History Of Islamic Philosophy - Henry Corbin.pdf - Falsafa

HISTORY OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
of the holy Imams, our account must of necessity incorporate elements
from the first to the eleventh century of the Hijrah. But this recourse
to such a historical span merely deepens the problem posed in principle
from the start.
II. Shiism and Prophetic Philosophy
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS
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The observations that we have already made concerning the ta'wil of
the Quran as the fount of philosophical meditation have already
indicated that it would be constricting to reduce the schema of speculative
and spiritual life in Islam to the Hellenizing philosophers (falasifah),
to the theologians of the Sunni kalam, or to the Sufis. It is
astonishing that in the general accounts of Islamic philosophy, no
consideration, one might say, has been given to the role and decisive
importance of Shiite thinking in the development of Islamic philosophical
thought. There have even existed certain reservations or prejudices
on the part of orientalists which border on hostility, and which moreover
accord perfectly with the ignorance evinced in Sunni Islam concerning
the real problems of Shiism. It is no longer possible to invoke the
difficulty of gaining access to the texts, since it is already thirty
years since some of the great Ismaili texts began to be published. For
their part, the Iranian publishers have increased the number of their
printings of the great Twelver Shiite texts. The situation calls for some
preliminary remarks.
1. Instead of embarking on the study of Shiite theology and philosophy
through the great texts, which extend from the traditions of the Imams
down to the commentaries written on them over the centuries, scholars
have been content to find political and social explanations which relate
only to external history, and which aim at deriving and deducing the
cause of the Shiite religious phenomenon from something else—in other
words, which aim at reducing it to something other than what it is.
For no matter how many external circumstances are collated, the sum
of them, or their product, will never give the initial religious phenomenon
(the Urphaenomen), which is as irreducible as the perception
of a sound or a colour. Shiism is explained first and last by the Shiite
consciousness itself, by the Shiite sense and perception of the world.
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