Journey · 9 stops
From Baghdad to Isfahan
Arabic and Islamic philosophy: how Greek reason met revelation, and what came of the encounter.
Stops
Stop 1 of 9: al-Kindi
In ninth-century Baghdad the Abbasid caliphs sponsor the translation of Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. Al-Kindi, the “Philosopher of the Arabs”, works alongside the translators and defends the enterprise: truth is welcome from whatever source, and reason and revelation cannot contradict each other. He reads Aristotle through Neoplatonic eyes – a blend that will mark the whole tradition.
Stop 2 of 9: al-Farabi
Al-Farabi makes al-Kindi’s openness into a system. His commentaries on Aristotle’s logic earn him the name “Second Teacher”, and with Plato’s “Republic” as model he describes the virtuous city, ruled by a philosopher who is also prophet. Philosophy, for him, is the demonstrative knowledge of which religion is the symbolic image for the many. The next great mind will take his metaphysics as its starting point.
Stop 3 of 9: Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Avicenna recalls that he only understood Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” after reading a short treatise by al-Farabi. On that basis he builds his own: in everything created, what it is (essence) is distinct from that it is (existence), and only God is necessary in himself. His “Healing” and “Canon of Medicine” are read for centuries from Samarkand to Paris – and his confidence in demonstration provokes a theological reply.
Stop 4 of 9: al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali, honoured as the “Proof of Islam” (hujjat al-islam), studies the philosophers in order to refute them. “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” examines twenty of their theses and declares three of them unbelief: that the world is eternal, that God knows particulars only in a universal way, and that there is no bodily resurrection. Among the rest is necessary causation: fire does not burn cotton by its nature; God creates the burning. After a crisis of doubt he turns to Sufism, and quotes Rabia of Basra on the selfless love of God.
Stop 5 of 9: Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
In Córdoba, almost a century later, Averroes answers with “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”, point by point. Demonstrative reason and the order of causes are defended; the law itself, he argues in the “Decisive Treatise”, commands philosophy for those able to pursue it. In the Latin West he becomes simply “the Commentator”; in the Islamic world his line thins out, while the tradition takes other paths.
Stop 6 of 9: Suhrawardi
One path leads inward. Suhrawardi, executed in Aleppo in 1191 at thirty-six, founds the philosophy of illumination (ishraq): reality is a hierarchy of lights, and the highest knowledge is not by definition and syllogism but by presence – the soul’s direct awareness of itself and of what illuminates it. He draws on Avicenna, on ancient Persian wisdom and on Plato, and opens the way for a philosophical mysticism.
Stop 7 of 9: Ibn Khaldun
Another path leads to society and history. Ibn Khaldun, a Maghrebi judge and diplomat, writes the “Muqaddimah” in 1377 as an introduction to a world history and in effect founds a new science: the study of human civilisation, of group solidarity (asabiyya), of the rise and decline of dynasties and the difference between nomadic and settled life. He criticises historians who repeat reports without testing them against the nature of society.
Stop 8 of 9: Mulla Sadra
In Safavid Isfahan the strands come together. Mulla Sadra joins Avicenna’s metaphysics, Suhrawardi’s illumination and Ibn Arabi’s mysticism into a system in which existence, not essence, is primary and comes in degrees, and every being is in “substantial motion” toward higher perfection. His “Four Journeys” shaped Iranian philosophy down to the present – the proof that Islamic philosophy did not end with Averroes.
Stop 9 of 9: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri
In the twentieth century the tradition is examined as a whole. The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, in his “Critique of Arab Reason”, distinguishes three epistemic systems in Arab-Islamic culture: textual explication, gnosis and demonstration. He sides with the demonstrative reason of Averroes and Ibn Khaldun against the gnostic strand that runs from the Persian east to Mulla Sadra – a reading as contested as the heritage it interprets.
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