 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy in the contemporary Islamic world with Anke von Kugelgen, who is professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Bern. Hello, Professor von Kugelgen. Hello. Thank you for coming on the show. Obviously, there are Muslims living all over the world in very different societies. There isn't really much reason to think that philosophical developments in say Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, whatever, are all going to be the same. Is it nonetheless possible to identify general philosophical trends in the Islamic world over the last century or so? Your question is very legitimate. Indeed, the so-called Muslim societies differ considerably from each other in many respects. Not least in regard to philosophical wedanchawung, you might call that currents and teachings. Unfortunately, the knowledge of the development of philosophy in the 19th to the 20th centuries in Muslim societies is still very limited though. There has been almost no research into this in the West. Although philosophical questions and arguments play an important role, not least in public debates about social and state reforms, social and supranational identities, human, individual and collective rights. With some of my doctoral students, I'm about to create at our institute a main research area, which we call contemporary philosophy in the near and Middle East. The nucleus or basis of it is a book that is an overview of philosophy in the Islamic world covering the 19th and 20th centuries, which I direct and co-edit with my colleague, Professor Ulrich Rudolf, and we have a redactor, Michael Frey. It will be the fourth volume of an overview of the whole history of the philosophy in the Islamic world. What the so-called Muslim societies share with each other, and by the way, I would say with many other non-Western societies and even with Western societies themselves, is in my view, the challenge of modern philosophy and science. Be it Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, or Lahore in the second half of the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century, the main ideas of positivism, Darwinism, materialism, socialism and constitutionalism provoked extensive reactions. They were particularly discussed in the newly established cultural and scientific journals and in some private schools, primarily, I would say, at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. And the responses to these challenging ideas varied just like in Europe or in the United States. Sometimes scholars welcomed the new developments, sometimes rejected them, and sometimes remained undecided. Of course, the responses were developed against the background of one's own intellectual traditions, and that is normal. And these traditions differed quite considerably from each other in terms of what was taught at the madrasas, that is, Muslim schools. There would be a difference between a mainly Shiite context like Iran and a predominantly Sunni environment like Egypt or the other countries nominally or fully belonging to the Ottoman Empire. Then there were also many private schools, not least the Christian confessional schools, either indigenous or run by missionaries. Despite all that, when they were confronted with a new understanding of science and philosophy, the differences between the traditions played a very minor role. Modern science, as you well know, had abundant determinism and any belief in unshakable knowledge, shifting to empirically based research and an heuristic approach. Philosophy had more or less given up on metaphysics, thus the core of what had been considered among Muslim philosophers over centuries as the first and most noble part of philosophy, meaning metaphysics seemed to have lost its meaning. Moreover, many parts of philosophy had, so to speak, gained independence and turned into sciences like psychology and sociology during the 19th century. That process, you all know, already started earlier with, for instance, biology and physics and spun off new sciences in the 19th centuries like paleontology. There were, roughly speaking, I would say, three main ways of reacting to this immense challenge, to stick to tradition, to adapt the modern ideas, or to harmonize the two with one another. Some schools successfully sealed themselves off from European influences and are even today still teaching traditional deterministic philosophies. So, for instance, in Iran, but also in India and Pakistan, the school following the Shirazian philosopher of being or existence, wajood in Arabic, mula sadra, from the 16th century, is still alive and well. Then, at the other extreme, there was wholehearted adaptation. At first, the European models were rather strongly imitated. So you have, for instance, the doctor, a medical doctor, Shibley Shumai from Lebanon and the Ottoman thinker Bahat Tefik, who propagated evolutionism following really one to one, more or less, the Germans, Ludwig Büchner or Ernst Hegel. Or you have the Iranian Azeri writer Mirza Fathali Ahunzadeh and the Ottoman politician and diplomat Ahmed Rizha, who spread positivism among their compatriots. These authors were, however, not all that influential in their home countries, though their writings are still in print today. The third approach was, as I said, in the middle, incorporating the new ideas into the traditional religious framework. Here, the first examples were Muslim reformers like the Iranian cosmopolitan and also political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. By the way, he is an Iranian or was an Iranian, not an Afghan. The Egyptian educational reformer and Mufti Muhammad Abduh and the Indian educational reformer said Ahmed Khan. Their motto was that Islam is a rational religion. So here, they are taking on the well-known claim of the classical Muslim philosophers and theologians that Islam is in full harmony with reason and thus with science and philosophy. But this idea, which seems to imply that reason or revelation has to submit to the other, took on a new aspect in the face of philosophies that are solely interested in this world and no longer in metaphysics or in God's essence and his attributes. In many Muslim societies, it stimulated the reformers to what I would call anthropologize the understanding of religion. The center of interest became the individual human being and the societies that human beings built. Since these reformers considered modern science and philosophy as a necessary mean to progress and fully compatible with Islam, they helped pave the way to a secularization of knowledge. So now let me come back to the core of your question, which was about developments and different geographical locations. At first, one can observe similar and closely connected developments across the Islamic world, especially until the establishment of national states in the near Middle East and in North Africa. But then, philosophies have become more diverse with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire into the republics of Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, among others after World War One, also independence from Great Britain in the case of Egypt, India and Pakistan, and as you all know from France and North Africa. In general, we can say that in each country, mainstream political philosophy has clearly been marked by state ideology. For instance, socialism in Syria, Iraq, and also in Egypt, especially in the 1950s and 60s. Camelism in Turkey from the 1930s onwards, followed by the Turkish Islamic synthesis. In Iran, then, you have the struggle between the constitutionalists and the adherents of the state doctrine of the Wilayet-e-Fakhr, which means the guardianship of the Jewish consort. Although the internal development and tradition of each country also plays a role in other fields of philosophy, the interest in European and North American philosophy remains a strong common feature. Here, the colonial background has left its imprint, of course. French philosophers like Henri Bergson and nowadays Michel Foucault, and also the French reception of English and German philosophers prevail, for instance, in Tunisia or Morocco, whereas you find English philosophers as, for instance, Herbert Spencer, Bertrand Russell, and also the English reception of French and German philosophers prevailing in Egypt and India. In Turkey, for instance, we see influence from philosophers in exile. This is very interesting. The neo-positivist Hans Reichenbach, and especially the historian of philosophy, Hans von Astell, have been very influential through their teachings and pupils at the University of Istanbul and had a major impact on the development of academic philosophy. So, we do see a divergence between different natures. Still, there have been some clear common features too. Since the late 17th of the last century, there is a new field that might be labeled philosophy of Turaz. That is the philosophically inspired, completely new interpretation of the Muslim intellectual heritage. It started in Lebanon and Syria with Hossein Muroo and Qayyab Tizini, and has been taken up in many Arab-speaking countries, with Muhammad Abed al-Jabri from Morocco as its known renowned representative. His works are widespread, apparently also in Indonesia. Okay, so it's a very complicated situation, a lot of variety, but also some common features. One thing I'm wondering is about the institutional frameworks within which philosophy is being practiced in the Islamic world today. So, should we be thinking in terms of like independent scholars outside the academy, maybe political commentators and activists, or should we be thinking more about people like us? So, academics who work in universities or maybe in the madrasa or maybe both? In fact, you have both. Philosophy in terms of the continuation of traditional schools of commentaries on Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, or Mulla Mahamudra in India is still taught at the madrasas. And it continues to be taught rather traditionally even at the reformed schools like for instance the Azhar. In Cairo. Yeah, in Cairo. The spread of European philosophy happened outside these institutions. This is very important to note. At the turn of the 20th century, the main channel of dissemination was cultural and scientific journals, not universities, they were not there. They were run by Muslim or Christian intellectuals, frequently medical doctors, but often self-made journalists and writers who knew at least one European language and had traveled to Europe, in some cases also the United States. The first case was apparently the Ottoman journal Felsa Fé Majmose that had survived for only six months in 1913. That may just be typical for the time since we find a lot of other non-specialized journals with only a short lifespan in that period. So this is not something special really. In some Arabic countries, professional philosophical journals started to appear in the last quarter of the 20th century. They have been closely linked to the universities and their philosophical departments, as well as to philosophical societies and congresses. In fact, philosophical societies and congresses have been another mean of disseminating philosophy, both traditional and modern types and currents also. Probably the first philosophical Congress to meet regularly is the Indian Philosophical Congress. And it was already created in 1925 at the initiative of Sarva Pali Radhakrishnan, who became president of India then in the 1960s. Most of these philosophical congresses and societies are national institutions or at least nationally anchored. Pakistan and afterwards also Bangladesh established their own philosophical associations and also Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan have their own philosophical societies. So this is like analogous to the American Philosophical Association or something? Exactly. Right, okay. With the establishment of modern universities, which started in the late 1920s in Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran and so on, and in India even earlier than that, philosophy had a new kind of academic context that profoundly differed from that of a madrasa. In these universities, philosophy was soon being taught just like in Europe or the United States. I mean, just like we know it nowadays. The main difference is that besides the main fields of theoretical and practical philosophy and the history of Western philosophy as well as modern logic, there has been always a chair of Islamic philosophy. In contrast though to the traditional commentary-oriented teaching at the madrasa, Islamic philosophy is understood in terms of the history of the development of philosophy in Muslim societies. Depending on the chair holder however, what is understood then under Islamic philosophy can differ quite considerably. So for instance, the first chair holder of Islamic philosophy at the University of Egypt, nowadays it's the Cairo University, Mustafa Abd al-Razk, developed a new perspective on the emergence of Islamic philosophy. According to him, it did not only arise due to the influence of Greek and other cultures, but had its origins also in the methods of Islamic jurisprudence, el-Mussula al-fik, developed by al-Shafi. Moreover, he emphasized the ties between el-Mulkalam and philosophy and stressed the contribution of early Islamic mysticism to Islamic ethics. And he has been rather influential in Egypt. By the way, Mustafa Abd al-Razk was not just an academic, he was also politically active. First in the Egyptian opposition and after his retirement from the university in 1938, he served as a government minister. It's actually very common for professors of philosophy and the so-called Muslim societies to be politically engaged, be it with or against the government. So for instance, the Iranian professor of Western philosophy at the University of Tehran, Hulam Ali Hoddad-Awadel, served for several years as chairman of the parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And Mansif Marzouki, the interim president of Tunisia, still today, as well as Leopold Seder Senghor, the first president of Senegal, they both studied philosophy and Senghor has remained a great admirer of Henri Bergson throughout his life. So another example of what you can achieve if you study a philosophy. Exactly. Like Alexander the Great. Coming president. And just to mention two other renowned personalities as further examples, the Syrian professor emeritus of Western philosophy, Sadaq Jalal al-Adham, was after 1967 actively engaged for the Palestinian cause and later on he constantly agitated against Middle Eastern forms of despotism in various articles and manifestives and is still doing. The Palestinian professor of Islamic philosophy, Sari Nusayba, has been politically very active in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, among others as the representative of the PLO in East Jerusalem. But with these examples, I don't mean to say that almost every professor of philosophy is politically engaged. In fact, most of them stay with academia on a national and also international level. Right. So much like in Europe, where there are some politically active academics, but most of them are just writing their books. Like me. Okay. So I guess, for the purposes of this podcast, I don't want to get too much into these political issues, although that's interesting as well. But rather to look back at all this stuff that I've covered over the dozens of episodes I've already spent looking at the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. And something that I'm very curious to hear more about is which philosophers, and maybe we could just concentrate for the moment on the sort of famous names up to say the 14th century or so, which of the historical figures have had the most significant cultural currency in the 20th century? Yes, I would say from the Masjid, Abi Sena, Ibn Sina, and to a lesser extent Al-Farabi, and from the Maghreb, of course, Averis, Ibn Rushd, and also Ibn Khaldun, though it is contested, I mean, even among Arab philosophers themselves, whether Ibn Khaldun can be called a philosopher, given his harsh criticism of the philosopher. Also Miska Way and Ibn Tufail have had some influence today. Let me start with Ibn Khaldun. For the Lebanese professor of philosophy, Fahmy Jad'an, with Ibn Khaldun, we have the beginning of the nahda, that is the Renaissance, an awakening of Muslim culture and an opening of the mind to progress, I mean, already in the 14th century. And for many contemporary intellectuals, he represents a turn towards realism and to a rational and empirically based rational approach to history. His harsh criticism of Felsa can be seen, to a certain extent, as being only a rejection of metaphysics, and thus of the possibility of grasping the hidden world using reason. Ibn Khaldun's encouragement of all sciences that deal with facts, his sharp analysis of historical events and his search for causality in history, all of which, by the way, was largely based on the Aristotelian theory of causes, these have been seen by quite a number of professors of philosophy as a major step forward. We find a whole series of scholars writing voluminous works on Ibn Khaldun and paying tribute to him. For instance, the Moroccan professor emeritus of history, Abdullah Laoui, who served, by the way, as a diplomatic representative in Cairo, and Paris, I won't come back to politics, and his compatriots and professors of philosophy, the late Mohammed Aziz al-Lahababi and Mohammed Abid al-Jabri. Also, I could name here the Lebanese professor emeritus of philosophy, Naseef Nasr. Still, they did not hesitate to criticize Ibn Khaldun on some topics, especially for his belief in miracles and superstition and his cyclical understanding of history. The research of Al-Farabi has been quite different and until now, at least, much less well-defined and widespread. It's really only the phrase al-madina al-fardila, that is, the Virtuous City, which is part of the title of one of his major works, that has been frequently used. But this is just a way of referring to an ideal of a city or a state and has nothing to do with Al-Farabi's own visions of politics. Several Arab intellectuals do regard Al-Farabi as a model to follow in respect to his rational and methodological approach. One scholar I can think of goes further. This is the Tunisian professor Fatih Tariqi, who is, by the way, holder of the UNESCO chair of philosophy in the Arabic world. In the context of his philosophy of living together, he has something like that philosophy of living together, he develops on Al-Farabi's concept of takul, as crucial for our time. In English, it might be rendered by reasonableness, I mean, this is from the German, take it from German, or practical reason. So, the idea here is that it is being contrasted to the theoretical reflection. Al-Farabi's notion of takul is meant to open the way for using reason in practical social life. So, this is like Phronesis, I guess, exactly. So, it's like the ability to use reason to get through practical affairs rather than thinking about maths or metaphysics or something. Exactly. So, let's not wait any longer. What about Avicenna? Yes, as for Avicenna, you have mentioned in your podcast that the Avicenna tradition has continued to be taught at madrasas and has more or less been fused with ideas from Sufism and Kalam. This kind of teaching is still alive in some madrasas, for instance, in Iran and Pakistan. The reception of Avicenna in modern Muslim societies seems to be understood, except in purely academic research, exactly in that way. And according to the Moroccan philosopher Al-Jabari, it is also that kind of mystical philosophy that the Islamic world has to get rid of in order to become again a part of modern civilization. He also criticizes Avicenna's theories in some detail. For instance, when Avicenna describes the world's dependence on God by saying that it is an existent, possible by itself and necessary through another. Mumken al-wujood min zatihi wa jib min raidehi. Al-Jabari understands this third value, he calls it Qima falifa, as an offense against the premise of the excluded middle because it gives created things this status that is supposedly neither just contingent nor just necessary. But this understanding of Avicenna is contested by quite a number of Arab professors of philosophy, like Ali Harb, George D'Arabishi and Mahmoud Amin al-Alim. However, the prevailing image of Avicenna is that he is close to mysticism or theosophy, not to Aristotle. Some scholars have admired him for this, for instance, the Iranian professor of philosophy, Said Hussein Nasser, who has been for quite a while at the Georgetown University in Washington. There's something ironic here because both Said Hussein Nasser, who wants to continue this Avicenna path, and Al-Jabari, who wants to reject it, they both consider a veris as representing an alternative to Avicenna. They both see a veris as someone who separated philosophy and science from religion. So the teachings of a veris are rejected by Said Hussein Nasser and propagated by Al-Jabari, but for the same reason. Actually, I want to ask you about a veris in a second because he's someone you've worked on quite a bit. I mean, his reception in the contemporary world, but actually that makes me wonder about Greek philosophy. So you just said that they don't see Avicenna as particularly close to Aristotle, and they have this mystical reading of him. Are the Greek philosophers still taken seriously as philosophers in the contemporary Islamic world the way that they are in, you know, European nations and in the United States? Yes, they are indeed. Greek philosophy actually enjoyed a revival from the second half of the 19th century onwards. It was seen as a common source that influenced both the Oriental and Occidental civilizations. We find them trying to make Greek philosophy directly fruitful for the modern day without referring to the Muslim medieval philosophers like Al-Faradi, Avicenna, or a veris. Aristotle seems to have been the most revered among the Greek philosophers. This is no wonder, especially influential in spreading his works where two Egyptian writers and political liberal thinkers, activists, and also temporary ministers for culture. These are Lutfi Asayit and Tahar Hussein. Lutfi Asayit translated even Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the work on generation and corruption, the physics, and the politics into Arabic. However, I mean, he didn't know Greek, so he translated from French. Better than nothing. Yes, exactly. For Lutfi Asayit, the return to Aristotle meant giving knowledge and judgment a sound basis, and he was convinced that the scientific spirit of Aristotle could help to restore that spirit in the Arab world. As to Tahar Hussein, who was a professor of ancient history, classical philology, and Arabic literature, he was very well versed in ancient Greek, and he also translated something from Aristotle, the constitution of Athens, into Arabic. He did that just after the so-called constitutional revolution in Egypt in 1919, when the Egyptians were discussing which political system to adopt. In his foreword, he explicitly argues against taking the Islamic principle of consultation, the shura, under the first four caliphs as a model, and recommends adopting the liberal principles of the Greek tradition. That's interesting. But this was a statement he later reconsidered. So there's a sort of parallel there where, I mean, you could think about like the American Revolution, where they refer back to this Greek model of democracy, or, you know, other appeals to say, the Roman Republic, in European history, so we see a parallel development in the Islamic world. We do. And so apart from Aristotle, or the I mean, maybe Plato or Socrates? Yes, Socrates, Plato and with him Socrates, has been much admired. And the Egyptian government employee and writer Muhammad al-Wailihi, for instance, was very critical of modern Western society. He wrote a book on ethics, where he talks about what he calls the healing of the soul, ere legenefs, I mean, the whole book is called like that, by the way. And he takes especially Socrates as a model. And he even accused modern European philosophers of having distorted their Greek sources. Socrates also inspired the translator of Darwin's The Origins of Species into Arabic, the Egyptian Ismail Madher. He saw Socrates as a model of virtue and of the right approach to critical investigation. That's really interesting. I'm especially struck by this idea that ethics is the healing of the soul, because that's an idea that we already saw, when we looked at ethical works written in the 10th century, in the Islamic world. So this seems to run right through the tradition. But not by Avicenna here, but directly going back to the roots. Yeah, right. So going to the same sources that actually inspired the original authors in the formative period. Let's get back to Averroes, though, because this is the person you've worked on the most in terms of his impact on the contemporary Islamic world. And as you've shown in your work on him, he's often been held up as a kind of hero of rationalism, a harbinger of modernity. Can you say something more about how he's been used to defend certain political and religious ideas within the Islamic world? I would like actually to concentrate here on the Arab world. So not the whole Islamic world? No, a bit too much. The rediscovery of Averroes in Arab-speaking intellectual circles dates back to the second half of the 19th century, when his Tahafud et Tahafud, and perhaps also his companion of Aristotle's Metaphysics, were published for the first time in an Arab country, while several other works were printed in Munich. This idea of him being a hero of rationalism started at the beginning of the 20th century and takes the fate of Averroes' thought in Europe as an important point of reference. It was Farah Antoun, a Lebanese Christian socialist and secularist writer, who thought that the voice of Ibn Rushd should be made known to the Arabs as a way to explain the descent of the Islamic and ascent of the European culture. But then there was a new wave of reinterpretation of the intellectual history, what I call the Turath turn, in the late 70s. And it's really at this point that Averroes was styled by some prominent scholars as a hero. Here the socio-political circumstances and personal orientations of these professors of philosophy was very relevant. In socialist Syria, for instance, Paep Tizini interpreted Averroes' theory of the world's eternity as an early expression of materialism and atheism even. He set aside Averroes' theological philosophical treatises, believing that Averroes was not speaking his true beliefs in them. In Morocco, when Muslim advocates of the unity of religion and state were becoming politically strong, Muhammad Abi al-Jabari launched his well-known critique of Arab reason, Naqd al-Aqd al-Arabi. He wanted to establish a new tradition of critical rationalism, which he saw as specific to the Maghreb, with an axiomatic view as its core method. He thought that Averroes was the high point of this sort of rationalism because of his criticism of the analogy between the suprasensible and the sensible, that is the Qiyas al-Rab al-Shahid, which had been put forward in Kalam and by Avi Senar and was criticized by Averroes. Instead, according to al-Jabari, Averroes regarded religion and philosophy as two axiomatic and deductive systems and the correctness of each system could only be proven within that system. But by the way, the peak of Averroes' understanding as a forerunner of modernity is probably reached not with the work of any philosopher, but with a film. It's called Destiny, Al-Masrir, and was directed by the Egyptian filmmaker, very renowned filmmaker Yusuf al-Shahid in 1997. It shows Averroes fighting dogmatism and fanaticism and ends with his books being burned by the religious authorities. Matthew 40. Actually, I've seen it. It has musical numbers in it and dance routines. Elisabeth Bishan Okay, you've seen it. Matthew 40. Yes, it's good. Elisabeth Bishan Having said all that, there has been another way of understanding Averroes' thought. He has also been seen as a harmonizer of religion and philosophy, as the one who most consistently and successfully showed that the Islamic revelation is in full agreement with reason. The Egyptian scholar Mahmoud Qasim, who taught for long years at the Dar al-Aloom in Cairo and published Averroes al-Qash' al-Manaj al-Adillah, placed him in the tradition of the Mu'athazilids, al-Kindi, and al-Razali, trying to demonstrate Averroes' orthodoxy. Matthew 40. Wow. Elisabeth Bishan That is amazing. Matthew 40. That is amazing. Elisabeth Bishan According to him, Ibn Rushd actually rejected the theory of the world's eternity and taught its creation. He believed not in a collective but in an individual immortality of the soul. And he subordinated philosophical to religious truth. Matthew 40. So, basically, I got a lot wrong in my podcast. Elisabeth Bishan No, please, please leave it. Pupil, I mean, you have even a pupil of Mahmoud Qasim, the independent scholar, Muhammad Ammara, who wrote a lot, a lot of books. He also used Averroes as one of his favorite models of Islamic rationalism, but in a little different way first. During the late 60s and 70s, on the basis of Averroes' definition of the relationship between religion and philosophy, of the world's eternity, and of his theory of knowledge and of the freedom of act and will, he tried to show that materialists and Muslims, and he calls it idealism, idealists, could be united. Since the 1980s, however, Ammara has changed his view on Averroes and adopted the theological approach now really of his teacher, Mahmoud Qasim. In that sense, he is still promoting Averroes as a model of Islamic rationalism, but sees him as being in agreement with Ibn Taymiyyah and his teaching of the harmony of reason and scripture. Finally, I would like to add that besides this kind of use of Averroes for various political and cultural purposes, there is also strong academic research on Averroes at several Arab universities. The research focuses especially on Averroes' commentaries and includes the retensilation of those commentaries back into Arabic, when the Arabic original is lost and we have only Hebrew or Latin versions. Right. Well, obviously, since the colonialist period, if not earlier, the Islamic world has been exposed to ideas from Europe. And we saw already we're talking about the Greek impact on modern day Islamic society, but there's also more recent ideas from Europe. So, I guess it's pretty easy to think of cases of this. You have maybe Marxism having an impact on political ideas in the Islamic world. What about more kind of technical philosophy? So, have ideas from thinkers like Descartes or Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, people like that, have they had a major impact on contemporary philosophy in the Islamic world? I mean, maybe even a greater impact than figures like Avicenna? Yes, down to the modern day, almost every European philosophical school and major philosopher has found advocates and opponents and many Muslim philosophical traditions have been reframed or harmonized with one or the other modern European philosophy. Due to the very incomplete state of research, though, it is hard to say who has been the most widely read of the European philosophers and who has been the most influential. Was it Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Kant, Spencer, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger or somebody else? There seem to have been waves of interest in one or the other philosopher and these waves seem to differ quite considerably from country to country. So, I prefer not to go on record with a statement given the current state of research where our knowledge is still so scattered. But concerning the reception of two philosophers, we will soon know more. Roman Seidel's dissertation on Kant in Iran will come out this year and Kata Musa's dissertation on Heidegger in contemporary Arabic philosophy will be published next year. Right. Or maybe it's already out depending on when you're listening to this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I suppose in a way that brings back again this point that's come up over and over, which is that saying, oh, the Islamic world, they all read Heidegger or something. I mean, it's as silly as saying in Europe, the most influential philosopher is Kant or something, right? I mean, it's just too complicated a situation. But on the other hand, I would still like to ask you one general question. Which is about critics of philosophy. I mean, you just mentioned him, Tamiya, a minute ago, and actually, you've written about him as well. And so he's someone who was very hostile to the philosophers of his day. And he was even critical of logic, which was broadly accepted by theologians like Al-Razabi, Fakhr al-Din al-Azi, and so on. And obviously, he's a very prominently discussed figure nowadays. Does his antipathy to philosophy in particular, live on as sort of explicit anti-rationalism in some parts of the Islamic world? And M.Tamiya is indeed a figure whose writings and opinions seem to be more widespread in the 20th century than ever before. But the work you mentioned is Rad al-Mantikayin, that is his refutation of the logicians, apparently does not count among them. Neither does his work, his major work averting the conflict between reason and tradition, dar ta'aru del aqlu wa nakl. Also, I would be careful about calling him anti-rational. In fact, he emphasizes again and again that reason is in full agreement with the Quran and the sound Sunnah. For him, reason means common sense, and also reasoning about moral and social questions on the basis of the Islamic revelation, or on empirical grounds. Even Tamiya does not reject natural science as such, he does reject what I called in one of my articles, intellectualism, meaning the non-empirical theories of mystics like even Arabi, the theology of the later Kalam, and of course, of the Muslim philosophers. Like Avicenna and so on. Yeah, actually, that's more or less in line with what I said about Tamiya in my podcast on him, which is not surprising, since I was reading your articles about him to write the podcast. Okay, I see. So we're going full circle here. Yes, among the explicitly anti-Western and anti-philosophical Muslim thinkers in the modern Arab world, the rejection of rationalism and logic is, as far as I can say, at this stage of research, not much based on Ippentamir's arguments. For example, the founder of Al-Ikhwan and Muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, simply stated as a dogma that mankind is unable to apprehend God by reason, so we should keep away from philosophical theories and logical proofs. And Saeed Qutb, the founder of the radical wing of his Brotherhood, who was sentenced to death by the Egyptian president Jamaduddin Abd al-Nasser in 1966, thought that rational logic, and he calls it al-mantik al-dhihni, was a bad way to reach God and the religious dogmas. He contrasts it to what he calls emotional logic, al-mantik al-wijdani, which he says attracts men through imagination and spiritual visualization. Both Hassan al-Banna and Saeed Qutb accepted natural sciences and medicine, though especially as applied sciences. What they rejected was all reasoning in the sphere that concerned man as an individual and collective, moral, emotional, and responsible being. Thus modern and ancient philosophy, the humanities and social sciences were exempt from free reasoning and should have at their bases the Qur'an and Sunnah only. Right. Okay, so taking us all the way back to the beginning of the Islamic tradition, appropriately enough. And in fact, in the next episode, I am going to rewind the clock quite a distance, because I'm going to be starting to look at medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom. So, we're finally done with the Islamic world, and that's what I'll be doing starting next time. But for now, I'd like to thank Anke van Kuggen very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time as I turn to medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you