Reference is made to “The Encyclopedia of Philosophy”, 1967 Crowell Collier And MacMillan, Library of Congress # 67-10059, Volume 4, topic “Islamic Philosophy”.

It would appear on one pan-Islamic hand there have always been Muslims arrayed as are Taliban or Ahmadinejad or Hamas, and on the other pan-Islamic hand those who put or attempt to keep logic and philosophy separate from religion.

Just as within Christendom, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, the Middle Ages saw the beginnings of Islamic philosophy picking up Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist concepts of God together with what constituted natural and supernatural things, thoughts, and so on.

The first Muslim philosopher of that era was Arab prince Ya’qub ibn-Ishaq al-Kindi; whereas Aristotle said God and matter exist separate from one another, al-Kindi accepted emanation theory yet also accepted creationism and never offered his own reconciliation of such opposing views…his intent seems to have been a call to Muslim scholars to debate and reach consensus on a form of knowledge that would do justice to demands of reason and revelation.

An early Muslim scholar taking such call was al-Farabi, who said shari’a (religious law) was inferior to logic, there is one spirituality of which all benign religions are symbolic expressions, that any of these value-equivalent systems could be applied interchangeably as revelations (even Mohammed’s) were not philosophic truths but imaginative truth, and that like a Shi’ite Imam any head of an Islamic State is a repository of divine wisdom and thus best able to pierce imaginative shells and use good old despotism since earth has naught to do with the beyond.

Next was Abu’ Ali ibn-Sina (a/k/a Avicenna), who said God has no matter or form but is pure existence as we know it, this “universe” emanates all intelligence and revealing truths of the afterlife have a wall of separation from truths of this life (further “truths” of this life may be created rather than reliance upon autonomous facts), and all founders of all faiths are mass psychologists launching religious movements to bring all people as close to the same philosophic truth as possible.

Hey! Freud, Heidegger, Marx, atheism, epigenetics, Richard Rorty’s calls to end philosophy, and logical positivism might hardly be anything new, witty, or resultant of modern progressive types or science; of course, one doubts even such old Muslim scholars invented it, either. But one can see the Middle Ages pretty much produced Muslim scholars who taught religions, even Islam, at best were opiates of the masses.

Then came ibn-Rushd (a/k/a Averroes) trying to imply the Divine and daily grinds as much as waved at each other. At this point, logic was simply taken over by Kalam (the orthodox theology favoring State leaders) as a necessary instrumental science…just like some modern leaders arrest religious expression to guard against similar “superstitious” folk peddling ideas of an interactive Absolute.

This nowadays is expressed in the Wahhabi and several State Islamic regimes as a fatal offense even by Muslims to tread upon State-regulated Islamic PHILOSOPHY as THE only interpretation of “what Mohammed meant but couldn’t say in the Koran”. Because philosophy can be pan-anything, even a Twelver Shi’ite like Iran’s Ahmadinejad can apply it like a Pakistani, Taliban, Darfur, Somalian or Hezbollah Islamic government. A number of Muslims and their sects opposing such Kalam philosophy have simply been jailed or wiped away by their own leaders.

For those seeking attention (in coincidentally hungry times) by burning Korans, ask yourselves: are you a champion of democracy and freedom for all standing against “the man”, or are you useful idiots for those globally who call all religion malarkey and constantly close down anybody but your ilk based on YOUR actions? Even worse, are you just faith-funded cats’ paws in such regard? You certainly exude a sense of jingoism and under-exposure to all things religious and philosophical, just as Ladenists do on their end.   

To me it seems the problem against normal religious, including Muslims, continues to be assorted government claims in nature that anyone believing “ALL people are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights by a Creator” is an affront to reason and burden upon the State, with such “affront” complained of grounded either in elective theosophy or other narcissism(s) based neither on Holy books nor normative human genetic dispositions…more like “A Clockwork Orange” turned into governmental and same’s orbital cultural protocol.