A Study of the Development of the Term “Philosophy” in the Islamic World

Philosophy is a demonstrative science in order to know the truths of being qua being. Such a knowledge makes no reference to any holy and divine affair in its title. However, in the world of Islam, philosophy gradually was accompanied with certain religious and theological terms, the most prominent of which is “Islamic”. In recent decades, the term “Islamic philosophy” has been discussed by certain thinkers and each of them has presented some views in order to justify it. It seems that, in order to examine the truth of Islamic philosophy more accurately, it is first necessary to study its historical roots. When it was the time to translate Greek philosophy books during the Translation movement, the term “philosophy” became prevalent in the world of Islam with no prefix. Kindī was the first Muslim philosopher who only used the term “prime” before philosophy. Of course, he considered a role for philosophy similar to that of religion, which could direct man to the peak of divine perfections. However, he never used any term other than “philosophy” and “prime philosophy”. Fārābī, who showed his own innovations in several fields, was the first philosopher and one of the rare Muslim philosophers who described philosophy laden with ethical and religious semantic adjectives. He even divided philosophy into different layers, with some of them being abject and some of them noble, or described some as being defective and some as perfect. Accordingly, it can be said that Fārābī played a significant role in granting a religious nature to philosophy, after him, Muslim philosophers used many different attributes for philosophy. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī used the term “supreme philosophy”; Ikhwān al-Ṣafā used the term “spiritual philosophy”, and even Ibn Sīnā in some places used the term “divine philosophy”, as well as “polite philosophy”, “impolite philosophy”, and “Oriental philosophy”. Ghazzālī, whose opposition to philosophy is quite known to all, referred to “philosophy of divine people”. Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, Ibn Ṭabīb, and Shahrzūrī used the terms “supreme philosophy”, “best philosophy”, and “philosophy of truth”, respectively. Suhrawardī used the term “Illuminationist philosophy”, which referred to his philosophical method. Interestingly enough, none of these terms enjoyed an ethical, religious, and holy semantic load, and each referred to one aspect of the multiple aspects of the philosophy intended by different philosophers. However, unlike most Muslim philosophers who equated philosophy with wisdom, Mīr Dāmād, the Peripatetic philosopher of the Ṣafavīd era, granted philosophy a status lower than that of wisdom. In his view, philosophy was the same legacy of the Greeks, which had been developed and promoted to the level of wisdom in the light of Islamic teachings. He believed that philosophy can never reach the level of wisdom unless in the light of Islam and its supreme teachings. He was the first thinker who used the term “Islamic philosophy” for first time for a kind of wisdom that he considered to be nobler and more perfect than Greek philosophy. Mīr Dāmād viewed himself at the same level with Ibn Sīnā as the leader of Islamic philosophy and with Fārābī in teaching it. The term “Islamic philosophy” remained forsaken after Mīr Dāmād until the contemporary period. In the present period, even a philosopher such as ‘Allāmah Ṭabāṭabā’ī’ did not use it and, instead, employed the term “philosophy of Islam” or the “divine philosophy of Islam”, which could be semantically different from “Islamic philosophy”. Abdulraḥmān Badvī and Murtaḍā Muṭahharī began disseminating the term “Islamic philosophy” almost at the same time, that is in 1330’s (1950’s). The results of the present study reveal that what contemporary thinkers state in order to justify this title is completely different from Mīr Dāmād’s conception of Islamic philosophy. The required data for this study were collected based on documentary research and analyzed following a historical-descriptive-logical method.