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

Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy Yesterday and Today 275
of philosophy in such universities and similar institutions that came to
be established later. In many places Islamic philosophy was reduced
to a shell and taught as the history of Islamic philosophy, and even
that was seen from the point of view of Western scholarship. Where
Islamic philosophy was taught, if it was taught at all, was in faculties
of theology (ilåhiyyåt) rather than in the faculties of arts and letters
where the central role of philosophy was by and large fulfilled by
modern Western philosophy.
This situation continues to some extent to this day in universities
from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Morocco, but during the past few
decades matters have begun to change. First, the history of Islamic
philosophy has gradually come to be seen from the point of view of
the integral Islamic intellectual tradition itself and not in its truncated
version. One needs only look at the History of Philosophy of De Boer
being taught at the beginning of the twentieth century in Muslim
India and the History of Islamic Philosophy edited by S. H. Nasr and
O. Leaman, which is now being taught all over the Islamic world, to
see the differences in how Islamic philosophy, in both its depth and
breadth, has been taught to Muslim students during most of the last
century. Second, the living Islamic philosophical tradition has been
revived to a large extent and is now entering academic circles, where
Western philosophy divorced from prophecy has held sway for so
many decades.
As has become clear from previous chapters, it was most of all
in Persia and to some extent in Muslim India that Islamic philosophy
as a living tradition survived into the modern period. As mentioned
earlier, the School of Tehran was witness to major philosophical activity
in the traditional Islamic mode. In India, British rule, the loss of
endowment (waqf) for religious schools, and many other factors led to
an eclipse of the Islamic philosophical traditions of Farangi Mahall
and other centers, despite the appearance of such a major figure as
Mawlånå ‘Al¥ Ashraf Thanw¥ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Nor did the partition of India help in the revival of
Islamic philosophy in Pakistan or among Indian Muslims. In fact, the
figure who is most associated with the idea of Pakistan and whose
influence has remained great in that country—namely Mu±ammad
Iqbål—although very philosophically minded and interested in Islamic
philosophy, did not philosophize for the most part within that tradition.
His poetry in fact was associated more with the reality of prophecy than
was his philosophy, which was also influenced by nineteenth-century
Western philosophy, although he was a Muslim thinker with firm belief
in the reality of prophecy. It is interesting to note that one of his best
known interpreters in the West, the German scholar Annemarie