The Story of Islamic Philosophy.

• Author: Rizvi, Sajjad H.
• Position: Book review

The Story of Islamic Philosophy

By Salman H. Bashier

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, 197 pages, ISBN 9781438437439.

You cannot judge a book by its cover--or even its title. Now and then, a work comes along that forces us to take notice of what the author means by giving his work a particular title. Certainly, those who pick up The Story of Islamic Philosophy might expect a conventional history of the philosophical endeavour in the world of Islam, starting with the translation movement and the appropriation of Aristotelianism and ending with the 'eclipse' of 'rational discourse' in medieval mysticism and obscurantism. The study of philosophy in Islam is rather polarised: the traditional academic field of Arabic philosophy' starts with the Graeco-Arabica and is very much in the mould of understanding what the Arabs owed to the Greeks and then what the Latins owed the Arabs. This book is a story of Aristotle arabus and then latinus, and hence it is not surprising that the story culminates with the ultimate Aristotelian, Averroes. Many Arab intellectuals, such as the late Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, have been sympathetic to such readings and wished to revive a sort of Averroist Aristotelianism in the name of reason and enlightenment. In particular, they wished to save the Arab-Islamic heritage from its 'perversion' by the Persians, starting with Avicenna and Ghazali who initiated the shift from reason and discourse to mystagogy and 'unreason.' The models for this tradition of philosophy are the Metaphysics and the Organon of Aristotle. However, the Greek heritage was always much more than Aristotle--Plato and the thoroughly neoplatonised Aristotle were critical. If anything, a serious historical engagement with the course of philosophy in the late antiquity period, on the cusp of the emergence of Islam, demonstrates that philosophy was much more than abstract reasoning, discourse and a linearity of proof.

Philosophy was a way of life that involved spiritual exercises, made famous in modern scholarship by the late Pierre Hadot and especially the practice of theurgy (conjuring up the gods in religious ritual as a means to achievement understanding)--the goal of which was theosis, to become god-like as Plato had announced centuries before. Those with more sympathy for 'Islamic philosophy' would stress the relationship between religion, philosophy and mysticism, which has been central to the philosophical enterprise since the twelfth...