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The Formation of Post-​Classical
Philosophy in Islam
 The Formation of
Post-​Classical
Philosophy in Islam
FRANK GRIFFEL

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Frank Griffel 2021

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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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address above.

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Griffel, Frank, 1965– author.
Title: The formation of post-classical philosophy in Islam / Frank Griffel.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009024 (print) | LCCN 2021009025 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190886325 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190886349 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Islamic philosophy—History.
Classification: LCC B741 .G675 2021 (print) | LCC B741 (ebook) |
DDC 181/.07—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009024
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009025

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190886325.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
für Claudia
Knowledge desired by some may mean ignorance and stagnation for
others.
—​Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant (1970)

Denn eigentlich unternehmen wir umsonst, das Wesen eines Dinges

auszudrücken. Wirkungen werden wir gewahr . . .

—​J. W. Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (1810)

 Contents

Introduction  1
Conventions  20

I . P O S T-​C L A S SIC A L P H I L O S O P H Y
I N I T S I SL A M IC C O N T E X T

First Chapter: Khorasan, the Birthplace of Post-​Classical

Philosophy, a Land in Decline?  25
The madrasa System  27
The Cities of Khorasan and Its Surrounding Provinces  33
The First Half of the Sixth/​Twelfth Century: Seljuq Rule  44
The Second Half of the Sixth/​Twelfth Century: Khwārazmshāhs
and Ghūrids  53
Other Patrons: Qarakhanids, the Caliphal Court in Baghdad,
and the Ayyubids in Syria  60
Second Chapter: The Death of falsafa as a Self-​Description
of Philosophy  77
Falsafa as a Quasi-​Religious Movement Established by
Uncritical Emulation (taqlīd)  79
Falsafa as Part of the History of the World’s Religions  85
Three Different Concepts of Philosophy in Islam  94
Ḥikma as the New Technical Term for “Philosophy”  96
Third Chapter: Philosophy and the Power of the Religious Law  108
The Legal Background of al-​Ghazālī’s fatwā on the Last Page
of His Tahāfut al-​falāsifa  112
Persecution of Philosophers in the Sixth/​Twelfth Century  122
ʿAyn al-​Quḍāt’s Execution in 525/​1131 in Hamadan  127
Shihāb al-​Dīn Yaḥyā al-​Suhrawardī’s Execution c. 587/​1192
in Aleppo  138
Was al-​Ghazālī’s fatwā Ever Applied?  152
viii Contents

II. PHILOSOPHERS AND PHILOSOPHIES:

A B IO G R A P H IC A L H I S T O RY O F P H I L O S O P H Y I N
T H E SI X T H / T ​ W E L F T H C E N T U RY I SL A M IC E A S T
The Principal Sources for Sixth/​Twelfth-​Century History of
Philosophy in the Islamic East  162
The Early Sixth/​Twelfth Century: Avicennism Undisturbed  176
Avicennism Contested: The Early Decades of the Sixth/​Twelfth
Century  191
The Outsider as Innovator: Abū l-​Barakāt al-​Baghdādī
(d. c. 560/​1165)  203
Two Ghazalians of Transoxania: al-​Masʿūdī and Ibn Ghaylān
al-​Balkhī (both d. c. 590/1194)  226
Majd al-​Dīn al-​Jīlī: Teacher of Two Influential Philosophers
Trained in Maragha  240
Al-​Suhrawardī (d. c. 587/​1192), the Founder of the “School of
Illumination”  244
Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī (d. 606/​1210): Post-​Classical Philosophy
Fully Developed  264

I I I . T H E F O R M AT IO N O F Ḥ I K M A A S A
N EW P H I L O S O P H IC A L G E N R E

First Chapter: Books and Their Teachings  307

Al-​Rāzī’s “Philosophical Books” (kutub ḥikmiyya)  316
What Books of ḥikma Do: Reporting Avicenna  326
First Perspective: Teachings on Epistemology  336
What Books in ḥikma Also Do: Doubting and Criticizing
Avicenna  341
Knowledge as a “Relational State”  351
Knowledge as “Presence”: The Context in al-​Suhrawardī  355
Knowledge as Relation: Abū l-​Barakāt al-​Baghdādī’s Key
Contribution  359
Knowledge as Relation: Sharaf al-​Dīn al-​Masʿūdī  369
Knowledge as Relation: Origins in al-​Ghazālī and Avicenna  373
Do al-​Rāzī’s “Philosophical Books” Teach Philosophical
Ashʿarism?  384
Second Perspective: Teachings on Ontology and Theology  387
A New Place for the Study of Metaphysics within Philosophy  390
Opposing Avicenna: God’s Essence Is Distinct from His Existence  392
The Content of God’s Knowledge Understood as Positive Divine
Attributes  403
What Books of ḥikma Mostly Do: Endorsing and Correcting
Avicennan Philosophy  407
 Contents ix

Second Chapter: Books and Their Genre  417

The Eclectic Career of al-​Ghazālī’s Doctrines of the Philosophers
(Maqāṣid al-​falāsifa)  428
Al-​Ghazālī as Clandestine faylasūf: Evaluating His Maḍnūn Corpus  442
The Maḍnūn Corpus and Forgery: Two Pseudo-​Epigraphies Foisted
on al-​Ghazālī  449
Between Neutral Report and Committed Investment: al-​Masʿūdī’s
Commentary on Avicenna’s Glistering Homily (al-​Khuṭba
al-​gharrāʾ)  458
Al-​Masʿūdī’s Reconciliation of falsafa and kalām on the Issue of
the World’s Eternity  467
Post-​Classical Philosophy and Tolerance for Ambiguity  471
Third Chapter: Books and Their Method  479
Dialectical Reasoning Replaces Demonstration: “Careful
Consideration” (iʿtibār) in Abū l-​Barakāt al-​Baghdādī  482
The Background of Abū l-​Barakāt’s “Careful Consideration” (iʿtibār)  493
The Middle Way between Avicennism and Ghazalianism:
How Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī Describes His Philosophy  499
Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī’s Method of “Probing and Dividing”
(sabr wa-​taqsīm)  506
A Case Study of the New Method: Al-​Rāzī on God’s Knowledge of
Particulars  518
The Method in Books of ḥikma: Implementing the Principle of
Sufficient Reason  524
The Method in Books of kalām: Limiting the Principle of Sufficient
Reason  532
Epilogue: Ḥikma and kalām in Fakhr al-​Dīn’s Latest Works  543
Conclusions  551
The Formation of Post-​Classical Philosophy in the Islamic East
during the Sixth/​Twelfth Century  562
What Was Philosophy in Islam’s Post-​Classical Period?  565

Appendix 1: List of Avicenna’s Students and Scholars Active in the

Sixth/​Twelfth Century Mentioned in Ibn Funduq al-​Bayhaqī’s
(d. 565/​1169–​70) Tatimmat Ṣiwān al-​ḥikma (ed. M. Shāfiʿ,
1935) and in Muʿīn al-​Dīn al-​Naysābūrī’s (d. c. 590/​1194)
Itmām Tatimmat Ṣiwān al-​ḥikma (MS Istanbul, Murad Molla
1431, foll. 126b–​157a)  573
Appendix 2: Relative Chronology of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Works
Based on Citation Relationships  577
Bibliography  579
Index of Manuscripts  635
General Index  639
 Introduction

In September 1683 a large army of soldiers from Germany, Austria, and Poland-​
Lithuania won a battle against an even larger Ottoman army that had laid siege to
Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. That same year, John Locke fled
England to the Netherlands and entered into circles that acquainted him with the
work of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In Holland, Locke also found
time to work on the manuscript of what would become his most important phil-
osophical work, The Essay concerning Human Understanding, published eventu-
ally in London in 1689.
The last two decades of the seventeenth century marked the beginning of two of
the most important developments in modern European history: Enlightenment
thought and the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire. This was the moment
when Europeans started to think of their own history in terms that we now call
“modern.” They witnessed history as progress, understood as increasing ra-
tionalization and liberalization, as well as the creation of material wealth and
the expansion of political power. When Europeans looked at the Muslim world,
however, they saw nothing but decline.
From the early Middle Ages, central Europeans had become more and more
used to thinking about Islam as Europe’s nemesis, the absolute opposite of all that
Europe stood for. By the late seventeenth century, the threat that earlier armies
of Muslims had posed to Europe had disappeared. The Turkish siege of Vienna
in 1683—​the second of its kind after an earlier Turkish attempt in 1526—​led to a
successful counterattack of central and eastern European armies that conquered,
within a few years, almost half of the Ottoman territories on the Balkan. By the
end of the seventeenth century, the Habsburg Empire had taken lands from the
Turks that are equivalent to the modern countries of Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia,
and parts of Romania. Never again would Islamic armies pose a threat to a cen-
tral European country. Quite the opposite: within only a century a European
army stood at the gates of a major Muslim capital and routed its defenders. In
July 1798, the French army fought a decisive victory over Egyptian forces during
the Battle of the Pyramids. The defeat led to the first European colonial admin-
istration of a Muslim country. The Battle of the Pyramids was, however, only the
first of many defeats that were inflicted upon almost all Muslim countries in the
period between 1798 and 1920. After the Battle of Maysalun before the gates of
Damascus in 1920, every Muslim country, with the exception of Turkey, Iran,

The Formation of Post-​Classical Philosophy in Islam. Frank Griffel, Oxford University Press. © Frank Griffel 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190886325.003.0001
2 Introduction

Afghanistan, and several principalities on the Arabian peninsular, was ruled by

Europeans.
Triggered by an increasingly critical attitude toward Western writings on
Islam, scholars in the 1990s began to see a connection between the early modern
European experience of a continuous progress in their societies and the Western
narrative of Islam’s decline. Starting with the seventeenth century, European his-
tory was considered a process of advancement and improvement. “Europe’s his-
tory, despite all temporary setbacks,” wrote the Danish environmental historian
Peter Christensen in 1993, “was characterized by progress, understood as cumu-
lative change for the better in material as well as moral terms.” At the same time
Europeans thought of Islam and the Middle East as the opposite of Europe, its
inverted reflection. “So it followed logically,” Christensen continued, “that the
opposite of progress, decline, must characterize the history of [the] Middle East.
With such a premise, it was not difficult to find confirming evidence.”1
The material and moral decline of the region that Europeans diagnosed was
ascribed, ultimately, to defects inherent in Muslim society: “The Europeans had
come to see progress as a virtual natural process. If a society had not evolved in
the same positive way as Europe did, there had to be something wrong with it.”2
One of the postulates of European thinking about the Middle East was that the
religion of Islam is so heavily imprinted upon its societies that it can ultimately
explain everything that had occurred, or failed to occur. Enlightenment thought
also made a close connection between Europe’s rapid political and economic
progress during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the rational-
ization it was proud to have achieved. The intellectual source of this rationaliza-
tion was sought in Europe’s tradition of philosophy. Born out of Greek culture in
antiquity, Enlightenment thinkers forged a narrative of the history of philosophy
in Europe that closely aligned with the cumulative progress that had manifested
during their lifetimes. Yet, historians of philosophy such as Edward Gibbon and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel realized that the history of European philosophy
was not one of continuous progress. The “dark” Middle Ages stood in the way of
an uninterrupted increase of rationality in European thought. Since the reemer-
gence of philosophical activity in Europe during the thirteenth century, however,
the story they told about European philosophy was one of uninterrupted prog-
ress. If philosophy in Europe progressed, what did it do under Islam?
Together with the narrative of a rise of European philosophy after the thir-
teenth century came the story of a simultaneous decline of philosophy in Islam.
Once, Islam had a great empire and an advanced civilization with cities such as
Baghdad and Cairo that had few rivals during their prime. The Islamic Empire

1 Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr, 9.

2 Ibid.
 Introduction 3

was seen as the last of the great civilizations of the Middle East and the Abbasid
caliphs worthy successors of the pharaohs of Egypt, the kings of Babylon, and the
khosrows of Persia. But Arabic high culture was only a very temporary phenom-
enon. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy of 1817, Hegel (1770–​1831)
treated Arabic philosophy not as an independent tradition but merely as one that
bridges the Greeks with the scholasticism of the Latin Middle Ages.3 Arabic phi-
losophy, Hegel writes, “has no content of any interest [for us] and it does not
merit to be spent time with; it is not philosophy, but mere manner.”4 For Hegel,
Arabic philosophy is only the “formal preservation and propagation” of Greek
philosophy,5 and has worth only insofar as it is connected to it. The Arabs created
no progress in the history of philosophy and “there is not much to benefit from
it” (aber es ist nicht viel daraus zu holen).6
Hegel stands at the beginning of the Western academic study of Arabic and
Islamic philosophy. He was closely followed by Ernest Renan (1823–​92) and his
1852 study, Averroes and Averroism, the first Western monograph on the history
of philosophy in Islam.7 French Enlightenment thinking and its enmity toward
the Catholic Church heavily influenced Renan’s perspective, leading him to
apply categories to the history of philosophy in Islam that were established in the
historiography of European thought. For Renan, philosophy in Islam suffered
under the persecution of an “Islamic orthodoxy” that would eventually prevail
and crush the free philosophical spirit in Islam. Renan wrote in 1861 that with
the death of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in 1198, “Arab philosophy had lost in him its
last representative and the triumph of the Qur’an over free-​thinking was assured
for at least six-​hundred years.”8 What relieved the Islamic world from the op-
pression of a Qur’anic orthodoxy was, in Renan’s mind, the French occupation
of Egypt in 1798.

3 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 19:514–​23. See the Engl. transl. in idem,

Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:26–​35.

4 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 19:517: “Sie ist nicht durch ihren Inhalt

interessant, bei diesem kann man nicht stehenbleiben; es ist keine Philosophie, sondern eigentliche
Manier.” E. S. Haldane’s translation of 1892 (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:29) leaves
out this particular sentence.
5 äußerliche Erhaltung und Fortpflanzung; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie,

19:514; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:34.

6 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 19:522; Lectures on the History of

Philosophy, 3:26.
7 In the decade before Renan, two important studies of philosophy in Islam had already appeared.

Solomon Munk (1803–​67) wrote several articles on Arabic philosophers, both Jews and Muslims,
for the six-​volume Dictionnaire des sciences philosophique, published 1844–​52. These articles were
later incorporated into Munk, Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (1857–​59). In 1842, August
Schmölders (1809–​80) published his Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, which is an
edition and annotated French translation of al-​Ghazālī’s al-​Munqidh min al-​ḍalāl.
8 Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (2nd augmented edition), 2. In the first edition of 1852

(1) this sentence did not yet have its colonialist second half: “Quand Averroès mourut, en 1198, la
philosophie arabe perdit en lui son dernier représentant.” In the second edition of 1861, Renan adds
“et le triomphe du Coran sur la libre pensée fut assuré pour au moins six cent ans.”
4 Introduction

Enlightenment thought provided the legitimization for colonizing the

Muslim world. Europeans convinced themselves that the decline they diagnosed
in the Muslim world after their military successes in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries had set in much earlier and that it was connected to an assumed
absence of philosophy in Islamic societies. European historians of philosophy
created the narrative that Arabic and Islamic philosophy ended with Averroes
during the last years of the twelfth century. The Dutch historian of philosophy
Tjitze J. de Boer (1866–​1942) was the first to write a textbook on the history of
philosophy in Islam. It came out in German in 1901, with an English transla-
tion in 1903, and remained influential for many decades, up until the 1990s.9
De Boer’s presentation of Arabic and Islamic philosophy ends with Averroes,
who is followed only by a brief appendix on Ibn Khaldūn. Averroes was the peak
of the philosophical tradition under Islam. His commentaries on the works of
Aristotle were regarded as the most profound philosophical works produced by
that tradition. Yet with him ended philosophy in Islam, and with him also began
the rise of Aristotelian and thus scholastic philosophy in Europe. Averroes was
the link that connected the progress of European philosophy with the decline of
the philosophic tradition in Islam. Already in his book Averroes and Averroism,
Renan had come up with the view that European philosophers valued the quality
of Averroes’s scholarship, whereas Muslims neglected it at their own peril.10
Historians like Renan and de Boer in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies were working with far fewer sources than what we have available today.
Their decision to exclude a host of philosophers who wrote after Averroes from
the history of this discipline, however, is not based on ignorance about their ex-
istence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Europeans started
to explore the history of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, they knew otherwise.
The books produced in this period had not yet adopted a colonialist perspec-
tive on Islam and the Middle East and are free from the idea that philosophy in
Islam had ever ended. In 1743, for instance, the German scholar Johann Jacob
Brucker (1696–​1770) published a six-​volume history of philosophy in Latin
(Historia critica philosophiae), which includes more than two hundred pages
on Arabic and Islamic authors. Here, readers could find relatively long articles
on Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī (d. 606/​1210) and Naṣīr al-​Dīn al-​Ṭūsī (d. 672/​1274).
Brucker mentions numerous authors of philosophy who wrote during Islam’s
post-​classical period, and this despite the fact that unlike Renan and de Boer, he

9 De Boer’s Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam was translated into English (1903), Persian (1927),

Arabic (1938), and even into Chinese (1946). The English translation was reprinted in London 1933,
1961, and 1965; in New York 1967; in New Delhi 1983; and in Richmond (Surrey) 1994. The Chinese
version was reprinted as late as 2012.
10 Renan, Averroes et l’averroïsme, 28 (1st edition).
 Introduction 5

read no oriental languages.11 A similar picture emerges from the monumental

four-​volume work Bibliothèque orientale, published at the end of the seventeenth
century in Paris. It was generated under the leadership of the French orientalist
Barthélemy d’Herbelot (1625–​95) and is a forerunner to the large encyclopedias
of the French Enlightenment. The Bibliothèque orientale is based on an Arabic
encyclopedia of the sciences that had appeared fifty years earlier, namely Kātib
Çelebī’s (d. 1067/​1657) Disclosure of Opinions about the Sciences and Their Books
(Kashf al-​ẓunūn ʿān asāmī l-​kutub wa-​l-​funūn). Kātib Çelebī was well acquainted
with the major achievements of post-​classical philosophy in Islam. Hence, the
Bibliothèque orientale is full of information about philosophers such as Fakhr
al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī, Naṣīr al-​Dīn al-​Ṭūsī, the Iranian Mullah Ṣadrā (d. 1050/​1640),
and the Ottoman Turk Kamālpashazādeh (d. 940/​1534) and their most impor-
tant works.12
In the nineteenth century, however, that information got lost in a narrative
of decline. De Boer saw the reason for the decline of philosophy in Islam in the
works of al-​Ghazālī. The most knowledgeable and influential Western authorities
in Islamic studies, such as Ignác Goldziher (1850–​1921), Hellmut Ritter (1892–​
1971), and Edward Granville Browne (1862–​1926), taught that al-​Ghazālī’s book
The Precipitance of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-​falāsifa) had ushered in the end
of philosophy in Islam.13 Al-​Ghazālī was, as Browne wrote in 1906, “the theo-
logian who did more than any one else to bring to an end the reign of philos-
ophy in Islam.”14 After al-​Ghazālī, and here I quote de Boer’s textbook, there
were only “epitomists” in the Eastern Islamic world. Philosophers they were, de
Boer acknowledges, but of a philosophy that was in decline, and “in no depart-
ment did they pass the mark which had been reached of old: Minds were now too

11 Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī appears under the name of “Ibnu El-​Chatib Rasi” and al-​Ṭūsī as
“Nasiroddinus”; see Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 3:113–​18. Other post-​classical authors
mentioned are Abū l-​ Barakāt al-​ Baghdādī (“Ebn Malca”) and al-​ Taftazānī (“Ettphtheseni”)
(3:119–​20).
12 Cf. d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 3:116–​ 17 on Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī, and 2:684 on his
work al-​Muḥaṣṣal and its commentary by al-​Kātibī al-​Qazwīnī (2:642, 1:527); further the articles
on Abū l-​Barakāt al-​Baghdādī (2:223), Athīr al-​Dīn al-​Abharī (1:21), Quṭb al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī (3:118),
or Naṣīr al-​Dīn aṭ-​Ṭūsī (3:26) and his work Akhlāq-​i Nāṣirī (3:27) as well as his Tajrīd al-​ʿaqāʾid and
its numerous commentaries (3:385–​86). Finally, see the interesting article on the science of ḥikma
(2:233–​34).
13 Goldziher, “Die islamische und die jüdische Philosophie des Mittelalters,” 63–​64; Vorlesungen

über den Islam, 177–​78, 198; Engl. transl. 158–​59; Ritter, “Hat die religiöse Orthodoxie einen Einfluß
auf die Dekadenz des Islams ausgeübt?,” 121, 134. I follow Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge,
108–​15, in his argument that the commonly accepted translation of tahāfut as “incoherence” is
wrong. The verb tahāfata means something like “to rush headlong into a seemingly beneficial but
ultimately dangerous situation,” almost like a moth that rushes toward the fire. Already in 1888, Beer,
Al-​Ġazzâlî’s Maḳâṣid al-​Falâsifat, 6, translated tahāfut as “blindly running after someone or a group
who runs fast and recklessly ahead,” “run into error.”
14 Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 2:293.
6 Introduction

weak to accomplish such a feat. . . . Ethical and religious doctrine had ended in
Mysticism; and the same was the case with Philosophy.”15
Those who work in Islamic studies know that the view of al-​Ghazālī as the
destroyer of philosophy in Islam is still very much alive, particularly in more
popular publications of our field. Today seemingly respectable publications still
present him as the final point of any discussion of philosophy in Islam,16 not to
mention the many polemical voices on the internet that fuel and are fueled by
sentiments of Islamophobia.17 Among those who work actively in the field of
the history of philosophy in Islam, however, al-​Ghazālī’s assessment has drasti-
cally changed in the past thirty years. He is no longer regarded as the destroyer
of philosophy in Islam. We now understand that his major response to the phil-
osophical movement in Islam, The Precipitance of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-​
falāsifa), is a complex work of refutation and is not aimed at rejecting philosophy
or Aristotelianism throughout. It is concerned with twenty teachings developed
by Aristotelian philosophers in Islam, and it vigorously rejects at least three of
them, to the extent that it declares those philosophers who uphold these three
teachings apostates from Islam and threatens capital punishment. The book,
however, does not reject philosophy as a whole. In fact, it can be read—​and it was
read—​as an endorsement of studying Aristotelianism to find out what is correct
and what is wrong among the teachings of Muslim Aristotelians. In that sense,
the book is a demarcation between those teachings of Arabic Aristotelianism
that al-​Ghazālī deemed fit to be integrated into Muslim thought and those he
thought unfit.18
The reevaluation of al-​Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-​falāsifa as a work that is not directed
against philosophy but aims to create and promote a different kind of philos-
ophy from that it criticizes is seconded by an earlier development in the field of

15 De Boer, Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam, 151; Engl. trans. 169–​70. This opinion is, for in-

stance, echoed by F. E. Peters, who wrote in 1968, “Ibn Sīnā’s disciples descended . . . into a faceless
mediocrity. . . . Both Abū al-​Barakāt (d. a.d. 1165) and ʿAbd al-​Laṭīf al-​Baghdādī (d. a.d. 1231) are
still worthy of the name of faylasuf, but the rest, if it is not silence, is not much more than a whisper”
(Aristotle and the Arabs, 230–​31).
16 A recent example from 2014 is, for instance, the presentation of al-​ Ghazālī in Starr, Lost
Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, 406–​22. According
to Starr, al-​Ghazālī was “the dark genius” (532), who taught that “Aristotle’s logic is totally irrele-
vant to revealed religion,” regarded any talk of causality as “quackery and fraud,” and thus “gave his
students an excuse for ignoring . . . the difficult studies” connected with the rational sciences (414,
417). “Convinced that he was in possession of divine truth, [al-​Ghazālī] proceeded to pass judg-
ment on all those who, in his view, were not” (419) and branded all philosophers and freethinkers
as apostates. “In doing so, Ghazali administered the coup de grâce” to philosophy and the sciences
(419). A hundred years later his “denunciation of science and philosophy had long . . . become a best-​
seller,” and “never again would open-​ended scientific enquiry and unconstrained philosophizing
take place in the Muslim world without the suspicion of heresy and apostasy lurking in the air” (422).
17 Examples are lectures by Neil deGrasse Tyson on the history of science in Islam that are widely

available on sites such as YouTube.

18 For more on al-​Ghazālī’s strategy see pp. 81–84 and 479–82 in this book.
 Introduction 7

Ghazālī studies. Two important articles were published more than thirty years
ago, in 1987, Richard M. Frank’s (1927–​2009) “Al-​Ghazālī’s Use of Avicenna’s
Philosophy” and Abdelhamid I. Sabra’s (1924–​2013) “The Appropriation and
Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Sciences in Medieval Islam.” Frank’s ar-
ticle launched a whole new direction of research on al-​Ghazālī. Earlier Western
contributions on him highlighted his critical attitude toward the teachings of
al-​Fārābī (d. 339/​950–​51) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/​1037). After Frank’s
article and a more thorough monograph published in 1992,19 books and arti-
cles appeared that investigate what al-​Ghazālī had adopted from falsafa. This
has become the dominant direction of Ghazali studies in the past twenty years.
Important books and articles made the case that many of his most original
teachings are adaptations of earlier ones by Avicenna. By adaptation we do not
mean that they are therefore no longer original to al-​Ghazālī. Rarely did he adapt
something from Avicenna without making changes. Often these were slight
changes in wording that amounted nevertheless to significant philosophical and
theological permutations. In his autobiography al-​Ghazālī points out that the
skilled expert produces the antidote to a snake’s venom from the venom itself.20
Sabra’s article offers context for Frank’s discoveries, showing that al-​Ghazālī’s
adaptation of teachings from Avicenna and al-​Fārābī was part of a much larger
phenomenon in Islam. Sabra observed that by the eighth/​fourteenth century,
sciences that were earlier called Greek and regarded as foreign had, in fact, be-
come Muslim sciences. For Sabra this happened in a two-​step development of
first appropriating Greek sciences in a process of translation and adaptation to
a new cultural context, characterized by the use of the Arabic language and a
Muslim-​majority culture, and second by naturalizing them so that the Greek
origins of these sciences were no longer visible. Although he did not work
with Sabra’s categories, Frank’s contributions of 1987 and 1992 can easily be
corresponded to Sabra’s suggestions. Whereas Avicenna’s philosophy is an ex-
pression of the process of appropriation in which the Greek origins of many of
his teachings are clearly visible and even stressed, al-​Ghazālī, who adopted and
adapted many of Avicenna’s teachings, obscured their origins and thus contrib-
uted to—​or maybe even initiated—​the process of naturalization. Sabra himself
never applied his suggestion to the fate of philosophy in Islam. It is, however, a
very fitting description of what happened during the sixth/​twelfth century and
after. The movement of falsafa can thus be regarded as the continuation of Greek
philosophy in Arabic. As Sabra’s work foregrounds, falsafa represents the ap-
propriation of a Greek science in Islam. Subsequently, the appropriated Greek

19 Frank, Creation and the Cosmic System.

20 al-​Ghazālī, al-​Munqidh, 25.19–​24, 27.7–​24. On that passage see al-​Akiti, “The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly,” 87–​88.
8 Introduction

science of philosophy becomes naturalized as ḥikma. The work of al-​Ghazālī is,

in fact, the beginning of the naturalization process of Greek philosophy in Islam.
In some of my earlier works, particularly Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam,
published in 2000, on the development of the judgment of apostasy in early
Islam, I tried to make the case that al-​Ghazālī cannot be made responsible for the
disappearance of philosophy in Islam. In this book I advance on closer inspec-
tion a different argument: philosophy did not disappear after al-​Ghazālī. In fact,
the period after al-​Ghazālī is full of philosophical works, even if adhering to most
narrow standards of what counts as philosophy. The existence of philosophy after
al-​Ghazālī is so obvious that we must ask how it could have been overlooked for
so long. Did earlier generations of intellectual historians—​including my earlier
self—​not see that there was a thriving philosophy after al-​Ghazālī? Some did.
The German scholar Max Horten (1874–​1945), who after 1913 held various pro-
fessorial positions at universities in Bonn and Breslau, understood the impor-
tance of several Arabic works of post-​classical philosophy that were printed in
Cairo at the beginning of the twentieth century. He started to paraphrase and
analyze them and thus became the first European expert on this kind of litera-
ture.21 Horten, however, insisted on translating the Arabic technical terminology
of these books into words that he thought his readers could relate to. He chose
terms from Latin medieval philosophy and hence obscured the teachings and the
originality of post-​classical philosophy in Islam. Horten also failed to connect
the texts to their context. This and the fact that his German paraphrases did not
reach the philological standards of recent works by Goldziher and others con-
firmed an earlier impression—​voiced by de Boer and others—​that post-​classical
philosophy in Islam is repetitive and arid.
The breakthrough in this field is happening only now. It is the result of sev-
eral factors, some of which I will discuss in this book. A proper understanding
of the continuity of philosophy in Islam will not be achieved unless one realizes
the crucial error that many intellectual historians of Islam have committed—​
and that not a small number of them still commit today: for the period after the
mid-​sixth/​twelfth century, the Arabic word falsafa no longer represents the full
range of what in English is referred to as “philosophy,” in German as Philosophie,
or in French as la philosophie. All these words have their origin in the Greek
word philosophía. Identical etymology, however, does not guarantee identical
meaning.
At the beginning of this book project stands the realization, shared by almost
everybody who works in this field, that al-​Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-​falāsifa is a work
of philosophy. This may sound like a trivial insight that even earlier researchers

21 On Horten’s work see pp. 310–12.

 Introduction 9

such as de Boer indeed shared.22 The full implications for the history of philos-
ophy in Islam, however, have yet to be drawn. Even very recent contributions to
the history of Arabic and Islamic philosophy contain statements saying that al-​
Ghazālī launched attacks “against philosophy in general, and metaphysics in par-
ticular.”23 This, however, gives the wrong impression that his attacks had come
from outside of philosophy. The quoted sentence excludes al-​Ghazālī from the
history of philosophy and suggests that he was hostile to rational inquiry and
the advancement of knowledge through reasonable and convincing arguments.
That was Renan’s view of al-​Ghazālī. Renan taught that philosophy in Islam was
attacked by outsiders like him who aimed at squashing it in the name of Islamic
orthodoxy. In reality, what we see happening at the turn of the sixth/​twelfth cen-
tury is the development of a philosophical dispute between those who defended
Avicenna’s teaching on God and His relation to this world (the falāsifa) and the
likes of al-​Ghazālī who criticized this position.24
Thinkers who followed al-​Ghazālī in his criticism of falsafa were also en-
gaged in philosophy and should be regarded as part and parcel of the history
of philosophy in Islam. They must count as active contributors to the history of
philosophy in Islam, as philosophers, albeit not falāsifa. This leads to the next
important realization: after al-​Ghazālī, philosophy in Islam was not the same as
Arab Aristotelianism. In his Tahāfut al-​falāsifa, al-​Ghazālī uses the word falsafa
to describe the kind of Aristotelianism that is taught in the books of Avicenna,
among them his most comprehensive work, The Fulfillment (al-​ Shifāʾ).25
Almost all philosophers writing in Arabic and Persian—​Muslims, Christian,
as well as Jews—​who came after al-​Ghazālī adapted this choice of language.26
Beginning with the Tahāfut al-​falāsifa, which was published in 488/​1095,27 the
word falsafa was understood in Arabic and Persian as a label for the philosoph-
ical system of Avicenna as well as for the teachings of al-​Fārābī and other ear-
lier philosophers wherever they are congruent with those of the Eminent Master

22 De Boer, Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam, 138–​50; Engl. trans. 154–​68, has a full chapter on

al-​Ghazālī.
23 Amos Bertolacci in his online article “Arabic and Islamic Metaphysics” in the Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​arabic-​islamic-​metaphysics/​, accessed

June 16, 2020), first published in July 2012.
24 This study does not close its eyes to the fact that one of these two philosophical parties tries to

use institutional power in the form of a religious authority to defeat the other. The point is discussed
in c­ hapter 3 of the first part of this book.
25 “Fulfillment” seems a more accurate translation of the title of Ibn Sīnā’s main work than the

oft-​used “Cure” or “Healing.” See Saliba, “Avicenna’s Shifāʾ (Sufficientia),” and Nusseibeh, Avicenna’s
al-​Shifāʾ, xv.
26 Ibn Rushd was one of the few Arabic authors who did not adopt al-​Ghazālī’s choice of language

in his Tahāfut and who argued that by focusing on Ibn Sīnā, al-​Ghazālī misrepresented the move-
ment of falsafa and neglected its various non-​Avicennan elements. Ibn Rushd was also one of a small
number of philosophers after al-​Ghazālī who claimed for himself the label of being a faylasūf.
27 See p. 417.
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