SITUACIÓN EN EL MUNDO. ALGUNOS NÚMEROS El desarrollo humano

The first great exponent of Greek philosophy in Islam was Ab¯u Y¯usuf Ya‘q¯ub al-Kind¯ı (ca. 801–66), an Arab aristocrat in Baghdad who was deeply involved with the translation movement.15

To judge by his sur- viving books and the titles of the many others now lost, Kind¯ı wielded

15

Peter Adamson, “Al-Kind¯ı and the Reception of Greek Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, pp. 32–51; idem, Al-Kind¯ı (Great Medieval Thinkers; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); George N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: The Philosopher of the Arabs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968; reprinted several times; Alfred Ivry, Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1974). Though there have been many studies of Kind¯ı, his works, and aspects of his thought, including some particularly good work on the translations that were his source for Aristotelian and Neoplatonic

considerable expertise in science and philosophy. In attempting to con- struct a philosophical theology, Kind¯ı did not have much to work with. By his time, Islamic thought had developed to a considerable degree but not, for the most part, in ways that were helpful to a philosopher’s project. The Qur’¯anic images of God and prophecy, the fundamental issues for a Muslim attempting to construct a philosophy of religion, were vivid but not philosophical or theological. God in the Qur’¯an, like God in the Bible, was both transcendent and personal, a figure of surpassing might, mercy, knowledge, and care for the beings of the world He had created, but He was not defined or analyzed in a rigorous theological or philosophical manner. There was much that was suggestive in the Qur’¯anic account of God, particularly the attributes or names by which He was described, but it was unclear how He should be explained in terms of the concepts used in the philosophical tradition. The situation with prophecy was even more difficult. The overarching image used to explain prophecy in the Qur’¯an and in early Islamic thought was the messenger, ras¯ul, a very ordinary concept, as the old Arabic dictionaries make clear: someone who carries a message from one person to another, as from a lover to his beloved.16

Muh.ammad was simply a human being who had been told something by God – the message of Islam and the words of its most important embodiment, the Qur’¯an – and who then faithfully conveyed this message to his people. Prophecy was simply the process by which God “taught man what he knew not” by means of a chosen human being.17

From a philosopher’s point of view, the Qur’¯an had left many critical questions unanswered: Was God part of the universe, as Aristotle and the Timaeus would seem to indicate, or was He beyond being, as the Neoplatonists would have it? What sorts of things did God teach through prophecy that man did not know? Were they things that man could

philosophy, the only relatively comprehensive synthetic and philosophically sophis- ticated study of his thought is Peter Adamson, Al-Kind¯ı (Great Medieval Thinkers; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

16

Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 vols. (London: Williams and Nor- gate, 1863–1893; often reprinted), 3.1081, quoting a pre-Islamic poet of the H_{. udhayl} tribe: “Had there been in my heart as much as a nail-paring of love for another than thee, my messengers had come to her.”

17

Qur’¯an 96.5; on Muh.ammad as a man charged with a message, see 3.144, 5.99, and many other passages.

know on his own but through ignorance or neglect had not figured out for himself, or were they things that in principle were beyond human knowledge and that thus could only be known by revelation? What was it about prophets that made them prophets? Did they differ from other human beings in some fundamental way, and if so, how? And how were scriptures, and particularly the Qur’¯an, to be understood? Obviously, not everything in the Qur’¯an could be taken literally, but how, then, were its symbols to be interpreted, and what in the Qur’¯an could be understood symbolically? And what of the practical teachings of prophetic religion, the specific laws and rituals? How did they relate to human law and rational ethics?

In Kind¯ı’s day, Islamic theology had begun to address such issues, but not yet in ways that philosophers would find satisfactory. As we have seen, a bitter theological debate was raging about the nature of God’s attributes, especially the more anthropomorphic ones, like God’s hand or footstool, between literalists associated with hadith scholars like Ah.mad ibn H.anbal and the more rationalist Mu‘tazilite theologians. In theology, a compromise was worked out by Ash‘ar¯ı that inclined more to the beliefs of the literalists. Likewise, there was a bitter debate about the nature of the Qur’¯an, with Ash‘ar¯ı eventually coming down on the side of those who had staunchly defended the puzzling doctrine that the Qur’¯an was uncreated. The other great debates of early Islamic theology – the questions of the imamate, leadership of the community after Muh.ammad and the question of free will and predestination – did not greatly concern the philosophers. As for the practical teachings of Islam, that was the territory of the legal scholars, the fuqah¯a’, who for the most part showed little interest in the question of the rational grounds of the Divine Law, being content to consider it the will of God.

For a philosopher, the critical issues were the relation of God to the universe – that is, whether or not He was a knowable part of being; whether the content of revelation could be known independently by reason; and the psychology of prophethood. Kind¯ı made little more than a start on these issues. He did begin the characteristic Muslim philosophical approach to religion, holding that the truths attained by philosophy and revelation were essentially the same and, therefore, that the Qur’¯an could be interpreted in the light of philosophical doctrine. He seems to have wavered in his approach, sometimes describing revelation

and philosophy as different methods of reaching the same truth and sometimes conceding that revelation can attain truths inaccessible to philosophy, thus placing theology above philosophy.18

At this point, we must mention another attempt to integrate philoso- phy with Islam: that of the Fatimid Isma‘ilis. They were an esoteric Shi‘ite sect that emerged into history at the beginning of the tenth century with the establishment of a regime in North Africa. For several centuries, their center was Egypt, from which they ran an aggressive campaign of reli- gious propaganda in the central and eastern Islamic lands. Early Isma‘ili thought had come out of a highly mythological strain of Shi‘ism, and the Isma‘ili theologians of the Fatimid period had seen fit to recast this exotic doctrine in the form of a Neoplatonic philosophy.19

By and large, how- ever, this philosophical tradition did not have a great deal of influence on non-Isma‘ili thought, although it is interesting to note that the father of Ibn S¯ın¯a (Avicenna) had Isma‘ili connections. The exception was a philosophical encyclopedia, The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, which has affinities with early Isma‘ili thought but cannot be shown definitely to be a product of the Isma‘ilis themselves.20