Islamic philosophy

Supporters of the latter thesis, like Leo Strauss, maintain that Islamic philosophers wrote so as to conceal their true meaning in order to avoid religious persecution, but scholars such as Oliver Leaman disagree.

A pupil of Hasan of Basra, Wasil ibn Ata, left the group when he disagreed with his teacher on whether a Muslim who has committed a major sin invalidates his faith.

From the 9th century onward, due to Caliph al-Ma'mun and his successor, ancient Greek philosophy was introduced among the Arabs and the Peripatetic School began to find able representatives.

During the Abbasid caliphate, a number of thinkers and scientists, some of them heterodox Muslims or non-Muslims, played a role in transmitting Greek, Hindu and other pre-Islamic knowledge to the Christian West.

But while Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and other Persian and Muslim philosophers hurried, so to speak, over subjects that trenched on traditional beliefs, Ibn Rushd delighted in dwelling upon them with full particularity and stress.

In the area of formal logical analysis, they elaborated upon the theory of terms, propositions and syllogisms as formulated in Aristotle's Categories, De interpretatione and Prior Analytics.

Ibn al-Nafis wrote the Theologus Autodidactus as a defense of "the system of Islam and the Muslims' doctrines on the missions of Prophets, the religious laws, the resurrection of the body, and the transitoriness of the world."

The book presents rational arguments for bodily resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, using both demonstrative reasoning and material from the hadith corpus as forms of evidence.

Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side.

There are several cosmological verses in the Qur'an which some modern writers have interpreted as foreshadowing the expansion of the universe and possibly even the Big Bang theory:[44] Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were ˹once˺ one mass then We split them apart?

[34] In the 10th century, the Brethren of Purity published the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, in which a heliocentric view of the universe is expressed in a section on cosmology:[45] God has placed the Sun at the center of the Universe just as the capital of a country is placed in its middle and the ruler's palace at the center of the city.Cosmological ideas maintained by scholars such as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, have strong resemblance with the Neo-Platonistic emanation cosmology.

[54]In Chapter 47 of India, entitled "On Vasudeva and the Wars of the Bharata," Abu Rayhan Biruni attempted to give a naturalistic explanation as to why the struggles described in the Mahabharata "had to take place."

The following statements from his 1377 work, the Muqaddimah, express evolutionary ideas: We explained there that the whole of existence in (all) its simple and composite worlds is arranged in a natural order of ascent and descent, so that everything constitutes an uninterrupted continuum.

He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of competition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates.

[67] Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status.

In the Book of Optics (c. 1025 CE), his scientific method was very similar to the modern scientific method and consisted of the following procedures:[37] In The Model of the Motions, Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam's razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth.

Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side.

He argued that if instruments produce random errors because of their imperfections or idiosyncratic qualities, then multiple observations must be taken, analyzed qualitatively, and on this basis, arrive at a "common-sense single value for the constant sought", whether an arithmetic mean or a "reliable estimate.

The Latin translation of his work, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

[83][87] Ibn al-Nafis described his book Theologus Autodidactus as a defense of "the system of Islam and the Muslims' doctrines on the missions of Prophets, the religious laws, the resurrection of the body, and the transitoriness of the world."

He presents rational arguments for bodily resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, using both demonstrative reasoning and material from the hadith corpus to prove his case.

[101] Other European scholars influenced by Philosophus Autodidactus include Gottfried Leibniz,[90] Melchisédech Thévenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens,[102] George Keith, Robert Barclay, the Quakers,[103] and Samuel Hartlib.

The political conceptions of Islam such as kudrah, sultan, ummah, cemaa -and even the "core" terms of the Qur'an, i.e. ibada, din, rab and ilah- is taken as the basis of an analysis.

The British philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner considered Ibn Khaldun's definition of government, "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself", the best in the history of political theory.

The development of modern historical writing seems to have gained considerably in speed and substance through the utilization of a Muslim Literature which enabled western historians, from the 17th century on, to see a large section of the world through foreign eyes.

Since no idea and no literary or philosophical movement ever germinated on Persian or Arabian soil without leaving its impress on the Jews, Al Ghazali found an imitator in the person of Judah ha-Levi.

[113] The idea of "essence precedes existence" is a concept which dates back to Ibn Sina (Avicenna)[27] and his school of Avicennism as well as Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi[28] and his Illuminationist philosophy.

The imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, for whom the Hanbali school of thought is named, rebuked philosophical discussion, once telling proponents of it that he was secure in his religion, but that they were "in doubt, so go to a doubter and argue with him (instead).

These approaches, of methodology and historiography are looked at from archival standpoints within Oriental and Mediaevalist Studies, fail to recognize the fact that philosophy in Islam can still be a living intellectual tradition.

[128] Maani’ Hammad al-Juhani, (a member of the Consultative Council and General Director, World Assembly of Muslim Youth)[129] is quoted as declaring that because philosophy does not follow the moral guidelines of the Sunnah, "philosophy, as defined by the philosophers, is one of the most dangerous falsehoods and most vicious in fighting faith and religion on the basis of logic, which it is very easy to use to confuse people in the name of reason, interpretation and metaphor that distort the religious texts".