Arabic falsafa reshaped almost every branch of medieval European thought
When Latin scholars translated Arabic philosophical texts, nearly every discipline in medieval Europe was transformed, from psychology to metaphysics. The Arabic word for this enterprise, falsafa, is simply the Greek philosophia reshaped in a new mouth, and its thinkers argued for centuries over how reason and revelation could live together.
Two traditions ran side by side. Kalam, literally speech, was a rationalist theology that used dialectical argument, while falsafa drew on Aristotle and Neoplatonism and covered logic, mathematics and physics too. Early philosophy is usually dated from al-Kindi in the early 9th century to Ibn Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes, in the late 12th, roughly matching the Islamic Golden Age. Caliph al-Ma'mun helped bring Greek learning to Arabic readers, and figures such as al-Farabi and Avicenna built on it.
One of the earliest arguments pitted defenders of free will against fatalists. In Basra, Wasil ibn Ata broke with his teacher Hasan over whether a grave sin cancels a Muslim's faith, and his followers, the Mu'tazilites, pursued one of Islam's first strictly rational theologies. Rival schools attacked them fiercely. By the 12th century al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers had struck hard at the Aristotelian camp, and Averroes, a contemporary of Maimonides, answered in its defence, even insisting that matter is eternal and that the world exists by necessity.
Logic was a particular strength. Philosophers argued with grammarians over the boundary between logic and language, treated the syllogism as the core of all rational argument and even analysed poetry syllogistically. Avicenna's system introduced hypothetical syllogisms, temporal modal logic and inductive logic, and Muslim logicians corrected Aristotle in ways that fed into Renaissance Europe. Scholars also developed isnad, a strict science of citation for backing claims.
After Averroes died, philosophy faded in al-Andalus and the Maghreb but thrived further east, in Safavid Iran, the Ottoman lands and Mughal India, where Illuminationism and the school of Isfahan flourished. Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah advanced the philosophy of history. Even the name is disputed: many prefer Arabic philosophy, since not all its authors were Muslim or concerned with religion, yet many who wrote in Arabic were not Arabs. Leo Strauss thought these writers hid their real views to avoid persecution; Oliver Leaman disagrees.
Source: Islamic philosophy
