the Quatrains
FitzGerald's free translation gives a hedonistic, fatalistic, this-worldly voice, skeptical of religion and perhaps of God. How could that man be the scholar to whom the chief judge of Fars sent questions on creation and duty? Nasr lists three answers people have given.
| Position | Nasr's verdict |
|---|---|
| Two different men: the scientist is not the poet. Nizami 'Arudi's Chahar maqalah lists him among astronomers, not poets | No cogent reason. Most quatrains are spurious anyway: names like Hayyani or Hayati are easily misread as Khayyami in Arabic script |
| A few authentic quatrains, written as a pastime, not a full philosophy | Closest to the truth: the poems are a source but not the book of his thought |
| The "real" Khayyam is the skeptic; the treatises were written for the authorities | No logic, only modern skeptics' need for a precedent. Calling him a hypocrite in order to make him a hero "is itself the worst kind of hypocrisy" |
Writing a few quatrains beside serious prose was normal for Persian philosophers. Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Tusi and Mulla Sadra did it; Nasir-i Khusraw, Afdal al-Din Kashani, Mir Damad, Lahiji and Sabziwari were real poets. The oldest manuscripts of the quatrains do not contradict his treatises.
The Age: An Eclipse of Philosophy
The Seljuqs united Western Asia under Sunni power, with the Abbasid caliph as symbol. Like the caliphs, they backed Ash'arite kalam and fought falsafah. Khurasan produced Juwayni and Ghazzali. Nizam al-Mulk barred philosophy from the Nizamiyyah colleges by the terms of the endowment. This was the age of Ghazzali's Tahafut, Shahrastani's Wrestling with the Philosopher and Fakhr al-Din Razi's critical commentary on the Isharat.
| Date | Figure |
|---|---|
| d. 1037 | Ibn Sina |
| 11th c. | His students Bahmanyar and Abu'l-'Abbas Lukari |
| 1048-1131 | Khayyam, solitary, disliked taking students, yet revered |
| 1153-1191 | Suhrawardi; influence comes later |
| 13th c. | Nasir al-Din Tusi answers Shahrastani and Razi and revives Ibn Sina; Ibn Rushd meanwhile answers Ghazzali in the Maghrib |
Philosophy of Mathematics
Historians have studied the mathematics of Islamic civilization, but much less its philosophy of mathematics, which is where Khayyam matters most to philosophy.
| Question | Khayyam's position |
|---|---|
| Where does mathematical order come from, and why does it match nature? | Answered in a treatise on being: the Divine Origin emanates wujud and order together. To speak of being is to speak of order |
| Postulates: the parallel postulate cannot be proved from Euclid's axioms | A science must look to first philosophy for its principles. He refused to use motion, as Ibn al-Haytham did, because motion belongs to matter, not to intelligible geometry. His proofs required some non-Euclidean theorems. In the Algebra he in effect geometrizes algebra |
| Natural versus mathematical body | al-jism al-tabi'i is substance, standing by itself, studied by natural science. al-jism al-ta'limi ("volume", hajm) is accident, studied by mathematics. Keep each discipline within its boundaries |
The Philosophical Treatises
| Work | Content |
|---|---|
| Persian translation and commentary of Ibn Sina's Splendid Sermon (al-Khutbat al-gharra') | A hymn to Divine Unity. He chose to translate it, not criticize it, so he identified with it. Khayyam rarely praised predecessors |
| Risalah fi'l-kawn wa'l-taklif (Arabic) | Replies to Abu Nasr Nasawi, judge of Fars. Names Ibn Sina as his master and echoes the Isharat |
| Darurat al-tadadd (Necessity of Contradiction) | Theodicy, determinism, subsistence |
| Risalat al-diya' al-'aqli (Intellectual Light) | Existence is distinct from quiddity and is added to it |
| Kulliyyat-i wujud (Persian), or The Hierarchic Chain | Chain of being, ten intelligences, and the classification of seekers |
| Risalah fi'l-wujud (Arabic), perhaps his main work | Emanation, order, Divine knowledge |
| Response to Three Questions | Survival of the soul, causal regress, time and motion |
His lineage runs Ibn Sina - Bahmanyar - Lukari - Khayyam. The dates rule out direct discipleship, but that chain of descent places him in the tradition.
- Evil: the Necessary Being gives only existence, but giving existence implies contradiction, that is nonexistence. That privation is what we experience as evil, so evil is not comparable to the good in quantity or quality.
- Determinism or free will: he leans to determinism, provided it does not slide into superstition.
- Subsistence: wujud and baqa' have one meaning, and separating them is a sophism.
- Theologians: content with disputation and "satisfying" proofs.
- Philosophers: use rational argument and are not content with "satisfying" ones, but "cannot remain faithful to the conditions of logic and become helpless with it".
- Isma'ilis: knowledge comes only through a truthful instructor.
- Sufis: knowledge through purifying the inner being, until the soul, as pure substance, reflects the forms of the spiritual world "without any doubt or ambiguity".
"This is the best of all ways ... If the veil be lifted ... the truth of things as they are will become manifest." He quotes the Prophet: "during the days of your existence, inspirations come from God. Do you not want to follow them?"
This text is certainly authentic, and Khayyam did not write to please anyone, so his ranking of kashf (unveiling) above all reasoning confirms a devotion to Sufism. It also makes a Sufi reading of the authentic quatrains more plausible.
In the Response to Three Questions he calls Ibn Sina simply "the philosopher" and says the Physics of the Shifa' contains the principles of the natural sciences but is itself a branch of universal knowledge: the principles of the sciences lie in metaphysics. Overall he is an Avicennan with his own insights, with a gift for mathematical and natural order, and an interest in Sufism. He quotes the Quran more than most Peripatetics.
The Quatrains Reread
| Quatrain | Nasr's reading |
|---|---|
| "Where Thou art, there can be no torment, / And where Thou art not, how can such a place exist?" | God is pure goodness; a gloss on "My Mercy precedeth My Wrath" |
| "Thrown in before Fate's Mallet ... He knoweth, he knoweth, he knoweth and knoweth" | Qada' is a Divine decree, not Greek fate: the Names al-Qadir and al-'Alim |
| "With neither truth nor certitude in scope ... never let the goblet out of hand" | Would a skeptic write an algebra or reform the calendar? It speaks of the relativity of reason, with wine as gnosis and the present as the door to the Eternal: "the Sufi is the son of the moment" |
| "The rotating wheel of heaven ... an imaginal lamp" | The cosmos is imaginal ('alam al-khayal), a lamp that shows a light beyond it, not ultimate reality |
| "A drop of water falls in an ocean wide ... A fly appeared a while, then invisible" | padid / napayda, manifest and nonmanifest, not life and death: all things return to their root |
| "Two voids define the limits of thy life ... in the middle thou art naught" | Not existential nihilism: the contingent (mumkin) is poverty of being before the Necessary, and Being itself is relative to Beyond-Being. "Only the Absolute is absolute" |
Another quatrain, "Tomorrow when stripped of self, what wilt thou know?", states the eschatology Mulla Sadra later sets out in Provisions of the Traveler: at death the soul keeps only the fruits of its deeds and its spiritual knowledge.
The pious often condemned both 1 and 3, and on their own level they were right to. Modern agnostics, by contrast, deliberately merge the two in order to attack position 2. Spurious poems led some traditional authorities, even a few Sufis, to condemn Khayyam before modern times, though he lived no hedonist's life. Today, when instant gratification has become close to a pseudo-religion, clearing him is even harder. Yet no authenticated quatrain on the afterlife has to be read as denial rather than gnosis.
Chapter 10: Azarbaijan and the School of Shiraz
Islamic law and Sufism flourished everywhere. Philosophy did not: it settled in particular cities at particular times. After Ibn Rushd, Persia became its main home. This chapter follows it from Khurasan to Azarbaijan (13th to mid-14th c.), then to Shiraz (14th to 16th c.), and from Shiraz to India. These are the least studied centuries in the history of Islamic philosophy, and the ones that made Mulla Sadra possible.
The School of Azarbaijan
Khurasan waned after Lukari, Qutb al-Zaman Tabasi, Hasan Qattan and Khayyam. Even before the Mongols, Azarbaijan took over, enough to speak of a School of Azarbaijan alongside the School of Isfahan.
- Asas al-iqtibas: the longest logic in classical Persian.
- Akhlaq-i nasiri: the most famous work of Islamic philosophical ethics.
- Awsaf al-ashraf: Sufi virtue, beautifully written.
- Sharh al-isharat: rebuts Razi's commentary and Shahrastani's Musari'ah, and revived Ibn Sina "once and for all in the East". He keeps his own views out of it except on God's knowledge of the world, where he follows Suhrawardi. Qutb al-Din Razi wrote the best-known commentary on it.
Colleagues: Qutb al-Din Shirazi (d. 1311), Dabiran-i Katibi, Fakhr al-Din Maraghi.
- Afdal al-Din Kashani (d. c. 1213), not at Maraghah but linked to it by legend as Tusi's relative. Joined logic to Sufi vision: autology (self-knowledge) is the key to ontology. Still revered as a saint near Kashan.
- Suhrawardi, from Azarbaijan, is the real beginning of the school. 'Abd al-Qadir Ahari (al-Bulghah, c. 1230), called "philosopher/Sufi", is perhaps the first ishraqi after him. Shahrazuri commented on Hikmat al-ishraq and the Talwihat and wrote The Divine Tree.
- Athir al-Din Abhari (d. 1264): a student of Fakhr al-Din Razi. His Hidayat al-hikmah was explained by Maybudi and Mulla Sadra. Sadra's commentary, called simply Sadra, was perhaps the most studied philosophy text in Muslim India. Tusi commented on Abhari's work, and his Isagoge logic reached Latin. He knew and cited Suhrawardi.
- Siraj al-Din Urmawi (Matali' al-anwar) and Abu 'Ali Salmasi (Treatise on Politics). Philosophy was spread across the whole province, unlike the single-city schools of Baghdad or Shiraz.
Tabriz and the Safinah
By the late 13th and early 14th c. Tabriz, the Il-Khanid capital, was perhaps the greatest philosophical center in Islam. Vizier Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah, historian, physician and philosopher, built the university city Rab'-i Rashidi. Muhammad Tabrizi commented on Maimonides' Guide; Ghadanfar summarized Sijistani's Siwan al-hikmah; Khusrawshahi abridged the Shifa'. Nearby, Shabistari wrote the Gulshan-i raz, a masterpiece of Sufi metaphysics. From the mid-14th c. the center moved to Shiraz.
The school reached into eastern Anatolia as far as Konya: Qutb al-Din lived in Sivas, Urmawi traveled widely, and early Ottoman ishraq (Anqarawi) probably came from Azarbaijan, not Syria. The same Persian culture let Rumi write in Konya. Dawud al-Qaysari, philosopher and commentator on Ibn 'Arabi, belongs here too.
| Trait | Evidence |
|---|---|
| 1. Second life of Avicennism | Tusi's Sharh, Abhari's Hidayah, Katibi's Hikmat al-'ayn (Katibi d. 1276): taught for centuries in Persia, India and Turkey |
| 2. Spread of ishraq | Both main commentators, Shahrazuri and Qutb al-Din, linked to it |
| 3. Ties to Sufism | Metaphysical Sufism of the Gulshan-i raz |
| 4. Rise of Persian | Suhrawardi's prose, Akhlaq-i nasiri, Baba Afdal, Qutb al-Din's encyclopedia Durrat al-taj, Rashid al-Din's universal history, the first of its kind; Arabic kept its place. These texts spread widely in India |
The School of Shiraz
The Atabaks of Fars spared Shiraz the Mongol fury. From the 13th c. to the Safavid unification it was an oasis of peace under the Jalayirids, Muzaffarids and Aq Quyunlu. Already in the Buyid 10th c. it was the dar al-'ilm, "abode of knowledge", rivaling Baghdad. It was a center of kalam and usul al-fiqh more than of Shi'ite law (Najaf), a center of literature and the arts, and the "Tower of Saints" (Burj al-awliya'): Kazaruni, Shams al-Din Lahiji, and Hafiz. Mulla Sadra himself, educated there, can be seen as the last great product of the School of Shiraz. He went back to teach at the Khan School later in life.
| Master | Life and role |
|---|---|
| Sadr al-Din Dashtaki (1424-1497), the real founder | A sayyid family; titles Sadr al-'ulama' and "Master of the Minutiae", hence confused with Mulla Sadra. Founded the Mansuriyyah madrasah in 1478, teaching philosophy, logic, natural and religious sciences. Killed by ruffians sent by the Turkic ruler; buried in his madrasah |
| Jalal al-Din Dawani (1427-1502) | Born near Kazirun (not "Dawwani"); sadr, then judge of all Fars under the Aq Quyunlu. Sunni authority (commentary on Taftazani), adopted Shi'ism late after a dream, according to tradition; loved by Ottomans and Indians |
| Ghiyath al-Din Mansur Dashtaki (1461-1542) | Sadr al-Din's son and student; for many the foremost philosopher of the 16th c. and greatest ishraqi between Qutb al-Din and Isfahan. Called the "eleventh intellect" and "Third Teacher". In 1521 he repaired Tusi's observatory. Wrote medical texts; served as Safavid sadr until he withdrew in 1531-32 |
| Shams al-Din Khafri (d. c. 1550) | Student of Sadr al-Din; moved to Kashan; an astronomer comparable to Tusi and Qutb al-Din; also wrote on geomancy |
Dawani: Ethics and Illumination
| Work | Character |
|---|---|
| Ibn Miskawayh, Tahdhib al-akhlaq (Arabic) | Greek ethics seen through Islam and Sufism |
| Tusi, Akhlaq-i nasiri (Persian) | Adds household management and politics; Avicennan |
| Dawani, Lawami' al-ishraq = Akhlaq-i jalali | Adds Quran, hadith and Sufi sayings; ishraqi; legitimate versus illegitimate rulers, good and evil societies, human types |
Dawani links Aristotle's mean to Quranic moderation, but holds that the content of the mean comes from revelation and the Law, not reason. Nasr sees parallels in Jewish, Christian and even Confucian and Neo-Confucian ethics.
His ishraqi works include Shawakil al-hur, a commentary on Suhrawardi's Temples of Light that explains the word haykal, popular in Persia and India but attacked by Ghiyath al-Din. Another is al-Zawra' ("Tigris"), written in Najaf. His idea of the unity of being, dhawq al-ta'alluh, is discussed at length in Sadra's Asfar and rejected by him.
Ghiyath al-Din Mansur
- al-Muhakamat: judges between his father's and Dawani's glosses, severe on Dawani.
- A Hayakil al-nur commentary, longer than Dawani's and critical of it.
- Shifa' al-qulub on difficulties in the Shifa'; al-Hikmat al-mansuriyyah, ishraqi, which he considered his best work; al-Isharat wa'l-talwihat, uniting Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi; Riyad al-ridwan, in Peripatetic language.
- Akhlaq-i mansuri, less popular than its two predecessors; medical texts al-Shafiyah and Ma'alim al-shifa'.
- Tuhfat al-fata: a philosophical and gnostic commentary on Surat al-Insan (Q 76), one of the finest philosophers' commentaries on the Quran before Sadra.
His students included his son Amir Sadr al-Din Muhammad Thani (al-Dhikra, 1554), who fled to Gilan, Fakhr al-Din Sammaki and Jamal al-Din Mahmud Shirazi, whose circle may have produced Sadra's first teacher. Politics scattered his heirs to India and the Hejaz. That weakened Shiraz but spread its name.
Khafri: The Step toward Sadra
| Sadr al-Din Dashtaki | Shams al-Din Khafri |
|---|---|
| Wrote Peripatetic philosophy separately from his interest in gnosis | Combined 'irfan and ishraq with mashsha'i thought |
| Wahdat al-wujud is beyond demonstration | Demonstrated it, treating wujud close to Sadra's principiality of existence |
| Wrote a treatise titled al-Asfar al-arba'ah, possibly the source of the name of Sadra's magnum opus. Brought Quran, burhan and 'irfan together in commentaries |
Sadra and later Sabziwari cite him often in metaphysics and natural philosophy.
Shiraz in India
- Rafi' al-Din Shirazi, Dawani's disciple, invited by Sikandar Lodhi.
- Shah Tahir (d. 1545), Khafri's best student, descended from the Isma'ili imams. Shah Isma'il loved him, then ordered his death after court intrigue; a Sufi vizier warned him and he fled to Ahmadnagar. He later refused the shah's invitation to return. When the king's son fell ill he asked for alms in the Twelfth Imam's name; after the cure the king embraced Twelver Shi'ism (1513). He still sent his works to Khafri for correction. Glosses on the Shifa' and Isharat.
- Mir Fath Allah Shirazi (d. 1590), student of Jamal al-Din Mahmud and Ghiyath al-Din. Joined 'Ali 'Adil Shah at Bijapur, then Akbar (1583). Worked on taxation, agriculture and a new calendar. Invented a mechanical mill, irrigation methods and military devices. Astronomer and physician. Rizvi: his arrival was "the turning point in the history of Shi'ism in northern India".
| Step | Event |
|---|---|
| Akbar's reform | Jurjani, Dawani and Ghiyath al-Din enter the curriculum of Sunni and Shi'ite madrasahs |
| Chain | 'Abd al-Salam of Lahore > 'Abd al-Salam of Dewa (Shahjahan's army mufti) > Daniyal Chawrasi > Mulla Qutb al-Din |
| After Qutb al-Din's violent death | Aurangzeb gives his family a former Dutch house in Lucknow: Farangi Mahall |
| Mulla Nizam al-Din | Creates the dars-i nizami, with a strong philosophy component; madrasah mainstay for three centuries |
| 1960s | Farangi Mahall closes; Khayrabad also descends from it |
Chapter 11: The School of Isfahan Revisited
Corbin and Nasr coined the name School of Isfahan decades ago. Nasr returns to it here because it trained Mulla Sadra, the full flowering of "prophetic philosophy". It is both a synthesis of nearly a thousand years of Islamic thought and the last major school of traditional philosophy in Islam, with influence over Persia, Iraq and Muslim India for four centuries.
Forerunners outside Shiraz
| Figure | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Sa'in al-Din Ibn Turkah Isfahani (d. 1432-33), Shi'ite, of a Turkmen family | Studied in the Hejaz, Syria and Egypt; exiled by Tamerlane to Samarqand. A Hurufi: the highest knowledge lies in the symbolism of the Arabic letters (al-jafr), a science traced to 'Ali, parallel to Kabbalah. Commented on Ibn 'Arabi, Ibn al-Farid, 'Iraqi and Shabistari. His commentary on the cleaving of the moon gives the readings of literalists, theologians, Peripatetics, Illuminationists, Akbarian Sufis, Hurufis and Shi'ite esoterists. His Tamhid al-qawa'id is still a standard text of 'irfan, recently given a large commentary |
| Qadi Maybudi (d. 1503-04), Sunni, a student of Dawani | Executed under Shah Isma'il for opposing Shi'ism. Wrote the well-known commentaries on Abhari's Hidayah and Katibi's Hikmat al-'ayn, a commentary on the Diwan attributed to 'Ali, and mathematics and astronomy. His Persian Jam-i giti-nama unites philosophy, cosmology and 'irfan. Proof that later philosophy was not only Shi'ite |
| Ibn Abi Jumhur Ahsa'i (d. c. 1501), Shi'ite Arab | From Ahsa', studied in Jabal 'Amil, settled in Khurasan. Jurist and hadith scholar cited by Majlisi; like 'Allamah Hilli but more ishraqi. His main work, Kitab al-mujli, is a major ishraqi text, quoting Shahrazuri's Divine Tree and touched by Ibn 'Arabi |
Also Rajab 'Ali Bursi of Iraq. All of them took the philosophical meaning of prophecy seriously.
Was Safavid Persia Good for Philosophy?
Some call the Safavid era a renaissance of all the sciences; others say dogmatism nearly smothered philosophy. Nasr avoids both extremes. The natural and mathematical sciences did not flower as the arts did, but there was a real philosophical renaissance. It happened because conditions allowed it, unlike Mamluk Egypt, and despite some jurists. Early on, philosophy and Sufism had powerful patrons inside Shi'ite piety.
Mir Damad, the Founder
| Work | Theme |
|---|---|
| al-Ufuq al-mubin (The Manifest Horizon) | Aeviternity (dahr, Latin aevum), time and existence |
| Taqwim al-iman | Creator and creation |
| al-Jadhawat (Burning Firewood) | A cycle of his thought, opening with letter symbolism |
| al-Sirat al-mustaqim | Eternity versus origination of the world |
| al-Qabasat (Firebrands), his masterpiece | Time, aeviternity, eternity |
| Khalsat al-malakut, al-Khal'iyyah | His own mystical states: Corbin's "ecstatic confessions" |
An Avicennan with an ishraqi reading. Original views on free will, the imaginal world and bada' (apparent change in the Divine Will in scripture). Credited with framing the question as principiality (asalah) of wujud or of mahiyyah, which shaped all later thought, starting with his student Sadra.
| Level | Relation |
|---|---|
| Sarmad (eternity) | Changeless to changeless |
| Dahr (aeviternity, metatime) | Changeless to changing |
| Zaman (time) | Changing to changing |
Each is both a relation and a state of being. What is in time is preceded not by nothingness but by what exists in dahr. So the world is neither eternal nor originated in time: it is originated in dahr (huduth-i dahri). Sadra later rejected the theory; others defended it.
Mir Findiriski
- A treatise on motion, and an answer to a question on ontology.
- A famous philosophical poem with several commentaries.
- Arabic glosses on the Yoga-Vasishtha (Panipati's translation) and the Muntakhab-i Juk (Anthology of Yoga). An Islamic commentary on a Hindu text came centuries before any on a Western text.
- An alchemical treatise on spiritual alchemy, which Corbin compares to Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens.
- Risala-yi sina'iyyah (Persian): the classes and arts of traditional society, ending with philosophers and prophets.
| Philosopher | Prophet |
|---|---|
| Can err | Does not |
| Knows through thought, by the light of the intellect | Knows through revelation, with boundless intellect and no veil before the angelic world |
| Research on a par with ijtihad; philosophy replaces theology as the supreme science | Above the philosopher |
The Next Generation and Its Strands
| Sadrian | Avicennan line of Rajab 'Ali |
|---|---|
| Mulla Sadra; his students Fayd Kashani and 'Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji: philosophy married to the esoteric side of prophecy, gradually replacing theology | Mulla Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi (d. 1669-70), Findiriski's student: rejects the unity and principiality of being; via negativa, God forever beyond the intellect (as with the Isma'ilis); al-Ma'arif al-ilahiyyah. Students: Qawam al-Din Razi, 'Abbas Mawlawi, Tunikabuni |
| Mulla Shamsa Gilani (d. before 1655), Mir Damad's student: corresponded with Sadra and wrote a work titled al-Hikmat al-muta'aliyah, yet remained an ishraqi-leaning Avicennan defending huduth-i dahri |
A foot in each camp: Qadi Sa'id Qummi (d. 1691), student of both Rajab 'Ali and Fayd. The Avicennan strand continues to this day.
- Qutb al-Din Ashkiwari (d. after 1665): Mahbub al-qulub, a spiritual history of philosophy from Adam to Mir Damad in three parts (ancient sages; Sunni sages; Shi'ite Imams and philosophers). Philosophy is a tree rooted in revelation. Corbin calls it an "immense rhapsody", a speculum historiale and Divinalia.
- Sayyid Ahmad 'Alawi (d. 1644-50): Mir Damad's nephew and son-in-law, commentator on the Qabasat and author of a major commentary on the Shifa', also wrote on what we would call comparative religion.
- Lawami'-i rabbani: refutes Pietro della Valle (1621); discusses changes in the Gospel text and knows the Gospels well.
- Misqal-i safa: refutes the Catholic A'ina-yi haqq-nama written in India, on the Trinity; it drew further missionary replies.
- Lama'at-i malakutiyyah: an ishraqi commentary on the Gospels, reading the Word and the three hypostases in accord with the Quran, and the Paraclete in light of Shi'ite gnosis. Of value for Muslim-Christian dialogue today.
In the modern West, comparative religion falls to theologians and scholars of religion, rarely to philosophers (perennialists excepted). In Isfahan, as philosophy absorbed theology, it fell to the falasifah.
Chapter 12: Mulla Sadra and Prophetic Philosophy
Sadra is now studied from Tehran to Tokyo, with regular conferences on his work. Nasr does not survey his whole system here. He picks out seven doctrines that make Sadra's transcendent theosophy the full flowering of prophetic philosophy. In Corbin's words, Sadra's thought culminates "not so much in a philosophy of the creative Spirit, as in a metaphysics of the Holy Spirit". Nasr also reminds us that Sadra's school was the main current of Isfahan, not the only one.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1571-72 | Born in Shiraz; early education there |
| Isfahan | Mir Damad's leading student; transmitted sciences with Shaykh Baha'i |
| Kahak, near Qom | Years of retreat, spiritual training and contemplation |
| Shiraz | Teaches and writes at the Khan School built for him |
| 1640 | Dies in Basra (or Najaf) returning from his seventh pilgrimage to Mecca |
Nearly fifty works, from logic to Quran commentary. Masterpiece: al-Hikmat al-muta'aliyah fi'l-asfar al-'aqliyyat al-arba'ah (Asfar). Perhaps the greatest of all Islamic philosophers in metaphysics.
Seven Doctrines of Prophetic Philosophy
- Renewed creation: creation happens anew at every moment, and essence is inseparable from the act of existence.
- Using Arabic (no copula) and Persian (copula), he spoke of being as act, not thing: not ens or esse but esto.
- Being is presence (hudur): "Whithersoever ye turn, there is the Face of God" (2:115).
- We are what we know, and we know to the degree that we are. Ousia was rendered not as quiddity but as haqiqah, meaning both reality and truth. Al-Haqq is a Divine Name.
| West | Sadra |
|---|---|
| Drift apart from the 13th c.; fully separate and often hostile after Descartes | All tension overcome. Hikmah functions as both and practically devoured Shi'ite kalam. It plays the role that philosophy, theology and mystical theology play in Christianity |
After Sadra
The tree can flower more than once. In India, in a mainly Sunni setting, Shah Wali Allah of Delhi and Mawlana Ashraf 'Ali Thanwi, both influenced by Sadra, joined philosophy, theology, usul, the religious sciences and Sufism into large unified structures. Sadra's influence in India was substantial. The Ottomans stayed indifferent until young Turkish scholars turned to him in the last two decades. In Persia, after a short eclipse, his school dominated Qajar thought (Sabziwari) and inspired the School of Tehran.
Chapter 13: From Isfahan to Tehran
How did Sadra's school survive the collapse of the Safavids, move to the new Qajar capital, and become the place where Islamic philosophy first met Western philosophy? Nasr, himself a student of the last masters of the School of Tehran, tells the story from personal knowledge.
Isfahan's Later Phase
After Sadra's students (Fayd Kashani, 'Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji) and others (Rajab 'Ali, Shamsa Gilani, Aqa Husayn Khunsari, Sayyid Ahmad 'Alawi, Qadi Sa'id Qummi), the late Safavid climate turned against philosophy, above all against Sadra.
The school spread out: Sadra to Shiraz, Fayd to Kashan (later Mulla Mahdi Naraqi), Lahiji and Qadi Sa'id to Qom. Philosophy hung on in Isfahan through the Afghan invasion. Isma'il Khaju'i (d. 1760) described the sack, lost many works, and still taught Naraqi.
The Transfer to Tehran
The Qajars made the small town of Tehran their capital (1796). In 1821-22 Muhammad Khan Marwi built a great madrasah, and Fath 'Ali Shah invited Nuri. Too old to leave his students, Nuri sent Mulla 'Abd Allah Zunuzi (d. 1841), who taught at the Marwi School for twenty years.
- Hajji Mulla Hadi Sabziwari (1797-1872), the most famous Qajar philosopher, teacher of many early Tehran figures. For decades his circle in Khurasan rivaled Tehran. His Asrar al-hikam was written in Persian for Nasir al-Din Shah. His Sharh al-manzumah is still the standard text wherever traditional philosophy is taught.
- Aqa Sayyid Radi Larijani (d. 1853-54): a Sadrian known above all for gnosis and esoterism, called "Master of the Esoteric" (malik-i batin). When Qumsha'i left Langarudi's Fusus class to study with him, Larijani said: "The teaching of the Fusus is the work of a qalandari, while Hajji Mulla Muhammad Ja'far is a hakim and not a qalandar." Isfahan's anti-Sufi authorities might have killed him like Suhrawardi or 'Ayn al-Qudat if a physician disciple had not testified he was "mad". He moved to Tehran late in life. Through Qumsha'i, his line runs to Mirza Hashim Rashti and Shahabadi, Ayatollah Khomeini's teacher in 'irfan.
The Four Hakims
| Master | Profile |
|---|---|
| Aqa 'Ali Mudarris Tihrani (Zunuzi), 1818-1889, "the Founding Hakim" | Zunuzi's son. Studied in Tehran, Najaf, Isfahan (with Mirza Hasan Nuri, Sayyid Radi, Langarudi) and Qazwin. Taught for forty years, more than twenty of them as official teacher at the Sipahsalar: the Asfar, Shifa' and Sharh hikmat al-ishraq. 27 surviving works |
| Aqa Muhammad Rida Qumsha'i, 1825-1888, pen name Sahba | "The second Ibn 'Arabi"; Khomeini called him "the master of our masters". Realized gnosis under Larijani and insisted on the need for a spiritual master: "Do not traverse this stage without the companionship of Khidr." He gave away his goods and moved to Tehran around 1877 |
| Mirza Abu'l-Hasan Jilwah, 1822-1896 | Born in Ahmadabad, Gujarat; raised in Isfahan from age seven. Taught at Dar al-Shifa', where Nasir al-Din Shah visited him. Essentially a Peripatetic in Rajab 'Ali's line, who accused Sadra of borrowing without credit. A meticulous editor of the Shifa', Tamhid, Fanari's Misbah al-uns and even Rumi's Mathnawi |
| Mirza Hasan Sabziwari | Student of Hajji Mulla Hadi; taught at the 'Abd Allah Khan madrasah. Famous mainly for mathematics, keeping alive the old link between philosophy and mathematics (Tusi, Qutb al-Din, Dashtakis, Khafri) |
The Later Masters
Next came Mirza Hasan Kirmanshahi (Peripatetic, mathematician, physician), Mirza Hashim Rashti ('irfan, ishraq), Mirza Mahmud and Mirza Ahmad Ashtiyani, Shahabadi, Muhammad Taqi Amuli, and three men Nasr singles out.
- Mirza Mahdi Ashtiyani (1888-1952): philosopher and jurist who also studied Western medicine with Qajar court physicians and law in Iraq. Lectured in India, Central Asia, Europe and Egypt. Wrote an Arabic commentary and a Persian paraphrase of the Asfar, and Asas al-tawhid. His commentary on Sabziwari turns the text into a gnostic work. Izutsu: it "turns the book into an original work of his own." His students included Sha'rani, Ja'fari, Mutahhari, Ha'iri Yazdi, Falaturi and S. J. Ashtiyani.
- Sayyid Abu'l-Hasan Rafi'i Qazwini (1897-1975): Nasr read the Asfar with him for five years. Ayatollah and marja' after Burujirdi, unequalled in explaining the Asfar. He disagreed with Sadra and Sabziwari on the union of knower and known and was not satisfied with the classical accounts of huduth and qidam. He loved Sufi poetry but never spoke of it in public and hated writing; his few treatises exist because Nasr insisted, and Hasanzadah Amuli edited them.
- Sayyid Muhammad Kazim 'Assar (1884-1975): for some, the last great master of the school. Studied at the Dar al-Funun, taught mathematics and French in Tabriz, then became the first Persian 'alim to study in Europe, followed by fourteen years in Najaf. Taught law followed by philosophy at the Sipahsalar, and Islamic philosophy at Tehran University's Faculties of Divinity and Letters, so he trained the country's future philosophy teachers. Refused religious taxes and political roles, laughed at shallow modernists, and seldom mentioned the West. Wrote on wahdat al-wujud, bada', 'Ilm al-hadith and the Fatihah. Sadrian, ishraqi in his own right, joining the transmitted and intellectual sciences under 'irfan.
Why Tehran Matters
| 'Allamah Tabataba'i (d. 1983) | Mahdi Ha'iri Yazdi (d. 1999) |
|---|---|
| From Tabriz, trained in Najaf, founded the new School of Qom. His Tehran meetings with Marxists produced Usul-i falsafa-yi ri'alism, the first extensive encounter with a Western school. His dialogues with Corbin took place almost entirely in Tehran | The first Persian 'alim to earn a doctorate in Western (analytic) philosophy; taught in Britain, Canada and the US. Hiram-i hasti and Knowledge by Presence, the first such book in English by a traditional Islamic philosopher |
| Legacy | Detail |
|---|---|
| Preservation | Carried the tradition from Zand and Qajar times into the Pahlavi era |
| Persian prose | Furughi, whose Sayr-i hikmat dar Urupa introduced European philosophy, built his vocabulary with Fadil-i Tuni, Tunikabuni, Ashtiyani and 'Assar. Yahya Mahdawi also drew on Qajar texts |
| Connectivity | Constant movement between Tehran, Qom, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz and Najaf: Tabataba'i came to Tehran every other week for thirty years; Mutahhari, Ha'iri, S. J. Ashtiyani, Jawad Muslih |
| First answers to the West | The ground for the encounter that is still going on |
Elsewhere the response to the West came mainly from jurists and Sufis (Egypt, North Africa, the Ottomans). India, from Shah Wali Allah to Thanwi, most resembles Persia. But mainly in Tehran, with an extension in Najaf, was the whole intellectual tradition kept and first brought into contact with Western philosophy.
Chapter 14: Islam and Modern Thought
Part Four turns from history to diagnosis. Nasr answers modern and postmodern thought from inside the tradition traced so far, a philosophy "rooted in the Intellect" and living in the land of prophecy. Debates on Islam and modernity usually generate heat, vague terms and a psychological sense of inferiority. He starts by defining his terms.
| Tradition (al-din) | Modernism |
|---|---|
| All that is of Divine Origin, with its unfolding on the human plane | All that is cut off from the transcendent and from immutable principles; merely human, "and now ever more increasingly subhuman" |
| Has shaped human life for "hundreds of thousands" of years: burying the dead, believing in the Spirit | Renaissance to today: "no more than the blinking of an eye" |
"Modern" here does not mean contemporary, up to date, or successful at dominating nature. Nobody asks whether an idea is true, only whether it is modern, or now postmodern.
The Traits of Modern Thought
| Trait | Diagnosis |
|---|---|
| 1. Anthropomorphism | Thought that admits no principle above man is man-centered |
| 2. No metaphysical principles | Human nature is too unstable to be a principle; empiricism and induction are valid on their level but are not principles |
| 3. Reductionism | Intellect reduced to reason, reality to what senses and reason detect; evolutionism |
| 4. Progress and utopia | Perfection through purely human means |
| 5. Loss of the sacred | Modern man can almost be defined by it |
| Stage | Measure of reality |
|---|---|
| Before Descartes | Pure Being, God's Being, sets the levels of reality |
| Cogito ergo sum | The individual's limited "I", not the Divine "I" of Hallaj's "I am the Truth" |
| Then | Ontology gives way to epistemology, epistemology to logic |
| Today | Logic faced by antirational "philosophies" |
By Aquinas's adaequatio, one needs an instrument adequate to its object. Deny anything higher than reason and you can only know what reason can grasp, so prophecy becomes irrelevant to knowledge.
| Islamic world | Modern West |
|---|---|
| Sources: revelation, intellectual intuition (dhawq, kashf, shuhud) through the opening of the "eye of the heart", and reason tied to both | Reason and senses only |
| Those who cut reason loose stayed marginal | Those who kept reason tied to revelation became marginal |
| Few defend the Bible as a source of wisdom that integrates scientia into sapientia, as Bonaventure did; literalist fundamentalists lose their fights with science |
Two Images of Man
A person thinks according to what he is. Knowledge depends on the mode of the knower. Put Ghazzali, Rumi, Erigena or Eckhart in the leading chairs of philosophy today and different philosophy would come out.
| Homo islamicus | Modern man |
|---|---|
| Servant ('abd) and vicegerent (khalifat Allah) of God | "Free" of Heaven, master of his own destiny |
| Crown of creation, containing plant and animal natures; man has always been man | Evolved from lower forms |
| Rules the earth for God, responsible for creatures, a channel of grace | Master of nature, answerable to no one |
| Reason and intellect; self-knowledge as the key: "He who knoweth himself knoweth his Lord" | Reason and senses |
| Consciousness from God, beyond death; a traveler guided by revelation as Law and as Haqiqah; access to 'alam al-ghayb | Eschatology replaced by future perfection in profane historical time |
| Aim: to become "nothing" before God (fana'), a mirror of His Names | Self-glorification; Promethean revolt |
These parallels with Christianity are deep: the scholastic "Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est" matches Islam's man as seeker of perfection (talib al-kamal). The opponent is modernism, not Christianity.
Evolution, Progress, Utopia
| Modern utopianism | Islamic "nowhere" |
|---|---|
| OED: "impossible ideal schemes for the amelioration or perfection of social conditions". From More's Utopia (1516), grafted onto a caricature of Christian incarnation and idealism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Marx and Engels. A parody of Augustine's City of God | Farabi's Virtuous City; Suhrawardi's Na-kuja-abad, "land of nowhere", the eighth clime beyond the seven geographical ones |
| Ignores evil; seeks good without God by human means | Realism: the Quran and hadith teach a gradual decline from the origin; perfection only with Divine help: the mujaddid, the Mahdi |
The idea of one-way progress, an "idol of the mind", is fading, but utopianism still grips many of the Muslim intelligentsia.
The Sacred and the Sole Adequate Answer
Islam has no concept of the "profane" or "secular": the One reaches into every corner of multiplicity, as Islamic art shows "in a blinding fashion". Muslims may talk even with those who deny God, but they cannot treat the secular as equally legitimate. The sacred alone truly is; the secular only appears to be.
Chapter 15: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy, Yesterday and Today
The closing chapter asks a direct question: are there still living schools of philosophy anywhere that work in the light of prophecy and perennial wisdom? Secular Western philosophy, which claims to be the only legitimate kind, dominates academic philosophy "from Tokyo to Rabat". Nasr's survey shows a more mixed picture.
| Region | Status |
|---|---|
| West | More people call themselves Christian philosophers; Jewish philosophy studied as philosophy; Thomism (De Wulf, Gilson, Maritain) lives on in North America, Catholic Europe and Latin America; some interest in Buddhist and Hindu schools |
| Japan, Tibetan diaspora | Mahayana and Vajrayana thrive, mostly outside universities |
| India | Hindu schools alive; departments still Western |
| China | After rationalism and official Marxism, renewed interest in Neo-Confucian and Taoist thought |
| Russia | After Marxism, attention to Orthodox philosophers of the 19th and early 20th c. |
| Islamic world | Secular Western philosophy dominates modern institutions, and at the same time Islamic philosophy continues and revives |
The Islamic World Country by Country
Modern universities in Istanbul, Cairo, Tehran and Lahore spread Western philosophy. Islamic philosophy was reduced to a shell, taught as history from a Western point of view, and pushed into faculties of theology while faculties of letters taught Western philosophy. Two changes followed: history is now written from inside the integral tradition (compare De Boer's history, once taught in Muslim India, with the Nasr-Leaman History of Islamic Philosophy now used everywhere), and the living tradition is entering the universities.
| Land | Situation |
|---|---|
| India and Pakistan | British rule, the loss of waqf endowments and other factors eclipsed Farangi Mahall despite Thanwi; partition did not help. Iqbal was philosophically minded but did not philosophize within the tradition. Schimmel titled her book on him Prophetischer Poet und Philosoph, not "prophetic philosopher". Yet his interest in Suhrawardi feeds a revival: Suheyl Umar (Iqbal Academy), after M. M. Sharif, M. M. Ahmad, Saeed Shaikh |
| Persia | Under the Pahlavis (1921), Tehran University's letters faculty was French and German; Islamic philosophy sat in theology until the 1960s. In the madrasahs it revived: Qazwini, 'Assar, Sha'rani, and Tabataba'i, who brought philosophy formally into Qom's curriculum with 400-500 students at his lectures on Ibn Sina and Sadra. Then Ha'iri, Mutahhari, S. J. Ashtiyani, Misbah Yazdi, Jawadi Amuli, Hasanzadah Amuli, Muhaqqiq Damad. Lay scholars: Dinani, A'wani, Dawari. No land pursues Islamic philosophy and its dialogue with the West more avidly |
| Iraq | Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, executed in his prime |
| Turkey | Universities still Western, but younger thinkers Kutluer, Kilic, Armagan, Ayvazoglu, Tahrali, Kalin turn to prophetic philosophy and perennialism |
| Malay world | Sufism spread Islam there, but philosophy drew serious attention only recently: al-Attas, Osman Bakar, Muhammad Baqir |
| Arab world (outside Iraq) | Many publications, but rationalism dominates and disdains "merely" mystical philosophy: al-Jabiri. Laroui and Hanafi have a leftist tinge, Hanafi with sharp insights, but neither organically continues the tradition |
The Task Ahead
The Islamic world stands between the West and the Orient of India and the Far East. Its philosophy must answer secular philosophies, and also the other philosophies born in other lands of prophecy. It is one of the most powerful of the traditional philosophies, an expression of what Miskawayh and Suhrawardi called Jawidan-khirad / al-hikmat al-khalidah, later the Latin philosophia perennis.
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- Philosophy and prophecy are not opposites. Pythagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles were seers, and Islamic philosophy saw itself as wisdom "from the niche of prophecy".
- "Prophecy" is universal: a message from higher orders of reality, found among rishis, shamans, Greek healer-prophets and the Abrahamic prophets.
- The Western story that Islamic philosophy ended with Ibn Rushd is a myth born of Latin interests. Its main life continued in Persia and India.
- Hikmah (wisdom) is a better name than falsafah. It joins rigorous reasoning with inner purification and the Quran.
- Kalam built "the walls of the city of knowledge". Philosophy and gnosis worked inside, and in Shi'ism hikmah eventually absorbed theology.
- Intellect ('aql) is not reason. Intellect is a supra-individual light that binds man to God; reason is its reflection in the mind.
- The distinction of existence and quiddity is the axis of Islamic ontology. Sadra's principiality, unity and gradation of wujud is its summit.
- Ash'arite occasionalism denied horizontal causality. It protected God's power but discouraged science and philosophy.
- Suhrawardi's metaphysics of light made lived, illuminated wisdom the norm for later philosophers.
- Khayyam was an Avicennan philosopher, a philosopher of mathematics and a Sufi sympathizer. Read in context, his authentic quatrains complement his treatises.
- He ranked Sufi unveiling (kashf) above the theologians', philosophers' and Isma'ilis' ways of knowing.
- The 13th-16th centuries were not dark. Azarbaijan revived Ibn Sina (Tusi), spread illumination and raised Persian as a philosophical language.
- Shiraz (the Dashtakis, Dawani, Khafri) began the fusion of Peripatetic thought, illumination, kalam and gnosis that Sadra completed.
- Philosophy passes person to person in chains (silsilah), like Sufi initiation.
- Shiraz scholars carried philosophy to India, where Farangi Mahall's dars-i nizami kept it in madrasahs for three centuries. In most Arab madrasahs it disappeared after the 14th c.
- From Mir Damad on, the philosopher was jurist and theologian rather than scientist, the reverse of what happened in Europe.
- Mir Damad's three levels of duration (eternity, aeviternity, time) answer a question only Abrahamic prophecy raises: is the world created?
- Findiriski: "when philosophers reach the end of their path, this end is the beginning of prophecy."
- Mulla Sadra unites demonstration, gnosis and the Quran. He is the fullest flowering of prophetic philosophy.
- Seven Sadrian themes: being as flow and presence, the Book, illumination, angels, the last things and the soul, the imaginal world, substantial motion.
- "We are what we know, and we know to the degree that we are." Being and knowing are one.
- The School of Tehran preserved the tradition into modern times and produced the first Islamic replies to Western philosophy (Badayi' al-hikam, Tabataba'i, Ha'iri).
- Many modern Muslims suffer a cultural inferiority complex: they imitated Descartes instead of answering him.
- Nasr defines modernism as thought cut off from the transcendent: anthropomorphic, unprincipled, reductive, utopian, desacralized.
- Even modern science is anthropomorphic in its knowing subject: its only criteria are human reason and the human senses.
- Homo islamicus is servant and vicegerent of God, and cannot be harmonized with Promethean modern man.
- Fundamentalism is a modern reform movement, opposed to traditional Islam's intellectual life just as modernism is.
- Reducing Islam to the Shari'ah leaves it defenseless. Intellectual challenges need intellectual answers.
- Prophetic philosophies are reviving worldwide. "The reality of prophecy is like that of the Sun; it can be eclipsed, but it always returns."
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Chapter | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Theology, philosophy, gnosis: three dimensions of a tradition | 8 | Map any religion's intellectual life and how its parts relate |
| Five Mu'tazilite principles versus Ash'ari's middle course | 8 | Rationalist versus voluntarist theology |
| Five schools of existence and quiddity | 4, 5 | Place any Islamic philosopher's ontology |
| Intellect / reason / intuition hierarchy | 6 | Distinguish modes of knowing |
| Khayyam's four seekers (theologian, philosopher, Isma'ili, Sufi) | 9 | Compare routes to certainty |
| Three attitudes to "Tomorrow" (denial, piety, gnosis) | 9 | Tell "transcendence from above" from "denial from below" |
| Natural versus mathematical body | 9 | Keep disciplines within their bounds; physics versus mathematics |
| Four traits of the School of Azarbaijan | 10 | How a regional school revives a tradition |
| Philosophical silsilah | 10 | Transmission of tacit knowledge |
| Sarmad / dahr / zaman | 11 | Levels of duration; creation without temporal beginning |
| Philosopher versus prophet (Findiriski) | 11 | Limits of discursive knowledge |
| Seven doctrines of prophetic philosophy | 12 | Test whether a philosophy is "prophetic" |
| Five traits of modernism | 14 | Diagnose a worldview |
| Homo islamicus versus modern man | 14 | Compare anthropologies |
| Modern utopia versus Na-kuja-abad | 14 | Human versus Divine routes to perfection |
A closer look
- Advocacy as history. Nasr writes as a participant in the tradition he describes. Historians such as Dimitri Gutas and the "Graeco-Arabic" school stress Islamic philosophy's rational, Aristotelian core and reject the "mystical turn" narrative, which they trace to Corbin. Many recent histories (Peter Adamson, Frank Griffel, Robert Wisnovsky) also show that post-classical philosophy flourished in Sunni and Ottoman settings too, not mainly in Shi'ite Persia.
- "Prophetic philosophy" can absorb everything. If every serious philosophy in a religious culture counts as prophetic, the term loses its edge. Rationalists such as Razi the physician, or Ibn Rushd on his own terms, sit awkwardly inside it.
- Khayyam. The authenticity of the quatrains is still unsettled. Nasr's Sufi reading is plausible but not proven, and some scholars think more skeptical quatrains are authentic than he allows.
- Evolution. Chapter 14's dismissal of evolution as "science fiction" contradicts the scientific consensus. The critics he cites (Dewar, Bounoure, Behe) are marginal in biology. His metaphysical point, that a science cut off from higher principles cannot explain meaning, can be separated from this empirical claim and judged on its own terms.
- Modernism as monolith. Treating everything from Descartes to Popper as a single "anthropomorphism" passes over real internal critiques (phenomenology, philosophy of science, virtue ethics) that Nasr might count as allies.
- Politics. The book praises the post-1979 growth of philosophy in Qom without addressing how state power shapes it. Some of the figures it lists (for example Misbah Yazdi) were also leading hard-line political voices.
- Strengths. It is unmatched in bringing neglected figures to light (Khayyam the philosopher, the Dashtakis, Khafri, Findiriski, the School of Tehran). It also gives a strong account of why ontology, epistemology and spiritual practice belong together.
Who's Who
| Figure | Role |
|---|---|
| Ibn Sina (d. 1037) | Master of Peripatetic philosophy; the "philosopher" for Khayyam and Tusi |
| al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) | Ash'arite critic of falsafah; Sufi |
| 'Umar Khayyam (1048-1131) | Avicennan philosopher, algebraist, poet |
| Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) | Commentator on Aristotle; "end" of philosophy only in the Western story |
| Suhrawardi (1153-1191) | Founder of Illumination (ishraq) |
| Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) | Gnosis, unity of being, imaginal world |
| Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274) | Reviver of Ibn Sina; Maraghah Observatory; Twelver theology |
| Qutb al-Din Shirazi (d. 1311) | Scientist; commentator on Hikmat al-ishraq |
| Sadr al-Din Dashtaki (d. 1497) | Founder of the School of Shiraz; Mansuriyyah madrasah |
| Jalal al-Din Dawani (d. 1502) | Akhlaq-i jalali; ishraqi commentator |
| Ghiyath al-Din Mansur Dashtaki (d. 1542) | Leading 16th-c. philosopher; Maqamat al-'arifin |
| Shams al-Din Khafri (d. c. 1550) | Demonstrated wahdat al-wujud; step toward Sadra |
| Mir Fath Allah Shirazi (d. 1590) | Akbar's scholar-engineer; madrasah reform in India |
| Mir Damad (d. 1631) | Founder of the School of Isfahan; huduth-i dahri |
| Mir Findiriski (d. 1640-41) | Avicennan, alchemist, commentator on Yoga |
| Mulla Sadra (1571-1640) | Transcendent theosophy |
| Mulla 'Ali Nuri (d. 1830-31) | Reviver of Sadra in Isfahan |
| Hajji Mulla Hadi Sabziwari (1797-1872) | Sharh al-manzumah |
| Aqa 'Ali Mudarris (1818-1889) | Founding hakim of Tehran; Badayi' al-hikam |
| Aqa Muhammad Rida Qumsha'i (1825-1888) | "Second Ibn 'Arabi" |
| 'Allamah Tabataba'i (d. 1983) | School of Qom; dialogue with Marxism and with Corbin |
| Henry Corbin (1903-1978) | French scholar who brought later Islamic philosophy to the West |
| Mahdi Ha'iri Yazdi (d. 1999) | Knowledge by Presence; Islamic and analytic philosophy |
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 'aql | Intellect; also reason. The faculty that "binds" man to God |
| asalat al-wujud / al-mahiyyah | Principiality of existence / of quiddity: which is fundamentally real |
| baqa' | Subsistence; in Sufism, abiding in God after annihilation |
| bada' | Apparent change in the Divine Will as reflected in scripture |
| burhan | Demonstration, logical proof |
| dahr | Aeviternity, metatime: the relation of the changeless to the changing |
| dars-i nizami | Madrasah curriculum of Farangi Mahall, with a strong philosophy component |
| fana' | Annihilation of the ego in God |
| fayadan / fayd | Emanation, effusion of being from God |
| falsafah | Philosophy (from Greek), especially the Peripatetic school |
| al-harakat al-jawhariyyah | Trans-substantial motion (Sadra): change in the substance of corporeal things |
| haqiqah | Reality and truth at once; the inner dimension of religion |
| hikmah / hakim | Wisdom, theosophy / the sage who possesses it |
| al-hikmat al-muta'aliyah | Transcendent theosophy, Sadra's school |
| huduth / qidam | Origination / eternity of the world |
| huduth-i dahri | Mir Damad's "aeviternal origination" |
| hudur | Presence; knowledge by presence |
| Hurufi | School that saw the highest knowledge in the symbolism of letters |
| 'irfan / ma'rifah | Gnosis, illuminating knowledge |
| ishraq / ishraqi | Illumination; Suhrawardi's school / its follower |
| i'tibari | Conceptual, mentally posited |
| al-jism al-tabi'i / al-ta'limi | Natural body (substance) / mathematical body (accident, volume) |
| kalam / mutakallim | Dialectical theology / theologian |
| kashf | Unveiling, direct spiritual vision |
| khalifah | Vicegerent of God on earth |
| 'alam al-khayal / mithal | The imaginal world, between the physical and the intellectual |
| mahiyyah | Quiddity, "whatness" |
| mashsha'i | Peripatetic (Avicennan) philosopher |
| mujaddid | Traditional renewer of religion (not a modern "reformer") |
| mumkin / wajib al-wujud | Contingent being / Necessary Being |
| Na-kuja-abad | "Land of nowhere" (Suhrawardi): the eighth clime |
| qada' | Divine decree |
| sarayan al-wujud | The flow of being through all things |
| sarmad | Eternity: the relation of the changeless to the changeless |
| silsilah | Chain of transmission from master to student |
| tadadd | Contradiction, opposition (Khayyam's theodicy) |
| tashkik | Gradation of being |
| ta'wil / tanzil | Spiritual hermeneutics (return to the origin) / descent of revelation |
| walayah / wilayah | Sanctity, initiatic power; the cycle that follows prophecy |
| wahdat al-wujud | Transcendent unity of being |
| wahy | Revelation in the strict sense, reserved for prophets |
| wujud | Being, existence; also "finding" |
| zaman | Time: the relation of the changing to the changing |
About this book
Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2006. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions