Islamic Philosophy-4

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agnostic
Greek philosophy
Roman philosophy
sceptical

Ibnu Sina

Certain Qur’anic themes have dominated Islamic philosophy throughout its long history and especially during the later period when this philosophy becomes a veritable theosophy in the original and not deviant meaning of the term, theosophia corresponding exactly to the Arabic term al-hikmat al-ildhiyyah.

The first and foremost is of course the unity of the Divine Principle and ultimately Reality as such or al-tawhid which lies at the heart of the Islamic message. The Islamic philosophers were all muwahhid or followers of tawhid and saw authentic philosophy in this light.

They called Pythagoras and Plato, who had confirmed the unity of the Ultimate Principle, muwahhid while showing singular lack of interest in later forms of Greek and Roman philosophy which were sceptical or agnostic.

How Islamic philosophers interpreted the doctrine of Unity lies at the heart of Islamic philosophy. There continued to exist a tension between the Qur’anic description of Unity and what the Muslims had learned from Greek sources, a tension which was turned into a synthesis of the highest intellectual order by such later philosophers as Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra.

But in all treatments of this subject from al-Kindi to Mulla Ali Zunuzi and Haul Mulla Had ! Sabziwari during the thirteenth/nineteenth century and even later, the Qur’anic doctrine of Unity, so central to Islam, has remained dominant and in a sense has determined the agenda of the Islamic philosophers.

Complementing the Qur’anic doctrine of Unity is the explicit assertion in the Qur’an that Allah bestows being and it is this act which instantiates all that exists, as one finds for example in the verse, “But His command, when He intendeth a thing, is only that he saith unto it : Be ! and it is [kun fa-yakunl ” (36:81).

The concern of Islamic philosophers with ontology is directly related to the Qur’anic doctrine, as is the very terminology of Islamic philosophy in this domain where it understands by wujud more the verb or act of existence (esto) than the noun or state of existence (esse).

If Ibn Sina has been called first and foremost a “philosopher of being “, and he developed the ontology which came to dominate much of medieval philosophy, this is not because he was simply thinking of Aristotelian theses in Arabic and Persian, but because of the Qur’anic doctrine of the One in relation to the act of existence. It was as a result of meditation upon the Qur’an in conjunction with Greek thought that

Islamic philosophers developed the doctrine of Pure Being which stands above the chain of being and is discontinuous with it, while certain other philosophers such as a number of Isma`ilis considered God to be beyond Being and identified His act or the Qur’anic kun with Being, which is then considered as the principle of the universe.

It is also the Qur’anic doctrine of the creating God and creatio ex nihilo, with all the different levels of meaning which nihilo possesses,”’ that led Islamic philosophers to distinguish sharply between God as Pure Being and the existence of the universe, destroying that “block without fissure” which constituted Aristotelian ontology.

In Islam the universe is always contingent (mumkin al-wujid) while God is necessary (wajib al-wujud), to use the well-known distinction of Ibn Sina.’ ?

No Islamic philosopher has ever posited an existential continuity between the existence of creatures and the Being of God, and this radical revolution in the understanding of Aristotelian ontology has its source in the Islamic doctrine of God and creation as asserted in the Qur’an and Hadith.’s

Moreover, this influence is paramount not only in the case of those who asserted the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in its ordinary theological sense, but also for those such as al-Faribi and Ibn Sina who were in favour of the theory of emanation but who none the less never negated the fundamental distinction between the wujud (existence) of the world and that of God.