ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the theme of love in the writings of five major Islamic philosophers: Abu Bakr al-Razi, Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ghazali, and Suhrawardi. This survey reveals the main conceptual features of the Islamic philosophical discourse on love. These features include an emphasis on knowledge as the preferred object of love. Knowledge finds its perfection in God: the First Cause is the most sublime object of human knowledge. This is explicit in Abu Bakr al-Razi and Ibn Sina, and with a more mystical bent in Ghazali and Suhrawardi. Love also serves political functions and thus appears as friendship, the glue that binds together social relations and ensures civic order. Farabi particularly gave a new life to this Aristotelian postulation. Finally, love is an affective force that can transform the self and assist in the cultivation of praiseworthy character traits but it can also cloud one’s reflective capacities and assist in the pursuit of pure hedonism. In Islamic philosophy, love is a mobile and dynamic psychic principle that is predisposed to both physical and metaphysical objects.
