1. Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca.

800–870 CE)
 was the first self-identified philosopher in the Arabic tradition. He worked with a group of
translators who rendered works of Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and Greek mathematicians
and scientists into Arabic.

Philosophies:

 His purpose in his book called Metaphysics is to explain things that subsist without matter
and, though they may exist together with what does have matter, are neither connected nor
united to matter; to affirm the oneness of God, the great and exalted, to explain His
beautiful names, and that He is the agent cause of the universe, which perfects [all things],
the God of the universe who governs through His perfect providence and complete wisdom.
 We must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even
if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples, there is for the student of truth
nothing more important than the truth, nor is the truth demeaned or diminished by the one
who states or conveys it; no one is demeaned by the truth, rather all are ennobled by it.
 Thus the true One possesses no matter, form, quantity, quality, or relation. And is not
described by any of the other terms: it has no genus, no specific difference, no individual, no
proper accident, and no common accident. It does not move, and is not described through
anything that is denied to be one in truth. It is therefore only pure unity, I mean nothing
other than unity. And every unity other than it is multiple.
 We say that the true, first act is the bringing-to-be of beings from non-being. It is clear that
this act is proper to God, the exalted, who is the end of every cause. For the bringing-to-be
of beings from non-being belongs to no other. And this act is a proper characteristic [called]
by the name “origination.”
 Given that al-Kindi sharply divides the rational soul from the body and the lower
psychological faculties, and that he sees the rational soul as our true “self” or “essence” and
as the only part of us that survives the death of the body, it is no surprise that his ethical
thought is likewise highly intellectualist. Unfortunately, the numerous works on ethical and
political topics ascribed to him in the Fihrist are almost all lost.

2. Ibn ‘Arabî (1165–1240)

 can be considered the greatest of all Muslim philosophers, provided we understand
philosophy in the broad, modern sense and not simply as the discipline of falsafa, whose
outstanding representatives are Avicenna and, many would say, Mullâ Sadrâ.

Philosophies:

 Ibn ‘Arabî has typically been called the founder of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujûd, the
Oneness of Being or the Unity of Existence, but this is misleading, for he never uses the
expression. Passages in his writings that approximate it have no special significance, nor
are they out of place in the general trend of contemporary philosophy and theology,
both of which affirmed the unity of the Necessary Being.
  To call Real Being “one” is to speak of the unity of the Essence. In other terms, it is to
say that Being—Light in itself—is nondelimited (mutlaq), that is, infinite and absolute,
undefined and indefinable, indistinct and indistinguishable.
 The Real is incomparable and transcendent, but it discloses itself (tajallî) in all things, so
it is also similar and immanent. It possesses such utter nondelimitation that it is not
delimited by nondelimitation.
 Imagination (khayâl), as Corbin has shown, plays a major role in Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings. In
the Openings, for example, he says about it, “After the knowledge of the divine names
and of self-disclosure and its all-pervadingness, no pillar of knowledge is more
complete” (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 2:309.17).
 When Ibn ‘Arabî talks about imagination as one of the heart’s two eyes, he is using the
language that philosophers established in speaking of the soul’s faculties. But he is more
concerned with imagination’s ontological status, about which the early philosophers had
little to say. Here his use of khayâl accords with its everyday meaning, which is closer to
image than imagination. It was employed to designate mirror images, shadows,
scarecrows, and everything that appears in dreams and visions; in this sense it is
synonymous with the term mithâl, which was often preferred by later authors.

3. Ibn Tufail
 Ibn Ṭufail was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, Islamic philosopher,
Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, and vizier. As a philosopher and novelist, he
is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan.

Philosophies:

 All bodies that we see around are subject to generation and corruption. They are
coming into existence and then disappearing after sometime. In other words, they are
all produced anew. There was a time when they were not there and at a certain point of
time they began to exist.
 Even if one does not find the evidence for total corruption in some bodies, he cannot
deny the fact or partial corruption or change. All bodies, in this world of generation and
corruption are subject to change. Change always implies a change in form.
 This Immaterial agent or the first cause is God. He has no cause of His existence of his
own, but is the cause of existence of all other things. He is the necessarily existent
being, he must necessarily exist if the existence of other things is to be explained
rationally.
 With regard to the matter or corporiety every body would be just like any other body. It
is the form which gives a body its special character and individuality. All its qualities and
functions seem to proceed from its form.
 There are different objects in nature, which are classified under various classes on the
basis of their actions and functions. Some of them, like stone, earth, water, air, etc.,
show elementary functions. This leads us to believe that they have an elementary form
or a simpler form. Some other objects, like plants and animals, show more varied and
complex functions. This makes us attribute a higher and richer form to them.
4. Ibn Khaldun
 Ibn Khaldun was an Arab sociologist, philosopher and historian who has been described
as the precursive founder of the proto-disciplines that would become historiography,
sociology, economics, and demography

Philosophies:

 ibn Khaldun also wrote, “History is an art of valuable doctrine, numerous in advantages
and honourable in purpose; it informs us about bygone nations in the context of their
habits, the prophets in the context of their lives and kings in the context of their states
and politics, so those who seek the guidance of the past in either worldly or religious
matters may have that advantage.”
 Ibn Khaldun’s method relied on criticism, observation, comparison and examination. He
used scientific criticism to analyse accounts of historical events, the sources of these
accounts and the techniques used by historians, examining and comparing various
different accounts in order to get rid of falsifications and exaggerations and obtain some
objective idea of what had actually happened.
 As an experimental philosopher he was interested in the holy experiments of the
Prophet Mohammed (570-632), which means he cannot have seen history as having no
end. If the existence of God is regarded as an absolute fact and His prophets and their
religious experiments as proof of this fact, then the statement that in history the past is
just like the future must mean it consists of a continuous series of events not stopping
with any nation, but continuing in cycles.
 Ibn Khaldun believed even the minutest of facts should be scrutinised in analysing
historical events, since these were not simple phenomena, but complex. He regarded
history as far from easy to study, being “the knowledge of qualitative events and their
causes in depth.”
 ibn Khaldun believes the intellect has limits it cannot exceed and that these prevent it
from reaching a complete understanding of God and His attributes. This is its reality, and
man cannot upgrade it or increase its level of capability. Ibn Khaldun insisted that the
intellect could not be aware of “the reality of the soul and the divine” or of anything else
existing in the higher world, because it was incapable of reaching, knowing or proving it.

5. Ibn Sina [Avicenna]

 was the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.[1] In his work he
combined the disparate strands of philosophical/scientific[2] thinking in Greek late
antiquity and early Islam into a rationally rigorous and self-consistent scientific system
that encompassed and explained all reality, including the tenets of revealed religion and
its theological and mystical elaborations.

Philosophies:

 Unlike Aristotle, Avicenna also recognizes a broader division of causes into physical
causes and metaphysical causes (Avicenna, [Ph], 1.10 [3]). The distinction is best
approached by considering the Aristotelian division between substances and accidents
as found in the ten categories.
 Regardless of whether one is considering physical or metaphysical causes, any motion or
change (whether of some specific existence itself or just of some new accident),
Avicenna explains, requires three things: (1) the form that comes to be as a result of the
change, (2) the matter in which that form comes to be and (3) the matter’s initial
privation of that form
 Avicenna’s response to this argument against the potentially infinite divisibility of bodies
is considered when discussing his theory of continuity. Prior to that, his reasons for
rejecting atomism must be examined. To start, Avicenna accepts that division with
respect to body is of two sorts: physical division and conceptual division.
 While some of Avicenna’s physical-style arguments are quite complex and sophisticated,
showing that the aggregation of bodies would simply be impossible on the Kalām
atomists’ view (an example can be found in Section 2.3 of the entry on Arabic and
Islamic natural philosophy and natural science), the following thought experiment is
perhaps more intuitively obvious. Posit a sheet of conceptually indivisible atoms
between yourself and the sun.
 Theology. Avicenna was a devout Muslim and sought to reconcile rational philosophy
with Islamic theology. His aim was to prove the existence of God and His creation of the
world scientifically and through reason and logic.