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

Introduction 5
phers but is again to be found especially among Islamic philosophers
from Ibn S¥nå , Nå∑ir-i Khusraw, Khayyåm, and Suhraward¥ to Af∂al
al-D¥n Kåshån¥, M¥r Dåmåd, and Mullå S • adrå to ¡åjj¥ Mullå Håd¥
Sabziwår¥, who lived in the thirteenth/nineteenth century. 16
In a world such as the one in which we live today where philosophy
is reduced to rationalism or more and more irrationalism and in
which not only esoterism but religion itself is either denied or
marginalized, the interpretation given above of the founders of Western
philosophy will be rejected in many circles, and the nexus between
philosophy and prophecy in general and philosophy, poetry
and esoterism in particular will be dismissed or considered as being
of little consequence. But strangely enough for the Western reader
the relation among philosophy, prophecy, and esoterism, affirmed
by a number of contemporary Western scholars, are found to be
central to the Islamic philosophical tradition with which most of this
book will be concerned. We have included the discussion of these
Greek figures here in order to demonstrate that the relation between
philosophy and prophecy, although severed to an ever greater degree
in the West from the end of the Middle Ages onward, is of great
significance not only for the understanding of Islamic philosophy
but also for a deeper comprehension of the origins of Western philosophy
itself, origins that Western philosophy shares with Islamic
philosophy but that have come to be understood in radically different
ways by these two currents of thought as Western philosophy
has come to distance itself to an ever greater degree from both the
perennial philosophy and Christian theology.
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There are of course different modes and degrees of prophecy, a fact
that one realizes if one studies various religious traditions and even if
one limits oneself to a single tradition as we see in Judaism and Islam
where the prophetic role of Jonah or Daniel is not the same as that of
Moses or the Prophet of Islam. And yet there are common elements in
various understandings of prophecy as far as the challenges posed to
philosophy are concerned. First of all prophecy implies levels of reality
whether these are envisaged as an objective or a subjective hierarchy.
If there were to be only a single level of reality associated objectively
with the corporeal world and subjectively with our ordinary consciousness
considered as the only legitimate and accepted form of consciousness,
then prophecy as the function of bringing a message from
another world or another level of consciousness would be meaningless