Islamic Philosophy-5

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Tags:
Divine Principle
eternity
Islamic thinkers
newness and eternity

Islamic Thinker

As for the whole question of “newness” or “eternity” of the world, or huduth and gidam, which has occupied Islamic thinkers for the past twelve centuries and which is related to the question of the contingency of the world vis-k-vis the Divine Principle, it is inconceivable without the teachings of the Qur’an and Hadith.

It is of course a fact that before the rise of Islam Christian theologians and philosophers such as John Philoponus had written on this issue and that Muslims had known some of these writings, especially the treatise of Philoponus against the thesis of the eternity of the world.

But had it not been for the Qur’anic teachings concerning creation, such Christian writings would have played an altogether different role in Islamic thought.

Muslims were interested in the arguments of a Philoponus precisely because of their own concern with the question of huduth and qidam, created by the tension between the teachings of the Qur’an and the Hadith, on the one hand, and the Greek notion of the non-temporal relation between the world and its Divine Origin, on the other.

Another issue of great concern to Islamic philosophers from al-Kindi to Mulla Sadra, and those who followed him, is God’s knowledge of the world. The major Islamic philosophers, such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Ibn Rushd and Mulla Sadra, have presented different views on the subject while, as with the question of huduth and qidam, they have been constantly criticized and attacked by the mutakallimun, especially over the question of God’s knowledge of particulars.’

Now, such an issue entered Islamic philosophy directly from the Qur’anic emphasis upon God’s knowledge of all things as asserted in numerous verses such as, “And not an atom’s weight in the earth or the sky escapeth your Lord, nor what is less than that or greater than that, but it is written in a clear Book” (10 : 62).

It was precisely this Islamic insistence upon Divine Omniscience that placed the issue of God’s knowledge of the world at the centre of the concern of Islamic philosophers and caused Islamic philosophy, like its Jewish and Christian counterparts, to develop extensive philosophical theories totally absent from the philosophical perspective of Graeco-Alexandrian antiquity. In this context the Islamic doctrine of “divine science” (al-ilm al-laduni) is of central significance for both falsafah and theoretical Sufism or alma`rzfah.

This issue is also closely allied to the philosophical significance of revelation (al-wahy) itself. Earlier Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina sought to develop a theory by drawing to some extent, but not exclusively, on Greek theories of the intellect and the faculties of the soul. Later Islamic philosophers continued their concern for this issue and sought to explain in a philosophical manner the possibility of the descent of the truth and access to the truth by knowledge based on certitude but derived from sources other than the senses, reason and even the inner intellect.

They, however, pointed to the correspondence between the inner intellect and that objective manifestation of the Universal Intellect or Logos which is revelation. While still using certain concepts of Greek origin, the later Islamic philosophers such as Mulla Sadra drew heavily from the Qur’an and Hadith on this issue.

Turning to the field of cosmology, again one can detect the constant presence of Qur’anic themes and certain Hadith. It is enough to meditate upon the commentaries made upon the “Light Verse” and “Throne Verse” and the use of such explicitly Qur’anic symbols and images as the Throne (al arch), the Pedestal (al-kursi-), the light of the heavens and earth (nur al-samdwat wa’l-ard), the niche (mishkat) and so many other Qur’anic terms to realize the significance of the Qur’an and Hadith in the formulation of cosmology as dealt with in the Islamic philosophical tradition . Nor must one forget the cosmological significance of the nocturnal ascent of the Prophet (al-mi raj) which so many Islamic philosophers have treated directly, starting with Ibn Sm !.

This central episode in the life of the Prophet, with its numerous levels of meaning, was not only of great interest to the Sufis but also drew the attention of numerous philosophers to its description as contained in certain verses of the Qur’an and Hadith. Some philosophers also turned their attention to other episodes with a cosmological significance in the life of the Prophet such as the “cleaving of the moon” (shagq al-qamar) about which the ninth/fifteenth-century Persian philosopher Ibn Turkah Isfahani wrote a separate treatise.