A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3d ed.
Majid Fakhry

New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 430 pages.

That Majid Fakhry’s A History of Islamic Philosophy, first published in
1970, has been brought out in a third revised edition can be of no surprise to
the many admirers of this most robust of scholars. Fakhry’s scholarship is
meticulous, and his style, even when handling the most complex ideas,
remains simple and straightforward. 

As many of the theological questions raised by Islam’s key philoso-
phers, particularly those pertaining to free will, justice, rights, and responsi-
bilities, had political implications, each chapter in this book begins with a
historical context. However, Fakhry only allows this context to play a sub-
sidiary role, as a backdrop to the main narrative: the history of ideas. This
approach lends itself very well to an examination of the ideas held by both
individual philosophers and schools of philosophy. Importantly, Fakhry
demonstrates how, during several key Islamic epochs, there was no one
dominant system of thought, but rather, contending systems of thought. He
takes us through these debates step by step, as in, for example, the first the-
ological controversy on free will and predestination (qadar). It is in the pres-
entation of these debates, more than anywhere else, that we see that while A
History of Islamic Philosophy is distinguished from the work of many other
grand narrative histories by not being marred by a partisan viewpoint,
Fakhry’s is by no means a clinically scientific approach.

This book comprises thirteen chapters. It begins with “The Legacy of
Greece, Alexandria, and the Orient,” covers the watershed periods in the

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growth of Islamic philosophy, and includes a chapter on “The Interaction of
Philosophy and Dogma” as well as one on “The Rise and Development of
Islamic Mysticism.” It concludes with an analysis of modernist and contem-
porary trends. 

Fakhry opens with an account of the last years of the Arab conquest of
the Near East and the ensuing problems of administering an empire. He
begins his story of Islamic philosophy by describing how, by the end of the
seventh century, Arabic came to replace Persian and Greek as the state pre-
scribed language. This is a significant shift, for with a change of language
comes a change of sensibility. His handling of the Greek material is
admirable, particularly as he analyzes the different strands of Platonism and
Aristotleanism that began to penetrate Islamic thinking. He is less interested
in how this occurred – assuming, no doubt, that this process is familiar to
most audiences – than in focusing on the ideas themselves and the intersec-
tion between these ideas and the Islamic ideas of that period. 

In the second chapter, “Early Political and Religious Tensions,” the con-
test for the caliphate is presented less as a political battle for individual
power than a contest between two opposing ideas of power. As this chapter
moves on to examine the rise of kalam (theology), Fakhry presents a cogent
summary of the Mu`tazilite creed. He then analyzes the position taken by the
Mu`tazilah and other rationalizing groups and traditional thinkers on key
theological issues regarding God’s nature, human beings’ nature, and the act
of creation. He notes that the “two attributes over which the fiercest contro-
versy raged in theological and philosophical circles were [free] will and
speech” (p. 62). These questions would remain important for the following
generation of thinkers, as Fakhry shows in the next chapter, which deals with
the works of al-Kindi, Ibn al-Rawandi, and al-Razi. 

As a “champion of the introduction of Greek and Indian writings into
the Muslim world” (p. 67) and a greatly innovative thinker himself, al-Kindi
was, as Fakhry demonstrates, Islam’s first systematic philosophical writer.
Fakhry’s reading of al-Kindi (close to thirty pages) is thorough and covers
such subjects as al-Kindi’s argument of why God is not a bearer of accidents
and why the quest for truth can never be reckoned as blasphemous. Fakhry
also outlines al-Kindi’s development of Aristotle’s principles of motion. This
chapter and the next, which examines the work of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, are
among the book’s strongest. 

If there is one chapter in which Fakhry foregoes his objectivity, it is
chapter 8: “The Rise and Development of Islamic Mysticism (Sufism).”
Perhaps this is why it is the book’s weakest chapter. Mysticism, he argues,

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runs counter to many Islamic teachings, for “The Muslim believer [here
counterpoised to the mystic] is called upon to accept this world of transient
existence (dar al-fana’)” (p. 241). To provide a broad overview of the devel-
opment of Sufism proves difficult on the following two counts: unlike some
of the other movements discussed in earlier chapters of this book, Sufism
has had a very long existence (and although the form of transmitting its
kalam and the long line of creativity associated with its name have changed,
it continues to be practiced) and has developed distinctly in different parts of
the Muslim world.

The concluding chapters on modernist and contemporary trends bring
us up to the present. In the modern period, the source of Islamic inquiry was
the same as it was in earlier periods: the Qu’ran. Additionally, the essential
questions regarding necessity, free will, and destiny continued unchanged.
The framework upon which these questions were hung, however, was
markedly different. In this we see, perhaps, the influence of both the
Muslim world’s contact with the post-Enlightenment West as well as the
changing nature of the body politic in Muslim countries. Of the Afghani
modernist thinker, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Fakhry says: “He reduces reli-
gion to a rationalist system of beliefs, shorn of any supernatural content” (p.
349). This is a position to which the Indian (and later, Pakistani) philoso-
pher Muhammed Iqbal did not accede, for: “Iqbal’s concept of religion is
that of a complex, partly rational, partly ethical, and partly spiritual experi-
ence” (p. 364). 

In his concluding chapter, Fakhry analyzes the thought of, among oth-
ers, the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb, for whom the “roots of the decline of
Western civilization are not material or economic but rather spiritual or
moral; the West has lost the ‘stock of values’ that enabled it in the past to be
the leader of mankind” (p. 381). Islamist groups have invested great impor-
tance in the ideas of such thinkers; this analysis is, therefore, a welcome
addition to the text.

In Fakhry’s hands, the complex ideas of the major Islamic philosophers
and schools are made accessible to a wide audience without being unneces-
sarily simplified. His publishers should be assured that there will be a fourth,
and no doubt, a fifth edition of A History of Islamic Philosophy produced in
the future.

Anita Mir
Writer/Researcher

London, United Kingdom

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