Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the ...

CHAPTER 7
A Framework for
the Study of the History
of Islamic Philosophy
In turning to the study of the history of Islamic philosophy, rather
than its doctrines and ideas, and in wanting to remain faithful to the
reality of the Islamic intellectual tradition where what has been said
has always prevailed over who has said it, it is necessary to create a
framework different from that of earlier histories of philosophy written
by Europeans and their Muslim imitators. As indicated earlier
such an attempt has been made since the 1960s in several different
works, including those of Corbin and my own. In this chapter I wish
to outline and summarize the framework developed by Corbin and
myself and to point out some of its salient features. First of all, although
in traditional Islamic circles Islamic philosophy has always
been taught as truth transcending time rather than simply ever-changing
ideas, a traditional Islamic conception of the history of philosophy has
existed as we see in the works of Suhraward¥, Mullå S • adrå, and others.
Second, the challenges of Western scholarship require that an authentic
Islamic interpretation of the history of Islamic philosophy be presented
in a contemporary language and yet remain faithful to the Islamic view
of both philosophy and its origin and later historical development.
Early in the twentieth century a few figures such as Mu∑†afå
‘Abd al-Råziq in Egypt and ƒiå˘ al-D¥n Durr¥ in Iran sought to write
histories of Islamic philosophy from the Islamic point of view, but
their project remained incomplete. Furthermore, they wrote in Arabic
and Persian, respectively, and exercised little influence in the West. In
1962, after I had written Three Muslim Sages, in which I tried to interpret
the whole of the Islamic intellectual tradition both morphologically
and historically, Corbin approached me to collaborate with him
on the writing of Histoire de la philosophie islamique, which was to be
part of the Pléiades collection and the first part of which first appeared
in 1964. To accomplish this task we thought of a historical framework
and periodization for the history of Islamic philosophy, one that would
107