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This monograph is a comprehensive study of the thought of al-Kindī, the first self-described philosopher in Islam, and the first to write original treatises in Arabic. Al-Kindī’s writings are closely engaged with Greek philosophical and scientific texts, whose translation into Arabic he oversaw. Some of the philosophical views for which al-Kindī is known are reactions to Greek thinkers. For instance, he used ideas from Philoponus in arguing against the eternity of the world, and his discussion of divine attributes is based on Neoplatonic texts. However, the book also places al-Kindī’s thought within the context of 9th century Islamic culture, especially contemporary theological developments. The book covers every aspect of al-Kindī’s extant philosophical corpus, including not only his philosophical theology but also his theory of soul, his epistemology, and his ethics. Two chapters are devoted to al-Kindī’s works on the natural sciences (in particular pharmacology, optics, music, and cosmology). The book concludes by discussing how al-Kindī used Greek cosmological ideas in his account of divine providence.

The aim of the present work is threefold. One, it intends to place the thought of Avicenna within its proper historical context, whether the philosophical-scientific tradition inherited from the Greeks or the indigenous influences coming from the medieval Islamic world. Thus, in addition to a substantive introductory chapter on the Greek and Arabic sources and influences to which Avicenna was heir, the historical and philosophical context central to Avicenna’s own thought is provided in order to assess and appreciate his achievement in the specific fields treated in that chapter. Two, the present volume aims to offer a philosophical survey of Avicenna’s entire system of thought ranging from his understanding of the interrelation of logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and medicine. The emphasis here is on how, using a relatively small handful of novel insights, Avicenna was not only able to address a whole series of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers working in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic world, but also how those insights fundamentally changed the direction philosophy took, certainly in the Islamic East, but even in the Jewish and Christian milieus. Three, the present volume will provide philosophers, historians of science, and students of medieval thought with a starting point from which to assess the place, significance, and influence of Avicenna and his philosophy within the history of ideas.

Afdal al‐Dîn Kâshânî, better known as Bâbâ Afdal, died in the village of Maraq near Kashan in central Iran in the year 1210. Little is known of his life or his teachers, only that he taught in Maraq and had many students. His Persian philosophical prose is the most beautiful in the language. He mentions Aristotle and Hermes among previous philosophers, but only alludes to his Muslim predecessors. His views, like those of the Ikhwân al‐Safâ’ and many others, are strongly tinged with Neoplatonism. He explains with rare clarity that the goal of philosophy is to actualize intelligence and to achieve human perfection. His positions on ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, cosmology, and psychology are both original and traditional. In three chapters, the book introduces Bâbâ Afdal and his writings, describes the world view of Islamic philosophy, and analyzes significant terms of the philosophical vocabulary. In the main body of the book, more than half of Bâbâ Afdal's Persian writings are translated into English.

Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most important theologians, philosophers, and Sufis of Islam. Born around 1056 in northeastern Iran, he became the holder of the most prestigious academic post in Islamic theology in Baghdad, only to renounce that position and teach at small schools in the provinces for no money. His contributions to Islamic scholarship range from responding to the challenges of Aristotelian philosophy to creating a new type of mysticism in Islam, and integrating both these traditions—falsafa and Sufism—into the Sunni mainstream. Using the most authoritative sources, including reports of his students, his contemporaries, and his own letters, this book reconstructs every stage in al-Ghazali’s turbulent career. The al-Ghazali that emerges still offers many surprises, particularly on his motives for leaving Baghdad and the nature of his “seclusion” afterwards. In its close study of al-Ghazali’s cosmology—meaning, how God creates things and events in the world, how human acts relate to God’s power, and how the universe is structured—the book reveals the significant philosophical influence on al-Ghazali. His cosmology has always been one of the most challenging aspects of his work. This book shows how al-Ghazali created a new discourse on cosmology that moved away from concerns held earlier among Muslim theologians and Arab philosophers. This new cosmology was structured to provide a framework for the pursuit of the natural sciences and a basis for science and philosophy in Islam to continue to flourish beyond the 12th century.

“None of that people should be spared, not even the babe in its cradle”. With these chilling words, the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan declared his intention to destroy the Ismailis, one of the most intellectually and politically significant Muslim communities of medieval Islamdom. The massacres that followed convinced observers that this powerful voice of Shi'i Islam had been forever silenced. Little was heard of these people for centuries, until their recent and dramatic emergence from obscurity. Today they exist as a dynamic and thriving community established in over twenty-five countries. Yet the interval between what appeared to have been their total annihilation, and their modern, seemingly phoenix-like renaissance has remained shrouded in mystery. This book probes the period from the dark days when the Ismaili fortresses in Iran fell one by one before the marauding Mongol hordes, to the emergence at Anjudan of the Ismaili Imams as the spiritual center of a community scattered across much of the Muslim world. The work explores the motivations, passions, and presumptions of historical actors while contemplating the esoteric worldview that animated the Ismailis and gave them the wherewithal to persevere. It explains how three aspects of Ismaili thought were crucial to the community's survival: taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation); the Ismaili da'wa, which literally means “summons”; and the soteriological dimension of the imamate and, in particular, of the role of the Imam of one's time in leading the adept to salvation and a mystical recognition of God.

The 17th-century philosopher Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, known as Mullā Ṣadrā, attempted to reconcile the three major forms of knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourses: revelation (Qurʼān), demonstration (burhan), and gnosis or intuitive knowledge (ʼirfan). In his grand synthesis, which he calls the “Transcendent Wisdom”, Mullā Ṣadrā bases his epistemological considerations on a robust analysis of existence and its modalities. His key claim, that knowledge is a mode of existence, rejects and revises the Kalam definitions of knowledge as relation and as a property of the knower on the one hand, and the Avicennan notions of knowledge as abstraction and representation on the other. For Ṣadrā, all these theories land us in a subjectivist theory of knowledge where the knowing subject is defined as the primary locus of all epistemic claims. To explore the possibilities of a “non-subjectivist” epistemology, Ṣadrā seeks to shift the focus from knowledge as a mental act of representation to knowledge as presence and unveiling. For Ṣadrā, in knowing things, we unveil an aspect of existence and thus engage with the countless modalities and colors of the all-inclusive reality of existence. In such a framework, we give up the subjectivist claims of ownership of meaning. The intrinsic intelligibility of existence strips the knowing subject of its privileged position of being the sole creator of meaning. Instead, meaning and intelligibility are defined as functions of existence to be deciphered and unveiled by the knowing subject. This leads to a redefinition of the relationship between subject and object.

This book traces the notion of a world of image from its conception until today. This notion is one of the most original innovations in medieval Islamic philosophy, and is unique compared to other parts of the history of philosophy. The notion originated out of discussions on the fate of human beings after death; would this be spiritual only or physical as well? The world of image suggests that there exists a world of non-physical (imagined) bodies, beyond our earthly existence. This world may be entered after death and glimpses of it may already be witnessed during sleep or meditation. Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) was the first to suggest something along these lines, arguing that people could simply imagine their afterlife without the need for it to be actually physical. Suhrawardī (d. 1191) included this suggestion in his innovative thinking on epistemology, known as ‘knowledge by presence’, without fully ontologizing it. Shahrazūrī (d. > 1286), finally, turned Suhrawardī’s thinking into the full-blown notion of a world of image. Notably through Taftāzānī (d. 1390) and Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621), the idea gained wider popularity and continued to be discussed, especially in Shīʿī circles, up to this day. This book gives an insight into late medieval and early modern Islamic philosophy, especially the role of commentary writing. It sets the record straight for the provenance and development of the world of image and reconsiders the importance of Suhrawardī for the development of philosophy in the Islamic world.

Building on recent revisionist scholarship, this book offers a new overview of the last two decades of the life of the seminal 11th-century Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). It focuses on his masterpiece, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and argues that al-Ghazali was the first Muslim thinker to self-consciously marshal the rhetoric of revival to promote his new vision of the Islamic religious sciences. This vision was not a Sufi one, as has often been asserted. Rather, the “Science of the Hereafter” that is the subject of the Revival draws on Islamic law, Sufism, and the philosophy al-Ghazali is understood to have refuted. While his autobiography suggests that his masterpiece grew out of a radical break with his earlier thought, a reading of his earlier work shows that its major theses were present before his famous spiritual crisis. Al-Ghazali’s letters show him actively promoting his revivalist agenda in the final decade and a half of his life. Reconstructing a controversy over the Revival later in his life, this book contextualizes al-Ghazali’s famous autobiography and explains what led him to give such a misleading account of his life and thought.

In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ʿArabi—al-la-shuʿur—as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. This book challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. The book provides an in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology—or “science of the soul,” as it came to be called—was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. It explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, the book shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. The book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

This book surveys Mulla Sadra’s thought and situates it in the Islamic intellectual tradition. As one of the most prominent figures of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy, Mulla Sadra sought, in his time (the seventeenth century) to revive the study of philosophy as both logical analysis and spiritual exercise. His writings combine qurʾan (revealed knowledge), burhan (demonstrative, logical knowledge) and irfan (realized, mystical knowledge) as the foundation of an integrated epistemology. Sadra’s ‘Transcendent Wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-mutaʾaliyah), the name he has given to his own school of thought, is based on the fundamental insight that beings derive their reality from existence (al-wujud) and that all philosophical and epistemological considerations must begin and end with the principle of existence. In contrast to the Peripatetic philosophers and theologians before him, Sadra treats existence not as an accident or static concept but as a dynamic and all-encompassing reality. Along the ‘four journeys’ of his philosophical quest, Sadra produces a world-picture that is a reflection of the infinite symphony of existence and its modalities. His penetrating deliberations on the human state and spiritual anthropology provide one of the most profound statements of the underlying unity between humans, the universe and the Divine. This book takes the reader through the elaborate and rich world of Sadra’s intellectual journey and shows its relevance for today’s philosophical issues in the Islamic and Western worlds.