Destiny Disrupted

SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 101

Elements

Minerals, Plants, and Animals

Plato had described the material world as an illusory shadow cast by a
"real" world that consisted of unchangeable and eternal "forms": thus,
every real chair is but an imperfect copy of some single "ideal" chair that
exists only in the realm of universals. Following from Plato, the Muslim
philosophers proposed that each human being was a mixture of the real
and the illusory. Before birth, they explained, the soul dwelt in a realm of
Platonic universals. In life, it got intertwined with body, which was made
up of matter. At death, the two separated, the body returning to the world
of all matter while the soul returned to Allah, its original home.
For all their devotion to Plato, the Muslim philosophers had tremen-
dous admiration for Aristotle, as well: for his logic, his techniques of classi-
fication, and his powerful grasp of particularities. Following from Aristotle,
the Muslim philosophers categorized and classified with obsessive logic. Just
to give you a taste of this attitude: the philosopher al-Kindi described the
material universe in terms of five governing principles: matter, form, mo-
tion, time, and space. He analyzed each of these into subcategories, divid-
ing motion, for instance, into six types: generation, corruption, increase,
decrease, change in quality, and change in position. He went on and on like
this, intent on parsing all of reality into discrete, understandable parts.
The great Muslim philosophers associated spirituality with rationality:
our essence, they said, was made up of abstractions and principles, which
only reason could access. They taught that the purpose of knowledge was
to purify the soul by conducting it from sensory data to abstract principles,
from particular facts to universal truths. The philosopher al-Farabi was
typical in recommending that students begin with the study of nature,
move on to the study of logic, and proceed at last to the most abstract of
all the disciplines, mathematics.
The Greeks invented geometry, Indian mathematicians came up with
the brilliant idea of treating zero as a number, the Babylonians discovered
the idea of place value, and the Muslims systematized all of these ideas,
adding a few of their own, to invent algebra and indeed to lay the founda-
tions of modern mathematics.