Timeline:

C8:                -Mu'tazilah

                    - Ahl al-Sunnah

813-33:       - Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Rashid

d. 870 c.     - Al-Kindi

875-950:     - Al-Farabi

C10:            - Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity)

980-1037:    - Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

1058-1111:  - Al-Ghazzali

1126-1198:  - Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

d. 1175 c.     - Abu'l Barakat

1149-1209:  - Al-Razi

1165-1240: -  Ibn al-Arabi

1571/2-1640: - Al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra)
 
 
 
 

Historical Introduction:

        Islamic philosophy began to develop in the mid-eighth century, impelled by diverse influences which included Christian Hellenism, Persian Zoroastrianism, Iraqi gnosticism, as well as elements of Judaic and Hindu thought. By far the most profound and seminal influence, however, was the rediscovery by Muslim thinkers of ancient Greek philosophical thought. The concepts and dialectical strategies of Greek philosophy were applied to theological and moral issues which had arisen in Islamic society. These included the questions of human free will as against predestination,  the nature and attributes of God, Divine justice, the disputed status of the Qu'ran as either created or eternal, prophethood, and the mutual relation of reason and revelation.

         The return to Greek thinkers was rooted in a number of practical motivations and circumstances. Many of the nations conquered by Islam had retained a Hellenistic culture from earlier Greek conquests. The Hellenic system of education extant in Iraq, which included medicine and philosophy, was preserved by the Muslims. And, perhaps most importantly, the Abbasid caliphate, established in Baghdad in 762, perceived the importance to the Islamic world of the Greek sciences and fostered the translation of Greek texts into Arabic and Aramaic. This project received enormous impetus from the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Rashid (813-833) who organised on a large scale the work of  translation; he established an institution called the "House of Wisdom" (bayt al-hikma), which included a library, and whose main function was to facilitate translation of Greek philosophical and scientific texts; Greek mythology and drama, culturally alien to Islam, were largely excluded. Most of these translations were made by Iraqi Christians who used Syriac versions of the original texts; a distinguished figure, who went back to original Greek sources, was the Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873).

        Works translated included nearly the entire corpus of Aristotle and texts of Galen, Hippocrates, Euclid and Porphyry. Two works which exerted a particularly profound impact were the Theologia Aristotelis and the Liber de Causis. As its name suggests, the former was attributed, though wrongly, to Aristotle; it was in fact derived from Plotinus' Enneads. Both this work and the Liber de Causis espoused fundamental Neoplatonic doctrines: a transcendent God as the first principle, from which emanated intellect as the second principle, which in turn gave rise to soul as the third principle. These Neoplatonic notions often coloured Islamic thinkers' readings of Aristotle, whose concepts and categories were a repeated point of reference; Plato's own thought, in comparison, proved to be a far less pervasive influence. Hence much Islamic philosophy was marked by a combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, and tended to accept the structure of Greek cosmology.

        Philosophy first made its appearance in Islam from the mid-eighth century in a debate between progressive and conventional schools of theology. The progressive school, known as the Mu'tazilites ("seceders" or "withdrawers") was rationalist in outlook, deploying the method of kalam (variously translated as logic or dialectic) in order to reconcile reason and revelation or reason and the content of faith. Four figures were primarily responsible for  the founding of the Mu'tazilite school: Mu'ammar (d. 830), Abu-l-Hudhayl (d. 841?), an-Nazzam (d. 836?) and Bishr ibn al-Mu'tamir (d. 825). The Mu'tazilites asserted that human morality presupposed free will; that the content of morality was accessible to human reason independently of revelation which could merely confirm this content; and that where the Qu'ran or Hadith conflicted with reason, they should be subjected to allegorical interpretations. They denied that the Qu'ran had ben eternally existent and they insisted that Allah was a purely spiritual being whose attributes could not be known by the human  intellect.

        These views of the Mu'tazilites were opposed by the Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'ah, the initial defenders of an orthodoxy which was ultimately to prevail permanently. In the nineteenth century, some Western scholars, such as Heinrich Steiner of Zurich, were disposed to view the Mu'talizilah as a congenial and liberal school of thought whose eventual eclipse by the forces of orthodoxy had a disabling impact on subsequent Islamic thought. But, as W. Montgomery Watt  and others have pointed out, the Mu'tazilites "were not free-thinkers but quite definite Muslims, even if they indulged in speculation on some points" (Islamic Philosophy and Theology, p. 46). In fact, Mu'tazilite doctrines and rationalism began to voice powerful challenges to orthodoxy during the reigns of the Caliphs al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid. The Caliph al-Ma'mun went so far as to proclaim Mu'tazilite doctrine the official doctrine of the empire. Beginning in 1832 he issued decrees requiring allegiance to fundamental articles of the Mu'tazilite creed:  the creation of the Qu'ran in time, the freedom of the human will, and the uncompromisingly spiritual nature of the Divine. Al-Ma'mun's successors al-Mutassim and al-Wathiq continued this program. This period of Islamic history is sometimes referred to as the "Inquisition," in acknowledgement of the compulsion and force used to establish Mu'tazilite doctrine as orthodoxy. A vivid and historically poignant dramatization of the clashing claims for theological hegemony is given in the fact that the theologian Ibn Hanbal, defending orthodoxy and refusing to bow before Mu'tazilite claims, was scourged and jailed; he was subsequently hailed by the orthodox as a martyr.

        The first major Islamic philosopher (as opposed to dialectical theologian) proper was Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, who was born in Kufa around 803 and died after 870. His work embodies the first systematic attempt to reconcile Greek philosophy with some of the doctrinal foundations of Islam. Nonetheless, he accepted and elaborated a philosophical groundwork for the central tenets of Mu'tazilism.