Islam by Carole Hillenbrand

Author:Carole Hillenbrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500772614
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2015-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

Islamic Philosophy

The word used in Arabic to denote philosophy is falsafa. It is a borrowing from the Greek word philosophia; there is no proper Arabic term for it. And this sums up the difficulty that Muslim legal scholars experienced in accepting philosophy as a legitimate and appropriate field of enquiry within the religious sciences.

During the rule of the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (ruled 813–33), the House of Wisdom (Dar al-hikma) was established in Baghdad. This was a translation center, which triggered a flood of translation activity and brought great fame to Baghdad. Important works of classical Greek science—by Galen, Dioscorides, Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy, among others—as well as some works of Plato and Aristotle, the cornerstones of Western philosophy, were translated into Arabic from the original Greek, often through the intermediary of Syriac. Works in Pahlavi, Syriac, and Sanskrit were also translated. Thus Muslim religious scholars came into contact with the ideas developed by classical Greek philosophy. Eventually these Arabic versions were retranslated into Latin in Spain and they made their way into the rest of Europe. In this way key classical Greek writers, in whom most Muslims had little interest, became known to the great Renaissance thinkers of Europe, in one of the seminal moments of Western history.

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