ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 1, Book 1 Introduction **Introduction by the Editor, M.M Sharif, M.A, ** Director, Institute of Islamic Culture, Lahore (Pakistan) * * A Histories of philosophy have been invariably written in the light of the philosophies of history presupposed by their authors. The result of this has been that errors vitiating their philosophies of history have crept into and marred their histories of philosophy.

In the present work our effort has been to steer clear of these errors. Instead of reading history in the mirrors of presupposed philosophies which may give distorted images, it is the study of history itself through which the dynamics of history can be clearly seen and its laws discovered.

We hope this study of Muslim philosophy and the empirical survey of its course will spot­light at least some of the misconceptions current among philosophers and historians about the nature of history and the laws governing it. It will perhaps be generally agreed that human nature is fundamentally the same the world over.

All human beings and the cultures they develop have the same fundamental needs, customs, impulses, and desires which, organizer as personalities, determine their march towards their personal and social goals. The fundamental nature of men being the same, the basic laws of cultural development and decay always remain the same.

But owing to different environmental conditions, cultural groups evolve differently in different parts of the world and thousands of years of indigenous experience give those groups their own social and psychological character; and their character in response to environmental stimuli creates all the differences that appear in their re­spective life‑histories. Muslim society forms a single cultural group.

It has been subject to the same laws of growth and decay as any other cultural group, but it has also developed some peculiar features of its own. B Philosophers of social history individually differ in their views about the universal laws of history.

There is a group of fourteenth/twentieth‑century philosophers of history who believe that social history is like a wave, it has a rise and then it falls never to rise again, and view a society or a culture as an organ­ism which has only one cycle of life. Like the life of any individual organism, the life of a culture has its childhood, maturity, old age, and death, its spring, summer, winter, and autumn.