Syed Muhammad al Naquib bin Ali al-Attas (Arabic: سيد محمد نقيب العطاس Sayyid Muḥammad Naqīb al-ʿAṭṭās; born 5 September 1931) is a Malaysian Muslim philosopher.
He is one of the few contemporary scholars who is thoroughly rooted in the traditional Islamic sciences and studied theology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, and literature.
Al-Attas' philosophy and methodology of education have one goal: Islamisation of the mind, body and soul and its effects on the personal and collective life of Muslims as well as others, including the spiritual and physical non-human environment.
[2] He is the author of 27 works on various aspects of Islamic thought and civilisation, particularly on Sufism, cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy and Malay language and literature.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas was born in Bogor, Java, Dutch East Indies into a family with a history of illustrious ancestors and saints.
While an undergraduate at the University of Malaya, he wrote Rangkaian Ruba'iyat, a literary work, and Some Aspects of Sufism as Understood and Practised among the Malays.
In 1965, al-Attas returned to Malaysia and became Head of the Division of Literature in the Department of Malay Studies at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.
Thereafter he moved to the new National University of Malaysia, as Head of the Department of Malay Language and Literature and then Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
In 1987, with al-Attas as founder and director, the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC) was established in Kuala Lumpur.
His two-volume doctoral thesis on The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri, which is the most important and comprehensive work to date on one of the greatest and perhaps the most controversial Sufi scholars in the Malay world earned him the PhD in the UK in 1965.
He discovered and published his meticulous research on the oldest extant Malay manuscript, wherein among other important matters, he also solved the issue of arrangements of the Malay-Islamic cyclical calendar.
Al-Attas maintains a firm critique that studying and using nature without a higher spiritual end has brought mankind to the state of thinking that men are gods or co-partners.
The Essentialists cling to the principle of mahiyyah (quiddity), whereas the Existentialists are rooted in wujud (the fundamental reality of existence) which is direct intuitive experience, not merely based on rational analysis or discursive reasoning.
This has undoubtedly led philosophical and scientific speculations to be preoccupied with things and their essences at the expense of existence itself, thereby making the study of nature an end in itself.
The process of creation or bringing into existence and annihilation or returning to non-existence, and recreation of similars is a dynamic existential movement.