The prominent French orientalist Christian Gambet was recently elected to the prestigious academy of the French Academy, as a culmination of outstanding scientific efforts, most of which were devoted to Islamic philosophy. Most of Gambet’s studies dealt with the great philosophers of enlightenment, namely Ibn Sina, Al-Suhrawardi, and Mullah Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, following the approach of his well-known teacher, Henry Corbin. Just as Corbin published his seminal book on the history of Islamic philosophy in the 1960s, Gambet had written a book on the same subject years earlier, even if it differed from it in approach and method. In contrast to most historians of Islamic philosophy, both Western and Arab, who confined the texts of this philosophy to the works of Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Tufail, and Ibn Rushd, while saying that the philosophical tradition ended in Islamic history after the end of the sixth century AH (twelfth century AD), Gambet went to Islamic philosophical writing is much broader than these reference texts, and it continued for long periods after the Averroist moment, and the contemporary style of Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, Descartes and Spinoza in the modern era, is sufficient evidence of this.
While historians of Islamic philosophy are usually concerned with the ontological axis inherited from the Greek era (the theory of existence and the path of metaphysics), we see that Gambet believes that the key to philosophical thinking in Islam is the interpretation of the self through open rational consideration of the revealed text, according to the centrality of the resurrection and after death. And the spiritual and moral dimensions that result from this theoretical approach regarding the relationship of the soul to the body and the pattern of managing desires, whims, and inclinations. Although Islamic philosophers paid much attention to logic and the theory of science, they considered the metaphysical question to be merely an entrance to true philosophy, which is self-reflection leading to the ethics of advancement and transcendence that establishes a dense and strong view of freedom, even if it contradicts the meaning of this saying in the modern Western context. It also It devotes a pattern of spiritual empiricism that reaches its extent in Sufi and mystical literature. Plato defined philosophy in the Phaedo as aiming to “teach us how to die.” If Islamic philosophers adopted this saying, they gave it a different meaning, commensurate with the centrality of the Resurrection and the Hereafter in their moral and spiritual system.
Thus, Gambet believes that what distinguishes philosophers from jurists is not the pattern of interest in the text, but rather their belief that mental activity is exercised freely and creatively within the interpretation of the text, which is the other side of self-awareness. In this spiritual interpretation, the mind exercises its cognitive and evidential power, according to complex and long cognitive conditions and determinants, so that reaching the truth is painstaking and difficult, even though most people are unable to penetrate illusion and imagination. The advantage of Gambet’s thesis is that he avoided the two prevailing positions in Orientalist studies, namely: either viewing Islamic philosophy as an ambiguous theology, or as mere Greek texts written in Arabic letters. Thus, Gambet distinguishes between the science of theology, which is a dialectical science in matters of faith, even if it has its deep philosophical aspects, and Islamic philosophy, which was formed in rich communication with the Greek narrative, even if it differed in its vision and approach from the Greek heritage because it emanates from purely Islamic problems that are completely distinct from philosophies. Greek.
However, Gambet shows that medieval Islamic philosophy established the two great traditions in modern philosophy, namely: the ontology of the thing (instead of the question of Aristotelian existence) as is clear in Kant’s criticism, whose roots we find in Descartes and Leibniz, and the hermeneutics of the self, which is the focus of modern and contemporary philosophy in the West. It is not our concern to present Jambet’s works, which are important and complex, and it is sufficient to direct attention to them because they are still largely unknown in the Arab intellectual arena.
Perhaps the reason for this neglect is the spread of the theory defended by the late Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri regarding what he called Ibn Sina’s Gnosticism and the philosophy of illumination after him, which he described as irrational mysticism. This vision entails the necessity of denying the fundamental aspect of Islamic philosophy on which Gambet focused all his attention, which is spiritual and mystical hermeneutics, which he considered to be the pinnacle of the philosophical mind in Islam, instead of the political and ideological perceptions that currently preoccupy religious extremist movements. What Gambet shows is that Ibn Sina, who presented the most important philosophical formulation of Aristotle’s metaphysics in the Middle Ages, realized that truth in its absolute sense is attained through experience in its sensory and spiritual dimensions, while the mind separated from the self and the body does not exceed the limits of abstract formal logic, and this vision is the essence of the philosophical position of thinkers. Ancient Islam.
* Mauritanian academic
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