Islamic philosophy makes a sharp distinction between different categories of believers. Some, and indeed most, believers follow Islam in an unquestioning and natural manner. They adhere to the legal requirements of the religion, carry out the basic rules concerning worship, pilgrimage, charity and so on, and generally behave as orthodox and devout Muslims. Some are more devout than others, and some occasionally behave in ways reprehensible to the teachings of Islam, but on the whole for the ordinary believer Islam presents no serious theoretical problems. There may well be practical problems in reconciling what they wish to do with what Islam instructs them to do, but this for most people is not something which leads them to question their faith as such. It merely leads them to wonder how to reconcile in a practical way the rival demands of religion and their personal wishes.

PART I: SUNNISM

A few initial points need to be made about the nature of Islamic theology in its later stages before a discussion of some of its main themes and thinkers can be attempted. First, there often exists no clear distinction between Islamic theology, in the sense of kalām, and the other Islamic and not so Islamic sciences, such as grammar, jurisprudence (fiqh), philosophy (falsafa/hikma), Sufism, and the even more specific activities of learning how to operate with the Traditions of the Prophet, and how to assess and rank the chains of narrators which differentiate their levels of reliability. Islamic theologians did not usually strictly separate what they did from all these other activities, and so it is not easy to provide a neat account of precisely what is “theological” and what is not.

The first four centuries of Islamic theology had been a time of vibrant creativity. The whole structure of the subject was being created, with its novel vocabulary and its distinctive hermeneutic techniques, but by the time of Ghazelī the basic paradigms were already well established, and kalem was rivalling or outstripping falsafa in intellectual eminence. It is often said that the assault of Ghazelī on philosophy destroyed the latter in the Islamic world until (and perhaps even in) modern times, and that he replaced philosophy with theology and Sufism. This is not true; for one thing falsafa as a discipline did not die; it continued to flourish in the Persian world and to some extent among the Ottomans, and it was only in the Arabic-speaking regions of Islam that it sank into a marked decline, until reviving in the nineteenth century as part of the Nahda or Arabic-Islamic “renaissance”. However falsafa's key concerns and methods lived on, and flourished, within developed kalām.

There was a time when collecting artistic and archaeological artefacts was widely regarded in a very positive light. Both private and public collectors saved objects so that the public could experience those objects and the scholarly community study them. A good indication is the title of a recent book (published by the Hayward Gallery) by the British National Art Collections Fund which provides funds for museums in Britain to buy works of art. It is called Saved! But gradually this activity came to be questioned. Much of the material in museums was acquired by dubious methods, it has been argued, and is presented in patronising ways. For example, ‘primitive’ communities are presented through their artefacts as exotic and we often treat important religious symbols as just things to be gaped at as representatives of a very alien way of life. We may even display their dead as items for public entertainment and study in ways that would lead to questions were we to be dealing with corpses from our own culture. On the other hand, the recent von Hagens ‘Bodyworks’ display of dead bodies in a variety of poses suggests that breaking taboos in this area is a potent source of audience attraction. Even though the bodies come from people who have voluntarily consigned them for display, or so we are told, one might wonder what point is made by their manipulation into unusual poses and public display.

Philosophers sometimes argue that there are particular expressions that are so frequently fought over that they are best characterized as “essentially contested concepts.” The concept of Jewish philosophy is just such a concept. There has always been a lot of controversy about what it is, and whether it is anything at all. This is not a problem for Jewish philosophy alone, of course, but affects all philosophies that are described in religious and ethnic terms, and familiar issues of definition then enter the discussion. Is Jewish philosophy philosophy by Jews? That is not such a simple question either, since the whole issue of who is a Jew is complex, and although at the time of the Third Reich the Nazis thought they had a neat definition of the Jewish race, we would probably hesitate to call Catholic priests Jewish thinkers merely on the basis of the fact that they had one Jewish grandparent. On the other hand, it would be wrong to define as a Jewish philosopher only those Jews who had a commitment to Judaism itself, since we know that many people feel themselves to be Jewish and are ethnically Jewish without sharing any religious beliefs at all with their more observant coreligionists. Yet they may have interesting views on religion and philosophy and it seems wrong to disqualify their work as potentially being Jewish philosophy. On the other hand, perfectly observant Jews may write on topics in philosophy that have nothing to do with Judaism, and it would be strange to classify what they do as Jewish philosophy.We seem to be getting back to the idea of Jewish science, a doctrine popular with racists but without much to be said for it otherwise.