3

Basic Philosophical
Notions
Like any discipline, Islamic philosophy has its own ways of saying things. Much of
the terminology goes back to Greek origins, but as soon as words were translated
into Arabic they took on lives of their own, so it is not always helpful to take the
original Greek terms as the standards by which to judge how Muslim thinkers were
employing and understanding Arabic words. Nonetheless, much of the philosophi-
cal vocabulary in this book represents the standard, modern English equivalents for
Greek words whose descendants became established in medieval European philoso-
phy. Hence, the philosophical meaning of the words will be found in any good dic-
tionary. Much of this terminology is also used in everyday English, or has entered
into the technical vocabulary of the modern scientific, social, and humanitarian
disciplines. However, dictionary definitions and commonly accepted meanings are
not likely to suffice for the more important words.
The purpose of this chapter is to review the meaning and usage of some of the basic
philosophical terminology found in Bābā Afḍal's writings. Since a thorough analysis
of his terminology wouldrequire a major book, my purpose here can only be to intro-
duce readers gradually to certain words and to suggest something of their use in the
philosophical tradition, with emphasis on Bābā Afḍal's own use. I will also draw ex-
amples from the Theology of Aristotle (i.e., the Arabic Plotinus), the treatises of the
Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, and the writings of Avicenna. 1 All three represent watersheds in
the history of Islamic philosophy, though much else of importance was written over
the same period.
Philosophy
The philosophers referred to their discipline by two basic designations—the Greek
loan word falsafa and the Arabic word ḥikma, normally translated as “wisdom. ”
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4
Background Texts
Aristotle
Aristotle as known to the Muslims would not be especially familiar to those ac-
quainted with his depiction by most modern scholarship. He was recognized as the
great master of rational thinking and the father of logic, but he also had a striking
spiritual dimension to him. He was looked upon as a man of surpassing virtue, and
several ethical treatises were attributed to him, some of them based on his own works,
others derived more from the Greek commentatorial tradition. His De anima, again
filtered through the commentatorial tradition, played a major role in the Muslim
understanding of the soul's everlastingness. By far the strangest aspect of the Mus-
lim depiction is that passages from the Enneads of Plotinus were translated into Ara-
bic and ascribed to Aristotle under the name Theology. Although most Western schol-
arship has taken Plotinus and Aristotle to represent two sharply divergent ways of
looking at things, the Islamic tradition conflated the two from early on. Among other
things, this is a sign of the fact that for Muslim intellectuals, the sharp contrasts and
conflicts that have been seen in the modern West between religion and science,
mysticism and logic, and imagination and rational thinking, did not exist. Rather,
by and large, to the extent that such contrasts were identified as different modes of
thinking, they were recognized as complementary rather than contradictory.
Bābā Afḍal's Aristotle is a logician, but he is also a mentor for seekers of self-
knowledge, a guide to virtuous activity, and a beacon on the path to the full actual-
ization of intelligence. The three books and one excerpt that Bābā Afḍal translated
into Persian from the Arabic Aristotelian corpus all present him as Bābā Afḍal's
alter ego. The works are written in the same liquid prose, and the emphasis is on the
same essential points: knowing one's self, fully actualizing the intellective potency
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