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

44 Part 1: Islamic Philosophy and Its Study
as an Islamic discipline, left its indelible mark upon the later intellectual
life of Sunnism, where, at least in the Sunni parts of the Arab
world in contrast to the Shi‘ite world, falsafah as a distinct discipline
had begun to wane after the eighth/eleventh century.
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Something must also be said about the position of falsafah in Islamic
universities during this early period. The official position accorded to
falsafah in the curriculum of the Islamic universities varied greatly
from land to land and period to period, depending upon theological
and political factors of a complex nature, which we cannot analyze
here. 49 In Jundishapur and the Bayt al-±ikmah in Baghdad, falsafah
was respected and taught, as it was also in the Azhar, after its establishment
by the Få†imids. But its teaching in official madrasahs came to
be banned with the rise of Ash‘arite power among the Abbasids and
Seljuqs, to the extent that in his will and testament for the trust (waqf)
of the Niπåmiyyah school system, Khwåjah Niπåm al-Mulk ordered
specifically that the teaching of falsafah be banned from the university
system founded by him. This ban in fact continued in most of the
Sunni part of the Arab world afterward except for logic, which was
always taught there. But later in Islamic history the teaching of falsafah
was made once again a part of the curriculum by Khwåjah Na∑¥r al-
D¥n al-apple¨s¥ at Maraghah and Rash¥d al-D¥n Fa∂l Allåh in the Rab‘-i
Rash¥d¥ in Tabriz, as well as in certain Ottoman madrasahs, and despite
a checkered career, it has continued as a part of the madrasah curricula
in Persia and many schools of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent and
Iraq to this day. As noted elsewhere in this book, in India especially
as a result of the influence of the scholars of Farangi Mahall in Lucknow
Islamic philosophy continued in the curriculum of madrasahs until the
fourteenth/twentieth century. In any case, however, the extent of the
role of falsafah must not be judged solely by whether it was taught in
universities or not, making a comparison with the situation in the
West. In Islam, because of the very informal structure of traditional
education, much of the instruction in falsafah as well as in the esoteric
sciences has always been carried out in private circles outside the
madrasahs and continues so to this day.
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When we come to later Islamic history, or what we might call the
“post-Ibn Rushdian phase” of Islamic philosophy, the role and func-