ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the Soviet period because, before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, studies of Islamic philosophical thought (in contrast to those which focused on the religious, social and political aspects of Islamic civilization) were few and far between. In prerevolutionary Russia, the study of “Oriental philosophy” occupied a fringe position between “religious studies” and the political and social history of the Muslim world. As in the West, such studies were conducted primarily by philologists. No wonder, then, that Russian Orientalists normally addressed falsafah only in passing, as an aside to the treatment of their principal topics, the Muslim religion and belles lettres. As exception to the rule, I would cite a brilliant, if concise, study of Persian mystical philosophy by V. Zhukovski, Chelovek i poznanie u persidskikh mistikov (“Man and Gnosis in [the Teachings of] Persian Mystics”) (St Petersburg, 1895). A thorough and original analysis of Mu‘tazilite thought based on rare manuscripts was carried out by P. K. Zhuzé (i.e. Jawzi), a scholar of Syrian—Lebanese background turned Christian missionary (see P. K. Zhuzé, Mu‘tazility: techenie v islame v IX veke (“The Mu‘tazilites: a [Religious] Movement in Islam in the Ninth Century”) (Kazan, 1899). Somewhat later the religious and mystical views of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī were analysed in A. Schmidt, ‘Abd-al-Wahhāb-ash-Sha‘rānī i ego “Kniga razsypannykh zhemchuzhin” (‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī and his “Book of Scattered Pearls”) (St Petersburg, 1914). Yet all these studies, along with the works of the other outstanding Russian/Soviet Orientalists of the first half of the twentieth century, such as E. Bertels, I. Krachkovski, A. Semenov and V. Barthold, can hardly be described as “philosophical” in the strict sense. Owing to a lack of special philosophical training, these scholars approached falsafah as philologists and culturologists par excellence. 1157Their primary goal was to understand Muslim literary works better rather than Muslim theoretical thought.
