The rise of philosophy under the Abbasid Caliphate was not surprising given the tolerant nature of Abbasid rule; after all, poets like Abu Nuwas and al-Mutanabbi had reached the peak of their popularity under the Abbasids. However, the undertaking of philosophy posed a problem in the Muslim world that can be reduced, for the moment,  to the problem of philosophy versus prophecy.

Albert Hourani, in A History of the Arab Peoples, writes: "The assumption of philosophy was that human reason rightly used could give man certain knowledge of the universe, but to be Muslim was to believe that some knowledge essential for human life had come to man only through the revelation of God's Word to the prophets" (77). The philosophy arising in Islamic society at the time was derived from the Greeks, whose works were being steadily translated and archived in the great libraries of the Muslim cities, such as Baghdad. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle adhered to a system of seeking truth by reason and logic, which implied that anything could be understood  utilizing such a system. Muslims, on the other hand, believed that God's Word, as embodied in the Qur'an, could never be challenged and that whatever they did not understand, God did not want them to understand.

Many Islamic philosophers of the period turned away from tradition and followed the attractive path established by Western thinkers, which was considered blasphemous because it established the philosopher as a more knowledgeable figure than the prophet. These risk-taking thinkers include the group of theologians known as Mu'tazilites, whose method of logical argument was quickly pitted against the more traditional theologians who asserted that all knowledge necessary for humans to possess was contained in the Qur'an. Rationalism seemed to some to be an undermining of the foundations of Islam, which call for absolute submission to God, which implies that it is blasphemous to question the existence of God or perhaps even to attempt to prove his existence. However, by this point in the Abbasid Caliphate, Islam was under philosophical attack by Christian scholars and theologians and some Muslim scholars felt the need to confront the arguments made against their religion in a way that utilized the resources of their opponents; that is, they had to master the bases of logic and rational theology in order to defend Islam. Others, including the philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925), also challenged the role of religion, writing that only human reason could help one attain truth and knowledge.

Some Muslim philosophers remained true to their religion and even managed to find an acceptable middle ground between Islam's teachings and Western philosophy. Al-Ash'ari (b.873 d.935) was attracted to the group of philosophers called the Mu'tazilites, whose method of logical argument was called kalam. In his earlier years Al-Ash'ari fell in with this group and presumably mastered the techniques of rational theology before he was drawn to the theological school founded by Ahmad bin Hanbal, who had died eighteen years before al-Ash'ari was born. Bin Hanbal's school maintained that Islam needed not bother with issues of rational theology, which was blasphemous, because all that Muslims needed to know was outlined in the Qur'an. Again, the Qur'an as the ultimate source of knowledge was emphasized because it was believed that the holy book was the word of God Himself. Interestingly, al-Ash'ari used the techniques of reason and logic to prove that the conclusions drawn by the Mu'tazilites were futile as they were drawn by speculative reason. His methods, though paradoxical, were respected and accepted by even the strictest Muslim theologians, and are indicated for example, in his piece "The Discussion Concerning God's Being Seated on the Throne." The following might be an outline of his argument that God is seated on His throne:

Premise 1: God is seated on his throne (evidence from the Qur'an)

Premise 2: The Throne is in the Heavens (based on logic)

Premise 3: The Throne is the highest thing in the heavens.

Premise 4: Muslims pray with their hands up to God.

Therefore, God must be seated on His Throne in heaven.

He is also asked how to respond to the claims of the Mu'tazilah that God is not seated on His throne, but instead, is omnipresent and exists everywhere (even in the womb of Mary, as Christianity posits). The response of al-Ash'ari is quite beautiful in its simplicity and use of logic: if God exists above the earth in the heavens (as he has proved above) as well as below the earth, then "He must be under that above which He is and above that under which He is, and this is impossible and self-contradictory" (166).

In The Attainment of Happiness, Al-Farabi (870-950) distinguishes between philosophy (the attainment of knowledge/truth through one's intellect) and religion (the attainment of knowledge/truth through persuasion). He further equates religion with the imagination and philosophy with intellectual perception and conception. He concludes that "religion is an imitation of philosophy" (167), and indeed, that philosophy predates religion. The philosopher then continues to assess the roles of the philosopher, the legislator, and the imam. He equates the philosopher with theoretical virtue, the legislator with a gift for practicality and extensive knowledge, and the imam with moral virtue. He writes, "The theoretical virtue must precede the others" (169). The legislator must acquire some of the gifts of the philosopher, and the perfect combination of the two is a prince. When theory and practicality can be made to fuse and to win over the people, this is the realization of an ideal which is called philosophy in the soul of the legislator-philosopher-prince and religion in the souls of the multitudes. The latter statement is interesting in that the parallel between prince/multitudes and philosophy/religion is tactfully emphasized. Al-Farabi truly walks a middle ground and manages to validate the roles of all three types of leaders: philosophers, legislators, and imams.

Born thirty years after al-Farabi's death in the Iranian village of Afshaneh, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (Avicenna b. 980 d. 1037) began an amazing medical career at the age of eighteen. He is remembered as the greatest scientist of the medieval era of Islam and his Canon of Medicine was a standard text for doctors in Europe until the Renaissance. Like al-Farabi, he found a way to incorporate both religion and philosophy, both faith and science, both prophecy and philosophy into the tradition of Islam without sparking conflict or contradiction. Ibn Sina proposed that "the body, mind and soul made up the whole personality of man -- there was no moral conflict between science and religion or between religion and philosophy, but all three were parts of the ultimate truth" (www.yale.edu/avicenna/bio.html, 2). Such a theory testified to the complexity of man and to the danger of limiting the scope of the human mind in one direction, whether that be religion, science, or philosophy. However, he posited that God was of the utmost importance in that He was the Creator, from which all thigs were derived. Ibn Sina outlined a theory of ten intelligences, all emanating from God, by which the world was ordered. Prophecy was therefore important, because prophets were needed to impart the truths of the Creator to the people, but the gift of the prophet was more of an intellectual one than a religious one. Hourani tells us that al-Ghazali, another philosopher, would later criticize Ibn Sina's ideas on the grounds that the God of the philosophers was not the God of man.

The conflict between the theories of Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali would later be reconciled in the works of Ibn Rushid, better remembered in history as Averroes (1126- 1198). Ibn Rushid, a Spanish/North African Muslim, commented and expanded on the works of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he "provided Europe with its greatest understanding of Aristotle and influenced European philosophy more than any other Arab philosopher" (ArabicNews.com, 1). It is said that Thomas Aquinas relied heavily on his philosophical works, one of which was entitled The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a direct response to and refutation of the work of al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In another work, The Decisive Treatise, Ibn Rushid asserts that the validity of the role of the philosopher could be supported by the Qur'an itself, which implied that there could be no contradiction between the investigations of philosophers by ways of logic and reason and the Qur'an or the Islamic faith. In fact, in order to achieve this reconciliation, Ibn Rushid further states that the Qur'an should not be interpreted literally, but instead, that the rational part of the human mind should be applied to the text. Indeed, he notes that "when the literal meaning of Qur'anic verses appeared to contradict the truths to which philosophers arrived by exercise of reason, those verses needed to be interpreted metaphorically" (Hourani 175).

Finally, it can be said that all of this philosophical debate was permitted under a Caliphate that was surprisingly tolerant of opposing points of view, especially considering the restrictions placed on philosophy and religious scholarship by Europe during and after the medieval period.