Ibn Sīnā’s “Oriental philosophy”

One cannot discuss the thought of Ibn Sīnā seriously, especially as it has influenced Islamic philosophy during the past millennium, without delving into the meaning of his “Oriental philosophy” (al-ḥikmat al-mashriqiyyah) which has drawn the attention of many Western scholars from L. Massignon, C. A. Nallino and S. Pines to H. Corbin, who has provided the most extensive plausible reconstruction of it. ¹ Although this dimension of Ibn Sīnā’s thought did not influence the West and has not been taken seriously by contemporary Western scholars save for Corbin and some of his students, ² it remains an important link in the uninterrupted tradition of Islamic philosophy marking a notable stepping stone from the synthesis of Ibn Sīnā to the Illuminationist doctrines of Suhrawardī, who in his Qiṣṣat al-ghurbat al-gharbiyyah (“The Story of the Occidental Exile”) refers explicitly to the Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān of Ibn Sīnā ³ and considers his work to be the achievement of what Ibn Sīnā had set out to accomplish without reaching the ultimate goal, implying that the “Oriental philosophy” was a prelude for Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, or theosophy of the Orient of Light formulated a century and a half later by Suhrawardī. Far from being a “harmless” and rational formulation of the well-known mashshā’ī philosophy by Ibn Sīnā, as claimed by C. A. Nallino, Ibn Sīnā’s “Oriental philosophy” belongs to the same world as that of Suhrawardī’s ishrāq and was seen as belonging to the same universe by such later figures as Mullā Ṣadrā and Sabziwārī. In this tradition, which must be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in Islamic philosophy as a distinct and integral intellectual tradition and not simply as a chapter of Western philosophy, mashriqī and ishrīqī can hardly be considered to be so distinct as to be unrelated. As Corbin has asserted, “Suhrawardī’s representation of Ishrāq moves in a circle. Illuminative 248 wisdom (ishrāqī) is neither in any opposition to Oriental wisdom (mashriqī) nor even distinguished from it: such a divine wisdom or theosophia is illuminative because Oriental, and Oriental because illuminative.” ⁴ In any case one cannot deal fully with Ibn Sīnā in the context of the later Islamic philosophical tradition without paying serious attention to what he calls al-ḥikmat al-mashriqiyyah.