Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophies of Science

by Osman Bakar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Foreword by)

The classification of knowledge is a recurring theme in Islamic scholarship. Successive generations of Muslim scholars, from al-Kindi in the ninth century to Shah Waliallah of Delhi in the eighteenth century, have devoted considerable efforts to the exposition of this theme. The lives and the ideas of the three thinkers discussed in Classification of Knowledge in Islam - al-Farabi (870-950AD), al-Ghazzali (1058-1111AD) and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236-1311AD) - cover the pivotal period of Islamic history from the first flourishing of the philosophical sciences to the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols. In addition, each of these three thinkers was either a founder or an eminent representative of a major intellectual school in Islam. Al-Farabi was the founder and one of the most prominent representatives of the mashsha'i (Peripatetic) school of philosopher-scientists. Al-Ghazzali is still recognised as the most famous theologian/sufi of Islam. Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi represents the ishraqi (Illuminationists) school of philosophy. Prof. Osman Bakar's Classification of Knowledge in Islam is the first work of its kind in the English language and is based on extensive scholarships and reference to the original texts.

Genres: Islam, Philosophy, History, Science, Education

330 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

Listed in Top500 list of influential Muslim, Osman Bakar is currently Al-Ghazali Chair of Islamic Thought at ISTAC-International Islamic University Malaysia and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Science at University of Malaya. He was formerly Distinguished Professor at Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies (SOASCIS), Universiti Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia Chair of Southeast Asian Islam at the Prince Talal al-Waleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Dr Bakar is author and editor of 38 books and numerous articles on various aspects of Islamic thought and civilization, particularly Islamic science and philosophy and interreligious and inter-civilizational dialogue. His writings have been translated into many languages. He has served as advisor and consultant to a variety of international academic and professional organisations, including UNESCO, the Qatar Foundation, and The European Science Foundation. He was awarded a Datukship by the Malaysian King in 2000.

Reviews

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sets out to provide a sketch on the classification of knowledge in the Islamic world. To achieve this objective, the author puts forward the analysis of three giants of the Muslim world, al-Farabi, al-Ghazzali and al-Shirazi. The section on al-Farabi is very comprehensive, a very useful sections in understanding the rudimentaries of Islamic psychology. The rest of the analysis on al-Ghazzali and al-Shirazi were quite straight-forward.

A thesis that puts forward by the author after examining these three giants is that the vision of hierarchy and order in the Islamic worldview. The reason for this worldview is simple; it is a top-down approach of which God occupies the zenith of the pyramid. God is the fount of knowledge is a consensus among these three figures, but the vehicle in achieving the transcendental truths differs.

Historically, we can summarize the progresssion between the three figures as follows. Al-Farabi is one of the first Islamic philosophers that incorporates or harmonizes Aristotelian ideas into the seams of Islam. This is as a natural response and inevitable consequence for the expansion of the dar-al-Islam into the Levant. Through the Nestorian Christians and the leniency of the Muslim rulers in the name of pursuit of knowledge, Aristotelianism immediately spread to the farthest eastern reach of the Caliphate. Al-Farabi rightly considered as the Second Teacher following Aristotle, as his ideas and writings were very comprehensible and accessible to larger populace in compared to his predecessor, al-Kindi.

Al-Farabi championed reason as the vehicle towards certainty of knowledge, while the conception of religion (it is important to note that what al-Farabi thought about religion is in its “millah” sense rather than “din”) is reduced to knowledge of approximate certainty via persuasive methods. Al-Farabi generated a concise idea on psychology which eventually concluded that the totality of beings is generated by the illumination of the active intellect that actualizes the potential intellects into real beings. This would be one of the first statement of the priority of quiddity; essence precedes existence. The relationship between the active intellect and the passive human potential intelect is that of between the Sun and the eyes. The eyes retains its ability of sight as mere potentiality; it is only through the ray of the Sun the eyes able to realize its potentiality into actualization of cognization of perception. Perhaps in Kantian terms, we could categorize al-Farabi’s idea into a form of theocentric transcendental realism, of which the certainty of the objects are only realized through active participation of the Divine. The idea of prophecy al-Farabi surmised, can be actualized by the union between the acquired intellect (the potential intellect actualized by the active intellect) with the active intellect. The prophetic intellect able to receive the impression from the divine revelation in an almost same way as the sensible are cognized via the sensible faculty. al-Farabi thus is one of the earliest figure that presupposed the existence of intellectual knowledge, where divine intervention, in a way able to make the object of the intelligible present, rather than our mere representative knowledge.

al-Farabi thus believed in primacy of reason to cognize transcendental truths. As a response, al-Ghazzali launched a crusade against the philosophers with heavy criticism on how the tools of the intellect is not suffice to cognize the transcendental truths. Following the Sufistic tradition who emphasized on the concept of ontological distance, mere abstractions is inferior to presentatial knowledge due to its non-immediate position. Thus al-Ghazzali provided a total reversal of the essentialistic position of al-Farabi by emphasizing the primacy of existence against quiddity. It is only by emphasizing the immediateness of Existence which systematically specializes and specifies the Absolute into the Multiplicity, one can really grasp the transcendental truths.

One of al-Ghazzali’s great achivements through his Niche of Light was to bring the concept of ontological existentialism into the orthodoxy, and separate it from false accusations and associations with the Batinis. He paved the way to the Illuminationists and the gnostic school of al-Arabi, and later Sufistic traditions.

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[MM · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent and erudite work examines the classifications of the sciences by three major figures: Farabi, Ghazali, and Qutb ul Din al Shirazi. Through examining their classifications, their differential priorities and visions of an ideal life were made clear. The author took a philosophical-historical approach to the text which served as fairly interesting biographies of the thinkers as well.

I truly enjoyed this work. It made me realise several things:
1) a classification of the sciences is missing from modern education - instead there are unwritten hierarchies based off of material benefit derived from a science and vague allusions to "most pure" without a truly honest study of how they link
2) a classification is very valuable as it helps a person organise their priorities and see the relationships and ultimately the unity of knowledge - it can act as a talisman against insecurity (in the Age of Information) and skepticism
3) every classification presumes a worldview and it ought to be explicated. What would today's classification be? And what does it assume?
4) the ethical and contemplative lives have an inherent tension as the height of man's development
5) a classification can clarify - does clarify - the basic subject and method of a science and is therefore a very good way to understand that science (through its major principle) without delving into it too deeply
6) modern education falsely overtly presumes an equality of the sciences - why?
7) cosmology is cool

I really enjoyed this work and I recommend it to everyone!