Arabic language of al - Kindi's time was in the process of...

Arabic language of al - Kindi's time was in the process of constructing and perfecting technical vocabulary for Greek scientific, medical, and philosophical words. Philosophy in the Islamic world spread initially through the medium of Arabic language. Its importance in the lives of meaning seeker Muslims helped them to standardize an articulate science of Arabic grammar and lexicography.

Preserving faultless and uncorrupted text of their Holy Qur'an, helped Muslim philosophers to set a higher standard of speech and expression. Philosophical thought in Islam known as falsafah - Arabic word for the Greek philosophia - emerged as a result of an intellectual discipline that matured from the philosophical appeal of the Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit texts translated into Arabic.

Islamic scholars of the seventh century meditated on falsafah, which they defined as knowledge of all existing things of divine as well as human matters. They identified falsafah with the Qur’anic term hikmah (wisdom or organized thought), believing the origin of hikmah to be divine and debated Qur’anic revelation and reason or kalam - a term used as a translation of the Greek logos .

Above all, an ethical reverence for seeking knowledge was infused by the Qur’anic appeal to reasoning and its Prophet’s traditions advising Muslims to pursue learning, even if one has to go as far as China and acquire knowledge even from the heathens. This reverence and various other factors provided the impetus for knowledge.

In order to understand why Muslim thinkers throughout the history of Islamic civilization have viewed philosophy an important subject of Islamic tradition, it is important to be familiar with the theological tradition of Islam.

William Chittick, in The Heart of Islamic Philosophy , argues: Like other religions, Islam addresses three basic levels of human existence: practice, understanding, and virtue; or body, mind, and heart; or, to use the well known Koranic triad, islam (submission), iman (faith), and ihsan (doing what is beautiful).

These concerns are patently obvious to anyone who has studied the Koran or the Hadith (the saying of the Prophet), and Muslims have always considered the "search for knowledge" that the Prophet made incumbent on the faithful to pertain to all three of these domains. Islamic virtue is grounded in the attempt to find God present at all times and in all places, just as the Prophet found Him present.