The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam

Research into Islamic intellectual history in general and the history of Islamic philosophy in particular has long been marred by narratives according to which the “fanaticism” and “narrow-mindedness” of religious scholars such as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 CE) brought an end to the once-blossoming tradition of Islamic philosophy. According to these narratives of decline, followers of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), arguably the greatest Muslim philosopher of all time, were soon marginalized and persecuted to the point that Islamic philosophy largely ceased to exist as an active intellectual tradition during the twelfth century. Evidence for these narratives was found in the fact that relatively few thinkers from the twelth century onward identified their area of work as falsafa—an Arabic term derived from the Greek φιλοσοφία, which modern researchers have often seen as being more or less identical in meaning to the English word philosophy.In his groundbreaking book The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam, Frank Griffel disproves these misguided narratives and provides a thorough, broad, and detailed account of the emergence of a new philosophical discourse referred to as ḥikma (lit. “wisdom”), which developed in the eastern parts of the Islamic world of the twelth century. He focuses on al-Ghazālī, Abū l-Barākāt al-Baghdādī (d. ca. 1165), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210), and other thinkers of their time who combined an interest in philosophy with a knowledge of Islamic rational, revelation-based theology (kalām). Unlike the tradition of falsafa after Ibn Sīnā, ḥikma did not primarily reproduce his teachings but rather offered an intellectual framework in which Ibn Sīnā’s teachings about God and the world were refined, criticized, and altered in ways that were often in dialogue with, but also clearly distinct from, kalām.Griffel traces the development of ḥikma on more than 650 densely printed pages that are divided between an introduction, three parts (of which the first and the third are again subdivided into three chapters each), a concluding section, two appendices, a bibliography, and two indexes. The introduction (1–21) discusses how and why European scholarship on the history of philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the Islamic philosophical tradition represented by Ibn Sīnā and others declined to the point of its alleged extinction in the late twelfth century. Earlier scholarship on the history of Islamic philosophy has often put the blame for this alleged decline on al-Ghazālī, who appeared to be a logical culprit, given that his famous work The Precipitance of the Philosophers was understood as a decisive refutation of the tradition of falsafa. Yet, as Griffel argues, al-Ghazālī’s work did not bring about the end of Islamic philosophy, but rather stood at the beginning of ḥikma. This postclassical and hitherto severely understudied discourse of Islamic philosophy found its fully developed form in the works of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, an author who wrote works on both ḥikma and kalām. As Griffel notes, al-Rāzī’s kalām works sometimes argue for theological views that outrightly contradict the teachings that al-Rāzī advocates in his works of ḥikma—an observation that leads Griffel to underline the need to study the emerging discourse of ḥikma concomitantly with kalām in the twelfth century.In the first part, “Post-Classical Philosophy in Its Islamic Context” (25–159), Griffel reviews in the first chapter the economic, social, and political background of philosophical activities in the Islamic East with a focus on Khorasan prior to the Mongol invasion, while the second chapter establishes the terminological basis of the study through a close analysis of the pertinent meanings of the Arabic words falsafa and ḥikma. The third chapter scrutinizes the relationship between philosophy and law and offers a very nuanced discussion of the question of whether philosophers were ever persecuted in the Islamic East because of their scholarly activities.The second part, “Philosophers and Philosophies: A Biographical History of Philosophy in the Sixth/Twelfth Century Islamic East” (161–303), offers a detailed overview of the lives of central philosophical thinkers in Griffel’s period and area of study with a focus on their reception of Ibn Sīnā’s and al-Ghazālī’s writings. This part culminates in a detailed biography of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (264–303) that constitutes a most welcome contribution to current scholarship in its own right.In the third and longest part, “The Formation of Hikma as a New Philosophical Genre” (307–549), Griffel undertakes a thorough analysis of central works of the emerging ḥikma tradition with a special focus on al-Rāzī’s early philosophical summae. The first chapter of this part investigates primarily how al-Rāzī addresses the same topic in works from different philosophical and theological genres, thereby establishing a new type of philosophical literature that builds on, but also critically engages with, Ibn Sīnā’s teachings. The second chapter uses primarily the example of works by or attributed to al-Ghazālī and their reception to examine the complex relationship between ḥikma and kalām as two interconnected but separate systems of world explanation. These two systems asked very similar questions but followed different rules of argumentation. They thus arrived at different results, without one being necessarily considered to lead to truer conclusions than the other by writers who contributed to both. The third chapter studies the methods of ḥikma between dialectical and demonstrative reasoning with a focus on Abū l-Barākāt al-Baghdādī and al-Rāzī. The short epilogue of the third part extends the investigation to al-Rāzī’s latest works, in which al-Rāzī explicitly comments on the respective value of theological and philosophical conclusions.In the “Conclusions” (551–71), Griffel summarizes his main findings and underlines how they intervene in current scholarly debates. Among other things, he notes that while recent scholarship has highlighted the integration of elements of falsafa into later kalām works, the existence of the ḥikma discourse shows that philosophical thought in the Islamic world of the twelfth century was also a vibrant field of intellectual activity outside of rational theology.The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam constitutes an outstanding scholarly achievement, and it seems impossible to do justice to its field-changing significance within the limits of a short book review. Superbly written and structured, Griffel’s book expertly guides its readers through the largely uncharted thicket of a highly sophisticated philosophical discourse that has hitherto remained one of the most poorly studied aspects of Islamic intellectual history in the late middle period. His argumentation is convincing throughout, and it is firmly grounded in his intimate knowledge of an impressively broad array of primary sources in Arabic and Persian as well as of the pertinent secondary literature in multiple modern languages. Paying due attention to questions of economic, social, and political history, the book explains the philosophical culture of the Islamic East in the twelfth century in its full complexity. Alongside other recent publications, such as Ulrich Rudolph’s multivolume Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Philosophie in der islamischen Welt (Basel: Schwabe, 2012), it brings our understanding of the philosophical heritage of the later Islamic world to an entirely new level. In doing so, it challenges once widely shared misconceptions that, as Griffel notes, continue to have far-reaching political and social repercussions (570–71).Frank Griffel has gifted the field with a momentous study that will be highly useful to specialists in the fields of Islamic intellectual history and the history of philosophy. However, undergraduate students and nonexpert readers are likely to struggle with this rich and thorough, but also complicated and lengthy, book. It can thus only be hoped that its important findings on a significant but hitherto little-known period of Islamic intellectual history will soon find their way into textbooks and other publications geared toward a broader readership

Epistemology · Islam · Sociology · Theology · Education and Islamic Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy

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