Introduction

Abstract

Starting with the observation that the beginning of the European Enlightenment coincided with the military defeat of Ottoman armies that threatened Central Europe and with the Western colonial expansion into Muslim territories, the introduction reviews how earlier generations of Western scholars have thought about philosophy in Islam. The earliest academic studies of philosophy in Islam were dominated by the Hegelian assumption of a Weltgeist that moved from Greece to Western Europe. It assumed that the philosophical tradition ended in Islam the moment it was passed unto Western Europe during the 12th century. Yielding a strong influence on the study of Islamic philosophy during the 19th and 20th centuries, this idea also determined the widespread conviction that books like al-Ghazali’s (d. 1111) Precipitance of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa) are not works of philosophy, rather they are directed against it. The introduction suggests to accept these works as books of philosophy and to draw the full consequences of that insight. It means that many books of philosophy were written in Islam after the 12th century, of which a certain kind is the subject of this study.