PHILOSOPHIA ISLAMICA
Seyyed Hossein Nasr Viewed from the point of view of the Western intellectual tradition, Islamic philosophy appears as simply Graeco-Alexandrian philosophy in Arabic dress, a philosophy whose sole role was to transmit certain important elements of the heritage of antiquity to the medieval West. If seen, however, from its own perspective and in the light…
Seyyed Hossein Nasr In the light of the Qur’an and Hadith in both of which the term hikmah has been used,1 Muslim authorities belonging to different schools of thought have sought over the ages to define the meaning of hikmah as well as falsafah, a term which entered Arabic through the Greek translations of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. On the one hand what…
A History of Muslim Philosophy
The Introduction of Greek Philosophy in the Muslim World [1] Greek or to be precise Hellenistic philosophy came into the Muslim world by way of Syriac. At Haran, in northern Iraq, a philosophical school kept versions of the Hellenistic philosophical heritage intact in either the original Greek or in Syriac translations. In the time of the Abbasid rule, that fertile period, in which the…