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

Dimensions of the Islamic Intellectual Tradition 137
with the archangel of revelation, Gabriel, is the instrument of revelation
itself. The treatise of al-Kind¥ on the intellect known as De intellectu
in the Latin West points to the significance that the doctrine of the
intellect was to have for later Islamic philosophers and even many
Latin Scholastics.
Al-Kind¥ was also deeply interested in the relation between religion
and philosophy or faith and reason. In his classification of the
sciences, he sought to create harmony between divine and human
knowledge 20 and wrote the first chapter in the long history of the
relation between faith and reason that occupied nearly all Islamic
philosophers for the next millennium. This was of course a necessary
consequence of philosophy functioning in the land of prophecy, and
we see similar concerns among Jewish and Christian philosophers. Al-
Kind¥ also helped create the Arabic philosophical terminology that
soon became a powerful vehicle for the expression of Islamic philosophy.
Much of the translation of Greek philosophical works was made
in Baghdad during his lifetime. He knew in fact some of the translators,
and it is said that the summary of the Enneads of Plotinus, which
came to be known to Muslims as the Theology of Aristotle, was translated
for him by Ibn al-Nå‘imah al-¡ims¥. In any case, one of the
major achievements of al-Kind¥ was the molding of the Arabic language
as a vehicle for the expression of philosophy, as one sees in his
celebrated treatise Fi˘l-falsafat al-¶lå (On Metaphysics). Although some
of the terminology used by him was rejected by later philosophers
writing in Arabic, 21 he remained a pioneer in the creation of Arabic
philosophic vocabulary and the father of Islamic philosophy. He was
the first devout Muslim who knew Greco-Alexandrian philosophy well
and sought to create a philosophical system in which this philosophy
was integrated into the Islamic worldview with its emphasis on the
unity of God and the reality of revelation.
Al-Kind¥’s immediate students were mostly scientists, although
some of them such as A±mad ibn appleayyib al-Sarakhs¥ are of philosophical
interest, and his real successor as the next major figure in
early mashshå˘¥ philosophy did not appear until a generation later in
Khurasan. He was Ab¨ Na∑r al-Fåråb¥ (d. 339/ 950), who was born
and raised in Farab in Central Asia in a family of Turkish background
living within a Persian cultural milieu. He was already a famous
philosopher when he came to Baghdad for a short period at midlife
only to migrate once again westward to settle in Damascus, where he
spent the rest of his life. At once a logician and musician, metaphysician
and political thinker, al-Fåråb¥ formulated mashshå˘¥, a philosophy
in the form it was to take in later Islamic history.