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ISLAM
philosophy is essentially “prophetic philosophy,” that is, a kind of philosophy based on a worldview in which revelation is a living reality and a source, or rather the supreme source, of knowledge and certitude. It is a philosophy born of the synthesis of Abrahamic monotheism and Greek philosophy, giving rise to a type of philosophical thought that was to wield great influence in both the Jewish and Christian worlds. Although opposed by proponents of kalām, Islamic philosophy must be considered a major field of Islamic religious knowledge, and one can no more deny its significance for Islamic thought than one can negate the importance of Maimonides for Jewish thought or St. Thomas Aquinas for Christian thought. In contrast to the view held by so many Western students of Islamic philosophy, this philosophy is part and parcel of the totality of the Islamic intellectual universe, and without it one cannot gain full understanding of that universe. Activity in Islamic philosophy began in the third/ninth century in Baghdad as more and more Greek and Syriac philosophical texts, especially those belonging to the school of Aristotle and his Neoplatonic commentators, became available in Arabic, transforming Arabic into one of the major philosophical languages and a repository for a great deal of the philosophy and science of Greco-Alexandrian antiquity. The first outstanding Islamic philosopher, Abū Ya‘qūb al-Kindī (d. ca. 260/873), sought to create a synthesis between Islamic teachings and Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy, laying the foundation for the mashshā’ī, or Islamic Peripatetic school, which is therefore not purely Aristotelian, as the name might indicate.