There is...

There is, of course, a large part of it which is concerned with matters either entirely, or, at any rate, partly, theological in character: the Oneness of God and the nature of His attributes (particularly His knowledge) in metaphysics, and the source of authority in the "practical" philosophy of ethics and politics are witnesses to this.

In a more indirect way, many of the problems which were taken up by the early philosophers of this tradition, and which have become conventional topics in the literature, owe their conception to the fact that they were originally subjects of debate among the kalam theologians which the philosophers tried to settle by their own methods.

But this in itself makes their philosophy no more "Islamic" than similar considerations would make contemporary Western philosophy "Christian", and we would do well to note that when "Western philosophy" investigates matters of theology this is referred to as philosophy of religion, not "Christian philosophy".

It is perhaps more revealing, in this context, that Western authors have given us "Buddhist philosophy", "the philosophy of the Vendanta", and so forth despite the fact that they have given us no "Christian philosophy" (unless they can restrict it to such things as Neo-Thomism, for example), nor do we find any reference to "atheistic philosophy".

It seems on this score, then, merely a convenience for bracketing up "alien" philosophies, for apparently rather dubious motives, and relegating them to other areas of research - anthropology, history, sociology, etc. - and leaving the field of "true philosophy" (or "philosophy per se") to contemporary Western philosophy. There is, of course, a large part of "Islamic philosophy" which does not directly concern itself with the kind of subject matter we have so far mentioned.

Logic is not regarded as part of philosophy as such in so far as it remains purely within its own bounds and stays formal, so to speak, but whenever logic raises questions outside this boundary, questions which involve the notions of existence or knowledge, for example, such questions become a part of "metaphysics in its more general sense" (al-ila-hiyat bi '1- ma'na '/-'amm), and it would be difficult to see how anyone could have thought this to be "Islamic" in subject matter.

Indeed its practitioners have thought it to apply well beyond the bounds of any theological considerations to all human thought.