by; Seyyed
Hossein Nasr
In the light of the Qur'an and Hadith in both of which the
term hikmah has been used,1 Muslim authorities belonging to
different schools of thought have sought over the ages to define the meaning of
hikmah as well as falsafah, a term which entered Arabic through
the Greek translations of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. On the
one hand what is called philosophy in English must be sought in the context of
Islamic civilization not only in the various schools of Islamic philosophy but
also in schools bearing other names, especially kalam, ma`rifah, usul
al-fiqh as well as the awa'il sciences, not to speak of such
subjects as grammar and history which developed particular branches of philosophy.
On the other hand each school of thought sought to define what is meant by
hikmah or falsafah according to its own perspective and this
question has remained an important concern of various schools of Islamic
thought especially as far as the schools of Islamic philosophy are concerned.
During Islamic history, the terms used for Islamic philosophy as
well as the debates between the philosophers, the theologians and sometimes the
Sufis as to the meaning of these terms varied to some extent from one period to
another but not completely. Hikmah and falsafah continued to be
used while such terms as al-hikmat al-ilahiyyah and alhikmat
al-muta`aliyah gained new meaning and usage in later centuries of Islamic
history, especially in the school of Mulla Sadra. The term over which there was
the greatest debate was hikmah, which was claimed by the Sufis and mutakallimun
as well as the philosophers, all appealing to such Hadith as "The
acquisition of hikmah is incumbent upon you and the good resides in hikmah."2
Some Sufis such as Tirmidhi were called hakim and Ibn Arabi refers
to the wisdom which has been unveiled through each manifestation of the logos
as hikmah as seen in the very title of his masterpiece Fusus al-hikam,3
while many mutakallimun such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi claimed
that kalam and not falsafah was hikmah,4 Ibn
Khaldun confirming this view in calling the later kalam (kalam
al-muta'akhkhirin) philosophy or hikmah.5
Our discussion in this
chapter is concerned, however, primarily with the Islamic philosophers’
understanding of the definition and meaning of the concept of philosophy and
the terms hikmah and falsafah.6 This
understanding includes of course what the Greeks had comprehended by the term philosophia
and many of the definitions from Greek sources which were to find their way
into Arabic sometimes with only slight modifications. Some of the definitions
of Greek origin most common among Islamic philosophers are as follows:7
1
Philosophy (al falsafah) is the knowledge of all existing things qua existents
(ashya' al-maujudah bi ma hiya maujudah).8
2
Philosophy is knowledge of divine and human matters.
3
Philosophy is taking refuge in death, that is, love of death.
4
Philosophy is becoming God-like to the extent of human ability.
5
It [philosophy] is the art (sind'ah) of arts and the science (ilm) of
sciences.
6
Philosophy is predilection for hikmah.
The Islamic
philosophers meditated upon these definitions of falsafah which they
inherited from ancient sources and which they identified with the Qur'anic term
hikmah believing the origin of hikmah to be divine. The first of
the Islamic philosophers, Abu Ya`qub al-Kindi wrote in his On First
Philosophy, “Philosophy is the knowledge of the reality of things within
people's possibility, because the philosopher's end in theoretical knowledge is
to gain truth and in practical knowledge to behave in accordance with truth.”9
Al-Farabi, while accepting this definition, added the distinction between
philosophy based on certainty (al-yaqiniyyah) hence demonstration and
philosophy based on opinion (al-maznunah),10 hence dialectic
and sophistry, and insisted that philosophy was the mother of the sciences and
dealt with everything that exists.11
Ibn Sina again accepted
these earlier definitions while making certain precisions of his own. In his `Uyun
al-hikmah he says “Al-hikmah [which he uses as being the same as
philosophy] is the perfection of the human soul through conceptualization [tasawwur]
of things and judgment [tasdiq] of theoretical and practical realities
to the measure of human ability."12 But, he went further in
later life to distinguish between Peripatetic philosophy and what he called
"Oriental philosophy" (al-hikmat almashriqi’yah) which was not
based on ratiocination alone but included realized knowledge and which set the
stage for the hikmat al-ishraq of Suhrawardi.13 Ibn Sina’s
foremost student Bahmanyar meanwhile identified falsafah closely with
the study of existents as Ibn Sina had done in his Peripatetic works such as
the Shifa’ repeating the Aristotelian dictum that philosophy is the
study of existents qua existents. Bahmanyar wrote in the
introduction to his Tahlil, "The aim of the philosophical
sciences is knowledge of existents." 14
Isma'ili and Hermetico-Pythagorean thought, which paralleled in
development the better-known Peripatetic philosophy but with a different
philosophical perspective, nevertheless gave definitions of philosophy
not far removed from those of the Peripatetics, emphasizing perhaps even
more the relation between the theoretical aspect of philosophy and its
practical dimension, between thinking philosophically and leading a virtuous
life. This nexus, which is to be seen in all schools of earlier Islamic
philosophy, became even more evident from Suhrawardi onward and the hakim came
to be seen throughout Islamic society not as someone who could only discuss
mental concepts in a clever manner but as one who also lived according to the
wisdom which he knew theoretically. The modern Western idea of the philosopher
never developed in the Islamic world and the ideal stated by the Ikhwan
al-Safa' who lived in the fourth/ tenth century and who were contemporary with
Ibn Sina was to echo ever more loudly over the ages wherever Islamic philosophy
was cultivated. The Ikhwan wrote, "The beginning of philosophy (falsafah)
is the love of the sciences, its middle knowledge of the realities
of existents to the measure of human ability and its end words and deeds
in accordance with knowledge."15
With Suhrawardi we enter not only a new period but also another
realm of Islamic philosophy. The founder of a new intellectual
perspective in Islam, Suhrawardi used the term hikmat al-ishraq rather
than falsafat al-ishraq for both the title of his philosophical
masterpiece and the school which he inaugurated. The ardent student of Suhrawardi
and the translator of Hikmat al-ishraq into French, Henry Corbin,
employed the term theosophie rather than philosophy to translate into
French the term hikmah as understood by Suhrawardi and later sages such
as Mulla Sadra, and we have also rendered al-hikmat al-muta aliyah of
Mulla Sadra into English as "transcendent theosophy"t6 and
have sympathy for Corbin's translation of the term.
There is of course the partly justified argument that in recent
times the term "theosophy" has gained pejorative connotations in
European languages, especially English, and has become associated with
occultism and pseudo-esoterism. And yet the term
philosophy also suffers from limitations imposed upon it by those who have
practised it during the past few centuries. If Hobbes, Hume and Ayer are
philosophers, then those whom Suhrawardi calls hukama' are not
philosophers and vice versa. The narrowing of the meaning of philosophy, the
divorce between philosophy and spiritual practice in the West and especially
the reduction of philosophy to either rationalism or .empiricism necessitate
making a distinction between the meaning given to hikmah by a Suhrawardi
or Mulla Sadra and the purely mental activity called philosophy in certain
circles in* the West today. The use of the term theosophy to
render this later understanding of the term hikmah is based on the older
and time-honoured meaning of this term in European intellectual history as
associated with such figures as Jakob Bohme and not as the term became used in
the late thirteenth/nineteenth century by some British occultists. Be that as
it may, it is important to emphasize the understanding that Suhrawardi and all
later Islamic philosophers have of hikmah as primarily al-hikmat
al-ildhiyyah (literally divine wisdom or theosophia) which must be
realized within one's whole being and not only mentally. Suhrawardi saw this hikmah
as being present also in ancient Greece before the advent of Aristotelian
rationalism and identifies hikmah with coming out of one's body and
ascending to the world of lights, as did Plato.17 Similar ideas are
to be found throughout his works, and he insisted that the highest level of hikmah
requires both the perfection of the theoretical faculty and the
purification of the soul.'8
With Mulla Sadra, one finds not only a synthesis of various
earlier schools of Islamic thought but also a synthesis of the earlier views
concerning the meaning of the term and concept philosophy. At the beginning of
the Asfar he writes, repeating verbatim and summarizing some of the earlier
definitions, "falsafah is the perfecting of the human soul to the
extent of human ability through the knowledge of the essential reality of
things as they are in themselves and through judgment concerning their
existence established upon demonstration and not derived from opinion or
through imitation". 19 And in al-Shawdhid al-rububiyyah he
adds, "[through bikmah] man becomes an intelligible world
resembling the objective world and similar to the order of universal
existence" 2°
In the first book of the Air dealing with being, Mulla
Sadra discusses extensively the various definitions of hikmah, emphasizing
not only theoretical knowledge and "becoming an intelligible world
reflecting the objective intelligible world" but also detachment from
passions and purification of the soul from its material defilements or what the
Islamic philosophers call tajarrud or catharsis.21 Mull!
Sadra accepts the meaning of hikmah as understood by Suhrawardi and then
expands the meaning of falsafah to include the dimension of illumination
and realization implied by the ishrdgi and also Sufi understanding of
the term. For him as for his contemporaries, as well as most of his successors,
falsafah or philosophy was seen as the supreme science of ultimately
divine origin, derived from "the niche of prophecy" and the hukama'
as the most perfect of human beings standing in rank only below the
prophets and Imams.22
This conception of philosophy as dealing with the discovering of
the truth concerning the nature of things and combining mental knowledge with
the purification and perfection of one's being has lasted to this day wherever
the tradition of Islamic philosophy has continued and is in fact embodied in
the very being of the most eminent representatives of the Islamic philosophical
tradition to this day. Such fourteenth/twentiethcentury masters as Mirth Ahmad
Ashtiyani, the author of Ndmayi rahbardn-i dmuzish-i kitdb-i takwin ("Treatise
of the Guides to the Teaching of the Book of Creation"); Sayyid Muhammad
Kazim `Ansar, author of many treatises including Wahdat al-wujud ("The
Transcendent Unity of Being"); Mahdi Ilahi Qumsha'i, author of Hikmat-i
ildhi khwdss wa amm ("Philosophy/Theosophy - General and
Particular") and Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, author of
numerous treatises especially Usul--i falsafa -yi rialism ("Principles
of the Philosophy of Realism") all wrote of the definition of philosophy
along lines mentioned above and lived accordingly. Both their works and their
lives were testimony not only to over a millennium of concern by Islamic
philosophers as to the meaning of the concept and the term philosophy but also
to the significance of the Islamic definition of philosophy as that reality
which transforms both the mind and the soul and which is ultimately never
separated from spiritual purity and ultimately sanctity that the .very term hikmah
implies in the Islamic context.
NOTES
1 For
the use of hikmah in the Qur'an and Hadith see S. H. Nasr,
"The Qur'an and ,Hadith as Source and Inspiration of Islamic
Philosophy", Chapter 2 below.
2
Alayka bilhikmah fa inna'l--khayr f 1-hikmah.
3 See
Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi, The Wisdom of the Prophets, trans. T.
Burckhardt, trans. from French A. Culme-Seymour (Salisbury, 1975), pp. 1-3 of
Burckhardt's introduction; and M. Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints -
Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn Arabi, trans. S. L.
Sherrard (Cambridge, 1993): 47-8.
4 See
S. H. Nasr, "Fakhr al-Din Razi", in M. M. Sharif (ed.), A History of
Muslim Philosophy, 1 (Wiesbaden, 1963): 645-8.
5 'Abd
al-Razzaq Lahiji, the eleventh/seventeenth-century student of Mulla Sadra who
was however more of a theologian than a philosopher, writes in his kalami text
Gawhar-murdd, "Since it has become known that in acquiring the
divine sciences and other intellectual matters the intellect has complete
independence, and does not need to rely in these matters upon the Shari `ah and
the proof of certain principles concerning the essence of beings in such a way
as to be in accord with the objective world through intellectual demonstrations
and reasoning ... the path of the hukamd, the science acquired through
this means is called in the vocabulary of scholars hikmah. And of
necessity it will be in accord with the true Shari `ah for the truth of
the Shari`ah is realized objectively through intellectual
demonstration" (Gawhar-murad (Tehran, 1377): 17-18). Although
speaking as a theologian, Lahiji is admitting in this text that hikmab should
be used for the intellectual activity of the philosophers and not the mutakallimun,
demonstrating the shift in position in the understanding of this term since
the time of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. There is considerable secondary material on
this subject in Arabic as well as in European languages. See Abd al-Halim
Maimed, al- Tafkir al fahaft f:l islAm (Cairo, 1964): 163-71; Mustafa
Abd al-Raziq, Tamhid li-ta'rikh al falsafat alislamiyyah (Cairo, 1959),
chapter 3: 48ff.; G. C. Anawati, "Philosophie medievale en terre
d'Islam", Melanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'Etudes Orientales du
Caire, 5 (1958): 175-236; and S. H. Nasr, "The Meaning and Role of
'Philosophy' in Islam", Studia Islamica, 37 (1973): 57-80.
7. See
Christel Hein, Definition and Einleitung der Philosophie - Von der
spdtantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen Enzyklopddie (Bern and New
York, 1985): 86.
8 This
is repeated with only a small alteration by al-Farabi in his al Jam' bayn ra
ay al-hakimayn. According to Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah, al-Farabi even wrote a
treatise entitled Concerning the Word Philosophy' (Kalam fr ism al falsafah)
although some have doubted that this was an independent work.
9. See
S. Strouma, AlFarabi and Maimonides on the Christian Philosophical
Tradition", Der Islam, 68(2) (1991): 264; and Aristoteles
- Werk and Wirkung, 2, ed. J. Weisner (Berlin, 1987). Quoted in Ahmed Fouad
El-Ehwany, "Al-Kindi", in M. M. Sharif (ed.), A History of
Muslim Philosophy, 1 (1963): 424.
10 Kitab
al-Huruf, ed. M. Mahdi (Beirut, 1969): 153-7.
11
KitAb jam' bayn ra ay al-hakimayn (Hyderabad, 1968): 36-7.
12 Fontes
sapientiae (Uyun al-bikmah), ed. Abdurrahman Badawi (Cairo, 1954):16.
13 On
Ibn Sina's "Oriental philosophy" see Chapter 17 below.
14
Kitab al-Ta{xil ed. M. Mutahhari (Tehran, 1970): 3.
15 Rasail
1 (Cairo, 1928): 23.
16 See
S. H. Nasr, The Transcendent Theosophy of Sadr al-Din Shirdzi (Tehran,
1977).
17 See
his Tawihdi, in H. Corbin (ed.) Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques,
1 (Tehran, 1976): 112-13.
18 See
S. H. Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (Delmar, 1975): 63-4.
19 Al
Asfar al-arba ah, ed. Allamah Tabataba i (Tehran, 1967): 20.
20
Mulla Sadra, al-ShawAhid al-rububiyyah, ed. S. J. Ashtiyani (Mashhad,
1967).
21 See
the Introduction of the Asfar.
22 Muhammad
Khwajawi, Lawami' al-arifrn (Tehran, 1987): 18ff., where many quotations
from the different works of Mulla Sadra on the relation between authentic hikmah
and revelation and the spiritual power and sanctity of the Imams (waldyah)
are cited.
