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

CHAPTER 5
Post-Avicennan Islamic Philosophy
and the Study of Being
The role of ontology and the major ontological distinctions made by
Ibn S¥nå and others such as that between wuj¶d and måhiyyah are so
central to the whole structure of Islamic philosophy for the past millennium
that it is necessary to turn to this issue again in this chapter.
It is also especially important to point to the way that the philosophical
traditions of Islam and the West gradually parted ways on this
central issue of ontology despite the great influence that early Islamic
philosophers such as Ibn S¥nå exercised by the Christian philosophy
of the European Middle Ages.
The history of the quest of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophers
for the understanding of being differs in fact markedly from that of
Western philosophers following St. Thomas and other masters of Scholasticism.
While gradually in the West the possibility of the experience
of Being nearly disappeared with the eclipse of sapiental mysticism
and the vision of Being gave way to the discussion of the concept of
‘being’ and finally to the disintegration of this very concept in certain
schools, in the Islamic world philosophy drew ever closer to the ocean
of Being Itself until finally it became the complement of gnosis and its
extension in the direction of systematic exposition and analysis. If in
the final chapters of the history of Western philosophy, at least in
several of its major schools, philosophy became wed to external experience
and experiment with the forces and substances of the material
world, resulting in various forms of empiricism, in the Islamic world
as well philosophy drew ever closer to experience. But in this case the
experience in question was of a spiritual and inward character, including
ultimately the experience of Pure Being, the tasting of the Reality that is
the origin of the sapiential wisdom or ÷ikmah that developed after the
sixth/twelfth century, a wisdom that for this reason is called “÷ikmah
dhawqiyyah” (intuitive or literally “tasted” philosophy), dhawq having the
same meaning in Arabic as the root of sapiential (sapere) in Latin.
The early Islamic philosophers such as al-Fåråb¥ and Ibn S¥nå, 1
who are known as masters of discursive philosophy (÷ikmah ba÷thiyyah)
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