After the death of
Ibn Rushd, Islamic philosophy in the Peripatetic style went out of fashion in
the Arab world, although the transmission of Islamic philosophy into Western
Europe started at this time and had an important influence upon the direction
which medieval and Renaissance Europe was to take (see Averroism; Averroism, Jewish; Translators; Islamic philosophy:
transmission into Western Europe).
In the Persian-speaking world, Islamic
philosophy has continued to follow a largely Illuminationist curriculum right
up to today; but in the Arab world it fell into something of a decline, at
least in its Peripatetic form, until the nineteenth century. Mystical
philosophy, by contrast, continued to flourish, although no thinkers matched
the creativity of Ibn al-‘Arabi or Ibn Sab‘in. Al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh sought to find
rational principles which would establish a form of thought which is both
distinctively Islamic and also appropriate for life in modern scientific
societies, a debate which is continuing within Islamic philosophy today (see Islamic philosophy, modern).
Iqbal provided a rather
eclectic mixture of Islamic and European philosophy, and some thinkers reacted
to the phenomenon of modernity by developing Islamic fundamentalism (see Islamic fundamentalism).
This resuscitated the earlier antagonism to philosophy by arguing for a return
to the original principles of Islam and rejected modernity as a Western
imperialist instrusion. The impact of Western scholarship on Islamic philosophy
has not always been helpful, and Orientalism has sometimes led to an overemphasis
of the dependence of Islamic philosophy on Greek thought, and to a refusal to
regard Islamic philosophy as real philosophy (see Orientalism and Islamic
philosophy).
That is, in much of the exegetical literature there has been
too much concern dealing with the historical conditions under which the
philosophy was produced as compared with the status of the ideas themselves.
While there are still many disputes concerning the ways in which Islamic philosophy
should be pursued, as is the case with all kinds of philosophy, there can be
little doubt about its major achievements and continuing significance.
