It is at any rate quite recently that the Orientalists in...

It is at any rate quite recently that the Orientalists in general have begun to realize that philosophical thinking in Islam did not fall irretrievably into decadence and fossilization after the Mongol invasion. In fact, the truth of the matter is that we can go to the extent of asserting without exaggeration that a kind of philosophy which deserves to be regarded as typically and characteristically Islamic developed not so much before the death of Averroes as after.

This typically Islamic philosophy arose and matured in the periods subsequent to the Mongol invasion, until in the Safawid period in Iran it reached the apex of vigorous creativity. This peculiar type of Islamic philosophy which grew up in Iran among the Shi'ites has come to be known as hikmat or theosophy (lit. "Wisdom"). We can trace the origin of hikmat back to the very beginning of the above-mentioned second phase of the history of philosophy in Islam.

Hikmat is structurally a peculiar combination of rational thinking and Gnostic intuition, or, we might say, rationalist philosophy and mystical experience. It is a special type of scholastic philosophy based on existential intuition of Reality, a result of philosophizing the Gnostic ideas and visions obtained through intellectual contemplation. Historically speaking, this tendency toward the spiritualization of philosophy finds its origin in the metaphysical visions of Ibn 'Arabi and Suhrawardi.

In making this observation, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that hikmat is also, at least in its formal make-up, a rationalist philosophy having a solid and strictly logical structure. And in this latter aspect, it goes beyond Ibn 'Arabi and Suhrawardi back to Avicenna in the first phase of the history of Islamic philosophy.

Hikmat , having as it does these two distinctive aspects, must be approached from two different angles, in order properly to analyze its formative process: (1) as a purely intellectual activity, and (2) as something based on trans-intellectual, gnostic experiencedhawq "tasting" as the mystics call it - of the ultimate Reality.

Mulla Sadra and the development of Islamic philosophy1 More than any other factor, the discovery of Sadr al-Din Shirazi (known usually as Mulla Sadra) has been responsible for the new awareness in the West of the continued vitality of Islamic philosophy after the so-called medieval period.