ABSTRACT
Shams C. Inati provides successful insights into the issue of evil in his book The Problem of Evil – Ibn Sīnā’s Theodicy. According to Inati, Ibn Sīnā is perhaps the first Muslim philosopher who has written extensively on the problem of evil. Ibn Sīnā’s theodicy is here divided into three main chapters, his ‘analysis of metaphysical evil,’ his ‘notion of moral evil’ and his ‘solution for the problem of evil and the problem of destiny.’ Ibn Sīnā approved many philosophers before him by stating that being (wujūd) is good (khayr) and ‘goodness is being or existence’; the more being or existence something has, the more goodness or perfection it entails. 2 Respectively, if good is being, than evil must be non-being (‘adam); hence, the less being, the more evil. 3 However, there is not only one kind of evil for Ibn Sīnā. A second kind actually has some sort of being. While Ibn Sīnā names the former essential evil (sharr bi dhāt), for him the latter is accidental evil (sharr bil-‘arad). These kinds of evils, according to Ibn Sīnā, are metaphysical evils.
