- •In the world of prophecy in its Greek religious sense and was
- •Into other worlds like shamans and not only described their journeys but
- •In all these worlds, prophecy, which is a central reality, creates
- •Inner knowledge, with the esoteric and the mystical, with visions of
- •In the traditional worlds in question, philosophy has not been
- •Islamic philosophical tradition tend these days to criticize the very
In all these worlds, prophecy, which is a central reality, creates
consequences with which philosophy has to deal. Prophecy provides
laws and moral teachings for society that ethical, political, and legal
philosophy have to consider. Moreover, prophecy claims to provide
knowledge of the nature of reality, including knowledge of the Origin
or Source of all things, of the creation of the cosmos and its structure or
cosmogony and cosmology, of the nature of the human soul, which
would include both what should properly be called “pneumatology”
and traditional psychology and of the end of things, or eschatology. The
fruit of prophecy is knowledge of all the major aspects of reality experienced
or speculated about by human beings, including the nature of
time and space, form and substance, causality, destiny, and numerous
other issues with which philosophy in general is also concerned.
Furthermore, certain forms of prophecy have had to do with
Inner knowledge, with the esoteric and the mystical, with visions of
other levels of reality not meant for the public at large. We have already
seen the relation of the origin of Greek philosophy to the esoteric
dimension of the Greek religion, and we can find many other
examples in other traditions including Buddhism and especially Islam
where philosophy became related more and more in later centuries to
the inner dimension of the Quranic revelation. The relation between
philosophy and esoterism, which is a dimension of prophecy as defined
here in its universal sense, also has a long history in the West lasting
until the German Romantic movement.
From the seventeenth century onward Western philosophy felt
forced to philosophize about the picture of the world painted by modIntroduction
7
ern sciences and became more and more a handmaid of modern science
especially with Kant and culminating with much of twentieth
century Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which is little more than logic tied
to the scientific worldview. In an analogous way, in various traditional
worlds in which the reality of prophecy and revelation was
central, whether the embodiment of this prophecy has been a book or
some other form of the message brought from heaven or the messenger
himself as in the case of the Hindu avatеrs, the Buddha, or Christ,
philosophy has had no choice but to take this central reality into consideration.
Philosophy has to philosophize about something, and in
the traditional worlds in question that something has always included
the realities revealed through prophecy, which have ranged in form
from the illuminations of the rishis of Hinduism and the Buddha, to
God speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai or the archangel Gabriel revealing
the Quran to the Prophet of Islam.
In the traditional worlds in question, philosophy has not been
simply theology as some have contended unless one limits philosophy
to its modern positivistic definition in which case there is in reality no
non-Western philosophy or for that matter medieval Western philosophy
to speak of. But if we accept the definition of philosophy given by
the person who is said to have first used the term—that is, Pythagoras—
and see it as love of sophia, or if we accept its definition according to
Plato as “the practice of death” according to which philosophy includes
both intellectual activity and spiritual practice, then certainly
there are many schools of philosophy in various traditional worlds,
some existing until now only in oral form as among the Australian
aborigines and Native Americans,18 while others having produced
volumes of philosophical writings over the centuries.
Even if one were to decide to deal only with written philosophical
works, one could compose volumes on the subject of philosophy
in the land of prophecy dealing with the Taoist and Confucian Chinese
philosophical traditions, with those of Tibetan and Mahеyеna
Buddhism including the schools of Japan, all of which possess their
own special characteristics, and of course with the very rich philosophical
traditions of Hindu India. One could also turn to the
Abrahamic world and write on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophical
schools from the perspective of philosophical activity in worlds
dominated by prophecy. Nor would such a treatment be completely
parallel for the three sister Abrahamic traditions—despite notable similarities—
because while the Jewish and Islamic conceptions of prophecy
and the sacred book are close together, that of Christianity, in
which the founder of the religion is seen as the incarnation of the
8 Introduction
Divinity, is different in many ways from both the Jewish and the
Islamic views of the matter. This difference is especially important
philosophically as we see in the philosophical treatments of the incarnation
in Christian philosophy and “prophetic philosophy” in its
Islamic context.19
__
In this work we shall limit our discussion of philosophy in the land of
prophecy primarily to Islamic philosophy. This limitation is due mostly
to the nature of our own studies in philosophy over the past five
decades, which have been concerned mostly with Islamic philosophy.
But we have also studied other traditions enough to be able to assert
that a similar work could be written for the Greek, Jewish, Christian,
or for that matter Neo-Confucian and Hindu philosophical traditions
with both the similarities and differences that are to be found between
these traditions. In a sense the similarities would be much more fundamental
than the differences for they concern the basic metaphysical
truths common between them, truths for which we use the term
philosophia perennis. But there are also differences of expression of the
perennial philosophy depending on the intellectual climate in which
the perennial philosophy is expressed in the same way that there is an
inner unity among religions along with diversity on the formal level.20
In any case our attempt in this work is to present Islamic philosophy
in its teachings as well as history as a philosophy that functions
in a world dominated by prophecy and, this being the world of
Islam, by a sacred book. We have concentrated especially on the later
periods of Islamic philosophy especially in Persia, which, after the
Mongol invasion in the seventh/thirteenth century, became the main
arena for the continuation of the life of Islamic philosophy and where
philosophy drew even closer to the inner realities made available
through prophecy. There is also the important reason that this later
period is still not well known in the West despite the research carried
out during the second half of the twentieth century by a number of
scholars in European languages. In fact the last part of the book presents
many figures and ideas not known in the West at all. This emphasis
on later Islamic philosophy is also of interest from the point of
view of comparative studies for it shows how two philosophical traditions,
the Islamic and the Christian, parted ways and followed such
different destinies from the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth
centuries onward. In the West philosophy became more and more
distanced from theology after the eighth/fourteenth century, and
Introduction 9
gradually the main schools of philosophy, in the West ceased to be
Christian philosophy, and in fact philosophy in many of its schools
turned against religion in general and Christianity in particular, pitting
philosophy as the main rival to religion. In contrast, in the Islamic
world philosophy continued to function within a universe dominated
by the reality of prophecy, and this situation has persisted to a large
extent to this day despite the appearance of secular philosophies here
and there in various Islamic countries.
Strangely enough, while a number of secularized Muslim scholars
of Islamic philosophy who write about it but do not belong to the