Islamic philosophy was given impetus and direction in the eighth century CE by the surge of translations of Greek writings into Arabic that began to be made at that time. Numerous Greek works, many of them on medical subjects, had been translated by Christian Syrians into Syriac in the fourth and fifth centuries and it was a group of Syrian scholars who were invited to the Baghdad court in 750 CE to undertake the translations into Arabic. In the ninth century a school of translators and scholars, known as the House of Wisdom, was founded at Baghdad. It was largely through the work of these men that the writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists became familiar to Arab thinkers and, subsequently, to the western world.
Two important factors, each of which has its own internal complexity, contributed influentially to the character of early Islamic philosophy. The first of these was the theology of the Islamic scriptures, the Koran, which informed every aspect of Muslim culture, including its political, legal and social institutions. This theology was first delivered by Muhammad the Prophet (c. 570 CE–632 CE) who saw himself as the messenger of God and the transmitter of God’s exact words, the words of the Koran. The Koran declares that its message is universal and that Muhammad is the ultimate Prophet. It sets out the Five Pillars, a practical doctrine that requires the Muslim to undertake the following: to testify publicly, on at least one occasion in a lifetime, that ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet’; to pray five times each day; to pay zakat, a poll tax for the benefit of the needy; to fast during Ramadan, the ninth month of the lunar year; and to perform pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. Further rules and customs for daily living, known as the sunnah (literally, ‘the well-trodden path’), were based on the Prophet’s example and enshrined in hadith, reports of advice and injunctions held to be traceable back to the Prophet’s actual words and deeds. The sunnah and hadith were closely interactive with Islamic jurisprudence.
By the eighth century CE two main schools of Islamic theology had been established: a rationalist school, the Mutazila, whose adherents held that reason can discover truths which are confirmed by revelation and that God does not act unreasonably, and the Sunni, who opposed the rationalism of the Mutazila, claiming that God obeys no norms, that actions become good or bad by God’s declaration, and that rational reflection cannot discover God’s will. It was, broadly, upon this complex cultural structure, grounded on faith and dogma but capable of internal debate, that the translations of Greek philosophical thought impacted.
The second element that gave Islamic philosophy its distinctive character was formed largely by an accident of intellectual history. Through an error of attribution, part of a work, the Enneads, by the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, was attributed to Aristotle and became known as The Theology of Aristotle. In consequence, certain Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas became assimilated to those of Aristotle so that Greek philosophy came to be seen and treated by its translators as more unified than it actually was. This meant that the early Arab philosophers tended to assume that in studying the Greek writings they were dealing with a coherent body of thought containing a strong element of mysticism that derived from all the Greek philosophers. In fact, the mysticism that attracted them was a characteristic peculiar to Neo-Platonism rather than ubiquitous among the Greek authors. But it was with Neo-Platonic mysticism that Islamic theology found its closest affinity and, in consequence, a vision for its own secure development in relation to Greek philosophy.
The task undertaken by the early philosophers of Islam was that of demonstrating how the unchallengeable revelations of the Koran, adhered to by faith, might be shown to be consonant with and reinforced by the conclusions of Hellenic reasoning. The carrying out of the task between the ninth and twelfth centuries not only established an Islamic philosophical tradition of the highest excellence but also, in due course, brought about the burgeoning of fresh philosophical thought in the West. Translations of the Greek writings began to reach the West in the first part of the twelfth century; but it was not just an Aristotelian or generally Greek influence that made itself felt, for the writings and thought that were transmitted were presented in the context of the Islamic philosophers’ intellectual struggle to reconcile reason and faith, a struggle that western theologians and philosophers, fired by the example of Muslims such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, were to make their own in succeeding centuries.
In the latter part of the eleventh century the philosopher and theologian al-Ghazali challenged the reasoning of the philosophers who preceded him, not by reasserting the primacy of faith but with arguments that undermined those claims of his predecessors that had put strain on Koranic dogma. He espoused the teachings of Sufism, that Islamic sect which practised an austere asceticism in its search for a mystical communion with God. But even as his scholarly advocacy of Sufism worked to effect a reconciliation of its stance with the mainstream of Islamic doctrine, an extremely rigid and highly organized system of Islamic education was being established throughout western Asia in the madrasa, or colleges, that were rapidly springing up. Standard textbooks on theology, ethics, law and the Koran guaranteed a uniformity of education, an uncritical acceptance of authority and, as time passed, a stultification of intellectual enquiry and enterprise. Sufism survived and developed in various ways but underwent, in some of its manifestations, corruption by charlatans who exploited the natural piety of simple people with tricks and pseudo-miracles. It was not until the eighteenth century that a revival of the fundamental doctrines of early Islam began to take place and a fresh concern to maintain a balance between reason and revelation became apparent in the work of theologians and philosophers.
In the twentieth century, Islamic philosophy and Islamic culture as a whole have had to confront the challenge presented to them by ideas and forms of life from which they had previously been more or less insulated. In particular, Islam has had to work out an attitude to rapid technological change and a political strategy for survival. Its philosophers have sought to cultivate a dynamism in Islamic thought, a movement clearly exemplified in the philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938), who saw both the rationalism of the Greeks and the mysticism of the Sufi as having exerted an adverse influence on Islam. Iqbal drew on the ideas of Henri Bergson, the French philosopher of process, and on Hegelian dialectic to help him generate a more dynamic sensibility for Islamic philosophy.
In the late twentieth century Islamic philosophers have worked on a broad front that encompasses politics, ethics, metaphysics, methodology and theology as well as the scholarly and critical study of their magnificent medieval tradition. Their fundamental task remains unchanged: to show that Islam, as a comprehensive form of life, is compatible with other forms of life in the contemporary world.