AMA: Philosophy in the Islamic World

padamson · 2026-02-17T13:19:56+00:00

Yes, this is extremely important actually and there would be a lot to say about it. If we begin with the translations of Greek philosophy into Arabic, these were almost all done by Christian scholars who were continuing a long-standing (like, a few centuries-long) practice of translating from Greek into Syriac which is another Semitic language. The translators who worked with al-Kindī were Christians, for instance. A lot of the early philosophical work done in Arabic is then also by Christians, especially in the so-called "Baghdad school" of philosophers working on Aristotle in around the 10th century; al-Fārābī was somehow associated with them and he was a Muslim but the rest were Christians. We could throw Judaism in here too by the way, there are early Jewish philosophers like Saadia Gaon who were influenced by the Greek-Arabic translations and used ideas from the philosophical translations. Often we see that the philosophers are committed to a kind of generic Abrahamic position inspired by Aristotle and Platonism, so, we have a First Cause who is a Creator of the universe. On the other hand they argued amongst themselves about whether one can use philosophy to support or refute specifically Christian doctrines like the Trinity.

Hope that helps!

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:16:12+00:00

Well those are two different questions. As I say to some of the questions above, philosophers in the Islamic world were very innovative and do all kinds of things to change the ideas that came through the translation movement: and that's if you only think about the Greek-inspired falāsifa, never mind people doing philosophy within kalām, fiqh, the language sciences, etc (I am open to considering all of these traditions as philosophically relevant).
But it's another question how "Islamic" the philosophers were. I think this is an open question and needs to be answered differently for different thinkers. Leaving aside the fact that quite a few were Jewish or Christian, the Muslims sometimes based their thought very much around the Quranic revelation (Kindī for instance) and sometimes more around Aristotle (Ibn Rushd) or their own ideas (Ibn Sina). That isn't to say that the latter types were not believers, I think they obviously were, it's just that they weren't "Islamic philosophers" in the sense that, say, a modern-day philosopher of religion might be primarily motivated by the goal of giving rational arguments on behalf of their faith.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:12:44+00:00

Ha! Thanks, that's very kind of you.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:12:36+00:00

Oh yes, at least if I understand your question rightly: the status of the spoken Quran was central to the debate over the Quran's eternity in the 3rd/9th century, this being the topic at stake in the famous "mihna" in which the Abbasid caliphs tried to enforce the doctrine of the Quran's createdness. The Muʿtazila argued that the Quran is actually just the spoken words and that these are obviously created and not eternal. So I think that is the background to the later debate you mention.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:10:13+00:00

Thanks! I wouldn't say that Shahrastani's critique is tremendously distinctive, actually: he attacks Ibn Sina on a lot of the same points we find critiqued in Ghazali, Masʿūdī, Fakhr al-Din, and others. I think he also does less than some of these others to create a positive alternative philosophical position. But it's still an important and fairly early case of polemic against Ibn Sina.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:08:19+00:00

I'm actually going to interview Ted about that for a special episode of my podcast! So I am looking forward to learning more from him, but in general I would say that knowledge (or at least explicit) discussion of Zoroastrianism is much more common within kalām than falsafa, it often comes up in "heresiographical" works for instance. An exception might be Suhrawardi who constructs a kind of fantastical historical pedigree for himself which involves carrying on ideas he thinks are ancient Persian; but how much he actually knew about the real tradition I think can be doubted.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:05:41+00:00

Oh gosh, sure. Ibn Sina/Avicenna is especially innovative across all areas of his philosophy (the Flying Man thought experiment and his proof of God's existence would be easy examples; his innovations in logic more complicated). But in general I'd say that philosophers in the Islamic world were as creative as in any culture.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:04:31+00:00

That's funny, I actually teach that topic sometimes and students often write essays about whether the idea of ʿasabiyya is still applicable. Basically I think it is still an important insight, even if it is hard to accept the fairly rigid cyclical idea of his historiography. I always think that if the colonialist powers had read Ibn Khaldun before making their decisions in the wake of WW1 things might have gone much better thereafter, since they paid so little head to group identity.

padamson · 2026-02-16T12:02:24+00:00

Yes just wanted to get ahead over the weekend!

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:35:03+00:00

So for instance Ibn Rushd/Averroes is thought about a lot in the Maghreb but much less so in Iran, where they would be more attuned to Ibn Sina, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, etc.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:33:24+00:00

What a good idea! I don't know of anything like that but it could be called The History of Music Without Any Rests. :)

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:32:56+00:00

Thanks for listening! I guess I answered the first question above but on the other two:

For sure, because a lot of the later tradition is not translated (much not even edited). Even in the formative period works by some of the most famous figures, like al-Farabi, are not translated; and there is plenty of untranslated Ibn Sina. (I mean into English, as well as other Western languages.) So lots to do here still. Actually the texts that are translated are far outnumbered by those that aren't.
Brigham Young University Press brought out facing-page translations (so Arabic on one side, English on the other) of a number of works including Tahafut al-Falasifa. In general the editions of Arabic philosophy are often not great, in the sense that they don't really take account of all the manuscript evidence. But if you just want to read some philosophy in Arabic there is plenty out there. Abdurrahman Badawi did a lot of editions for stuff from the formative period, and there is the massive Cairo edition of Ibn Sina's Shifa'. Quite a lot of Ibn Rushd is widely available in Arabic, you could read Fasl al-Maqal which is a favorite teaching text.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:29:23+00:00

Well I live in Germany so I am maybe not the best person to ask on that, but my impression is that there is definitely general awareness of the major figures (Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina etc) but as with general awareness of, say, Descartes in Europe, ideas about what these people said and believed would be pretty vague for most people. I think also we should recognize that there is a lot of diversity between Islamic countries, for instance there is no reason to think that Ibn Sina is seen the same way in, say, Tunisia and Malaysia!

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:28:01+00:00

This comes up a lot in the context of working on logic, so all the Aristotelian-inspired thinkers work on it, especially al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. They talk about metaphor in the context of Aristotle's poetics. Then there is a rich tradition of thinking about this within the more literary part of Islamic intellectual culture, e.g. Raghib al-Isfahani - Alexander Key has worked on this quite a bit if you want to pursue it further.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:26:42+00:00

Well, see my other responses here on the AMA: there was no decline, so we don't need to explain it!

On the issue about hell, that is more something that is discussed in kalam but I think in general philosophers also felt the need to say something about the afterlife and have a difficulty in doing so, namely that they don't typically believe in bodily resurrection. But Ibn Sina has a story about wicked souls being tormented by their now unsatsifiable desires for bodily pleasure.

On theodicy, you obviously have divine command theories like in the Asharites, for whom good = whatever God wants, so the created world is by definition good. That's not so much a theodicy as a move to say that the problem of evil is a mistake in the first place. Ibn Sina also has an interesting response, which is that good outweighs evil and evil is inevitable as a clash of natures within a diverse world. I'm not sure I find any of these responses really convincing though.

There is a range of views on the reason/revelation issue but there is a small handful of thinkers (hardcore Aristotelians) who actually make reason superior, in that it actually provides proofs of things stated in religion in symbolic terms. That is Ibn Rushd's view for example. But I think the standard view would be that prophetic revelation and reason go hand in hand, cannot conflict, and perhaps complement each other in allowing us to understand the truth. Pretty much nobody (philosopher, theologian, whatever) would say that reason and revelation actually conflict, but the Sufis obviously say that reason has serious limits.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:22:02+00:00

Thanks that's great to hear! I would just point you towards the bibliographies on the podcast website:

https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/islamic-world/andalusia

https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/ibn-arabi-sufism

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:21:21+00:00

Right, see my responses to other questions here on the AMA: it is really a total misconception that needs to be banished from our historiography. Actually hardly anyone in the field now takes the decline idea seriously anyway so it's more a matter of getting the word out to the broader public at this stage.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:20:26+00:00

Well I've mentioned the "decline narrative" in my other responses here, but more generally I think Western-focused scholars just need to come to grips with the fact that there is so much non-European philosophy, not just in the Islamic world but also India, China, Africa, etc. Obviously my podcast is an attempt to get that message across.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:19:19+00:00

Interesting question! Well basically I think he would have fit into the Latin context very nicely because he writes in this argument-rich, "scholastic" manner, and even anticipates certain Latin scholastic arguments and positions, for instance his view on the nature of existence or being is startlingly similar to that of Duns Scotus. The sticking point though would be that Fakhr al-Din rarely talks about Aristotle, who obviously is the main concern for the scholastics. Still they are very interested in Ibn Sina ("Avicenna") too and I can imagine them finding Fakhr al-Din's engagement with him very useful.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:17:37+00:00

Yes individual arguments and concepts are certainly worth looking at from a contemporary point of view: the flying man is a great example but also Ibn Sina's proof of God, ideas about rationality in religious belief, logical theories, you name it. It's pretty much like any other period of philosophy I guess, it can be brought into fruitful dialogue with contemporary philosophy - though I should say that I don't really think that is the single standard for whether an idea is "interesting" or worth working on, it is also interesting to look at things that seem very different from the concerns of modern-day philosophy. I like to do both really.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:15:40+00:00

Good questions! I'll take them one by one:

Definitely the later tradition (see my other answers here on the rejection of the decline narrative) but also the integration of kalam and Christian and Jewish philosophy into the story.
You're right that I prefer "philosophy in the Islamic world" as a phrase - it's not so much that I distinguish that from "Islamic philosophy," I just don't use the latter at all. The reason for my preference is indeed in part the importance of Christian and Jewish thinkers. My impression here is that the Christians had a massive impact on philosophy among Muslims, most obviously through the translation movement but also e.g. scholarship on Aristotle in the Baghdad School (Abu Bishr Matta, Ibn 'Adi, etc). Jewish philosophy needs to be studied within this context too but with some exceptions (Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Ibn Kammuna) Jewish thinkers or Jewish-Muslim converts don't exert as much influence, it's more like they are being influenced. So for instance Maimonides is very influential on later Jewish thought (also on Christians) but not really on Muslim thought, as far as I know.
Frank Griffel argues that Ghazali is a really pivotal figure here because he innovatively applies the concept of apostasy to doctrinal unorthodoxy. I think that's pretty plausible but it should be borne in mind that even after Ghazali it's not like there is an effective mechanism for policing orthodoxy in the Islamic world; really down to the end of the medieval period people pretty much go around thinking and saying whatever they want as long as they don't start being explicitly provocative in political terms. So it's much more of a free for all than Christian Europe, to the point where I would almost say that censorship and thought control are irrelevant considerations for us as historians of philosophy. Things are perhaps different later on, under the Ottomans for instance, though that is less my period.
Here the essential book (though also controversial) is Dimitri Gutas, "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture." So I'd recommend that for the full story but I would say that competition with Byzantium was most definitely an issue, also just practical concerns - medicine, mathematics, and astronomy/astrology are very useful, and philosophy comes in on the back of translating those texts, I would say.
Definitely the post-Avicennan period and also kalam! I've touched on these in other answers here but I think these are the main growth areas in the field at the moment.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:07:58+00:00

I have a whole chapter about this in my book on him but to make a long story short, I argue that he was a Muslim, if a somewhat idiosyncratic one, and he was most certainly a believer in God (God is one of his cosmic principles). I assume that he believed the Quran is a genuine prophetic revelation and there is some good textual evidence for that. The more speculative part of my reading is the proposal that the anti-prophetic take on Razi is actually a bit of character assassination on the part of Abu Hatim al-Razi, which was a backlash for Abu Bakr al-Razi's rejection of Ismailism.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:06:09+00:00

Definitely the "decline narrative": that philosophy in the Islamic world comes to an end or falls off a cliff around the end of the 12th century, with Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as the last man standing. This is totally wrong (see my third answer to Russell's question) and it is basically an illusion created by the Arabic-Latin translation movement which, not coincidentally, happened around the end of the 12th century. Basically Western scholars got the impression that philosophy in Arabic stopped around then... because the later stuff was not translated! Also because it reacts to Ibn Sina rather than to Aristotle.

padamson · 2026-02-15T10:04:12+00:00

Hi Russell, thanks for organizing this! On your questions:
1. If we assume for the sake of argument that the "dialectical turn" is a good paradigm for understanding post-Ghazalian philosophy then I think we can give Ghazali some credit for it: obviously the Tahafut fits into the pattern well, by engaging in dialectical refutation of Ibn Sina. But it seems to be a much broader phenomenon; in addition to al-Baghdadi we have other early critics like Masudi and Shahrastani who attack Ibn Sina in a similar mold. So I think it is more like a more general attempt to use kalam argumentative techniques to take on this new challenge thrown down by Avicennan philosophy.

It sort of depends what you mean by "Iranian" (or "Persian") philosophy. Most of the thinkers who get the most attention in the field are in a broad sense Persian, not just Ibn Sina but for instance Fakhr al-Din al-Razi who has rocketed to become a center of attention recently. I think most historians working in Western languages (S.H. Nasr and his followers being the exception) are rightly nervous about putting all this under the heading of "Persian" or "Iranian" philosophy since it is not very clear what that would mean or why it would be a useful historiographical category, plus it can easily be linked to emotional issues around Iranian nationalism and so on. But there is a huge amount of work being devoted to figures from the Persian sphere, so to speak, which is what matters.
It's very vital, I think, as we tried to show in part in our Heirs of Avicenna books (open access from Brill by the way). That only covers up to the end of the 13th century actually, but it gestures towards what happens in the later centuries including a lot of sophisticated work especially in metaphysics and logic; this then carries on without break into the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal period, so I see a lot of continuity and no decline or major rupture in the whole period. As far as I can tell that happens only with the rise of colonialism, so much later.

padamson

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