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The Study of Arabic

Philosophy in the Twentieth
Century An Essay on the
Historiography of Arabic
Philosophy
Dimitri Gutas
Version of record first published: 28 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Dimitri Gutas (2002): The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29:1, 5-25

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 British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2002),
29(1), 5–25

The Study of Arabic Philosophy in

the Twentieth Century
An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy1
DIMITRI GUTAS*

Aucun grand moment de la pensée humaine n’a sans

doute été—et ne reste—plus injustement traité par les historiens
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de la pensée que la philosophie islamique.2

Introduction
Philosophy is considered a recalcitrant subject, and Arabic philosoph y particu-
larly so, both by historians of philosoph y in general and by scholars of Arabic
and Islamic studies in particular. Though naturally I disagree with this view,
there would appear nevertheless to be good reasons for its prevalence. In the
former case, the historian of ancient and medieval philosophy , at home with
Greek and Latin, Ž nds nothing in his education to help alleviate the estrangement
that he inevitably feels when confronted with what is taken to be the impen-
etrable barrier of the Arabic language and the perceived otherness of Islamic
culture; and when he tries to approach the subject through the mediation of the
secondary literature by Arabist historians of philosophy , he Ž nds little there to
whet his appetite for more, as I will soon explain. In the case of the scholar of
Arabic and Islamic studies, traditional education has taught him that philosoph y
in Islamic civilization was at best a fringe activity which ceased to exist after the
death blow allegedly dealt to it by al-Ghazāl¯õ in the eleventh century, was
anyway frowned upon by a presumed orthodoxy, and, being therefore largely
inconsequential —a feeling further corroborated through casual perusal of the
unappetizing specialist secondary literature I just referred to—could be safely
disregarded.
In both cases this (mis)perception may be justiŽ ed, but the fault lies not with
Arabic philosoph y3 itself but with its students and expositors: Arabist historians
of philosophy themselves have not done their job properly and they have failed,

* Professor Dimitri Gutas is Professor of Arabic at Yale University.

1
A lecture delivered on 4 July 2000, at a plenary session of the annual BRISMES Conference held at Cambridge.
Apart for some minor revisions and the addition of full references, the text of the lecture has been retained as
delivered.
2
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Introduction à la critique de la raison arabe (Paris: Éditions La Decouverte, 1995),
p. 77.
3
I say ‘Arabic’ and not ‘Islamic’ philosophy for the reasons discussed later in the section Illuminationist
Approach.

ISSN 1353–0194 print/ISSN 1469–3542 online/02/010005–21 Ó 2002 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies
DOI: 10.1080/1353019022012404 3
 DIMITRI GUTAS

by and large, to present the results of their research, Ž rst, to historians of

philosoph y in a systematic and rationalized way that will exploit the common
points of reference and contact, and second, to their colleagues in Arabic and
Islamic studies in a way that will make manifest the relevance of Arabic
philosoph y to Islamic intellectua l life in general. It is not sufŽ cient, at the turn
of this millennium , with the multicultural sensibilitie s of much Western aca-
demic discourse, that the historian of medieval scholastic philosoph y and the
Islamics expert be prepared to acknowledge the massive and decisive in uence
exerted by Arabic philosoph y on medieval Christendom and Islam respectively
simply because of the weight of incontrovertibl e historical evidence;4 the
historian of Arabic philosoph y is obliged at the same time to present his material
in such a way that will convince his audience that the study of Arabic philosoph y
is indeed worthwhile and potentially beneŽ cial to their own work.
I will now try to present the case of how it is that we, that is, historians of
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Arabic philosophy , have failed to present the subject to our colleagues, both
within and without Islamic studies, in a way that would have gained it
acceptance as part of our common discipline long time ago—after all, the study
of Arabic philosoph y has been more or less constant since Ernest Renan’s
epoch-making Averroès et l’Averro¨õ sme, which Ž rst appeared a century and a
half ago in 1852. For even a cursory look at Fernand van Steenberghen’s very
useful Introductio n à l’étude de la philosophi e médiévale5 will tell us that the
scholarly study of Latin and Arabic medieval philosoph y has roughly the same
age—and yet how vastly unequal the accomplishments of the two Ž elds have
been! It is obvious that much more substantiv e work on the history of Arabic
philosoph y could have been accomplished in the last century and a half and that
consequently the reasons that it has not have to be sought in other factors which
have been impeding its progress. I will survey the various types of error, of both
commission and omission, which have accompanied its study in the course of the
present century. By avoiding these errors in the next, Arabic philosoph y will
perhaps Ž nally gain the position of eminence it deserves both within Arabic and
Islamic studies and, more generally, within the history of Western philosophy.
To begin with, let me make a few statements of fact to dispel some of the
misconception s I referred to earlier. Arabic philosoph y did not die after al-
Ghazāl¯õ (d. 1111) and it was not a fringe activity frowned upon by a so-called
‘orthodoxy’. It was a vigorous and largely autonomous intellectual movement
that lasted a good 10 centuries—some would say it is still alive in Iran—and
played a crucial role in shaping high culture both before and, especially, after
Avicenna (Ibn S¯õ nā), its greatest exponent. The accompanying chart sketches in
a necesarily simpliŽ ed way its progress from the ninth to the eighteenth
centuries.
The problem is, brie y put, that Arabic philosophy has been very unevenly
investigated, with some periods and personalities receiving the lion’s share of
4
Such acknowledgemen t is increasingly the case in general textbooks of medieval Latin philosophy . See, for
example, the statements of a leading scholar in the Ž eld, K. Flasch: ‘Die zivilisatorische und damit auch die
philosophische Entwicklung des lateinischen Westens seit dem 13. Jahrhunder t ist ohne den Ein uss der Araber
nicht zu verstehen’, in his Das philosophische Denken im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1986), p.
262; a similar sentiment is also to be found in his Einführung in die Philosophie des Mittelalters (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1987), p. 95. Admittedly, the actual coverage of Arabic philosophy in such
textbooks is perfunctory, but this is precisely for the reasons that form the subject of this talk.
5
(Paris/Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1974), pp. 42–43.

6
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7
ARABIC PHILOSOPHY
 DIMITRI GUTAS

attention and others none, something which is partly also responsible for the
failure of historians of Arabic philosoph y to present it adequately to the outside
world. It is possible , and relatively easy, to trace the causes of this uneven
treatment of Arabic philosophy , and its lack of appreciation and under-
standing by other specialists of both Islamic studies and philosophy , to three
approaches to it which, because of their predominance, have virtually monop-
olized its study in the twentieth century. These three approaches can be roughly
identiŽ ed as: (1) the orientalist; (2) the mystical/illuminationist ; (3) the political.
I will now try to present these approaches in greater detail and give some
pertinent examples.

The Orientalist Approach

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The approach with the longest history and the widest ramiŽ cations and, one
might say, reincarnations, is the orientalist. Orientalism has become a loaded
term in Arabic and Islamic studies that easily excites passions, but I have no
wish to go into theoretical or polemical arguments here, either for or against. All
I would like to refer to by that term is to a certain nineteenth century picture of
the natives of the ‘Orient’—and in our case, of the Semite Arabs—held by
Westerners: mystical, sensual, otherworldly, non-rational and intensely interested
in religion—for which they, just like their cousins, the Hebrews, allegedly have
a great talent—living in despotic societies and immutable ways of life and
systems of thought.6
This caricature may seem today no more than that, and perhaps no single
individual ever held to it in its totality, but it fairly represents what nineteenth
century Europeans were predisposed to believe about people living in Islamic
societies, about ‘orientals’.7 This cultural predispositio n determined not only
what they might believe about orientals, but also the nature of the questions they
might ask about them and their society; it determined, in other words, the
European research agenda. And this, in my view, is one of the major reasons for
the speciŽ c paths which Western scholarship about the Islamic world has taken
up to the present day. It is also one of the most pernicious effects of orientalism,
effects which, for all our contemporary protestation s and affectations of multi-
culturalism, are still very much with us today.
In the study of Arabic philosophy, the perniciousnes s I mentioned manifested
itself in various ways, and I think I have time to talk about four of them. These
are, viewing Arabic philosoph y as mystical, as only an intermediary between
Greek and medieval Latin philosophy, as being concerned only about the relation
between religion and philosophy , and as coming to an end with Averroes, when
the torch was passed on to the West.

6
M. Mahdi presented the evidence for the prevalence of these notions in the works of some orientalists of the
Ž rst half of the twentieth century in his ‘Orientalism and the Study of Islamic Philosophy’, in Journal of Islamic
Studies, 1 (1990), pp. 79–93.
7
An apposite example is offered by the book of Léon Gauthier, a not inconsequential student of Arabic philosophy
and editor of texts, entitled, Introduction à l’étude de la philosophie musulmane. L’esprit sémitique et l’esprit
aryen; la philosophie grecque et la religion de l’Islam, (Paris: 1923).

8
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

Viewing Arabic Philosophy as Mystical

The predispositio n to view Arabic philosoph y as mystical is dramatically
illustrate d by a publication by A.F. Mehren, an orientalist in Copenhagen who
worked quite consistentl y on Avicenna at the end of the nineteenth century. It
is a long story which I have already told, but very instructive and entertaining,
and, I think, worth repeating.
In the prologue to his magnum opus, al-Shifā’—the SufŽ cientia of the
Latins—Avicenna (d. 1037) mentions that he wrote two major books encom-
passing all of philosophy, the Shifā’, which the reader holds in his hands, and
one which he calls The Easterners, al-Mashriqiyy ūn. The distinctio n which
Avicenna draws between the two books is stylistic: the Shifā’, he says, is
expositor y and analytical, and contains discussion s of all the main positions
taken by various philosopher s in the history of Aristotelianism . The Easterners,
by contrast, he says, is a dogmatic work: he presents just those philosophica l
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theories which he thinks are true, and spends no time refuting other views. By
‘Easterners’, Ž nally, Avicenna was referring to the philosopher s working in the
Mashriq, the traditional Khurāsān, i.e. to himself and to his disciples who he
hoped would continue his teachings.
As luck would have it, the second book, The Easterners, was partially lost
soon after it was written and circulated in extremely limited circles. Even today
we possess only about half of the entire work: a part on logic and the physics.8
The Shifā’, by contrast, survived in full in multiple copies and travelled
widely—widely enough to reach Islamic Spain and, as we all know, to be
translated partially into Latin. In Spain, it naturally attracted the attention of the
mentor of Averroes, Ibn T½ ufayl (d. 1186), who referred to it in the prologue to
his famous philosophica l romance, H ½ ayy b. Yaqz½ ān—the so-called Philosophu s
Autodidactus—which bears the suggestive subtitle, ‘On the Secrets of Eastern
Philosophy ’ (F¯õ Asrār al-H ½ ikma al-Mashriqiyya). Ibn T½ ufayl, however, for
reasons of his own and which do not concern us here, completely misrepresented
the stylistic distinctio n between the Shifā’ and The Easterners which Avicenna
drew in his prologue as one of substance, claiming, in fact, that there is a
diference in doctrine between the two books: the Shifā’ he said, contains merely
Peripatetic doctrine, while The Easterners contains the mystical ‘secrets of the
Eastern philosophy ’, secrets which occasioned his own book, H ½ ayy b. Yaqz½ ān.9
It does not appear that Ibn T½ ufayl was very successful in convincing his
contemporaries of the validity and accuracy of his presentation; Averroes (Ibn
Rushd), for one, who read the same prologue of the Shifā’ that Ibn T½ ufayl had,
certainly does not share his mentor’s understandin g of it in the few places that
he mentions it. Ibn T½ ufayl’s Ž ction, however, found a ready audience and
immense success in modern times among orientalists who were eager and
properly predisposed to espouse his connotation s of the East—the ‘Orient’—as
mystical and visionary. And here is where A.F. Mehren comes in. Starting with
Ibn T½ ufayl’s presentation of Avicenna’s ‘Eastern’ philosoph y and taking that to

8
See D. Gutas, ‘Avicenna’s Eastern (“Oriental”) Philosophy. Nature, Contents, Transmission’, Arabic Sciences
and Philosophy, 10 (2000), pp. 159–180.
9
The reasons for Ibn T½ ufayl’s tendentiousnes s are discussed at length in D. Gutas, ‘Ibn T½ ufayl on Ibn S¯õ nā’s
Eastern Philosophy’, Oriens, 34 (1994), pp. 222–241. The objection by A. Elamrani-Jamal to my interpretation
and my response to him are given in my article cited in the preceding note, p. 161, note 10.

9
 DIMITRI GUTAS

be the gospel truth, he looked around for texts by Avicenna that would contain
that ‘Eastern’ philosophy. He found none, however, for as I already mentioned,
Avicenna’s The Easterners has survived very poorly and in fragmentary form in
a handful of manuscripts of which Mehren was not aware. Lacking documen-
tation, Mehren was predisposed to use his imagination. He found certain brief
allegories by Avicenna, which he collected; to these he added the last three
chapters of Avicenna’s last major book, Pointers and Reminders (al-Ishārāt
wa’l-Tanb¯õ hāt), chapters that deal with philosophica l epistemology , that is, the
conjunction of the human with the active intellect, using on occasion terminol-
ogy from Islamic theology and mysticism rather than the standard Peripatetic
one. Mehren then edited the whole collection in four fascicles, under two titles,
one in Arabic and another in French. The Arabic title he borrowed directly from
Ibn T½ ufayl’s subtitle : ‘Treatises by Avicenna on the Secrets of Eastern Philoso-
phy’ (Rasā’il … Ibn S¯õ nā Ž¯ Asrār al-H
½ ikma al-Mashriqiyya) despite the fact that
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none of the treatises actually edited by Mehren in these fascicles not only does
not bear such a title, but ‘Eastern philosophy ’, either as a term or as a concept,
is not even mentioned once in any of them! What is worse, however, is Mehren’s
French title for the entire collection, which makes the fateful, if totally un-
founded, connection between Avicenna’s Eastern philosoph y and mysticism:
Traités mystiques … d’Avicenne (Leiden 1889–1999). To be sure, the great
Italian Arabist Carlo Alfonso Nallino, one of the very few serious students of
Arabic philosophy , objected strenuously to this title, already in 1925: ‘An
entirely arbitrary title’, he said, ‘without any basis in the manuscripts, which has
subsequently become the cause of errors.’10 His objections, however, were to no
avail; once it gained printed legitimacy through the publication of Mehren’s
fascicles, the myth of Avicenna’s mystical Eastern or ‘Oriental’ philosophy has
since reappeared in a number of variations that bear no relationship to the extant
Eastern texts and are irrelevant to Avicenna’s thought. And it is here, to cite but
one example in this category, that Arabists have been misleading Latinists in
believing that the ‘oriental’ philosoph y of Avicenna is something different from
his other philosophy ; Ibn T½ ufayl’s Ž ction reappears in Alain de Libera’s recent
compilatory account of medieval philosophy .11

Intermediary Between Greek and Medieval Latin Philosophy

Another attitude which hampered the independent investigatio n of Arabic
philosoph y as philosophy —and hence its presentation as such to non-Arabists—
was one which considered it as philosophicall y insigniŽ cant in itself but also
merely as an intermediary between Greek philosophy and later Latin scholasti-
cism. This attitude is best exempliŽ ed by the statements of one of the earliest
authors of a general introductio n to Arabic philosophy , T.J. De Boer’s The
History of Philosophy in Islam, a book which Ž rst appeared in German in 1901.12
As it appeared soon afterwards in an English translation, a translation that was
reprinted a number of times, it remained, until the publication of Henry Corbin’s
10
In his ‘FilosoŽ a ! Orientale @ od ! Illuminativa @ d’Avicenna?’ Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 10
(1923–1925), p. 443: ‘Titolo affatto arbitrario, senza alcun fondamento nei manoscritti, e che poi è stato causa
d’errori’.
11
La Philosophie Médiévale (Paris: PUF, 1993, second edition 1995), pp. 115–116.
12
Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam (Stuttgart: F. Frommans Verlag, 1901).

10
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

history in 1964, which I will mention later, the single most accessible account
of Arabic philosophy. De Boer is quite explicit about the philosophica l value of
his subject; he says, and I quote from the English translation:

Muslim philosophy has always continued to be an Eclecticism which depended on the

stock of works translated from the Greek. The course of its history has been a process
of assimilation rather than of generation. It has not distinguished itself, either by
propoundin g new problems or by any peculiarity in its endeavours to solve the old ones.
It has therefore no important advances in thought to register.13

The only value which De Boer can Ž nd to credit Arabic philosoph y with is in
the social history of ideas. He goes on to say,

Now the history of philosophy in Islam is valuable just because it sets forth the Ž rst
attempt to appropriate the results of Greek thinking with greater comprehensiveness and
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freedom than in the early Christian dogmatics. Acquaintance with the conditions which
made such an attempt possible will permit us to reach conclusions by way of analogical
reasonings … as to the reception of Graeco-Arabic science in the Christian Middle Ages,
and will perhaps teach us a little about the conditions under which philosophy arises in
general. (p. 29)

It is impossible to conceive how such statements can have been made by learned
people who must have been aware of the immense material in Arabic philosoph y
which had not yet been studied. Since therefore these generalizing statements
were not based on an evaluation of all the relevant evidence, the conclusion is
inescapable that such an attitude would appear to have been based on the
presumption that even if one were to read all the works of Arabic philosoph y one
would still not Ž nd any original or important advances in thought, a presumption
clearly based on the view—we might call it racist today—that the Semites—in
this case, the Arabs—are incapable of critical rational thought, in so far as they
have a genius for religious and especially mystical thought. That some such,
perhaps unconscious , assumptions were operative can be gleaned from consider-
ation of the following.
Simon van den Bergh made a signiŽ cant contributio n to the study of our
subject through his well-known translation of the refutation by Averroes of
al-Ghazāl¯õ ’s criticism of the philosophers , the famous Incoherence of the
Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut). He published the work in two volumes, the
Ž rst containing the translation proper and the second copious notes elucidating
the philosophica l points and providing references to Greek philosophy .14 One
would have thought that the preoccupation, during the arduous task of translation
and annotation, with al-Ghazāl¯õ ’s arguments and with their relentless and highly
technical refutation by Averroes would have convinced him that here, at least,
one could see philosophica l thinking at its best. And yet, as epigraph for his
translation Van den Bergh chose the following two quotations : one, by Epicurus:
‘Only Greeks philosophize ’, with the obvious implication that everything that is
contained in his two volumes is nothing else but derivative from Greek

13
T.J. De Boer, The History of Philosophy in Islam, translated by E.R. Jones, (London: Luzac & Co., 1903, reprint
New York, Dover: 1967), p. 29.
14
Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut, (Oxford and London: Luzac & Co., 1954).
11
 DIMITRI GUTAS

philosophy; 15 and second, the statement from Maimonides’ Guide of the Per-
plexed, where Maimonides says,
One must know that everything the Moslems, Mu‘tazilites as well as Ash‘arites, have
professed concerning these subjects [i.e. theological matters] has been borrowed from the
Greeks and Syrians who applied themselves to the criticism of the philosophers.16
Thus, if Arabists present Arabic philosoph y as derivative and philosophicall y
insigniŽ cant, it is easy to see how other historians of philosophy , and especially
medievalists, would be justiŽ ed in adopting the same view.

Relation of Philosophy to Religion

My third item is closely related to the Ž rst two, and that is the view that the
greatest contributio n of Arabic philosoph y to world thought is its analysis of the
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relation of philosoph y to religion. The origins of such a view are both easy and
difŽ cult to discern. On the one hand, there is certainly the nineteenth century
view that the Semites were religious geniuses, so it is natural to expect them to
make a contribution on this issue when it came to philosophy . However, what
is more important is the fact that Western scholars themselves were intensely
interested in the issue precisely because of the medieval Latin controversy on the
subject and in particular of the ps.-Averroist double truth theory. From Ernest
Renan’s original Averroès et l’Averro¨õ sme which appeared in 1852, to the book
by the same title by Alain de Libera and Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, published in
1991, there is a long list of books purporting to present a history of Arabic
philosoph y which do little more than discuss the various aspects of this
question. 17 Most obviously guilty in this regard is Oliver Leaman, who published
in 1985 a book with the title An Introductio n to Medieval Islamic Philosophy.18
Apart from the sixth and last chapter in the book, which treats the methodolog-
ical question of ‘How to read Islamic philosophy’,19 the Ž rst three chapters
contain an analysis of the three points on the basis of which al-Ghazāl¯õ accused
the philosopher s of heresy, together with Averroes’ rejoinders, the fourth
discusses ethics from the con icting viewpoints of religion and philosophy , and
the Ž fth presents yet another review of al-Fārāb¯õ ’s and Averroes’ so-called
political philosophy , which itself is discussed in terms of religion versus
philosophy . The impression generated by the whole book is precisely that
medieval Arabic philosoph y was in fact nothing else but a continuous squabble
through and across the centuries about the relative truth values of religion and
15
See the review of Van den Bergh’s book by Franz Rosenthal who rightly brings up this point: The general
tenor of this volume, Rosenthal says, ‘is indicated in two statements by Van den Bergh himself. One is the motto
derived from Epicurus and placed at the beginning of the volume: “Only Greeks philosophize”. Notwithstanding
the eminence of its author, it can hardly be denied that this is a particularly unfortunate expression of cultural
chauvinism, eliminating as it does not only al-Ghazzâlî and Averroes but also van den Bergh and philosophy itself’,
in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 15 (1956), p. 198.
16
Both quotations appear on the Ž rst page of the second volume of Van den Bergh’s book. A more literal
translation of the passage by Maimonides is given by S. Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, (Chicago II: UCP,
1963), vol. I, p. 177.
17
De Libera and Hayoun’s Averroès et l’Averro¨õ sme (Paris: PUF) appeared in the series ‘Que sais-je?’. On pp.
3–8 they present a summary of the discussions with a list of the more notable publications.
18
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); cf. my review in Der Islam, 65 (1988), pp. 339–342.
19
This chapter is actually a reprint of an earlier article by Leaman that appeared under the title, ‘Does the
Interpretation of Islamic Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 12
(1980), pp. 525–538.

12
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

philosophy , a misconception of which Leaman himself, in his last chapter,

accuses those who adopt a political view in interpreting Arabic philosoph y
(the followers of Leo Strauss, about whom more later). As Leaman states in the
original article, the origins of this misconception partly lie in the fact that the
edition and translation of Arabic philosophica l works by Westerners have often
concentrated on such subjects. This, however, is no more than the projection of
Western preoccupation with this subject onto medieval Islamic culture, and it
would accordingly be a mistake to conclude from this preoccupation of the
Westerners ‘that such a theme was the major problem of interest for [Islamic]
thinkers. Rather, the religion-vs. philosoph y works are selected for attention [by
Westerners] because they are thought to be central, which leads to a self-
fulŽ lling prophecy’.20
This vicious circle in orientalist approaches to Arabic philosoph y is indeed
what perhaps characterizes most acutely such interpretations . It seems that one
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always starts with a certain preconception of what Arabic philosoph y should be

saying, and then concentrates only on those passages which seem to be
supporting such a bias, thereby appearing to corroborate the preconception on
the basis of the texts themselves. Were one, however, truly to investigate Arabic
philosoph y dispassionatel y and objectively, it would be immediately clear to him
that religion versus philosoph y is but a very minor subject of concern, and only
at certain times and in certain places. Islamic Spain at the time of Averroes may
have been such a place, but this is very far from characterizing the entire Islamic
world during the 10 centuries of Arabic philosophy that I talked about at the
outset. One is not allowed to generalize from one instance to the whole,
especially in the face of contrary evidence, which in this case is overwhelming:
al-Ghazāl¯õ died in 1111 at T½ ūs (north-east Iran), but, despite his refutation of
philosophy , his charges of unbelief (kufr) against philosophers , and the institu-
tional support given to his theses by his colleagues and successors in the various
Niz½ āmiyya colleges, philosoph y continued to  ourish in the East with renewed
vigour throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.21
Furthermore, it is completely misleading, in the context of medieval Islamic
civilization , to pose the problem as if the question actually being discussed were
whether religion or philosophy is true; all Arabic philosophers , with the possible
exception of al-Rāz¯õ (Rhazes), did believe that religion—some religion, be it
Islam, Christianity , Judaism, Zoroastrianism, or even paganism, in the case of
the Sabians—was true and their concern was not to deny its validity. The way
that the question of religion was framed by those philosopher s who did discuss
it was in terms of prophetology , and they localized its discussion in two areas,
in epistemology and in the logic of propositions . In the case of epistemology , the
question that was asked was, how the prophet, given that he has no philosophica l
20
Leaman, ‘Does the Interpretation …’, p. 529.
21
H. Corbin already made this point when he noted that Abū, ©l-Barakāt al-Baghdād¯õ ‘continued to write long after
al-Ghazāl¯õ died. This fact in itself is sufŽ cient evidence that it would be more than exaggeratio n to believe that
al-Ghazāl¯õ ’s critique spelled ruin for the destiny of philosoph y in Islam’; Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1964); here cited from the English translation by L. and P. Sherrard, History of Islamic Philosophy (London
and New York: Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 179. For the attitude of the Niz½ āmiyya professors to philosophy in the twelfth
century see now F. Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 350–358. For the ef orescence of
philosophy in the East in the period after Avicenna see D. Gutas, ‘The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic
Philosophy, 1000–c.1350’, in the proceedings of the Leuven Conference on the heritage of Avicenna, September 1999,
to be edited by J. Janssens and D. De Smet. In the West, in al-Andalus, philosophy of course declined after Averroes
(d. 1198) and Ibn T½ umlūs (d. 1223) not because of al-Ghazāl¯õ ’s attacks but because of the reconquista and the rapid
deterioration of the conditions of Arab society in the peninsula.

13
 DIMITRI GUTAS

upbringing , knows the intelligibilia , the eternal realities in the intellects of the
heavenly spheres and ultimately of the Necessarily Existent; the answer in this
case invariably rested on an analysis of the human soul and its intellectua l and
imaginative faculties—in other words in the context of the problématique of
Aristotle’s De Anima.22 In the case of the logic of the propositions , the question
that was asked was how and to whom the prophet communicates the knowledge
of the intelligibilia ; in other words, whether he uses demonstrative, dialectical,
sophistical , rhetorical, or poetical propositions , and the answer was then nat-
urally discussed in the context of Aristotle’s Organon, especially the Topics and
the Rhetoric, with imagination being considered the attendant faculty for the
process. 23
Seen in this light, it is an unfortunate distortion with grave consequences to
state that the issue of religion versus philosoph y was central in Arabic philoso-
phy. As a matter of fact, those responsible for this distortion did not even read
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properly their Averroes, the one author around whom the Western discussion has
centred. As is well known, Averroes wrote an essay in which he discussed this
particular question, The Decisive Treatise Determining the Nature of the Con-
nection between Religion and Philosophy (Fas½ l al-Maqāl wa Taqr¯õ r mā bayna
½ ikma min al-Ittis½ āl). This essay has been published, translated,
’l-Shar ¯õ ¨a wa’l-H
and studied by numerous scholars ever since its original edition, at the very
beginning of the study of Arabic philosoph y in the West, by M.J. Müller in 1859
in his book entitled Philosophie und Theologie von Averroes (Munich)—a fact
that in itself demonstrates that the religion versus philosoph y issue is completely
a Western concern and has nothing to do with Arabic philosoph y per se.
Averroes begins his essay as follows:
The purpose of this treatise is to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law,
whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or
commanded either by way of recommendation or as obligatory.24
It is thus obvious from Averroes’s own words which I emphasize here that this
is a legal text, in answer essentially to another legal text by al-Ghazāl¯õ , not the
Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, to which the philosophica l response is Averroes’ Tahāfut
al-Tahāfut. This discussion, along with a very few other legal responsa on the
question of the permissibility of the study of logic and philosoph y in Islam,
belong, from the point of view of the nature of their contents, to Islamic law and
not to Arabic philosophy ; one must not forget that both al-Ghazāl¯õ and Averroes
were primarily legal scholars and known—and widely respected—as such in
their respective communities. There is accordingly a double misunderstandin g
here in Western studies of Arabic philosophy ; not only is what was in reality a
legal debate mistaken for a philosophica l controversy—with the unfortunate
consequence of debasing the very contents of Arabic philosophy by viewing the
dogmatic and sophistica l thought characteristic of legal argumentation as rep-
resentative of philosophica l analysis and cogitation—but also the subject of that
22
Cf. D. Gutas, ‘Avicenna: De anima (V 6). Über die Seele, über Intuition und Prophetie’, in K. Flasch (ed.)
Hauptwerke der Philosophie. Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), pp. 90–107.
23
This approach was initiated by al-Fārāb¯õ and continued by subsequen t philosophers . See the pioneering article
by R. Walzer, ‘Al-Fārāb¯õ ’s Theory of Prophecy and Divination’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 77 (1957), pp.
142–148, reprint in his Greek into Arabic (Oxford: Cassirer, 1962), pp. 206–219.
24
George F. Hourani, Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (London: Luzac & Co., 1961), p.
44.

14
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

legal debate is taken to be representative of all Arabic philosoph y and its central
concern.

Arabic Philosophy ends with Averroes

The fourth obstacle, Ž nally, which the orientalist biases that I have just described
generated has been the widespread notion until relatively recently that Arabic
philosoph y ends with Averroes; this is the natural result if one views Arabic
philosoph y merely as an intermediary between late Greek and high medieval
scholasticism , and if one views it from a Eurocentric perspective in which
Averroism was indeed the last major theory from the Islamic world to have
in uenced medieval Western thought. Long before today, and to his undying
credit, the French orientalist Henry Corbin demonstrated the falsity of this view
in his by now classic Histoire de la philosophi e islamique (1964), a book which
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was also translated into English (1993). In numerous passages he makes the case
in this regard very aptly:
We have … lamented the fact that it has been repeated over and over again that Averroes
was the greatest name and the most eminent representative of what has been called ‘Arab
philosophy’, and that with him this philosophy attained its apogee and its goal. In this
way we have lost sight of what was happening in the East, where in fact the work of
Averroes passed as it were unnoticed. Neither Nas½¯õ r T½ ūs¯õ , nor M¯õ r Dāmād, nor Mullā
S½ adrā, nor Hād¯õ Sabzavār¯õ had any inkling of the role and the signiŽ cance attributed by
our textbooks to the Averroes–Ghazāl¯õ polemic. If it had been explained to them they
would have been amazed, as their successors today are amazed.25
And yet, after more than 30 years from the original appearance of Corbin’s
work, the fact remains that more than 90% of all the Western publications , books
and articles on Arabic philosoph y treat only or primarily the period from
al-Kind¯õ to Averroes, despite the fact that there is basic and original work to be
done on all the philosopher s after Averroes.
Let me give you a brief idea of how basic and how original with two
examples. Although the preeminence of Avicenna is now universally acknowl-
edged, we know next to nothing about his immediate school and successors who
were, after all, responsible in large measure for the propagation and study of his
works in the second half of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. There are
no studies on any aspect of the subject, from the transmission of the text of
Avicenna’s works among his students, to the interpretation by them of his
philosophy. 26
Second, there is the example of Ath¯õ r al-D¯õ n al-Abhar¯õ , a philosophe r from
Mosul in northern Iraq who died in 1264. He wrote a handbook of logic, a
summary treatment of all parts of the Aristotelian Organon, to which he even
gave the Greek name of Īsāghūj¯õ , i.e. Eisagoge, introduction to logic. The title
is consciously borrowed from Porphyry—from the Greek, no less—but the
subject matter is the entire Organon, not merely Porphyry’s quinque voces. This

25
Corbin, History, p. 242.
26
A pioneering study in this regard is D.C. Reisman’s The Making of the Avicennan Tradition (Leiden: Brill,
2002) which traces the manuscript transmission of Avicenna’s work and its diffusion among his immediate
disciples. See also Griffel, Apostasie, pp. 341–349 for a discussion of the works of al-Lawkar¯õ , a third generation
student of Avicenna.

15
 DIMITRI GUTAS

book gained astounding popularity in subsequent Arabic philosophy , was com-

mented upon by dozens of scholars throughout the centuries, and was still
studied in Islamic traditiona l schools in the Ottoman Empire earlier this century.
To a large degree it supplanted even Avicenna’s smaller productions on logic.
Al-Abhar¯õ wrote also another very widely read summa philosophia e, Philosoph-
ical Guidance (Hidāyat al-H ½ ikma), in which he treated logic, physics, and
metaphysics, following the pattern set once and for all by Avicenna. This book
also was the object of very many commentaries and supercommentaries. But we
know very little about both of these extremely in uential works; neither their
precise contents, nor an analysis of them, nor their relation to Avicenna’s
philosophy , nor, Ž nally, the developments made in the commentaries on them.
The same attitude about philosoph y after Averroes is still prevalent even in
Majid Fakhry’s A History of Islamic Philosophy, which appeared in 1970.27 For
Arabic philosoph y after Averroes, Fakhry merely has a brief section (pp.
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293–311) on the illuminationis t tradition and its Safavid developments, follow-

ing Corbin, but nothing about the seven centuries long tradition of Avicennism
in the Arab lands and in the Ottoman Empire. The same unfortunately holds
largely true also of the recent but very disappointin g two-volume History of
Islamic Philosophy edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman.28
These four aspects of the orientalist approach to the study of Arabic philoso-
phy have coloured its interpretation for the last century and a half, and it is little
wonder that when non-Arabist historians of philosoph y read such distorted
perceptions of Arabic philosoph y they are not impressed, much less incited to
take up its study by learning Arabic. The sway of the orientalist approach has
weakened considerably in recent decades, though it certainly has not ended yet.
However, what is even more disturbing than the misperceptions created by the
orientalist approach is that it gave rise to two alternative ways of studying Arabic
philosoph y which are currently rather strong and in uential. One is the illumina-
tionist interpretation of Henry Corbin and the other the political esoteric
interpretation of Leo Strauss.

Illuminationist Approach
I stated above that the orientalist view that Arabic philosoph y came to an end
with Averroes caused subsequent authors to be neglected. This, of course, is
true, but there are deeper causes for this neglect. Most of them have to do,
ironically, also with Henry Corbin who, as I mentioned, championed the cause
of the continuity of philosoph y in Islam after Averroes. Corbin, an in uential
scholar of Iran and, one must decidedly add, contemporary mystic—the word he
would have liked to have been used would be ‘theosophist ’—had an obsession
with what he perceived to be Iranian spirituality .29 His early work on the
late-twelfth century philosophe r Suhraward¯õ appears to have coloured his under-
standing not only of later Arabic philosoph y but of Islamic civilization in

27
(New York: Columbia, second edition 1984).
28
(London: Routledge, 1996). Of the 1200 pages the two volumes contain, apart from the justiŽ ably full treatment
of Nas½¯õ r al-D¯õ n al-T½ ūs¯õ (pp. 527–584), only 12 pages (pp. 584–596) are devoted to the Avicennist tradition!
29
See the obituary of Corbin by Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, Journal Asiatique, 267 (1979), pp. 231–237. An
account of ‘his work and in uence’ along hagiographi c lines is provided by Pierre Lory in the Routledge History
of Islamic Philosophy, II, pp. 1149–1155, with further bibliography .

16
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

general. Suhraward¯õ , who, apparently for completely unrelated reasons, was put
to death in Aleppo in 1191 by the son of the great Saladin of Crusader fame (and
apparently upon orders by Saladin), was the founder of the Illuminationis t
school, a Platonic version of Avicennism in which the Platonic ideas were given
ontological status in what he called the ‘world of the archetypes’ (¨ālam
al-mithāl), located between the sublunary world and the intelligible world of the
spheres. Epistemologically , the world of the archetypes is accesible through the
Aristotelian/Avicennan faculty of imagination, just as the intelligibl e world is
accessible through the intellect. Following the lead of Avicenna, Suhraward¯õ also
expressed his universe in poetic terms, using as his leitmotiv the ancient
Zoroastrian concept of light, and interpreting the Platonic archetypes as well as
the intelligible beings in terms of Zoroastrian angelology. It is in this context that
access to the world of the archetypes and the intelligibl e world beyond is seen
as illumination . Corbin chose to concentrate on the allegorical presentation of
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Suhraward¯õ ’s system and see it as a fusion of philosoph y and Islamic mysticism,

and eventually arrived at the position of considering this new amalgam as
representing the true image of all Islam. By so doing Corbin thus took the older
orientalist position that Arabic philosophy is mystical to its logical conclusion
and elevated it to the sole hermeneutical principle of his approach. He said, in
effect, ‘al-Suhraward¯õ and, after him, the whole school of ishrāqiyyūn (Illumina-
tionists) directed their efforts to uniting philosophica l enquiry with personal
spiritual realization. In Islam above all, the history of philosoph y and the history
of spiritualit y are inseparable’.30 He thus spoke of ‘Islamic philosoph y as of a
philosoph y whose development, and whose modalities, are essentially linked to
the religious and spiritual fact of Islam’ (p. xiv). It is in this context that he
spoke of and justiŽ ed Arabic philosoph y as ‘Islamic philosophy ’ (pp. xii–xiv).
There are serious problems with this approach. In the Ž rst place, I speak of
Arabic philosoph y as Arabic not because of ethnic considerations , as Corbin
suggests in his discussion, but for two major reasons. First, Arabic was the
language of Islamic civilization and the vehicle in which the identity and
self-consciousnes s of that culture was cultivated and transmitted to all citizens
in the Islamic world, regardless of their religion. The philosopher s who wrote
philosoph y as philosoph y (and not as theology or mysticism, as Corbin would
have it) were not only Muslims but Christians, Jews and pagans (the
H½ arrānians). They all participated in the same enterprise, and even more
importantly, they saw and identiŽ ed themselves as engaging in the same
discipline with each other, beyond religious differences. In my chart I include,
among others, Isaac Israeli and Maimonides, who were Jews, as well as
Abū-Bishr Mattā, the founder of the Peripatetic school in Baghdad, and all his
immediate followers except al-Fārāb¯õ , who were Christians. Thābit ibn Qurra
was a pagan (Sabian), and al-Rāz¯õ , for all practical purposes, was an atheist. It
would thus be just as absurd to call them ‘Islamic philosophers ’ in the religious
sense that Corbin proposes as it would be to call Porphyry and Plotinus, for
example, Syrian and Egyptian, respectively, or, for that matter, Roman philoso-
phers. Secondly, and what is presupposed by my Ž rst point, is that through the
efforts of the translators of Greek philosophica l works, Arabic was made into a
philosophica l language which eventually won its autonomy and became a
30
Corbin, History, p. xvi.

17
 DIMITRI GUTAS

determining element in the expression of philosophica l thought. Even in the

cases where some late philosophica l works were written in Persian, the terminol-
ogy was still completely Arabic as was the way of thinking that underlay the
expression.
More signiŽ cantly, calling Arabic philosoph y ‘Islamic’ and consequently
seeing it as ‘essentially linked to the religious and spiritual fact of Islam’ injects
an overpowering religious dimension to it which was not there. The distinctio n
between philosoph y and theology is well known to any student of medieval
Latin philosoph y and the two should not be confused: Arabic philosoph y is not
Islamic theology, either in the period before Avicenna or after him. Islamic
theology may have borrowed concepts and positions from Arabic philosoph y
(mainly in dialectics and epistemology) , just as Arabic philosophy paid attention
to some of the subjects at the centre of Islamic theology (like the nature of the
prophet’s knowledge and of the attributes of the supreme being), but they
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remained distinct in so far as philosophy argued on the basis of philosophica l

data about philosophica l subjects in demonstrative terms, while theology argued
on the basis of revelational data about a largely different set of subjects in
dialectical or rhetorical terms. By blurring this distinctio n in the name of what
Corbin thinks is the higher reality of divine illumination , he makes of Arabic
philosoph y nothing more than Islamic mysticism and theology, he mistakenly
directs attention only to ‘prophecy and the prophetic Revelation’ as the core
elements of this philosoph y (p. xv), and he ignores the hundreds of volumes
written on logic (including rhetoric and poetics), on all parts of the traditional
subjects dealt with under physics, as well as on metaphysics in the Aristotelian
sense of the study of being qua being. In the end, it is small wonder that
Corbin’s volume on the history of Arabic philosophy , pioneering though it was
in going beyond Averroes, did not excite scholars interested in Arabic philoso-
phy; if all that Arabic philosoph y after Averroes was, was some adolescent talk
about mysticism and self realization, then philosophicall y minded researchers
had certainly better things to do.
The inhibiting effect which Corbin’s approach had on the study of later Arabic
philosoph y even extended to Avicenna. Following in the footsteps of Mehren
who saw Avicenna’s ‘eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ philosoph y as mystical, as I
discussed, Corbin went one step beyond and found in Avicenna the precursor
and real founder of Suhraward¯õ ’s illuminationism , despite the fact that
Suhraward¯õ himself accused Avicenna of being a thorough going Peripatetic with
no understandin g of this doctrine! As a result, the serious studies on Avicenna
in the West after Corbin’s book Avicenne et le récit visionnair e (Tehran and
Paris, 1954), translated into English in 1960 as Avicenna and the Visionary
Recital, have been few and far between. Again, philosopher s would not bother
to look if all they could expect to Ž nd was confessiona l esotericism. And by the
same token, just as Corbin’s approach alienated philosopher s from the study of
Avicenna and all post-Avicennan Arabic philosophy, it attracted scholars who
were interested precisely in confessiona l esotericism as a means to promote their
personal or ethnic or religious chauvinisti c agenda. This is a far cry from
studying Arabic philosoph y as philosoph y in its historical context, much less
making it accessible to historians of philosoph y and scholars of Islam!
An outgrowth of this approach, which has become increasingly popular in the
last 20 years (as it follows the rise of religious fundamentalism in both the

18
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

Islamic world and the West), is the view that Islamic philosophy , theology, and
mysticism are closely related and that their common inspiration and origins are
to be found in the Qur’ān and the h½ ad¯õ th. This approach, which can be called
Islamic apologetics, is taken by a number of Muslim scholars, foremost among
whom is Seyyed Hossein Nasr.31 In this case, confessionalis m has completely
replaced scholarship.

Political Approach
Finally, I will now brie y turn to the third major cause for the erroneous
approaches to Arabic philosoph y in the twentieth century. This may be known
to most of you; it concerns the hermeneutical methods of Leo Strauss as applied
to the interpretation of Arabic philosophy . Just as Corbin’s tendency to interpret
all Arabic philosoph y as illuminationis m is an offshoot of the older orientalist
view of it as mystical and non-rational, so also Strauss’s approach is an offshoot
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of the older orientalist conception of Arabic philosoph y as being invariably

about the con ict between religion and philosophy. And just as Corbin allowed
his own idiosyncrati c interpretation of Suhraward¯õ to colour his understandin g of
all Arabic philosophy , so also did Strauss start with Maimonides’ introduction to
the Guide of the Perplexed and applied what he understood from it as valid for
all Arabic philosophy .32 In that introduction , Maimonides lists the various causes
which ‘account for the contradictory or contrary statements to be found in any
book or compilation’, and offers suggestion s about how they are to be read in
order to eliminate all seeming inconsistencie s and contradictions.33 There is
nothing novel in this approach of Maimonides; allegorical interpretation of
religious texts is as old as at least the Stoics and had been in constant use
throughout the centuries in all religious traditions in the Middle East until the
time of Maimonides; as for philosophica l texts, their obscurity, and especially
the obscurity of Aristotle’s works, had become in late antiquity a doctrinal topos
among the Aristotelians of Alexandria. Al-Fārāb¯õ adopted wholesale the Alexan-
drian teaching on this issue—as in many others—and repeated the reasons for
Aristotle’s obscurity as follows:
Aristotle used an obscure way of expression for three reasons: Ž rst, to test the nature of
the student in order to Ž nd out whether he is suitable to be educated or not; second, to
avoid lavishing philosophy on all people, but only on those who are worthy of it; and
third, to train the mind [of the student] through the exertion of research.34
31
See, for example, his article on ‘The Qur’ān and H ½ ad¯õ th as Source and Inspiration of Islamic Philosophy’ in
the Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy, I, pp. 27–39. Numerous other articles in the same publication
consistently blur the distinctions among these three disciplines. For a discussion of S.H. Nasr’s ideological
background , theoretical orientation, and place in modern Iranian intellectual history see M. Boroujerdi, Iranian
Intellectuals and the West (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 120–130.
32
For a clear account of the relationship of the developmen t of Strauss’s thoughts on method to his reading of
Maimonides see Rémi Brague, ‘Leo Strauss et Maïmonide’, in S. Pines and Y. Yovel (eds) Maimonides and
Philosophy (Dordrecht and Boston, MA: M. Nijhoff, 1986), pp. 246–268; English translation as ‘Leo Strauss and
Maimonides’, in A. Udoff (ed.) Leo Strauss’s Thought (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991), pp.
93–114. Literature on both Strauss and Maimonides has grown out of bounds. The particular in uence of Arabic
philosophy on Strauss’s thought is analysed by G. Tamer, Islamische Philosophie und die Krise der Moderne,
Das Verhältnis von Leo Strauss zu Alfarabi, Avicenna und Averroes (Leiden: Brill, 2001). An interesting analysis
of the ideological background of Strauss’s historical/philosophica l hermeneutics and its relationship to right wing
politics is provided by G. Paraboschi, Leo Strauss e la destra americana (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993), especially
pp. 70–78.
33
See S. Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, p. 17.
34
Al-Fārāb¯õ , Mā yanbagh õ¯ an Yuqaddama Qabla Ta¨allum Falsafat Arist½ū (Cairo: 1910), p. 14, translated by D.
Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1988), p. 227.

19
 DIMITRI GUTAS

Maimonides, as is well known, was a faithful follower of al-Fārāb¯õ . In the

introductio n to his Guide, he largely adopts the arguments about how to read a
philosophica l text from al-Fārāb¯õ ’s works, and especially from the latter’s
Agreement between Plato and Aristotle (Al-Jam¨ bayna Ra’yay al- H ½ ak¯õ mayn).
By Maimonides’ time, these arguments had already become in themselves a
topos in Arabic philosoph y through their wide use and disseminatio n by
Avicenna.35
Strauss, who, for all his accomplishments, did not know Arabic well enough
to read Arabic philosoph y and hence did not know Arabic philosophy , failed to
see the historical context and philosophica l pedigree of Maimonides’ introduc-
tion, and already in uenced by his work on Socrates and his execution by the
Athenians, misinterprete d the introductio n to mean that philosopher s never say
explicitly what they mean out of fear of persecution and lest they suffer the same
fate as Socrates. He then generalized this position, allegedly held by Mai-
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monides, to all Muslim philosophers , if one is to judge by his analysis of

al-Fārāb¯õ ’s works. Al-Fārāb¯õ , incidentally , is a particularly inappropriate philoso-
pher if one wishes to document Strauss’s thesis because, Ž rst, he is explicitly
critical of theology as a science, relegating it to a status little more than the
verbal counterpart of street Ž ghting, and second, with religion in general, he is
equally explicit in assigning to it a purely functional role in society, namely to
maintain the social order among the unlettered masses.
Strauss’s interpretation of Arabic philosoph y is based on two assumptions :
Ž rst, it is assumed that philosopher s writing in Arabic worked in a hostile
environment and were obliged to represent their views as being in conformity
with Islamic religion; and second, that they had to present their real philosoph -
ical views in disguise . ‘What is required [therefore, in order to understand their
text,] is a key to understanding the peculiar way in which the text has been
composed, and that key is to be found by paying attention to the con ict between
‘religion and philosophy ’.36 And this brings us back to the origin of Strauss’s
hermeneutics, the orientalist notion that all of Arabic philosoph y is about the
con ict between religion and philosophy ; for how else could one hold Strauss’s
view and claim that philosopher s never say what they mean when they write
about logic, all subjects of physics (other than the eternity of the world), etc.
which are patently not threatening to the presumed orthodoxy of the religious
authorities?
Now not only is this position untenable in the case of Muslim Arabic
philosopher s because it is contradicted by historical facts—there is not a single
such philosophe r who was ever persecuted, let alone executed, for his philosoph-
ical views37 —but it is wrong even in the case of Maimonides; he and his family
were persecuted by the Almohads and had to leave Spain in 1149 not because
Moses was a philosopher —in any case, he was barely in his teens at the
time—but because they were Jews. Furthermore, it is patently absurd to claim
35
See the discussion of this subject, with regard to Avicenna and his predecessors , in Gutas, Avicenna, pp.
225–234.
36
Cited from O. Leaman, ‘Does the Interpetation …’, p. 525.
37
Suhraward ¯õ (d. 1192), who is usually cited as an example in this connection (most recently by Griffel, Apostasie,
p. 358), was executed because he had usurped, though an outsider to Aleppo, the position of the local ¨ulamā©
as conŽ dant and manipulator of the prince, al-Malik al-Z½ āhir, Saladin’s son. The execution of Abū ©l-Ma¨āl¯õ
al-Mayānajï (d. 1131; also cited by Griffel) took place not because of his philosophica l beliefs but, as even
al-Bayhaq¯õ reports, ‘on account of an enmity between him and the vizier Abū ©l-Qāsim al-Anasābādh¯õ ’, see M.
Meyerhof, ‘¨Al¯õ al-Bayhaq ¯õ ’s Tatimmat S½iwān al-H ½ ikma’, Osiris, 8 (1948), p. 175.

20
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

that philosoph y was in a hostile environment in Islamic societies when it was

practised in various times and places throughout Islamic history for well over 10
centuries (again, a look at the chart is instructive). And yet, one Ž nds statements
such as the following and representing assumptions , as if they were hard facts,
upon which the entire ediŽ ce of Straussian interpretation rests:
Islamic political philosophy has always been pursued in a setting where great care had
to be taken to avoid violating the revelations and traditions accepted by the Islamic
community, since these offer guide-lines for the secular conduct of that community, as
well as injunctions about the manner in which its religious life should be conducted.38
This sweeping statement is offered as a given; there is not a single reference to
any source, primary or secondary, that would support it; since this setting is
supposed to have been so ‘always’, it should have been easy to Ž nd even a single
instance to substantiate it. But the interest of such authors is not in history;
starting from the biased orientalist attitude that philosoph y could not thrive in
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‘Islam’ because of the intrinsically anti-rationalist nature of the latter, they

proceed to add to it misinterpretation s culled, in this case, from the presumed
hermeneutics of a medieval Jewish scholar. The notion that ‘Islam’ is inimical
to rational philosophica l thought, upon which such claims rest, is itself an
orientalist notion, based partly on anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic prejudice and
partly on ignorance of social realities in Islamic societies throughout history.39
Nevertheless, Strauss’s theory gained adherents among students of Arabic
philosophy . It had two major negative consequences, both naturally following
from the two fundamental assumptions of their position I just mentioned. To
begin with, it created a hermeneutical libertarianism, or arbitrariness, among its
proponents when they read Arabic philosophica l texts. That is to say, if one
assumes a philosophe r not to have meant what he said and always to have
concealed his true meaning, how is one to understand his text? In other words,
how is one to Ž nd the ‘key’ with which to unlock his allegedly secret meaning?
Straussians, of course, always claim to have the right key and to be able to read
correctly between the lines, but their claim by itself cannot hide the arbitrariness
of their enterprise nor the fact that if there are no rules to the game then
anybody’s interpretation of a philosophica l text would be equally valid.40 The
result of this hermeneutical libertarianism has been that a number of Straussian
scholars felt completely at liberty to disregard even the most elementary rules of
philologica l and historical research. These scholars, in comparing Arabic philo-
sophical texts with those of Plato and Aristotle, conduct their discussion as if the
Arabic philosopher s had recourse to the same Greek texts of Aristotle and Plato
as ours, and as if they had the same understandin g of ancient Greek society and
institution s as ours. Thus all historical and philologica l factors which con-
ditioned the Arabic philosophers ’ understandin g of the Greek philosophica l

38
C.E. Butterworth, ‘Rhetoric and Islamic Political Philosophy’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
3 (1972), p. 187; emphasis added.
39
The orientalist basis of the Straussian approach is discussed by O. Leaman, ‘Orientalism and Islamic
Philosophy’, in the Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy, II, pp. 1145–1146.
40
The literary pathology of overinterpretation , where interpretation has no uniform criteria, is analysed by
Umberto Eco (in the essays in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with R. Rorty, J. Culler, and C. Brooke-Rose
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), who brings out its paranoiacal and obsessive nature (see, e.g.
p. 48). Though Eco makes no reference to Strauss, his analyses are signiŽ cant for placing the Straussian enterprise
both within a historically recognizable tradition and an ideological framework.

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 DIMITRI GUTAS

tradition are eliminated: factors such as translators’ misunderstandings , scribal

errors, extrapolations , exegetical additions and elaborations that accumulated
over the 12 centuries and more that separate classical Greek philosoph y and the
beginning of Arabic, and the semantic and connotative range of Arabic terms
and expressions that were current at the time of each Arabic philosopher .41
Needless to say, the result of such analysis is closer to belles-lettres than to
historical scholarship.
The same assumption, that philosopher s hide their true meaning, leads to
another absurd result, equally untenable. If philosopher s can hide their meaning
in a text so well that only other philosopher s can understand it, this assumes that
throughout the history of Islamic societies for over 10 centuries there have been
only a few dozen or so supremely intelligent individuals —the philosophers —
who could accomplish this, and that all the other thousands of ‘religious’
scholars, from whom the philosopher s were successful in concealing their true
meaning, were absolute idiots, unable to read between the lines! And by further
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consequence, that the contemporary Straussian scholar, who has no trouble

unlocking the ‘concealed’ meaning of the philosophers , is intellectually the
superior of these thousands of religious scholars.42
The second negative consequence of the Straussian position has been the
assumption that the key to understandin g the allegedly secret meaning of the
philosopher s is politics. Since Arabic philosoph y is assumed to be about religion
and philosophy , and since—it is stressed—in Islam (as in Judaism and in
contrast with medieval Catholicism) there was no separation of canon and civil
law and hence if ‘philosophy was to re ect upon any law it had to be the Law’,
that is the Islamic religious Law,43 then the reason why Arabic philosopher s
allegedly had to disguise their real opinions was because they wrote about
politics and that what they were doing was, in essence, political philosophy.
Thus all Arabic philosophy until Averroes is seen as having a political frame-
work. Let me quote the main proponent of the Straussian position among
students of Arabic philosophy , Muhsin Mahdi:
Throughout its long history in Islam, philosophy was understood by those who practiced
it as the science of the sciences that included the investigation and interpretation of
41
For examples see the reviews (a) of Ch. E. Butterworth’s Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) by J.N. Mattock in the Classical Review, 37 (1989), pp. 332–333,
and by D. Gutas in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110 (1990), pp. 92–101; and (b) of J. Parens’s
Metaphysics as Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY, 1995) by D. Gutas in International Journal of the Classical Tradition,
4 (1998), pp. 405–411. Butterworth’s response to my review, apart from failing to answer a single speciŽ c charge
made, is indicative of the political framework of overinterpretation —mentioned in the preceding note—indulged
in by Straussians; see his ‘Translation and Philosophy: the Case of Averroes’ Commentaries’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 26 (1994), pp. 19–35, and cf. his ‘De la traduction philosophique ’, Bulletin
d’Études Orientales, 48 (1996), pp. 77–85.
42
A very pertinent example, which I quote from Gutas ‘Ibn T½ ufayl on Ibn S¯õ nā’, p. 223 note 2, is offered in the
article by M. Mahdi on Arabic ‘Philosophical Literature’ (in Religion, Learning and Science in the ¨Abbasid Period
[The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature], edited by M.J.L. Young et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 76–105. Mahdi claims that Ibn T½ ufayl understands Ibn S¯õ nā’s reference to Eastern philosophy
in the Prologue to the Shifā© ‘to mean that one needs to engage in a “careful” reading of the Shifā© and Aristotle’s
writings’. Ibn T½ ufayl, Mahdi continues, thus distinguishes between the ‘surface’ and the ‘deep sense’ of these books
and then employs this distinction for three purposes: ‘to avoid having to deal explicitly with any of the issues
raised by al-Ghazāl¯õ in his Tahāfut’, ‘to hint that … al-Ghazāl¯õ dealt with the surface sense of Ibn S¯õ nā’s Shifā©’,
and ‘to protect philosophic writings against the prying eyes of a man like al-Ghazāl¯õ ’ (p. 101). This analysis
assumes that Ibn T½ ufayl thought Islamic scholars of the calibre of al-Ghazāl¯õ stupid enough to be duped by his
alleged verbal and compositiona l acrobatics, something which is far from being the case.
43
For a statement of this position see the Introduction by R. Lerner and M. Mahdi in Medieval Political Philosophy
(New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 14.

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 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

religion (revelation, prophecy, and the divine law) as a philosophic problem … In the
classical period of Islamic philosophy, religion (including theology and jurisprudence)
were investigated within the framework provided by political philosophy … This
political framework was largely abandoned in the post-classical period … and replaced
by a new framework provided by Islamic mysticism.44
These assertions are made on very  imsy evidence; in fact, the only Arabic
philosophe r of the ‘classical’ period, i.e. of the period before Averroes, who has
been repeatedly studied for his so-called ‘political’ philosoph y has been al-
Fārāb¯õ . Other than him, there is no other philosophe r who with any stretch of the
imagination can be said to have been a ‘political philosopher ’. A good case in
point is the reader/textbook on Medieval Political Philosophy put together by
Muhsin Mahdi and Ralph Lerner, both Sraussians and thus to be counted on to
unearth any piece of writing that could be considered as political, however
remotely. Other than al-Fārāb¯õ , this anthology includes Avicenna, one brief essay
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by Avempace, selections from Ibn T½ ufayl, and Averroes’ Decisive Treatise. This
last one, as we discussed earlier, is not on political philosophy , but on Islamic
law. Ibn T½ ufayl’s philosophica l romance is about the philosophu s autodidactu s,
an epistemologica l tale, while Avempace’s essay, Conduct of the Self-exile
(Tadb¯õ r al-Mutawah½ h½ id) is an ambiguous piece on how to achieve salvation
when one is not ruled by a virtuous ruler, as deŽ ned by al-Fārāb¯õ . As for
Avicenna, the pieces selected have nothing to do with political philosoph y but
only with the allegorical interpretation of texts revealed by prophets, as we
discussed earlier in the case of Maimonides. It is also very signiŽ cant that of the
10 allegedly ‘political’ texts collected in this anthology by Lerner and Mahdi,
only two are cited in their entirety, and of these the one is the legal essay by
Averroes; the rest are cited in fragments that refer to social questions or
prophetology . These fragmentary passages, plucked as they are out of their
context in the fuller works that have nothing to do with political philosophy,
generate the false impression that there are signiŽ cant texts in Arabic on political
philosophy.
The truth of the matter is that there is no political philosophy as such in
Arabic, as the term is normally understood, before Ibn Khaldūn; there is, in other
words, no independent Ž eld of study within Arabic philosoph y which investi-
gates political agents, constituencies , and institution s as autonomous elements
that operate according to their own dynamic within the structure of the society.45
The discussion on the perfect or virtuous ruler that we do Ž nd in al-Fārāb¯õ is
centred on emanationist metaphysics and the theory of the intellect (noetics) of
Alexander of Aphrodisias as developed by al-Fārāb¯õ himself. I will cite here a
very brief passage by al-Fārāb¯õ :
As it is stated in Aristotle’s De Anima, union with the Active Intellect [for man] results
from possessing the acquired intellect … The power that enables man to understand how
to deŽ ne things and actions and how to direct them toward happiness, emanates from the

44
Muhsin Mahdi with M.W. Wartofsky in the Editors’ Note in The Philosophical Forum, 4 (1973), p. 4. Mahdi
later expanded on this position in The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy, Occasional Papers Series
(Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1982).
45
Even the scholars most predisposed to Ž nd such political philosophy in Islam had serious difŽ culties
documentin g it and thus discussed what they termed the political ‘aspects’ of Arabic philosophy ; see the articles
edited by C.E. Butterworth, The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy [Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi],
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

23
 DIMITRI GUTAS

Active Intellect to the passive intellect. This emanation that proceeds from the Active
Intellect to the passive through the mediation of the acquired intellect, is revelation. Now
because the Active Intellect emanates from the being of the First Cause, it can for this
reason be said that it is the First Cause that brings about revelation to man through the
mediation of the Active Intellect. The rule of this man is the supreme rule; all other
human rulerships are inferior to it and derived from it … The men who are governed by
the rule of this ruler are the virtuous, good, and happy men. If they form a nation, then
that is the virtuous nation; if they are associated in a single [city], then the [city] that
brings together all those subject to such a rule is the virtuous city.46
The noetic basis of al-Fārāb¯õ ’s so-called ‘political philosophy’ was well under-
stood by the real political philosophe r in Islam, Ibn Khaldūn, who said the
following about the subject:
By ‘government of the city’ (al-siyāsa al-madaniyya), the philosophers mean simply the
disposition of soul and character which each member of a social organization must have
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if, eventually, people are completely to have no need of rulers. They call the social
organization that fulŽ lls these requirements the ‘virtuous city’ (al-mad¯õ na al-fād½ ila). The
norms observed in this connection are called ‘government of the city.’ They do not mean
the kind of government that the members of a social organization are led to adopt
through laws for the common interest. That is something different. The ‘virtuous city’ of
the philosophers is something whose realization (wuqū‘) is rare and remote. They discuss
it only as a hypothesis.47
The passages I emphasize in Ibn Khaldūn’s formulation make it abundantly clear
that he also denied the philosopher s any contributio n to political philosoph y
proper: ‘that is something different’, something which Ibn Khaldūn himself
treats. One may have reservations about a number of things in Ibn Khaldūn’s
Muqaddima, but in terms of general knowledge of and insight into Islamic
civilization , as well as on the particular issue under discussion here, historians
of Arabic philosoph y would have been (and would be) well advised to follow
him rather than Strauss. Nevertheless, the prevalence of the Straussian interpret-
ation of al-Fārāb¯õ has had a chilling effect on mainstream studies of this very
signiŽ cant philosopher , just as the prevalence of Corbin’s illuminationis t in-
terpretation of Avicenna for a long time inhibite d mainstream research on
Avicenna. Furthermore, as can be seen from Mahdi’s statement I quoted earlier,
it appears that these two approaches have monopolized between themselves the
study of the entire Arabic philosophy ; the Straussians claim the classical period
as their own while ceding to the illuminationist s the post-classica l period. The
wide disseminatio n of studies that were and are the result of the old orientalist
approach with its many shortcomings, and the currently reigning two offspring
of that approach, the Straussian and Illuminationist , account for most of the
misrepresentation s of Arabic philosophy .
Investigate d under these conditions , it is small wonder that Arabic philosoph y
has not yet gained the respect of historians of philosophy and other scholars of
Arabic and Islam; we, the students of Arabic philosoph y have simply failed them
and also failed the Ž eld itself. There is therefore much work to be done, and one
46
The Political Regime, or The Principles of Beings, as cited in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy,
pp. 36–37.
47
Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, ed. M. Quatremère (Paris: B. Duprat, 1858), II, p. 127; translation adapted from
F. Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, second edition, 1967),
II, p. 138.

24
 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

hopes that in the twenty-Ž rst century, the efforts of scholars will concentrate on
the edition, translation, and study of the literally hundreds of important texts of
Arabic philosoph y that span the 10 centuries of its existence. This will generate
the indispensable material on the basis of which we will be in a position to write,
in the twenty-second century, a serious history of Arabic philosophy .

Postscript
This lecture presents a preliminary and synoptic approach to the study of the
historiograph y of the history of Arabic philosophy . Though the subject has not
been treated before to any appreciable degree, to the extent that students of
Arabic philosophy , of whatever background, had their formation in the Western
intellectual tradition, it is part and parcel of the wider Ž eld of the historiograph y
of the history of philosophy , to which numerous signiŽ cant and sophisticate d
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studies have been devoted. See, for example, some seminal articles in the
following collections: The Historiograph y of the History of Philosophy, History
and Theory, Beiheft 5 (’s-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co., 1965); J. Rée, M. Ayers
and A. Westoby, Philosophy and Its Past (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978);
R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner, Philosophy in History: Essays on the
Historiograph y of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
and G. Boss, La philosophi e et son histoire (Zurich: Éditions du Grand Midi,
1996), which also contains a bibliograph y of all the relevant twentieth century
literature (pp. 327–349). To gain a perspective on the accomplishments (or lack
thereof, as I have tried to argue in this lecture) of the historiograph y of Arabic
philosophy , it is necessary that it be subjected to the same kind of detailed
scrutiny. We have an invaluable resource and a starting point in that direction.
The resource is Hans Daiber’s excellent Bibliograph y of Islamic Philosophy, 2
vols (Leiden: Brill, 1999) (cf. my review in the Journal of Islamic Studies, 11
(2000), pp. 368–372); the starting point is Daiber’s article in the same work on
‘What is the Meaning of and to What End Do We Study the History of Islamic
Philosophy ? The History of a Neglected Discipline’, (pp. xi–xxxiii), which
presents an almost complete and annotated bibliograph y of histories of Arabic
philosoph y from the Middle Ages to the present. I hope that the present essay
will serve to start the discussion; some of the references in the notes raise
questions or point to issues that could not have been adequately addressed within
the format of a public lecture

25