The Ghazalian Turn is the Beginning of Islamic Philosophy

If you were to ask a historian of philosophy to give you an elevator summary of the story of philosophy in the Islamicate world, the story would go something like this: “The rapid territorial expansion of early Islam led to an encounter with Greek philosophy; translation ensued; the new philosophy instigated a productive tension between reason and revelation which gave life to such rationalists as al-Farabi, al-Kindi, Ibn Bajja (they are more likely to call him “Avempace”), and the earlier Razi (that is Abu Bakr ar-Razi), as well as some more moderate rationalists like Ibn Sina (although, they might say, “maybe he belongs in the earlier category,” and they are more likely to call him “Avicenna”), Ibn Rushd (they are more likely to call him “Averroes”), maybe Abu Sulayman as-Sijistani; but eventually this tension gave rise also to anti-rationalists like Imam Al-Ghazali. Eventually, under the influence of the ascendant anti-rationalists, especially Ghazali, the entire venture collapses.”

The elevator has just arrived on the history, religious studies, or philosophy floor and our historian friend must step out as you continue on your own way. But if they are like most of the folk who would give you this sort of history, they might say, as they exit and with a hint of pity, “what a shame it was” that the likes of Ghazali won in the end, and they might leave you with an image of a character like Ibn Rushd as the last wounded but still-fighting hero standing in that stalwart history, the last line of enlightenment in a world going slowly into darkness. That is the story. A very bad story, but that is the story.

Why is it a bad story? The gentle answer is that it is “reductive.” The more uncompromising answer, well…

But there is a new version of the history, one which rewrites the story to introduce “complexity” and does away with the reductions. The new narrative is that philosophy actually continues after Ghazali, and the historians who tell this version of the history point to “complex” figures like the later Razi (that is, Fakhruddin Razi) or the continuing Shi’ite peripatetic tradition of figures like Mir Damad. But this story, malgré all its complexity, and maybe because of it, is also bad, because the reason why the old story was bad is actually much simpler: philosophy does not come to an end after Ghazali, not because there are still people talking about Aristotle or Plato after Ghazali but in fact and on the very contrary because people stop talking (so much) about Aristotle and Plato. In fact, I go as far as to say: philosophy only properly begins in the Islamic world after Ghazali – everything that happens before is irrelevant or mere propaedeutic. Much of what counted as philosophy before the Ghazalian turn, if that is as significant an event as the old story has made it seem, was not – even if it was original – “Islamic Philosophy” or I should say was not distinctly Islamic in its nature, which is why it traveled so frictionlessly into the Medieval Christian philosophical world as though there were no fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam! It was philosophy, for sure, but to my mind to call it Islamic Philosophy is to pass over the actual philosophical tradition that deserves that name, the post-Ghazalian blossoming of a philosophy truly native to Islam. 

I will say two things (or three things, depending on how you count them) in my defense of these contrarian claims: first, that the “rationalist” philosophy assumed an epistemic framework which deprioritized the claims of Islam in a way that makes it a stretch to call it Islamic. Second, that what happened with the so-called Ghazalian turn was an end to a kind of obsessive scholasticism, which end finally permitted serious philosophical thinking to happen instead of the obsequious rehashing of what Aristotle or Plato said, much akin to the post-Scholastic Cartesian turn in Western philosophy. I will then say, lastly (and this might count as some version of the the first or the second point), that the “rationalist” philosophers were not productive for Islam (worse, they were counterproductive) and did not further any of the intrinsic philosophical goals of Islam.

All of this sounds as though the argument I am making is more than just historical and is rather polemical or, as they sometimes say in the communications department, an attempt to impose a “persuasive definition” of “Islamic philosophy.” And I must confess that is exactly what I am doing. My arguments might consequently be counted as a rather partisan and biased bit of historiography, but sobeit — that is the nature of all historiography. So let us start from the fact of this confession, which will lead into my first argument:

I am clearly and admittedly using the term “Islamic philosophy” in a rather special way which differs from the definition applied to it by the standard stories of “Islamic philosophy”; I marked this already in the very first sentence of this essay, with a terminological sleight, by asking our imaginary historian friend not about the history of philosophy in the Islamic world but about the history of philosophy in the Islamicate world. This intuitive distinction, formalized by Marshall Hodgson, is one between, on the one hand, Islam the religion, and, on the other, the culturally and ideologically heterogeneous worlds that existed within societies whose formal political and social structures were defined by this religion but comprised, nonetheless, a variety of theological and philosophical worldviews. The Islamic world and the Islamicate world were roughly coincident, but not the same: there were things that happened in the Islamicate world that were not Islamic at all — such as flourishing wine cultures (which, a propos, was a popular pastime of one too many of the “rationalist” philosophers) — and there were parts of the Islamic world (such as the flourishing Muslim communities in Medieval China) that were not Islamicate at all since they were outside the cultural and political dominion of a society and state constituted on Islamic terms. The relevance of this distinction, and the reason for my rhetorical sleight at the outset, was to mark a difference between two ways of viewing Islam in relation to philosophy: one, the Islamic, in which the claims of the religion are given epistemic priority, and the other, the Islamicate, in which this is not the case. This difference in epistemic priority is evident in the many debates about the hierarchy and relative merits of prophetic revelation and philosophical insight which characterized the writings of the Islamic peripatetics of the so-called “rationalist” school to whom we were introduced by our imaginary historian friend at the outset. In these debates, philosophical insight invariably and unsurprisingly came out at the top of the hierarchy for the rationalists — and that sometimes figured in their explanations of why, for instance, they were allowed to drink wine: the prohibition, they declaimed as they decanted, is for non-philosophers! So while it might seem trivial to be so fussy about their wine-drinking, the point is not the wine-drinking, but the epistemological worldview that justifies it. It is to my mind rather misleading to call “Islamic” a philosophy whose epistemological hierarchy prioritized the dicta of Aristotle over the dicta of prophecy so central to Islam. And this nicely works us into the second, and I think much more interesting, justification for some of the tendentious claims I have been making so far:

I said above that the old histories of Islamic philosophy are bad “not because there are still people talking about Aristotle or Plato after Ghazali but in fact and on the very contrary because people stop talking (so much) about Aristotle and Plato.” The reason I said this is because as I see it what really ends after Ghazali is not philosophy per se, but a certain obsequious scholasticism. The “rationalists” (whom I am now tired of calling by that misleading name — I shall henceforth simply call them the Islamicate peripatetics) lavished much of their intellectual attention and effort on commentaries on Aristotle who was affectionately termed the “First Teacher” (al-mu’allim al-awwal) and, amongst them, to be “second only to Aristotle” was the highest possible praise. Whereas prophetic dicta could be transcended, the words of Aristotle remained sacred. One of the things that Ghazali and his so-called “anti-rationalists” brought about was an overcoming of this sort of obsequious deference. To give an example of this attitudinal shift, here is a revealing passage by Ibn Sab’in writing about Ibn Rushd in the Budd al-‘Arif:

“This man [Ibn Rushd] was absolutely crazy about Aristotle. He worshipped him and followed him almost blindly in his views of sense perception and first intelligibilia. Had he heard that according to [Aristotle] one can stand and sit at the same time, he would have repeated this with full conviction. Most of his writings deal with the teachings of Aristotle which he paraphrased or adapted. Ibn Rushd is absolutely incapable, his knowledge is small, he has stupid ideas, and he is unintelligent. Yet he is a good man, who does not interfere (in things which do not concern him), he is just and aware of his limited capacities. Then again, he did not rely on his own endeavour since he followed Aristotle blindly.”

Such criticisms were not unusual, as Anna Ayse Akasoy has written: “The passage is an extraordinary source for attitudes to philosophical authorities in the thirteenth century in the Arab West.”¹ She cites other critical figures who make similar arguments against the Islamicate peripatetics, including Ibn Tufayl who, unlike Ibn Sab’in, excludes Ibn Rushd from criticism (an exclusion which is interesting and to which I will return in a moment). This sort of criticism is what Louis Massignion called the “psychological critique” of Islamicate peripateticism and in a moment I will say a bit more about why it legitimates some of the controversial claims I have made about the history of Islamic philosophy. But it is first worth noting a certain irony in the fact that whereas in the history of European philosophy the “overcoming” of Aristotle which marked the end of Scholasticism is seen as a fresh and proper beginning for Western philosophy, this same sort of overcoming by the thinkers of the Islamic(ate) world is taken to be an end for philosophizing in that world. It would be a strange history of European philosophy which sees Francisco Suarez as the last true philosopher in Europe, for being the last committed Scholastic, and takes the Cartesian turn to be the end of philosophy; and yet this is the very strange history to which our imaginary historian friend must be committed if they take the Ghazalian turn to be the end of philosophy in the Islamic(ate) world.

The psychological critique is a far more interesting argument for the theses about the history of Islamic philosophy I am offering you because when we follow its tracks we meet along the way many of the interesting characters that I think constitute that philosophy really worth calling Islamic. We have met some of those characters already: Ibn Sab’in, for instance, who is doubly interesting because he is also quite likely the author of the Sicilian Questions (al-Masa’il as-Siqqiliyya), a work which through and through demonstrates its writer’s peripatetic learning.

What right then has Ibn Sab’in to criticize Ibn Rushd if he is himself a peripatetic? The answer is that he is not — he just happens to know peripatetic philosophy. But in fact he, as the aforementioned Anna Ayse Akasoy article indicates, declares even in the Sicilian Questions that peripatetic philosophy is a thing to be studied and then transcended because while dialectically useful in some situations (presumably including the one that led him to compose his responsa to the Sicilian Questions) it does not provide ultimate truth. That, he argues, only comes from “tahqīq” (we will see what this means in a moment and how this approach to “truth” defines the native Islamic philosophy to which I have been so far alluding²). Ibn Sab’in’s engagement with peripatetic philosophy, for all his ultimate disagreement with its practitioners, is salient for disambiguating my thesis: my point is not that an Islamic philosophy must be ignorant of other ‘non-Islamic’ philosophy to be Islamic; instead, the relationship it bears to them must be critical and not obsequiously deferent. That was the point of bringing Ibn Sab’in into our narrative. But Ibn Sab’in might be accused of having gone overboard in his criticism of peripateticism because while he criticizes some figures like al-Farabi who are clearly through and through peripatetics, his criticism of Ibn Rushd might have been too strong (remember we said that Ibn Tufayl excludes Ibn Rushd from the same sort of criticism) and includes, of all people, Ghazali himself! Now, we might excuse the inclusion of the latter as an artifact of his having read some of Ghazali’s expository works, such as the Maqasid al-falasifa, erroneously, like many others did, as works stating Ghazali’s own positions rather than expounding the peripatetics’ views (but there are indications in the Budd al-’Arif that Ibn Sab’in’s criticism of Ghazali was likely more than just this³). But the criticisms of Ibn Rushd are a bit more nuanced, since Ibn Rushd was indeed very much partisan to peripateticism; but there are nevertheless elements of his philosophy that are harbingers of a really Islamic philosophy — his intellectual efforts in the Fasl al-Maqal, for instance, are indicative of a genuine interest in epistemologically prioritizing the claims of prophecy and revelation in ways that are at odds with the characterization of the peripatetics I gave above.⁴

At any rate, even if we are willing to give Ibn Rushd a reduced sentence for the crimes for which Ibn Sab’in charges him, it is still true that he is not in fact the last stalwart soldier standing in the history of “Islamic philosophy” as the old history makes it appear. On the contrary he is in fact, like his occasional nemesis Ghazali, a harbinger of a generation of emerging native Islamic philosophers. And indeed he himself appears to have foreseen this fact, not least in one of the most mystifying episodes of the history of Islamic philosophy, his meeting with the then young boy who was to become perhaps the single most outstanding example of a native Islamic philosophy, a then “hardly older than fifteen”⁵ years old Muhyiuddin Ibn Arabi. I like to tell the story of that meeting every chance I get and I’d like to tell it to you here too in my own words, but that would be to cheat you of the fascinating telling of it by Ibn Arabi himself:⁶

“And so, one fine day, I went to Cordova, to the house of Abu-l Walld Ibn Rushd. He had expressed the desire to meet me personally, because he had heard of the revelations that God had accorded me in the course of my spiritual retirement [khalwatī], and he had made no secret of astonishment at what he had been told. For this reason my father, who was one of his intimate friends, sent me to his house one day, pretexting some sort of errand, in reality to enable Ibn Rushd to have a talk with me. At that time I was still a beardless youth [ṣabīyyun]. When I entered, the master arose from his place, received me with signal marks of friendship and consideration, and finally embraced me. Then he said “Yes[?]” And I in turn said, “Yes.” His joy was great at noting that I had understood. But then taking cognizance of what had called forth his joy, I added: “No.” Immediately Ibn Rushd winced, the color went out of his cheeks, he seemed to doubt his own thought. He asked me this question: “What manner of solution have you found through divine illumination and inspiration [fi-l kashfi wa-l fayḍi-l ilahī]? Is it identical with that which we obtain from speculative reflection [al-naẓar]? I replied, “Yes No. Between the Yes and the No, spirits take their flight from their matter and heads are separated from their bodies.” Ibn Rushd turned pale, I saw him tremble; he murmured the ritual phrase, “There is no power save in God” for he had understood my allusion [mā ashartu ilayhi].

Later, after our interview, he questioned my father about me, in order to compare the opinion he had formed of me with my father’s and to ascertain whether they coincided or differed. For Averroes was a great master of reflection and philosophical meditation [min arbābi-l fikri wa-l naẓari-l ‘aqliy]. He gave thanks to God, I was told, for having allowed him to live at such a time and permitted him to see a man who had gone into spiritual [retreat] and emerged as I had emerged. “I myself,” he declared, “had said that such a thing was possible, but never met anyone who had actually experienced it. Glory be to God who has let me live at a time distinguished by one of the masters of this experience, one of those who open the locks of His gates. Glory be to God who has accorded me the personal favor of seeing one of them with my own eyes.”

The mystifying telegraphic conversation that Ibn Arabi and Ibn Rushd had during this meeting has received various interpretations; the most satisfying one I have seen is that the conversation was about the question of the possibility of bodily resurrection,⁷ a question over which the peripatetics and orthodox Muslims notably differed. Whatever the interpretation, what is most interesting about the meeting, and Ibn Arabi’s later reflection on it, is its prioritizing the sort of “divine illumination” that Ibn Arabi had acquired over the sort of philosophical reflection on which Ibn Rushd relied. The collection of practices that lead to this kind of illumination is what Ibn Sab’in and Ibn Arabi both called “tahqīq.”

What is tahqīq? You are likely to find this term translated either as “verification”, which etymologically is as direct an English equivalent as you are likely to get, since tahqīq is the verbal noun form of haqqaqa, whose root is h-q-q (“truth”); or translated as “gnosis” (this is a fraught term, but let’s make do with it) since the term is principally used in the philosophical sense which concerns us here by Muslim mystics like Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sab’in. These two translations of the word seem manifestly contradictory: the sort of empiricism suggested by “verification” seems at odds with the sort of mysticism suggested by “gnosis.” But neither of these translations alone will get across what both Ibn Sab’in and Ibn Arabi and their cohort of Islamic philosophers wanted to do with the term, which is to indicate the knowledge of a class of supernormal experiences which, nevertheless, have a systematic, replicable, and even falsifiable character. It would not be too tendentious given this intended usage to say that the best way to define tahqīq is as a science of verifying by positive experience the metaphysical claims of religion, comprising a body of definite claims, theories, revisionable methods, and, inevitably, a unique epistemology and ontology. This can only be a makeshift definition because the subsumption to “science” of this kind of knowledge cannot be anything but analogical and much more has to be said philosophically about just what this mode of knowledge really entails. Of course, much controversy surrounds the epistemology of religious experience itself, including what we grudgingly called “mysticism” (on which I have previously very briefly reflected), but these controversies are akin to those in any other philosophical tradition trying to metaphilosophically justify itself. 

What is important here is that this mode of knowledge is what, in the alternate story I am telling you of the history of Islamic philosophy, becomes the philosophical theme and centrepiece which defines a native Islamic philosophy, namely, “philosophical Sufism.” This is not the only possible form of an indigenous Islamic philosophy, but it is the one which in my estimation has been the most coherent and productive. This approach to philosophizing, which returns priority to Islam, the religion, was set rolling by characters like Ghazali who, in writing like the Munqidh min al-dalal (often in fact compared to Descartes’ Meditations, giving some credence to the parallel between the Cartesian and Ghazalian turns) starts to make a deeply existential case for this new way of philosophizing (and what is philosophy if it does not serve existential ends), and in other writing like the Ihyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn, shows by example how the new philosophy would look in practice. The story writes itself after this turn in a series of books in the mold of the Ihyā’, none more famous (and often contentious) as Ibn Arabi’s Futūhat al-Makīyyah which might just be the summa of the tradition. This is not to say that either Ghazali or the Ihyā’ are completely without precedent (I am only humoring the idea of the Ghazalian turn as a historical device in this essay); inevitably, as with any intellectual history, some characters and some works are selected only as the foreground, but there are always those in the background who it would always be worth saying something about if one had the time and space.

But, lest we get carried away in our bashing of the old philosophy and our valorization of the new, it must be remarked that the emergence of philosophical Sufism did not necessarily mean, as we saw in Ibn Sab’īn, a complete anathema on peripateticism. Aristotle might have been off the mark, but some things he did were useful — for instance, his systematization of logic. So, since as the tradition goes, “Wisdom is the lost property of the [Muslim]; wherever he finds it he is most worthy of taking it,”⁸ some of the proponents of the native Islamic philosophers made use of certain elements of the peripatetic inheritance. For instance, in the kitab al-tafakkur (the book on contemplation) in the Ihyā’, Ghazali introduces the syllogistic method into reflective meditation. But the use of the peripatetic tradition was no longer obsequiously deferent and the appropriation of ideas from it became extremely limited; and in fact some of the proponents of the new philosophy like Ibn Arabi were dubious even about the seemingly innocuous elements. The Islamic world had finally overcome the neurotic scholasticism of the peripatetics and Islamic philosophy could really begin. 

Sometimes, this period of overcoming — the Ghazalian turn — played out dramatically in the life of a single individual, as in the case of Jallaludīn Rumī who is not often read as a philosopher, but who is, in my accounting, in fact one of the major ones. Some readers might know the famous story of how Rumī came to meet with Shams: Rumī, who was philosophically well-studied prior to becoming the famous mystical poet we all know and many of us love, used to deliver lessons in philosophy alongside his lessons on jurisprudence, theology, etc. One day, while delivering a lesson a seeming vagabond comes in and chastises him for wasting his life on mere words and calls him to true knowledge. You can imagine how this pompous young scholar must have felt about this ostensibly disheveled intruder. An altercation ensues and the vagabond throws the young scholar’s books in a nearby river. Dismayed, the young scholar rushes to rescue his books from the river. He fishes them out and, lo!, behold!, the pages are utterly dry and not a single point of ink has bled! The vagabond, having miraculously made his point, again calls the young scholar to true knowledge; it is at that moment the young Rumī becomes Shams’ disciple. The story might be apocryphal but is symbolic of the turn we have been discussing here. If you read Rumī’s discourses (for instance, in his Fihī mā fihī, translated nicely into English as “Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jallaludin Rumi” by W.M. Thackston, Jr) you can still see, in the dialectical form of some of his arguments and in some of the allusions, his philosophical learning, but it is always clear that he has undergone the overcoming which the story indicates.

This is as good a place as any to wrap up the second argument I have been making, namely that the peripatetics were guilty of (at least they were so perceived) a certain kind of neurotic scholasticism which had to be overcome if productive knowledge was to be had — and such criticisms as the “psychological critique” were an indication of the disgruntlement with this scholasticism among a class of sometimes philosophically trained individuals who wanted a new philosophy — and the overcoming of the peripatetic tradition did indeed lead to the emergence of a new philosophy which returned priority to the claims of Islam in a way the peripatetics could not tolerate, even though, as we saw in the ambiguous case of Ibn Rushd, some of them did try. But maybe the point to be taken away from all of this is not just that the content of the peripatetic philosophy was “un-Islamic” (again with this ugly term) but that uncritical and obsequious concession — witting or unwitting — to the claims of any inherited philosophical system cannot, definitionally, be philosophy, because it is not really thinking. 

If the danger of uncritical reception and engagement is not really about peripateticism, then the dangers for the identity of an Islamic philosophy is always live. And indeed, I think many contemporary Muslims pining for philosophical clarity are committing the same vices the Islamicate peripatetics did, putting in place of peripateticism a new scholasticism which frequently takes the form of some variety of Analytic Philosophy. I will give an example which pains me because it requires me to be a bit irreverent to the memory of a man I otherwise admire:

Shabbir Akhtar was a great philosopher. That was his problem. He described, at the beginning of A Faith for All Seasons, that the writing of the book, which well exemplifies his style of philosophizing about Islam, was a very lonely task. I can understand it. Akhtar’s philosophical style is interesting and I think for those Muslims with a foot in academic philosophy, refreshing. But it is neither of the East nor the West, and not in the transcendent sense of the “tree neither Eastern nor Western,”⁹ but in the sense that precisely in trying to be of both East and West, it failed to belong to either. Akhtar’s philosophy was too concerned with Islam to concern the Western academy and too Western to encompass the radical otherness/strangeness¹⁰ of the Islamic worldview and hence to give its claims the sort of epistemic priority we have been saying is characteristic of an actually Islamic philosophy. Now, the reason Akhtar ends up in this philosophical no man’s land is because he appears to suppose that the only thing which counts as philosophy is the sort of thing the “Western” folk are doing; he appears to have succumbed to the claim of that tradition that it has universal privilege and prerogative over all other philosophical systems (sometimes it calls these other systems “wisdom traditions” because the term philosophy is apparently too good for them) — that what it means really to philosophize is to philosophize like this and not like they did down in the Nizamiyya or the zaouia, much like his peripatetic cousins before Ghazali thought that the way to philosophize is like Aristotle did and in no other way. We know he thought this because he accused his Muslim brethren of being “apologists” who have no “extant philosophical tradition” by which to see that their ideas are nothing before philosophical modernity and the challenges to the reasonableness of their thought which it ostensibly presents. It did not seem to have dawned on him at the time of writing that from within a philosophical tradition they might actually be entertaining, those challenges, even if they might require some response (and that much I concede to him), are not meaningful ones. Perhaps I am simply being uncharitable, and he meant that modern Muslims had no such tradition because they have abandoned the philosophical riches of their own cogent philosophical traditions. Perhaps. But I doubt it because his style of philosophizing privileges so many of the assumptions of this rival philosophical tradition and under its pressures, like his peripatetic cousins before him, he dismisses some of the claims of Islamic orthodoxy.

Too many would-be Muslim philosophers have philosophized themselves into non-orthodox positions, sometimes unwittingly because they don’t even know the orthodox positions. This is not a healthy situation and certainly puts the clearly reasonable need for engagement with other philosophies in the wrong place: comparative engagement only starts once you know what the content of your own tradition is — it cannot be slavish deference to the comparator. The false dream that one can philosophize not merely about Islam, but in Islam, in the Analytic or peripatetic mode (or whatever mode “secular” philosophy takes in the historical moment) is one that has sent so many philosophically talented Muslims down wrongheaded paths for centuries. Remarkably, there are still those who are still enamored of that dream. Following a certain conceit of the same Grecian tradition that waylaid al-Farabi and al-Kindi, they insist that “Man is the measure of all things” an axiom eminently at odds with any philosophy that can count as actually Islamic — not that such a philosophy will not have a place for its own kind of humanism. 

The model for philosophizing in Islam is not al-Farabi or al-Kindi and maybe not even Ibn Rushd, but Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Rumī. But according to common wisdom, these latter individuals are theological ideologues not philosophers; if philosophers at all, the assessment goes, they are only so incidentally, mystical theologians first and foremost. That is perhaps true, and that is perhaps entirely the point; Islamic philosophy is always incidental, never intentional. The desire to philosophize intentionally is degenerate even from a secular perspective (just ask Richard Rorty) — it yields artificial philosophical questions and frequently arises from a place where the rubber is suspended over the road; it rarely makes contact with the world of lived experience and thus has nothing to say to that world, because one starts philosophizing as it were from the outside. This is the sort of criticism of secular philosophy that Muslim philosophers like Ghazali have pursued in the past and then offered a unique philosophy starting from actual experience. In this sense, as I have been insisting so far, the Ihyā’, not the Maqāsid, and not even the Tahāfut, is Ghazali’s philosophical masterpiece.

All I’ve just said might be opposed on the grounds that one must give a response to philosophical modernity. The argument goes that the ideological crowd of philosophical modernity, with its mass of secularizing ideas, hems in any attempt at an Islamic philosophy of the kind I have been describing, and some like Shabbir Akhtar think the only way to the other side is through the crowd. And it is no consolation to say that philosophical Sufism insists that if we are ecstatic enough we can leap over the crowd to the other side; one must meet philosophical modernity on its own grounds — so the argument for the Akhtar type of philosophy goes. It is true: philosophical modernity should be contended with. It has certain inexorable powers of “disenchantment”¹¹ that, when left unaddressed, makes futile any attempt at an Islamic philosophy of the kind I have been describing. All that is true. But it should not, as those who make this claim suppose, be contended with by being reasoned with on its own terms because its very concept of reason is unreasonable, not just according to “Muslim apologists” who have no “extant philosophical tradition” by which they might be able to recognize the challenges of reason it presents, but according to critics even within the very tradition of philosophical modernity itself. So much for all of that — much more ought to be said, but that is the task of exactly that native Islamic philosophy continuing the work of the post-Ghazalian cohort.

To close off this section, I would like to do an ironic thing and cite a remark of Muhammad Iqbal’s made at the beginning of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam: the only appropriate attitude for a would-be Islamic philosopher is to “carefully…watch the progress of human thought, and to maintain an independent critical attitude towards it.”¹² It is an ironic citation to produce here because all the irreverent comments I have just made of Akhtar also apply to Iqbal, and perhaps even more so, and the Reconstruction for all its fame (often cited, rarely read) is less a work of Islamic philosophy in the sense I have defined here than it has been taken to be. But, for the sake of covering all bases, I must confess in conclusion that a lot of what I have said of Akhtar here falls apart on inspection of his later works, and I suspect that in his later age Akhtar sobered very much to the prospect of a native Islamic philosophy. Something similar could be said of Iqbal, who has often been described as almost two different individuals: the poet-philosopher Iqbal and the formal philosopher Iqbal – the former is far closer to articulating a native Islamic philosophy, but the latter, the Iqbal of the Reconstruction, is much closer to the sort of philosophizing I have been criticizing here. Which of these was the real Iqbal? That is likely a question with an indefinite answer, but I am often impressed by certain indications of an internal struggle in the poetic Iqbal which suggest that the poetic Iqbal, and not the formal philosophy Iqbal, was the real Iqbal; in the Asrar-e-khudi, for instance, he says of himself: “For a long time he laboured and sweated, / But philosophy brought no wine to his cup.” In the place of this futile philosophy, he wished to pursue a sort of devotional thinking that could ostensibly lead him out of what in the same poem he calls the “wilderness of speculation”; the result was the philosophical worldview of the poetic Iqbal.

At any rate, it might still be useful to answer a question an exasperated critic might ask at this point: “If Akhtar and Iqbal are not Islamic philosophers, who is?Are there works or writers that fit your rather “parochial” label?” I will answer this question, but before that I would like to introduce the final argument which I promised at the outset I was going to make. I said that the third reason why Islamic philosophy actually begins after Ghazali is that much of the previous stuff was not productive for Islam. What does this mean? It is essentially a claim that summarizes the first two points (which is why I said depending on how you count I might be making three or two arguments): an Islamic philosophy is one that serves the purposes which constitute the community of Muslims as a community. al-Farabi and al-Kindi did nothing to further any such purposes, and might in fact have attempted to undermine it. Ghazali’s Ihyā’ did and still does, and speaking from personal experience, the writings of Ibn Arabi and Rumī still do. I do not know how to precisify this definition of productivity any more than this. The sort of works and writers that count as Islamic philosophy are those which allow their readers or hearers to come into the fullness of the tradition of Islam no matter where they might be, in the midst of philosophical modernity’s ideological crowd or the Sahel in the 18th century. Now what recent individuals or works fit this mold? Depending on how recent “recent” is for you, here are some: Bediuzamman Said Nursi whose oeuvre contains a native Islamic philosophy of science that is sophisticatedly well-developed for its time; Seyyed Hossein Nasr whose writing delineates a native Islamic philosophical anthropology and environmental philosophy; Syed Naquib al Attas who develops a philosophical ethics native to Islam; and the singular most important work of Islamic philosophy written in the twenty first century (I might be exaggerating just a bit) is the aphoristic Contentions of Abdal Hakim Murad. This is a schematic list — it is not meant to be exhaustive, but inductive: you know by instinct who else might fit in this train of names. There are a host of young Muslim philosophers who could be added to the list, some of whom may not much be thought of as philosophers: Hassan Spiker , Tom Facchine, Shoaib Malik, who is trying to develop a philosophy of science responsive to both Islamic theology and the empirical evidence, etc. I am not here to do an extensive infomercial, so this should suffice. I must say though, dampening the mood a bit, that a good deal of the work done by some of those just mentioned mostly focuses on confronting philosophical modernity in a way that does not concede the ground, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but we can’t keep fighting fires — if we have nothing positive to say, it won’t be much of a philosophy and will only count as skeptical discourse. 

We have come a long way since the elevator ride with our historian friend. It is now time for us to get off on our own floor. In that time we have managed a coup of sorts — we have managed to upend the entire story we were told: where that story claimed that Islamic philosophy ends with Ghazali, we are now adamant that it only begins then! Often the ideal in academic disputes of this sort is to avoid one extreme and find the middle ground — not to go to the other extreme. And yet that is exactly where we have gone. And the reason we (I keep saying “we” because I am hoping that even this late in the essay I still have you on-side)  have done this is because this is no mere academic essay-mongering, but a sort of dogmatics: the only way to do an actually Islamic philosophy is to insist on the Islam — no compromise allowed. This sounds bad for any hope of the sort of universalism that philosophy should apparently have. But the fact is that there are no universal philosophies¹³ — there are no “views from nowhere.”

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Works Cited:

1. Anna Ayse Akasoy, “Ibn Sab‘īn’s Sicilian Questions: the Text, its Sources, and their Historical Context”. Al-Qanṭara 29(1):115-146. [↩]
2. Or I should say “one of the…” [↩]
3. Ibn Sab’in broadly criticizes Ghazali of being unstable in his commitments (“one moment,” he says in the Budd al-‘Arif, “a Sufi, the next a [peripatetic] philosopher…”), to be all talk and no substance, and to have been merely deluded in his mystical insights. It is not our job here to pass judgment on either, so let us pass this internecine conflict over and let the family solve its issues beyond closed doors. For the rest of the essay we will present both as members of one happy family, facing the (“rationalist” philosophical) world together.

   But, for whatever it is worth, I think Ibn Sab’in to be grossly mistaken about Ghazali. [↩]

4. Interestingly these efforts are precisely one of those elements of his philosophy whose attempted translation into the Medieval European context was anything but frictionless — his attempt to reconcile revelation and scripture resulted in the chimera of double-truth theory among Christian Scholastics like Siger of Brabant, because (and I cannot go into an argument for this point here) they did not appreciate the context of theological and scriptural debates in the Islamic world about ta’wil that underlay his work. [↩]
5. This is the estimation of Claude Addas in her biography of Ibn Arabi, Ibn ʻArabī, ou, La quête du soufre rouge, translated by Peter Kingsley as The Quest for the Red Sulphur (The Islamic Texts Society: Golden Palm Series, 1993), a great work of scholarship and a narrative delight. [↩]
6. The following translation is adapted from an original by Henry Corbin in turn reproduced in Steffen Stelzer ‘Decisive Meetings: Ibn Rushd, Ibn ‘Arabi, and the Matter of Knowledge’ Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 16, Averroës and the Rational Legacy in the East and the West (1996). [↩]
7. See here: https://sufi-tavern.com/sufi-doctrine/dr-averroes-i-presume/. [↩]
8. This is often reported through Abu Huraira (RA) as a Hadith, for instance by Tirmidhī (yes, that Tirmidhī), but its provenance is spurious; but the attitude it suggests is regarded as well-founded even by those who question its authenticity. [↩]
9. Q 24.35. [↩]
10. To extend the analogy of the transcendent tree of Surah Nur: that tree is often identified with the paradisiacal tree “Touba” which is possibly, according to some commentators, the subject of that famous Hadith which speaks of the radical strangeness of Islam and congratulates those who embody this strangeness with the statement “…so Touba [which is also homonymous with an Arabic word for ‘congratulations’] to the strangers…”. [↩]
11. Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age”. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007. [↩]
12. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. [↩]
13. (To advertise them again) Just ask Tom Facchine or Hassan Spiker, who make this point constantly in response to the false universalisms of some of the philosophical traditions that today parade as the universal “view from nowhere”. [↩]