Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join

Reading path · Beginner

Understanding Islamic philosophy

Philosophy in the Islamic world grew from the translation of Greek works into Arabic in Abbasid Baghdad and continued for more than a thousand years. This path starts with a narrative history. Three short primary texts suited to a first reading follow: an autobiography of doubt, a philosophical tale and a legal defence of philosophy. It ends with two larger works, a theory of society and history and the most famous attack on the philosophers. Read the history first, because it gives each text its context. Allow two to three months.

6 books, in order

  1. Step 1: Philosophy in the Islamic World

    Peter Adamson · 2016

    Adamson's sixty-two short chapters run from the translation movement through Avicenna and al-Ghazālī to later centuries in Iran, India and the Ottoman lands. He also covers Jewish philosophers who wrote in Arabic.

    Where to start
    Read chapter 1, 'The straight path: philosophy and Islam', and chapters 3 and 4, on the translation movement and al-Kindī. Then read the chapter on each later author before the primary text.
    Time
    4–6 weeks, a few chapters at a time
    Difficulty
    Beginner

  2. Step 2: Deliverance from Error

    Al-Ghazali · c. 1100–1108

    Al-Ghazālī's intellectual autobiography describes a crisis of doubt about the senses and reason, then weighs the theologians, the philosophers, the followers of an infallible teacher and the Sufis. It is a short primary text, often compared with Descartes.

    Where to start
    Read it whole. Richard J. McCarthy's translation appears in Deliverance from Error: Five Key Texts.
    Time
    2 evenings
    Difficulty
    Beginner

  3. Step 3: Hayy ibn Yaqzan

    Ibn Tufayl · 12th century

    Ibn Ṭufayl's tale from al-Andalus follows a child raised by a gazelle on an island, who reasons his way to knowledge of nature and God. He then meets a man whose society lives by revealed religion.

    Where to start
    Read the whole tale in Lenn Evan Goodman's translation, whose notes give the philosophical background.
    Time
    2–3 evenings
    Difficulty
    Beginner

  4. Step 4: The Decisive Treatise

    Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · c. 1178–1180

    Ibn Rushd (Averroes) argues that the religious law calls for the study of philosophy. Demonstrative reasoning, he holds, does not conflict with what the law teaches when scripture is rightly read.

    Where to start
    Read the whole text in Charles E. Butterworth's facing-page translation (2001).
    Time
    1–2 evenings
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  5. Step 5: The Muqaddimah

    Ibn Khaldun · 1377

    Ibn Khaldūn's introduction to his universal history asks why historians make mistakes. It then builds a theory of how group solidarity (ʿaṣabiyya) carries dynasties to power and how settled life wears it away.

    Where to start
    In Franz Rosenthal's translation as abridged by N. J. Dawood, read the Foreword and the Introduction on historiography, then Chapters 2 and 3, on Bedouin civilisation and on dynasties and royal authority.
    Time
    3–4 weeks
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  6. Step 6: The Incoherence of the Philosophers

    Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · c. 1095

    Al-Ghazālī examines twenty teachings of the philosophers, chiefly al-Fārābī and Avicenna, and argues that they fail by the philosophers' own standards of proof. His discussion of causation is often compared with Hume, though how far the comparison holds is debated.

    Where to start
    Read the introductory sections, then the First Discussion, on the eternity of the world, and the Seventeenth, on causation, in Michael E. Marmura's parallel English–Arabic translation.
    Time
    3–4 weeks
    Difficulty
    Advanced

Then

Other reading paths

Every reading path