The Influence of Hermetic Literature on Moslem Thought

Extract

Students of Moslem philosophy and mysticism have often observed the highly eclectic character of that type of human thought. All Moslem speculation, philosophical and theological, no less than the Sūfī literature of the more theosophical kind, as represented for instance by Ibn ‘Arabī and Suhrawardī of Aleppo, displays this eclecticism. Yet no definite answer has been given to the question how or why the main current of Moslem thinking came to be of that type of mixture in which ideas from Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Philo Judæus, the Catholic thinkers of the Christian Church, the Gnostics, and the Neoplatonists are brought into one harmonious whole and mingled together in such an extraordinary manner. Certain attempts have been made in studying individual thinkers of Islam to trace their systems back to their respective sources, for no one source can satisfactorily explain such a diversity of doctrines as we find in Moslem literature. This was done by scholars who studied, e.g. al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, and was done by myself in studying the mystical philosophy of Muhyid-Dln Ibn ‘Arabī. In each case the fundamental ideas of the Moslem thinker were traced to the special source or sources which were deemed to have influenced his thought.

One important question, however, has always been overlooked, whether it is possible that the Moslem thinkers were not themselves responsible for mixing together those irreconcilable elements of Greek philosophy with other ideas derived from the prevalent religions of the East. In other words, was the eclecticism of Moslem thought only a reappearance of another kind of eclecticism which existed long before ? Some of the aspects of this problem will be dealt with in this paper.