Philosophy in Eastern Islam

The quick expansion of Islam from Arabia, where Mahomet preached (622-32), towards the Mediterranean, the north African coast and the far East, brought the Muslims in direct contact with the classical culture of the Christians and the Jews who were living in the newly conquered lands, in particular in the ex-Byzantine territories. To these populations, insofar as they were ‘people of the Book’, the Muslims granted protection and tolerance, selectively assimilating those parts of classical culture that were new to them: Greek science and philosophy (literature and law offered few reasons for interest, given the existence of a pre-Islamic literature in Arabic and the grounding of social life in the Koran). The same attitude was adopted towards the culture of Harran, through which Islam came to know a cosmologic-astrological-magical literature of oriental origin, which was attributed to the ‘revelation’ of Hermes Trismegistus. Under the first caliphate, that of the Ommayades (660-750), assimilation prevailed through the work of the translators; but starting with the Abbasid Caliphate (750-861) and the foundation of the ‘House of Wisdom’ in the new capital of Baghdad, a new process of reflection on the relationship between the Koran and Greek philosophy began, stimulated by the intellectual circle formed around al-Kindi. At the same time an autonomous and rational reflection on the Koran (Kalam) arose, opposed to the strictly prescriptive-legal interpretation, as well as Sufism, a mystical movement which would later undergo various philosophical articulations. Under the following caliphs (until 1055) the heritage of Greek philosophy continued to be developed in the East in Arabic and Persian; the ‘Hellenizing’ philosophers of this time, al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina (Latinized as Avicenna), and al-Ghazali, would heavily influence the Latin philosophy of the Scholastic period. The relationship between philosophy and theology is crucial in the entire eastern Islamic intellectual tradition, whose original contributions to philosophy can be synthesized as follows: the development of Kalam (a rational theology evolving at the same time as dialectics in the West); the elaboration of a Neoplatonic philosophy/theology and its harmonization with Aristotelian metaphysics (in particular emanation cosmology), which transmitted to the Latin West a profoundly changed Greek philosophy and which, through the works of Avicenna, merged this world view with themes from Mazdean angelology; and the various attempts to create a non-Aristotelian logic (of those, only the attempt of al-Ghazali was known in the West). Finally, philosophical developments concerning prophetic knowledge are particularly relevant.