Henry Corbin – History of lslamic Philosophy
Foreword
In undertaking the present study I had no predecessor, and a few lines
are therefore needed in explanation of its title and structure .
1 . First and foremost, we speak of ‘Islamic philosophy’-not, as
has been customary ever since the :Middle Ages, of ‘Arab philosophy ‘ .
T o b e sure, the prophet o f Islam was an Arab from Arabia; written
Arabic is the language of the Quranic Revelation, the liturgical language
of Prayer, the language and the conceptual tool employed by Arabs
and non-Arabs alike in the construction of one of the most extensive
literatures in the world : the literature expressing the culture of lslam.
Neverthele s s , the meaning of an ethnic designation evolves with the
centuri e s . Today, the term ‘ Arab ‘, both in common parlance and in
official usage, has reference to a specific ethnic , national and political
concept, which coincides neither with the religious concept of ‘Islam’
nor with the boundaries of its universe.
The Arab or Arabicized p eoples are in fact no more than a tiny fraction of the Islamic world in its entirety.
The ecumenism of ‘Islam’ as a religious concept can be neither
transferred to, nor confined within, the limits of a secular ethnic or
national concept.
This is self-evident to anyone who has lived in a non-Arab Muslim country.
It has been and could be maintained, of cours e, that the term ‘Arab
philosophy ‘ is to be understood simply as referring to a philosophy
written in the Arabic language, that is to say , in the written Arabic which even in our own day is still the liturgical bond both between the non-Arab members of the Islamic community, and between the different parts of the Arab world, each of which is characterized by its particular Arabic dialect.
Unfortunately, this ‘linguistic’ definition is both inadequate and wide of the mark .
In accepting it, we would no longer know where to class Iranian thinkers such as the Ismaili philos opher Nasir-i Khusraw (eleventh century) or Afdal al-Din Kashani (thirteenth century), a pupil ofNasir al-Din Tusi, whose works are all written in Persian-not to speak of all tho s e who, from Avicenna and al-Suhrawardi down to IVlir Damad (seventeenth century ), Hadi Sabzavari (nineteenth century ) and our c ontemporaries , write some times
i n Persian and s ometime s i n Arabic .
The Persian language itself has never ceas ed to play a role as the language of culture (even as a ‘liturgical’ language among the Ismailis of Pamir, for example ) .
D escartes , Spinoza, Kant and Hegel wrote some of their treatiess in
Latin, but are not therefore classed as ‘Latin’ or ‘Roman’ authors .
In order, therefore, to give a name to the world of thought that forms
the subj ect of this book , we must find a designation which is both
broad enough to preserve the spiritual ecumenism of the c oncept of
‘ Islam ‘ , and at the same time maintains the concept ‘ Arabic ‘ at the
level of propheti c inspiration at which it made its appearanc e in history
with the Quranic Revelation.
Without prejudging the opinions or the ‘orthodoxy’ that call into question the ‘Muslim’ quality of one or other of our phil osophers , we will be speaking of ‘Islami c philosophy ‘ as of a philosophy who s e development, and who s e mo dalities, are essentially linked to the religious and s piritual fact of Islam : a philos ophy whose existence is proof that, contrary to what has b e e n unjustly claimed, canon law (fiqh) alone is neither an ade quate nor a decisive expression oflslam.
- It follows that the c oncept of lslamic philosophy cannot b e confined
within the schema-long traditional in our handbooks of the history
of philosophy-which preserves only the names of the few great
thinkers of lslam who were known to medieval scholasticism in Latin
translation.
Certainly the translation of Arabic works into Lati n, at Tol edo and in Sicily, was a cultural development of prime importance ; but one which i s radically incapable of denoting the general orientation which allows one to gras p the meaning and development of philosophical meditation in Islam.
It is profoundly untrue to say that this m editation c ame to an end with the death of Averroes in 1198 .
B el ow , at the end of the first chapter ofthis study, we will attempt to explain what it was that actually c ame to an end at the time ofhis death.
The work of the philosopher of C 6rdoba, translated into Latin, gave Averroism to the West, and this swamped what has been called ‘Latin Avicennism’.
In the East, and particularly in Iran, Averroism passed unnoti ced, and
al-Ghazali ‘s critique ofphilos ophy was never regarded as having put
an end to the tradition inaugurated by Avicenna.
3 . The significance and continuance of philos ophi c al meditation in
Islam can be truly grasped only so long as we do not attempt to see
it, at any price , a s the exact equivalent of what we in the West have
for our part called ‘philos ophy’ over the last few centuries .
Even the terms falsafah and faylasuf, which derive from the transcription of the Greek terms and go back to the Peripatetics and neo-Platonists of the
first centuries of Islam, are not the exact equivalents of our own concepts of ‘philos ophy’ and ‘philos opher’ .
The clear-cut distinction which exists in the West between ‘philos ophy ‘ and ‘theology ‘ goes back to medieval scholasticism, and it pre supposes a processof ‘secularization’ the idea of which could not exist in Islam, primarily because Islam has never experienced the phenomenon of the Church, with all its implications and consequences .
A s the ensuing pages will make clear, the term hikmah is the equivalent of the Greek sophia, and the term hikmat ilahlyah is the literal equivalent of the Greek theosophia. Metaphysics is generally defined as being concerned with the ilahiyat, the Divinalia.
The term ‘ilm ilahi (scientia divina) cannot and should not be translated by the word theodicy. Muslim historians , from al-Shahrastani in the twelfth
century to Qutb-al-Din Ashkivari in the seventeenth, tak e the view
that the wisdom of the ‘Greek sages ‘ was itself als o derived from the
‘Cave of the lights of prophecy ‘ .
Hence if we merely transpo s e to Islam the question of the relationship between philosophy and religion as this has been traditionally established in the West, our enquiry is lopsided, because then we take into account only one aspect of the situation.
To be sure, philosophy in Islam has confronted more than one difficult situation, but the difficulties were not the s ame as those confronted in the Christian world. Philosophical enquiry (tahqiq) in Islam was most ‘ at home ‘ where the obj ect of meditation was the fundamental fact of prophecy and of the prophetic Revelation, with the hermeneutical problems and situation that this fact implies .
Thus philosophy as sumes the form of ‘prophetic philosophy’ . This is why ,
in the pres ent study, pride of place is given to the two main aspe cts
of Shiite prophetic philosophy :
Twelver lmamism, and lsmailism.
Recent res e arch concerning both of thes e has not yet been condens ed
into a study of this type .
Our information has been obtained not from the ‘heresiographers ‘, but directly from the sources .
Correspondingly, it is not possible to speak of hikmah in Islam without speaking of mysticism-without speaking, that is to s ay, of Sufism both from the point of view of its spiritual experience and from mat of its speculative theosophy, which has its roots in Shiite es oteri cism.
As we shall s e e , al -Suhrawardi and, after him, the whole school
of ishraqiyun directed their efforts to uniting philosophical enquiry with
p ers onal spiritual realization. In Islam above all, the history of phil osophy
and the history of spirituality are inseparable .
4 . As regards the pres e nt study, we have b e en constrained to keep
within narrow limits . It has proved impossible to devote to the explanation of certain problems, enc ountered among certain thinkers, all the consideration which they demand.
Neverthele s s , as we are dealing mainly with doctrines that are very little known, if not entirely unknown, and as the following pages are addressed not j ust to the Orientalist but to the philos opher in general , we could not merely allude to things or confine ourselves to dictionary references .
We trust that the necessary minimum has been said.
Nee dless to say, the epochs in the history of Islamic philosophy annot, save by a verbal artifice, be subjected to our usual system of dividing the history of philosophy-and history in general-into three periods which we call Antiquity, the l\1iddle Age s , and modern times .
It would be equally inappropri ate to say that the l\1iddle Ages have
continued down to our day, for the very notion of the l\1iddle Ages
presupposes a vision of history themati zed according to a particular
perspective .
There are ways more serious and lasting whereby to define a ‘type of thinking’ than mere chronological references , and in Islam certain distinct types ofthought have p ersisted from the b eginning down to our time .
Furthermore , among our Islamic thinkers the question of division into periods has b een concretized in a form that corresponds to their own particular perspective-a form not unrelated to their representation of the cycles of prophecy . Qutb al-Din Ashkivari, for example , divides his history of thinkers and spiritual m en into three great cycles : the thinkers prior to Islam, the thinkers of Sunni Islam, and the thinkers of Shiite Islam. And we in our turn cannot impose upon them a chronological schema imported from a foreign world.
We have consequently distinguished between the following three
periods :
(a) The first peri od tak e s us from the beginning up to the death of Averroes (595/1198) . In some respects, this period has remained to date the least insufficiently known.
When we reach its term we will explain what has determined the choice of such a demarcation.
With Averroes, something came to an end in Western Islam.
At the same time , with al-Suhrawardi and Ibn al-‘ Arabi , something began which was to continue in the East down to the pres ent day .
Even with regard to this period we have had to focus attention on many features which have come to light only during the last twenty years of re search. But the limits imposed upon us , and the consequent need to find the minimum framework within which a philosophical exposition could still be coherent, forced us to stay within the bounds of this first period, which forms the first part of the pres ent study .
(b) The s econd period extends over the three centuries preceding the Safavid Renaissance in Islam.
It is characterized mainly by what it is convenient to call the ‘Sufi metaphysic’ : the growth of the school of lbn al-‘Arabi and of the school deriving from Najm al-Din al-Kubra, the merging-after the Mongol destruction of Alamut in 1 256—of Sufism with Twelver Shiism on the one hand and with reformed Ismailism on the other.
(c) This brings us to the third period. Whereas, in the rest of lslam,
philosophical enquiry from the time of A verroes is reduced to silence (a fact which motivates the summary judgement we repudiated above), the Safavid Renais sance in the sixteenth century produced an extraordinary
flowering of thought and thinkers in Iran, the effects of which were to extend throughout the Qaj ar period up to our own time .
We will have occasion to analyse the reasons why this phenomenon should
have made its appearance in Iran in particular, and in a Shiite milieu.
Thes e reasons , and the more recent appearance of other schools
elsewhere in Islam, will enable us to look ahead into the near future .
Inevitably, the first part of this study contains references to several
thinkers of the second and third periods .
How, for example, can one determine the essence of Shiite thought, as set forth by the teachings of the Shiite Imams during the first three centuries of the Hijrah, without reference to the philos ophers who were later the commentators on thes e teachings?
A detailed study ofthes e thinkers ofthe second and third periods will be undertaken in the second and third parts of this work .
Two dear friends, one of them an Iranian Shiite and the other a Sunni Arab from Syria, have helped me to c ompl ete the first part of the study by supplying me with invaluable material for several of the paragraphs of the eight chapters -material which has b e en j ointly insert d here .
They are Mr Seyyed Hoss ein Nasr, profe s s or in the Faculte des Lettres
at Tehran University, and Mr Osman Yahya, res earch lecturer at the C .N.R S.
The three of us share a deep affinity of view with regard to what constitutes the ee of spirssenceitual Islam .
The foll owing pages,
I believe, bear witness to this .
Tehran,
November 1962 ~Henry Corbin, History of lslamic Philosophy, Foreword, Page – XIII – XVIII
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