History Of Islamic Philosophy - Henry Corbin.pdf - Falsafa

HISTORY OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
without speaking of mysticism—without speaking, that is to say, of
Sufism both from the point of view of its spiritual experience and from
mat of its speculative theosophy, which has its roots in Shiite esotericism.
As we shall see, al-Suhrawardi and, after him, the whole school
of ishraqiyun directed their efforts to uniting philosophical enquiry with
personal spiritual realization. In Islam above all, the history of philosophy
and the history of spirituality are inseparable.
4. As regards the present study, we have been constrained to keep
within narrow limits. It has proved impossible to devote to the explanation
of certain problems, encountered among certain thinkers, all the
consideration which they demand. Nevertheless, as we are dealing
mainly with doctrines that are very little known, if not entirely unknown,
and as the following pages are addressed not just to the Orientalist
but to the philosopher in general, we could not merely allude to things
or confine ourselves to dictionary references. We trust that the necessary
minimum has been said.
Needless to say, the epochs in the history of Islamic philosophy
cannot, save by a verbal artifice, be subjected to our usual system
of dividing the history of philosophy—and history in general—into three
periods which we call Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times.
It would be equally inappropriate to say that the Middle Ages have
continued down to our day, for the very notion of the Middle Ages
presupposes a vision of history thematized according to a particular
perspective. There are ways more serious and lasting whereby to define
a 'type of thinking' than mere chronological references, and in Islam
certain distinct types of thought have persisted from the beginning down
to our time. Furthermore, among our Islamic thinkers the question
of division into periods has been concretized in a form that corresponds
to their own particular perspective—a form not unrelated to their
representation of the cycles of prophecy. Qutb al-Din Ashkivari, for
example, divides his history of thinkers and spiritual men into three
great cycles: the thinkers prior to Islam, the thinkers of Sunni Islam,
and the thinkers of Shiite Islam. And we in our turn cannot impose
upon them a chronological schema imported from a foreign world.
We have consequently distinguished between the following three
periods:
(a) The first period takes us from the beginning up to the death of
Averroes (595/1198). In some respects, this period has remained to
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FOREWORD
date the least insufficiently known. When we reach its term we will
explain what has determined the choice of such a demarcation. With
Averroes, something came to an end in Western Islam. At the same
time, with al-Suhrawardi and Ibn al-'Arabi, something began which
was to continue in the East down to the present day.
Even with regard to this period we have had to focus attention on
many features which have come to light only during the last twenty
years of research. But the limits imposed upon us, and the consequent
need to find the minimum framework within which a philosophical
exposition could still be coherent, forced us to stay within the bounds
of this first period, which forms the first part of the present study.
(b) The second period extends over the three centuries preceding
the Safavid Renaissance in Islam. It is characterized mainly by what
it is convenient to call the 'Sufi metaphysic': the growth of the school
of Ibn al-'Arabi and of the school deriving from Najm al-Din al-Kubra,
the merging—after the Mongol destruction of Alamut in 1256—of
Sufism with Twelver Shiism on the one hand and with reformed
Ismailism on the other.
(c) This brings us to the third period. Whereas, in the rest of Islam,
philosophical enquiry from the time of Averroes is reduced to silence
(a fact which motivates the summary judgement we repudiated above),
the Safavid Renaissance in the sixteenth century produced an extraordinary
flowering of thought and thinkers in Iran, the effects of which
were to extend throughout the Qajar period up to our own time. We
will have occasion to analyse the reasons why this phenomenon should
have made its appearance in Iran in particular, and in a Shiite milieu.
These reasons, and the more recent appearance of other schools
elsewhere in Islam, will enable us to look ahead into the near future.
Inevitably, the first part of this study contains references to several
thinkers of the second and third periods. How, for example, can one
determine the essence of Shiite thought, as set forth by the teachings
of the Shiite Imams during the first three centuries of the Hijrah, without
reference to the philosophers who were later the commentators on
these teachings? A detailed study of these thinkers of the second and
third periods will be undertaken in the second and third parts of this
work.
Two dear friends, one of them an Iranian Shiite and the other a Sunni
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