Islam

Muslim Philosophy

By

Peter Pan

Philosophy 2010

November 11, 2005

Muslim Philosophy

Islam is based on the Koran a revelation from God to the prophet Muhammad supplemented by the Sunnah which is a set of traditions about Muhammad's words and deeds. Muslims recognize Judaism and Christianity as revelations from God. However they believe that the revelation made to Muhammad is God's final word. Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet but not God in the flesh.

Islam spread from Arabia mostly due to holy wars. Non-Muslims defeated in battle were offered the choice of conversion or death, much like the Spanish Inquisition. The exception was for Jews and Christians, who were allowed to continue their religious observances so long as they recognized Muslim political authority and paid a tax. The works on politics written by the Islamic philosophers were based especially on Plato, with influence also from Aristotle. This view was passed on to the Islamic philosophers.

Islamic philosophy is a longstanding attempt to create harmony between faith, reason or philosophy, and the religious teachings of Islam. The problem lays in the difficulty in fusing religion and philosophy since there are no clear preconditions. Most religions have a set of rules or principles that they consider to be truths.

The main sources of Islamic philosophy are the religion of Islam itself and the Greek philosophy.

Its principal dogmas are:

1. God is an absolute unity and no attribute can be ascribed to Him.

2. Man is a free agent.

3. All knowledge necessary for the salvation of man emanates from his reason; humans could acquire knowledge before, as well as after, Revelation, by the sole light of reason. This fact makes knowledge obligatory upon all men, at all times, and in all places.

From the ninth century onward, Greek philosophy was introduced to the Persians and Arabs. During the Abbasid caliphate a number of thinkers and scientists, many of them non-Muslims or heretical Muslims, played a role in transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic knowledge to the Christian West. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. Three speculative thinkers, the Persians, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, and Arab thinker, al-Kindi combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam. They were highly unorthodox and it is open to question whether they could be considered Islamic philosophers.

From Spain Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin, contributing to the development of modern European philosophy. The Egyptian philosophers Moses Maimonides (who was Jewish) and Ibn Khaldun were also important.

Aristotle attempted to demonstrate the unity of God; but from the view which he maintained, that matter was eternal, it followed that God could not be the Creator of the world. To assert that God's knowledge extends only to the general laws of the universe, and not to individual and accidental things, is tantamount to denying prophecy. One other point shocked the faith of the Mutakallamin Ð'-- the theory of intellect. The Peripatetics taught that the human soul was only an aptitude Ð'-- a faculty capable of attaining every variety of passive perfection Ð'-- and that through information and virtue it became qualified for union with the active intellect, which latter emanates from God. To admit this theory would be to deny the immortality of the soul.

Wherefore the Mutakallamin had, before anything else, to establish a system of philosophy to demonstrate the creation of matter and they adopted to that end the theory of atoms as enunciated by Democritus. They taught that atoms possess neither quantity nor extension. Originally atoms were created by God, and are created now as occasion seems to require. Bodies come into existence or die, through the aggregation or the sunderance of these atoms. But this theory did not remove the objections of philosophy to a creation of matter.

For, indeed, if it be supposed that God commenced his work at a certain definite time by his "will," and for a certain definite object, it must be admitted that he was imperfect before accomplishing his will, or before attaining his object. In order to obviate this difficulty, the Motekallamin extended their theory of the atoms to time, and claimed that just as space is constituted of atoms and vacuum, time, likewise, is constituted of small indivisible moments. The creation of the world once established, it was an easy matter for them to demonstrate the existence of a creator, and that God is unique, omnipotent, and omniscient.

The oldest religion-philosophical work preserved is that of the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon, Emunot ve-Deot, "The Book of Beliefs and Opinions". In this work Saadia treats the questions that interested the Mutakallamim, such as the creation of matter, the unity of God, the divine attributes, the soul, etc. Saadia criticizes other philosophers severely. For Saadia there was no problem as to creation: God created the world ex nihilo, just as the bible attests; and he contests the theory of the Motekallamin in reference to atoms, which theory, he declares, is just as contrary to reason and religion as the theory of the philosophers professing the eternity of matter.

To prove the unity of God, Saadia uses the demonstrations of the Mutakallamin. Only the attributes of essence can be ascribed to God, but not the attributes of action. The soul is a substance more delicate even than that of the celestial spheres. Here Saadia controverts the Mutakallamin, who considered the soul an "accident" and employs the following one of their premises to justify his position: "Only a substance can be the substratum of an accident". Saadia argues: "If the soul is an accident only, it can itself have no such accidents as wisdom, joy, love," etc. Saadia was thus in every way a supporter of the Kalam; and if at times he deviated from its doctrines, it was owing to his religious views; just as the Jewish and Muslim Peripatetics stopped short in their respective Aristotelianism whenever there was danger of wounding orthodox religion.

The twelfth century saw the apotheosis of pure philosophy and the decline of the Kalam, which latter, being attacked by both the philosophers and the orthodox, perished for lack of champions. This supreme exaltation of philosophy was due,