Suppressed or Falsified History? The Untold Story of Arab-Islamic Rationalist Philosophy

Abstract

In his book History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, a distinguished British philosopher, displays a little understanding of what he calls ‘Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy’. Ray Monk describes the book as ‘the perfect introduction to its subject’, while Sir Isaiah Berlin hails its arguments as ‘not merely classically clear but scrupulously honest’.¹ The Oxford Companion to Philosophy depicts it as Russell’s best-known philosophical work that ‘exemplifies this breadth of interest and understanding, and shows that no two areas of philosophy can be guaranteed to be mutually irrelevant’.² Unfortunately, the reader is not given a chance to make up his mind since the gurus of philosophy have already attested to the greatness of the book. Exploring a foreign territory, such as Arabic-Islamic culture and philosophy, without having the appropriate tools or genuine knowledge, Russell refers briefly to two Muslim philosophers, the Persian Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037), and the Andalusian Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126–98) without clearly stating his sources. The information given is very shallow and he then concludes his chapter with the following statement:

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry — in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization — education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism — the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus produced new thought better than any produced by the transmitters — in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also). ³