Islamic Intellectual History
Islamic intellectual history is the tradition of thought produced in the Islamic world from the seventh century to the present, spanning [[Quran|scripture]] and its interpretation, [[Hadith]], [[Kalam|theology]], [[Falsafa|philosophy]], [[Usul al-Fiqh|legal theory]], [[Fiqh|substantive law]] and the [[Schools of Jurisprudence|schools of law]], [[Sufism|mysticism and its orders]], and the mathematical, astronomical, and medical sciences. Its formative development was inseparable from translation: the translation of Greek texts into Arabic and the formation of the [[House of Wisdom]] in Baghdad were instrumental in introducing Islamic scholars to the work of Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek philosophers[^c1], and Islamic philosophy emerged in the early centuries of Islam as Muslim scholars sought to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology[^c2]. That work was sustained by an extraordinary programme of patronage — it was the Abbasids of Baghdad who sponsored the astonishing multigenerational project to translate major portions of the Greek philosophical and scientific canon, without which, arguably, much of that canon might have been permanently lost[^c14] — and it was later carried westward into Latin Europe through the [[Toledo School of Translators]], the group of scholars who worked together in Toledo during the 12th and 13th centuries, translating many of the Islamic philosophy and scientific works from Classical Arabic into Medieval Latin[^c15].
The tradition was transmitted by a scholarly class and articulated through a set of rival disciplines. The [[Ulama]] were its guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam[^c17], working through personal chains of instruction rather than institutional office, and the sciences they cultivated rested on the Qur'an: in Islam, most intellectual disciplines, including Islamic theology, philosophy, mysticism and jurisprudence, have been concerned with the Quran or have their foundation in its teachings[^c6]. [[Tafsir]], the science of Qur'anic exegesis — so called from the root F-S-R, to explain, to expound, to disclose[^c18] — grew alongside [[Hadith|hadith criticism]], whose corpus is demonstrably the work of the two hundred and fifty years after the prophet's death[^c7], and legal theory, which beyond Quran and hadith recognised juristic consensus and analogical reasoning as sources of law[^c22]. The central intellectual contest of the classical period was between kalam, the rational defence of revealed doctrine, and falsafa, the philosophical programme inherited from the Greeks — the traditional and often bitter division between practitioners of the two[^c4]. For over a thousand years Ash'ari-Maturidi theology defined Sunni orthodoxy[^c3], and [[Sunni Islam]] remains the largest branch of Islam and the largest religious denomination in the world[^c19], while the first school of speculative theology, the [[Mu'tazila]], held that it was necessary to give a rationally coherent account of Islamic beliefs and maintained, in addition to an atomistic view of the universe, five theological principles, of which the two most important were the unity of God and divine justice[^c13]. Alongside the Sunni majority stood [[Shi'i Islam]], the branch that accepted a line of twelve hereditary successors called Imams, which is the majority tradition of modern Shi'is[^c12], and [[Ismailism]], the branch that took Isma'il ibn Jafar as the sixth Imam and concentrated on the esoteric meaning of religion[^c20].
The tradition's intellectual life extended across philosophy, mysticism, and the sciences. [[Suhrawardi]], the twelfth-century Persian mystic and philosopher, founded the School of Illumination, one of the most important schools in Islamic philosophy[^c23], and [[Sufism]] produced both a technical science of the soul and a literature that travelled far beyond Islam — most conspicuously in [[Jalal al-Din Rumi]], whose Persian works are considered the most eloquent expression of Islamic mystical thought, and whose long mystico-didactic poem, the Mathnavi, has been called "the Qur'an in the Persian tongue" by the great fifteenth-century poet Jami of Herat[^c16]. The [[Ikhwan al-Safa]] compiled an Islamic encyclopedia consisting of fifty-two treatises and an additional comprehensive treatise on the various philosophical sciences[^c9], and encyclopaedic ambition of this kind recurs across the disciplines. In the sciences, Islamic achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine[^c25], and Islamic astronomers went far beyond the Greek mathematical methods, providing in trigonometry the essential tools for the creation of Western Renaissance astronomy[^c8]. The tradition's geography was wider than the Arab-Persian core: Timbuktu, a major centre of the West African book trade, attracted learned men from all corners of the Islamic Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa[^c24], and the scholarly culture of the Nusantara preserved its own manuscript inheritance. Its modern chapter is one of reform and self-criticism, in which the recovery of the tradition's women scholars has become a distinct project — the muhaddithat alone numbering more than ten thousand in a 43-volume biographical dictionary that treats the modern period alongside the classical[^c26]. From the nineteenth century, [[Islamic Modernism]] reopened the debate over [[Usul al-Fiqh|ijtihad]] and the compatibility of Islam with modern science, and [[Islamism]] gave the tradition its most contested contemporary political expression, with figures from [[Hasan al-Banna]] and [[Sayyid Qutb]] to Maududi and Khomeini[^c21]. Later thinkers such as [[Al-Jabri]] diagnosed the intellectual crisis of the Muslim world as a deficit of rational method rather than a deficit of faith: the main issue indicated to be the cause of the decline of Muslims is the lack of rational ability[^c11], and the tendency to be closed to logical thinking expressed by non-Muslims[^c10] has been identified as a principal obstacle. The Golden Age of the eighth to thirteenth centuries produced some of the most important thought in human history[^c5], and its recovery — in philosophy, in law, and in the sciences — remains the reference point for contemporary debates.