Customer Reviews

History of Islamic Philosophy (Routledge History of World Philosophies, V. 1)

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After spending close to $80 on this book I had to see if it was truley worth it--and it was. The book's articles chronicle almost every major Islamic philosopher (from Sufis to Shi'ites to Sunnis) and their interpretations of Islamic philosophy. I was especially interested to see a large section on Jewish philosophy.

While this one may be incredibly dry for some, the facts, sources, and articles it contains are priceless if you need information on Islamic philosophy.

Unfortunately in the West, even with a lot of first-class scholarship now going on to recover the thought of various periods in the history of both Western and Eastern Philosophy, the course of Philosophy in the Muslim world is relatively unknown. This book, edited by Seyyed Hussein Nasr, gives an excellent and comprehensive history of Philosophy as it has meandered through 14 centuries of Islamic intellectual thought and religious belief.

Anyone who reads this book will quickly realise much of the garbage being said about Islam today as always being a deeply backward part of world civilisation whose essential basis is wars of conquest and terrorism is utter nonsense. Jihadi terrorism itself has its roots in the thoughts of the Egyptian radical thinker and writer Seyyd Qutb, who was disgusted at the excesses of 1950's America, and also to an extent also in the thought of Ayotallah Homeni, the Iranian philosopher and theologian who was deeply influenced by thinkers such as Ibn-Arabi. Yet while these thinkers are important, they only form a small part of the overall very rich tapestry of Islamic philosophical thought, which ranges from schools which followed Aristotle and Plato to mystical schools like those of Ibn-Arabi and Shawradi, and schools which closely examined what would now be called the philosophy of law and politics. Islamic thought also contains a rich tradition in the Philosophy of Religion, which asked questions about what Holy Scripture means and how it is to be interpreted, what can and cannot be said about God, how humans can know God, and so on. Also interesting are Islamic examinations of epistemology, science, and metaphysics, which often contains a range and depth of sophistication equalling that of that found in other world civilisations.

This book is worth reading by any serious student of Philosophy interested to see how humans in another mode of civilisation have attempted to answer the basic questions which seem to puzzle human beings anywhere in the world.