There are certain Hadith which point to God having offered prophecy and philosophy or hikmab, and Luqman chose hikmah which must not be confused simply with medicine or other branches of traditional hikmah but refers to pure philosophy itself dealing with God and the ultimate causes of things. These traditional authorities also point to such [...]

The very term al-hagigah is of the greatest significance for the understanding of the relation between Islamic philosophy and the sources of the Islamic revelation. Al-baqiqah means both truth and reality. It is related to God Himself, one of whose names is al-Hagq or the Truth, and is that whose discovery is the goal of [...]

One might say that the reality of the Islamic revelation and participation in this reality transformed the very instrument of philosophizing in the Islamic world. The theoretical intellect (al-aql a1-no ari) of the Islamic philosophers is no longer that of Aristotle although his very terminology is translated into Arabic. The theoretical intellect, which is the [...]

Viewed from the point of view of the Western intellectual tradition, Islamic philosophy appears as simply Graeco-Alexandrian philosophy in Arabic dress, a philosophy whose sole role was to transmit certain important elements of the heritage of antiquity to the medieval West. However, if seen, from its own perspective and in the light of the whole [...]