Voices of Islam (236 page)

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in order that it might provide the mind with a small number of principles, tightly linked together, which derived greater persuasive force and mnemonic effectiveness precisely from such systematization. Short sayings summed up, sometimes in striking form, the essential dogmas, so that the student might easily relocate himself within the fundamental disposition in which he was to live.
5

This, of course, does not exhaust the significance of rationally systematized philosophical treatises. One could think of other functions: for instance, attending to a tightly argued and systematic treatise assists the philosopher in transcending the limits of the empirical self and its preferred modes

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of reasoning at the service of the appetites, mundane desires, or social conventions.
6

Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy as primarily a way of life or as he says elsewhere, ‘‘the practice of spiritual exercises,’’
7
accentuates the central- ity of ethics in the ancient philosophical enterprise. Famously, ethics concerns the good life, that is, how one ought to live, but most modern moral philos- ophers construe this concern as directing us to the agent’s actions and the articulation of the requirements determining the rightness or the wrongness of those actions. Depending on their preference for intrinsic goodness of acts or human interests and desires, modern philosophers can be divided into deontologists and teleologists, respectively. There are those espousing hybrid theories as well, but what they all share is a focus on actions. Modern philoso- phy’s act-centered ethics is to be contrasted with the agent-centered (Greek) virtue ethics where the focus is on the agent and her character. Virtue ethi- cists inquire into the cultivation of the character traits that allow the agent to lead the good life.
8
In other words, the moral agent does not resort to an algorithm (deontological, consequential, or a hybrid) to figure out what to do. Her cultivation of relevant character traits enables her to perceive the good in each particular circumstance and to pursue it.

Hadot’s reading of the ancients does not simply assert the truism that their version of ethics is a virtue ethics. Rather, he claims justifi bly that virtue ethics is the core of their philosophical orientation and that all of ancient philosophical production was at the service of the inner transformation con- stituting the good life. Even Aristotle, whose account of the highest good as contemplation culminating in thought thinking itself is often invoked to establish the priority of theory over practice, situated theory and its discursive expression in the context of the ethical cultivation of the soul. ‘‘It is some- times claimed that Aristotle was a pure theoretician, but for him, too, phi- losophy was incapable of being reduced to philosophical discourse, that is, to the production of a body of abstract knowledge. Rather, philosophy for Aristotle was a quality of the mind, the result of an inner transformation.’’
9
To put it differently, for Aristotle, it is only after acquiring the practical traits of the soul (for example, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom) that one is drawn to and able to cultivate the theoretical intellect. I will get back to this point later.

In this part of the chapter, I want to look at the approaches of some prominent scholars of Islamic philosophy regarding what they take as that which the Muslims inherited from the Greek philosophers. I want to do this through the lens of Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy, because it is extremely useful in unveiling the assumptions that obfuscate the genuine sense of philosophy in the Islamic tradition. Richard Walzer, the prominent scholar of the transmission of Greek philosophy into the Islamic world, maintains that Islamic philosophy continued and preserved the Greek philo- sophical discourse. Walzer’s ‘‘Islamic philosophers’’ drew upon the

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Voices of Change

translated Greek philosophical texts and composed works that were a fusion of the views of their Greek predecessors. For him, it seems that genuine philosophy ultimately advances original theses in ‘‘rational terms’’ about rel- evant topics, and he is adamant that no such original thesis is to be found in the works of Islamic Philosophers. In the case of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (Alfarabi

d. 950
CE
), for instance, Walzer maintains that the latter’s theory of prophecy contains an original synthesis of Greek views on ‘‘imitation’’ and imagina- tion, but he cannot help arguing, ‘‘I have not been able to fi precise evidence for it in extant Greek tests although it is obviously of Greek origin.’’
10
Oliver Leaman is correct to diagnose a trace of Orientalism in Walzer’s views.
11
Drawing upon Edward Said’s influential work, Leaman argues that Walzer’s reading is influenced by a colonialist agenda. Oriental- ists, that is, scholars under the influence of the colonialist program, promote the colonialist agenda by arguing for the superiority of the culture of the colonizer. ‘‘Implicit in the Orientalist attitude, therefore, is the belief that the Orient had passed its golden age as the west was being born, and was thus in decline.’’
12
I find Leaman’s diagnosis plausible, but surely, this is not the only Orientalist assumption exhibited in Walzer’s approach. Not only are the so-called Orientals currently in decline, but their golden age was not also anything other than an imitation of the Greek original.

It should also be pointed out that philosophical Orientalism is itself prem- ised on the view that philosophy is the production of rational and systematic treatises. Walzer’s Greeks take the credit for the conception of philosophy as the production of rational systems and the later Europeans are credited for advancing it. Muslims, in this picture, play the role of transmitters, who lacked the rational prowess and the requisite creativity to build upon it. His philosophical Orientalism in conjunction with his commitment to the account of philosophy as philosophical discourse blinds him to the ways the Muslim philosophers sought to reconcile ancient Greek philosophical practices with their own religious commitments and exercises. As a result, Islamic philosophy is construed as a mere repository of ancient theories in order to preserve them for the later Europeans.
13

Leaman diagnoses another manifestation of Orientalism in the position advanced by some scholars of Islamic philosophy, principally Leo Strauss, that ‘‘Islamic philosophers were not good Muslims, as philosophy and religion could not be reconciled.’’
14
Strauss, in
Persecution and the Art of Writing,
attributes the ‘‘collapse’’ of philosophy in the Jewish and the Islamic traditions to the conflict between reason and religious practice. He argues that philosophy prospered in the West precisely because Christian theology, the rational defense of Christian dogma, allowed philosophical discourse an important role in the education of clerics.
15
The symptoms of Orientalism are also detectable in this account. It is assumed that there was a collapse of rationalism in the East, since the tenets of philosophy are incom- patible with those of Islam and Judaism. Consequently, in this view, Jewish

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and Islamic traditions of philosophy became disfigured, because philosophers had to conceal Greek philosophical theories in their texts to avoid persecu- tion by the irrational practitioners of faith, who constituted the majority of society. As a result Muslim and Jewish philosophers simply restated what they inherited from the Greeks and their major contribution was developing an art of writing that contained their accounts of Greek philosophy in disguise (so as to avoid persecution).
16

Strauss’ Orientalism, like its counterpart in Walzer, presupposes a notion of philosophy as the production of rational knowledge. The identifi on of this assumption helps explain more of the details of Strauss’s position. Phi- losophy comes into conflict with religion, in his reading, because it involves rational reflection on the nature of things whereas religion is concerned with practice based on revealed (read impervious to rational scrutiny) doctrines. Perhaps the most striking evidence for his metaphilosophical commitment is his view that philosophy prospered under the protection of Christian theology.
17
According to Hadot, it was precisely under these conditions that philosophy proper was marginalized.

With the advent of medieval scholasticism, however, we find a clear distinction being drawn between
theologia
and
philosophia.
Theology became conscious of its autonomy
qua
supreme science, while philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics. Reduced to the rank of a ‘‘handmaid of theology,’’ philosophy’s role was hence- forth to furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical— material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception.
18

Strauss applauds Christian theology’s appropriation of philosophy because he does not see ethics and the practice of spiritual exercises as constitutive of ancient Greek philosophy. For him, philosophy is the manufacturing of rational knowledge and it is under the tutelage of Christian theology that philosophy comes into its own (perhaps for the first time). But even if it does so, unbeknownst to Strauss, it is at the cost changing its essence. It goes without saying that he misses out on the particular character of Islamic philosophy, as a reconciliation of the practice of ancient philosophy and that of Islam.

This approach to Islamic philosophy—relying on the understanding of ancient Greek philosophy as the production of rational discourse, peppered with Orientalism—is not restricted to European and American scholars. The Moroccan Scholar, Muhammad Abed al-Jabri, in
Arab-Islamic Philoso- phy,
argues that philosophy
qua
production of rational knowledge declined in the Islamic world because of the influence of Persian Gnosticism. For Jabri, Arabic Islam was an ideology ‘‘committed to the service of science, progress and a dynamic conception of society.’’
19
Thus, it embraced Greek

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Voices of Change

rationalism. However, Persian antirationalism (that is, Gnosticism) gave rise to an assault on the Arabic tradition and resulted in its decline.
20
Implicit in Jabri’s argument is a call to unfasten the Gnostic, especially the Shiite, element from the Islamic heritage and facilitate a renaissance of Arabism, which is nothing other than Islam at the service of reason and the European idea of progress. For Jabri, the borders of the Orient have shifted further to the East but the same prejudices are present. Jabri’s view is especially awkward because it fl s in the face of historical evidence. It is well known that the Persian world encouraged the pursuit of philosophy. The flowering of philosophy in the Safavid dynasty and its cultivation in the Shi‘a seminaries to this day testify to the problematic nature of Jabri’s account of the nature of philosophy and its history in the Islamic world.

Assigning primacy to the production of rational knowledge in defining the Greek philosophical heritage need not always accompany an Orientalist attitude. A good example of a scholar holding such a view is Leaman. As we have seen, Leaman rejects Orientalism but considers Greek philosophy as ‘‘the acme of rationality.’’
21
For him, ‘‘The main purpose of philosophy is to understand arguments, and to assess those arguments and construct new arguments around them.’’
22
He argues not that Muslims were barbarians and against reason (a favorite assumption of his Orientalist counterparts); rather he maintains that Greek philosophy was challenged by a number of other rational modes of discourse. These included Islamic theology, the theory of language, and jurisprudence, and that these modes of rational dis- course had already entered the Islamic cultural scene before philosophy came along. Now this view makes some sense of the resistance offered to philoso- phy by a theologian and jurist like Ghazali, but it is still problematic because it misses out on the significance of philosophy as a way of life and the Islamic appreciation and appropriation of this significance.
23
So, for Leaman, Islamic philosophy is Islamic just as any other production of rational knowledge in an Islamic context is Islamic: ‘‘Perhaps the best way of specifying the nature of Islamic philosophy is to say that it is the tradition of philosophy which arose out of Islamic culture, with the latter term understood in its widest sense.’’
24
To be fair, Leaman admits that Islamic philosophy, when it comes into its own, ‘‘involves study of reality which transforms the soul and is never sepa- rated from spiritual purity and religious sanctity.’’
25
Here, Leaman recognizes the significance of Islamic philosophy as the practice of cultivating and transforming the soul, but he does not see its continuity (in this regard) with the Greek past. As a result, he misses out on what is unique in
Islamic
philosophy, what makes Islamic
philosophy
Islamic.

Perhaps one of the most notable proponents of the view that Islamic philosophy involves the practice of transformative spiritual exercises is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In ‘‘the Meaning and Concept of Philosophy in Islam,’’ Nasr claims that ‘‘This conception of philosophy as dealing with the discovering of the truth concerning the nature of things and combining mental

Is ‘‘Islamic’’ Philosophy Islamic?
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knowledge with the purification and perfection of one’s being has lasted to this day wherever the tradition of Islamic philosophy has continued and is in fact embodied in the very being of the most eminent representatives of the Islamic philosophical tradition to this day.’’
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He calls the practice of spiritual exercises ‘‘the purification and perfection of one’s own being’’ and insists that it is constitutive of Islamic philosophy. Nasr also recognizes that the Greeks, especially the Platonists and Hermetico-Pythagoreans, under- scored the relation between the theory and the practice of philosophy.
27
But for him, Peripateticism de-emphasizes this relation and one of the virtues of Islamic philosophy proper is the overcoming of the Peripatetic distor- tion.
28
For Nasr, the move away from Peripateticism occurs in the later writ- ings of Abu ‘Ali ibn Sina (Avicenna d. 1037
CE
), especially in what remains of
al-hikma al-mashriqiyya
(Eastern philosophy), in which Avicenna decries the follies of the Peripatetics and declares his commitment to an approach to phi- losophy that draws from non-Greek sources.
29
Nasr sees in this a revival of perennial wisdom, which involves an alliance between theory and spiritual exercises. He is adamant about the importance of ascetic self-purification and self-discovery for the true notion of philosophy: