Islamische Philosophie. Band 1

This is a book of limited size and 192 pages only, published by a whole team of authors which also reproduces two small earlier publications of mine in German, i.e. On the Role of Islamic Philosophy (pp. 46–66) and A philosophical Approach to Islam (pp. 90–103). The other chapters deal with “What is Islamic Philosophy?”, “Al-Afghani’s Support of Islamic philosophy”, “The Rôle of Intuition in Islamic philosophy”, and al-Kindi’s Philosophical Contributions (pp. 143–159). An introduction was contributed by the prominent German Muslim Aiman Mazyek. The first chapter, discussing al-hikmah and al-falsafah, states that a true Muslim philosopher begins as a faylasuf and finishes as a hakim (p. 25). Obviously, the bayt al-hikmah, created by the Caliph al-Ma’mun in 809 CE, did play a major rôle in this context. The author admits that these earliest Muslim philosophers emancipated into genuine Muslim thinkers.