In all these worlds, prophecy, which is a central reality, creates

consequences with which philosophy has to deal. Prophecy provides

laws and moral teachings for society that ethical, political, and legal

philosophy have to consider. Moreover, prophecy claims to provide

knowledge of the nature of reality, including knowledge of the Origin

or Source of all things, of the creation of the cosmos and its structure or

cosmogony and cosmology, of the nature of the human soul, which

would include both what should properly be called “pneumatology”

and traditional psychology and of the end of things, or eschatology. The

fruit of prophecy is knowledge of all the major aspects of reality experienced

or speculated about by human beings, including the nature of

time and space, form and substance, causality, destiny, and numerous

other issues with which philosophy in general is also concerned.

Furthermore, certain forms of prophecy have had to do with

Inner knowledge, with the esoteric and the mystical, with visions of

other levels of reality not meant for the public at large. We have already

seen the relation of the origin of Greek philosophy to the esoteric

dimension of the Greek religion, and we can find many other

examples in other traditions including Buddhism and especially Islam

where philosophy became related more and more in later centuries to

the inner dimension of the Quranic revelation. The relation between

philosophy and esoterism, which is a dimension of prophecy as defined

here in its universal sense, also has a long history in the West lasting

until the German Romantic movement.

From the seventeenth century onward Western philosophy felt

forced to philosophize about the picture of the world painted by modIntroduction

7

ern sciences and became more and more a handmaid of modern science

especially with Kant and culminating with much of twentieth

century Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which is little more than logic tied

to the scientific worldview. In an analogous way, in various traditional

worlds in which the reality of prophecy and revelation was

central, whether the embodiment of this prophecy has been a book or

some other form of the message brought from heaven or the messenger

himself as in the case of the Hindu avatеrs, the Buddha, or Christ,

philosophy has had no choice but to take this central reality into consideration.

Philosophy has to philosophize about something, and in

the traditional worlds in question that something has always included

the realities revealed through prophecy, which have ranged in form

from the illuminations of the rishis of Hinduism and the Buddha, to

God speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai or the archangel Gabriel revealing

the Quran to the Prophet of Islam.

In the traditional worlds in question, philosophy has not been

simply theology as some have contended unless one limits philosophy

to its modern positivistic definition in which case there is in reality no

non-Western philosophy or for that matter medieval Western philosophy

to speak of. But if we accept the definition of philosophy given by

the person who is said to have first used the term—that is, Pythagoras—

and see it as love of sophia, or if we accept its definition according to

Plato as “the practice of death” according to which philosophy includes

both intellectual activity and spiritual practice, then certainly

there are many schools of philosophy in various traditional worlds,

some existing until now only in oral form as among the Australian

aborigines and Native Americans,18 while others having produced

volumes of philosophical writings over the centuries.

Even if one were to decide to deal only with written philosophical

works, one could compose volumes on the subject of philosophy

in the land of prophecy dealing with the Taoist and Confucian Chinese

philosophical traditions, with those of Tibetan and Mahеyеna

Buddhism including the schools of Japan, all of which possess their

own special characteristics, and of course with the very rich philosophical

traditions of Hindu India. One could also turn to the

Abrahamic world and write on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophical

schools from the perspective of philosophical activity in worlds

dominated by prophecy. Nor would such a treatment be completely

parallel for the three sister Abrahamic traditions—despite notable similarities—

because while the Jewish and Islamic conceptions of prophecy

and the sacred book are close together, that of Christianity, in

which the founder of the religion is seen as the incarnation of the

8 Introduction

Divinity, is different in many ways from both the Jewish and the

Islamic views of the matter. This difference is especially important

philosophically as we see in the philosophical treatments of the incarnation

in Christian philosophy and “prophetic philosophy” in its

Islamic context.19

__

In this work we shall limit our discussion of philosophy in the land of

prophecy primarily to Islamic philosophy. This limitation is due mostly

to the nature of our own studies in philosophy over the past five

decades, which have been concerned mostly with Islamic philosophy.

But we have also studied other traditions enough to be able to assert

that a similar work could be written for the Greek, Jewish, Christian,

or for that matter Neo-Confucian and Hindu philosophical traditions

with both the similarities and differences that are to be found between

these traditions. In a sense the similarities would be much more fundamental

than the differences for they concern the basic metaphysical

truths common between them, truths for which we use the term

philosophia perennis. But there are also differences of expression of the

perennial philosophy depending on the intellectual climate in which

the perennial philosophy is expressed in the same way that there is an

inner unity among religions along with diversity on the formal level.20

In any case our attempt in this work is to present Islamic philosophy

in its teachings as well as history as a philosophy that functions

in a world dominated by prophecy and, this being the world of

Islam, by a sacred book. We have concentrated especially on the later

periods of Islamic philosophy especially in Persia, which, after the

Mongol invasion in the seventh/thirteenth century, became the main

arena for the continuation of the life of Islamic philosophy and where

philosophy drew even closer to the inner realities made available

through prophecy. There is also the important reason that this later

period is still not well known in the West despite the research carried

out during the second half of the twentieth century by a number of

scholars in European languages. In fact the last part of the book presents

many figures and ideas not known in the West at all. This emphasis

on later Islamic philosophy is also of interest from the point of

view of comparative studies for it shows how two philosophical traditions,

the Islamic and the Christian, parted ways and followed such

different destinies from the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth

centuries onward. In the West philosophy became more and more

distanced from theology after the eighth/fourteenth century, and

Introduction 9

gradually the main schools of philosophy, in the West ceased to be

Christian philosophy, and in fact philosophy in many of its schools

turned against religion in general and Christianity in particular, pitting

philosophy as the main rival to religion. In contrast, in the Islamic

world philosophy continued to function within a universe dominated

by the reality of prophecy, and this situation has persisted to a large

extent to this day despite the appearance of secular philosophies here

and there in various Islamic countries.

Strangely enough, while a number of secularized Muslim scholars

of Islamic philosophy who write about it but do not belong to the