Date Posted: Monday, March 01, 2004

It is proper to say that the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic became a movement toward the end of the second/eighth century because of its massive programs and the speed with which its materials were digested and incorporated into Islamic culture. The process was aided by Christians who converted to Islam, as well as by those who sought fortune and prosperity in the new order Islam had established in the Near East. These were the instruments of that process. The movement was prompted by the new converts' questioning, as well as by that of those who remained Christians and countered the missionary efforts of Muslims with arguments drawn from Greek philosophy. To respond adequately to them, it was necessary that the Muslims learn these arguments, discover their underlying postulates and logic, and use them against their opponents. A third factor contributing to the rise of Hellenistic philosophy among Muslims was the fact that philosophy was not unrelated to the medical and natural sciences, which the Muslims avidly sought. The texts of both science and philosophy were intertwined, and were often included in the same work or manuscript, following each other as chapters in the same systematic work.  It was intellectually difficult, if not impossible, to separate them from each other. The Mu'tazilah were the first to seek, to study, and to use the philosophical legacy of the Greeks.  The Muslim intelligentsia followed their example.

ABU YA'QUB AL KINDI

Al Kindi (d. 251/866) was the first Muslim to elaborate a system of thought based on the logic of Greek philosophy.  It was he who first established an Arabic lexicon of philosophical terms and laid down the definitions of the various categories. To this purpose he devoted a whole book, Risalah fi Hudud al Ashya' wa Rusumiha, the first treatise in epistemology and logic. He was also the first to realize the gap between Islamic and Arabic thought, on the one hand, and the Greek ideas which he introduced on the other, and hence the first to seek to bridge that gap. Between religion and philosophy, between the Shari’ah and Greek logic, he claimed, there is a coincidence of purpose despite the difference in method. He defined philosophy as "the establishment of what is true and right," and argued that both religion and philosophy are equally necessary and legitimate, complementing each other. Contradiction or variance between them is never real, never final, but always apparent. It arises from application of the wrong method; for each kind of human pursuit there is a methodology proper to it which if violated or exchanged will result in contradiction. Al Kindi inclined toward the Mu'tazilah but he accepted the Gnostic doctrine of illumination as the proper method to arrive at religious truth.

IKHWAN AL SAFA

The Ikhwan al Safa (c. 313 - 363/927 - 975), literally the Brethren of Purity, was an association of men founded in Basrah about 350/961 whose Rasa’il (Treatises) were known C. A.H. 375. There is wide disagreement about their identity and their projected role in society. The identity of the Ikhwan – authors of the treatises, the Rasa’il Ikhwan al Safa-has been established by diaries of Abu Hayyan al Tawhidi (414/1023), a contemporary of the Ikhwan. These diaries were edited by Ahmad Amin and published under the title of Al Imta’ wa al Mu’anasah in Cairo (1939-1944). Al Tawhidi mentions Zayd ibn Rifa'ah, Abu Sulayman Muhammad ibn Ma'shar al Bisti (alias al Maqdisi), Abu al Hasan 'Ali ibn Harun al Zanjani, Abu Ahmad al Mihrajani, and al ‘Awqi as members of the fraternity and authors of the Rasa’il which he read, took to his teacher, and discussed with them and others in A.H. 373. According to the Rasa’il, the Ikhwan were many and widespread; yet their organization was close-knit. "We have Ikhwan and friends among the notables and virtuous, scattered all over the country. Some are of royal blood, some are viziers, governors, men of letters; others are noblemen, merchants, 'ulama, jurists, artisans and their children. To every class of these we have delegated a worthy and wise Akh (singular of Ikhwan) to serve and counsel them." On this issue, al Qifti (646/1249) wrote: "As the authors have not disclosed their identity, people disagreed about them. Some said that the Rasa’il were the work of some descendants of  'Ali; others said they were the work of Mu'tazili philosophers of the first period.  None were able to establish their claim by any manner of means; for it is all guesswork." Confirming al Qifti’s insight, modern scholarship has ruled such claims out on the grounds that the persons in question all lived and died before a number of poets and thinkers (Ibn al Rumi, al Mutanabbi, Abu al 'Ala' al Ma’arri) whose authorship of many verses and quotations in the Rasa’il is beyond question, and on the evidence which the discovery of al Tawhidi’s diaries has brought.

The Ikhwan sought to achieve two tasks: first, to recover in the main body of Islam, the ummah, its original Islamic ethical significance; and second, to enable the Shari’a, by infusing it with liberal rationalism, to guide a recalcitrant, awakened human intellect that refuses to adopt imperatives without inner, personal, rational conviction. We have it on the authority of Abu Hayyan al Tawhidi that the Ikhwan came together to "elaborate a philosophy which, they claimed, brought them close to God's grace. The Shari’a, they said, had been mixed up with falsehood and there was no way to purify it except through philosophy because only philosophy can give doctrinal truth and practical wisdom. For when Greek philosophy is harmonized with the Arab Shari’a, there is perfection.

The discovery of al Tawhidi’s diaries shed further light on the nature of the Ikhwan's argument with the traditionalists. They speak of the Ikhwan as regarding the Shari’a as medicine for the sick and a means to restore to them their lost health. They considered philosophy as medicine for the healthy, meant to preserve health and enable man to acquire virtue and prepare him for divine life and heavenly eternity.  Thus, according to the Ikhwan, philosophy grants the Shari’a a place in its scheme though the latter repudiates the former. With Shari’a man would come closer to God's grace by mere obedience; but with wisdom he wins that grace by grasping God's power and providence in the cosmos. It is a proof of God's goodness that there exist two mutually complementing ways for salvation, reason and revelation. Thus each would add to the excellence of the other: philosophy by giving the pious proof of the truth, conviction, and wisdom; and revelation by giving the wise piety, temperance, and love of God.

The Ikhwan accepted Greek dualism as far as the nature of man was concerned, but they assigned to body and soul functions in accordance with the imperatives of the Shari’ah and the desiderata of Islam. "Food for the body and knowledge for the soul" was for them a sort of war cry. To knowledge and its pursuit, the Ikhwan assigned first place among the virtues. Not one of all the duties imposed by the Shari’ah was more necessary, worthier, or closer to God, once He and His prophets were recognized, than knowledge and its pursuit and propagation. This enthusiasm for knowledge carried the Ikhwan to a perfect Socratism where knowledge, the good, and virtue are identified with one another. Knowledge is declared to bring in its train every good virtue and moral and material advantage. It makes the miser generous and gives the weak strength, the lowly, grandeur, the proud, humility.

Following their allegorical interpretation of the Qur'an, the Ikhwan moreover identified Iblis, or Satan, with evildoing, and defined evildoing as blind belief in false opinions without knowledge or insight. They contrasted the good soul with the evil soul, which does all its bad work without thought or deliberation. They concluded from such comparison that all ethical deeds and moral acts attributed to the rational soul are the results of that soul's true knowledge and beautiful belief; that all true knowledge and belief is the result of ijtihad (creative intellectual effort) and deliberation. To the man who seeks salvation, they counseled a self-purification through the washing off of false opinions and deliverance from the darkness of untruth. For education, that is, enlightenment, is the main – nay, the only – business of society and state. Knowledge should be taught to brother and neighbor, for it is the only medium of interpersonal moral relationships. The Ikhwan's neighborly love consisted not in charitable and altruistic sacrifices or in desiring ethical results in the persons of others, but first and foremost in educating one's neighbor, in bringing to him knowledge, man's most precious possession. To teach and educate and spread knowledge is the very essence of everything good. The Ikhwan were particularly interested in teaching the young, because these are the "pure in heart" and "anxious to win paradise" and "beginners in science." The older people, on the other hand, are "blindly attached to their sect, overconfident and prejudiced." They emphasized that teaching should proceed "in stages in proportion to the assimilative capacity of the candidate, with kindness and sympathy.”

The Ikhwan endeavored to cover all the sciences of their times and to organize in a summa all the departments of knowledge bound together by a single structure. The Rasa’il, fifty-three in number, covered all the fields from mineralogy, botany, and gynecology to ethics and religious laws .6 That the unifying structure is ethical is obvious. Even numbers were studied not as pure quantity but as interpreting natural phenomena, and this significance of number was cosmos-pervading. The sciences were classified by order of their ethical significance, the highest being that which brings man knowledge of the divine kingdom, and the lowest, that which instructs him about objects in this world. The animal kingdom was ordered on an evolutionary basis, but not with regard to the physical characteristics of the species, in the manner of Darwin, but to the order of rank of the values each species had realized. Thus for their fidelity, memory, and nobility of disposition, the horse and the elephant rank far higher, and therefore closer to man, than the apes despite the closer physical resemblance of the latter. By order of the avenues of sense and thought leading to them, the sciences were thought to be empirical (having to do with the reports of sense), discursive (having to do with pure thought such as logic and mathematics), rational (dealing knowledge of ethics and values and the divine world-law), and illuminative (bestowed by God and directed to His nature and to the cosmic mysteries). Since the last science cannot be sought and is the prerogative of prophets, man's energies should be directed to the highest possible, to ethical knowledge.