”Of all the arts,” Modris Eksteins writes, “the one that may best express the conflicts in the twentieth-century soul is film.” The years of World War I were those in which film was becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate source of entertainment, as a serious art form, as a crucial medium for education, and as the most effective propaganda instrument. In one sense, the relationship between World War I and cinema is a matter of historical and temporal concurrence or coincidence; in another, modern war and film have a complex and profound interconnection, as twin technologies of modernity. World War I was, Paul Virilio has argued, not only “bloody conflict” but a pyrotechnic “lighting war,” a “continuous performance, all day and all night.”

The question of what defined “war films” during the years of the First World War is a complex one. In her study of US cinema and World War I, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche notes that film producers, distributors, exhibitors, and reviewers took up varying positions on the question of the role of popular culture in periods of national crisis, and were often divided between the view that films should provide escape from contemporary realities, with comedy tending to be favored as the proper film genre in wartime, and the conviction that it was the role of film to reflect historical immediacies.

When considering the legacy of the Great War, one is inevitably drawn to consider why that war is so frequently reimagined by modern writers. What is to be gained, after nearly a century, from resurrecting the stories embedded in the work of Owen, Sassoon, and Graves? Why does this war haunt the English cultural imagination? And why, specifically, is it the story of the infantry officer on the Western Front that is told and retold by writers as diverse as Stuart Cloete, Susan Hill, and Jennifer Johnston, by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and the writers of Blackadder Goes Forth, and, in the 1990s, by Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker, and Kate Atkinson?

There are, of course, exceptions to and variations on the theme of subaltern disillusion, some of which are included in the work of writers named above. And there are alternative perspectives – those of women, of the colonial regiments, of the working classes, and of the other fronts on which the war was fought. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when the rash of memoirs emerged that seemed to solidify the subaltern’s story, its universality was questioned. Douglas Jerrold, for instance, objected to what he called the “anti-war” stance as unrepresentative of the young men who experienced the war positively, in terms of adventures and action hitherto unknown. The narrative of bitter disillusionment, according to him, was not the only story.

SUHRAWARDĪ AND HIS CAREER

One is tempted to romanticize Suhrawardī. Indeed, there is no particular reason to avoid romanticizing him as a personality. He lived the life of a wandering wise man, and his story involved a prince, a magic gem, the fabulous Saladin, and a tragic early death. We can see him as his contemporaries saw him - probably as he saw himself - as a figure out of philosophical folklore, the like of whom had not been seen since Apollonius of Tyana. However, in my view it is a grave error to examine his philosophy, Illuminationism, through romantic spectacles, for Suhrawardi, despite his own attempts to mystify his project, was a hardheaded philosophical critic and creative thinker who set the agenda for later Islamic philosophy. Al-Ghazāli’s attempt to make religion independent of reason and Averroes' Aristotelianism left little trace in later Islamic thought, but Suhrawardi’s critique of Avicenna’s ontology and of Aristotelian epistemology and his solutions to these problems were his successors' starting points. The modern description of his philosophy as “theosophy” does not do justice to the rigor and philosophical influence of his thought.

Suhrawardī was probably born around 1154 in the village of Suhraward near Zanjān in northwestern Iran. We know nothing of his family or ethnic background. He first appears in Marāgha, a nearby city, where he studied logic and philosophy with Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī, a scholar of moderate prominence who also was the teacher of the famous theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

In a monotheistic culture of the “examined and contemplative life,” the central intellectual challenge for a thinking, experiencing believer is to address the question: how can I know God? and concomitantly, how can I know what God means? In the classical period, Muslim thinkers approached this question by delineating four possible paths toward realizing, understanding, internalizing, and implementing the “truth” or “reality.” These four ways are succinctly and importantly examined in the famous “autobiography” of the theologian and Sīfī Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Munqidh min al-dalāl (The Deliverer from Error): the imitation of infallible authoritative example (ta'līm, following the infallible Shī'ite Imām), acceptance of prophetic traditions and norms (taqlid of the Sunna), rational and discursive argument ('aql, naz. ar), and ineffable “pure” experience or “taste” (dhawq). So the first question that needs to be considered is the method of acquiring truth and certainty. In the context of this chapter, the options that I shall consider are reason and experience. In al-Ghazālī’s account, the use of philosophical reason is denounced for its failure to conform to “revealed truths,” while mystical experience is lauded: the difference is, as he puts it, that reason is an indirect means of acquiring truth through the verification of arguments, while “taste” experiences and directly takes on the state of truth, effecting a critical complementarity between knowledge and action. “Taste” has the added advantage of being a Qur’ānic concept and became the commonplace nomenclature for experience in Sīfī circles. Thus it would seem that early on in Islam, we find reason and experience pitted against each other.

In this chapter I will discuss Arabic and Persian philosophical trends as presented in texts mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their more recent continuation. Philosophical activity continued especially in the lands marked by the geopolitical boundaries of Persianate influence, centered in the land of Iran as marked since the Safavid period beginning in 1501. Of the philosophers in the earlier, formative period of Arabic philosophy, it was Avicenna whose works made the most direct and lasting impact on all subsequent philosophical trends and schools. The structure, techniques, and language of Avicenna’s philosophy - best exemplified in his two main works, al-Ishārāt wa al-tanbīhāt and al-Shifā' - define a holistic system against which all subsequent philosophical writings, in both Arabic and Persian, are measured. Avicenna’s philosophical texts give Arabic and Persian Peripatetic philosophy its technical language and methodology, as well as setting out a range of philosophical problems in semantics, logic, ontology, epistemology, and so on. Later trends must be regarded as refinements and developments from within philosophical texts already established by the twelfth century C.E.

In the history of Western philosophy the role played by texts written in Arabic is crucial. This can be seen from the sheer volume of works that were translated (see the table that follows this chapter). We have hints of Arabic-speaking teachers of philosophy. Adelard of Bath (fl. 1116-50) speaks of his studia Arabica/Arabum studia (in reference to natural philosophy) and magistri, which he probably encountered in southern Italy and Sicily. Stephen of Pisa (fl. 1127), who wrote on cosmology in Antioch, expresses his debt to “a certain Arab.” Kamal al-Din ibn Yunus of Mosul (d. 1242), the greatest Muslim teacher of his time, in turn, boasted of Christians among his pupils; one of Ibn Yunus' pupils, Siraj al-Din Urmawi, became a member of Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s household and wrote a book on logic for him. Andrea Alpago (d. before 1546) acquired knowledge of Avicenna’s psychology from the Shī'ite scholar Muhammad ibn Makkī Shams al-Dīn al-Dimashqī (d. 1531) in Damascus. But it is through the surviving Arabic texts and their translations that we can best gauge the extent of the impact of Arabic philosophy. The works translated reflect the various genres current in Arabic.

From the first incursion of Islam into Spain in 710 until the eventual success of the Christian reconquest in 1492, the Iberian peninsula was partially or wholly under Muslim rule, the westernmost outpost of a sprawling Muslim empire. For many decades the intellectual and cultural climate of “al-Andalus” was thus subsidiary to that of the East. Philosophy was no exception: it came first from the East, but in time acquired an autonomous life. This is reflected in the history of Andalusian philosophy, which at first followed in the footsteps of al-Fārābī and Avicenna, but soon developed along two very different paths. On the one hand, the Andalusians took up al-Fārābī’s project of reconstructing and further developing the thought of Aristotle, a process that would culminate in the commentaries of Averroes. On the other hand, Andalusian philosophers were attracted by Sūfism. Most prominently, the mystic Ibn ‘Arabī hailed from al-Andalus. But as will be indicated below, even authors who worked within the falsafa tradition were not immune to the appeal of the Sūfīs. This chapter will illustrate these competing traditions in the thought and writings of the two most significant Muslim philosophers of al-Andalus prior to Averroes: Ibn Bājja (known as Avempace to the Latins) and Ibn Tufayl.

LIFE AND WORKS

The philosophy of al-Fārābī stands in marked distinction to that of al-Kindī but is no less representative of the major trends of thought inherited by the Islamic world. His tradition is consciously constructed as a continuation and refinement of the neo-Aristotelianism of the Alexandrian tradition, adapted to the new cultural matrix of the Near East. The Neoplatonic element of al-Fārābī ’s thought is most obvious in the emanationist scheme that forms a central part of his cosmology, though that scheme is much more developed than that of earlier Neoplatonists in its inclusion of the Ptolemaic planetary system. His theory of the intellect appears to be based on a close reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias and develops the concept of an Active Intellect standing outside the human intellect. Above all, al-Fārābī ’s legacy to later thinkers is a highly sophisticated noetics placed within a rigorous curriculum of instruction in Aristotelian logic. Fārābī was above all a systematic and synthesizing philosopher; as such, his system would form the point of departure on all the major issues of philosophy in the Islamic world after him.

The status accorded al-Fārābī’s intellectual legacy here stands somewhat at odds with what we can reconstruct of his life with any certainty. With the exception of a few simple facts, virtually nothing is known of the personal circumstances and familial background of al-Fārābī. The great variety of legends and anecdotes about this second major philosopher of the Islamic period is the product of contending biographical traditions produced nearly three centuries after his death.

Metaphysics, first philosophy, or divine science has always been a subject of controversy. Too often medieval Arabic metaphysics is regarded as either simply a paraphrase of or a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or a curious and rather unsuccessful blend of Aristotelian metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Cristina D'Ancona has shown the superficiality of this latter approach by highlighting how carefully and creatively the “falāsifa” or Hellenizing philosophers used the various Greek sources, such as the works of Aristotle, the Plotiniana Arabica (a group of texts based on Plotinus and including the so-called Aristotle’s Theology derived from Enneads IV-VI), and the Liber de Causis, adapted from Proclus' Theology and known in Arabic as The Book of the Pure Good. Yet Greek sources are not enough to explain some developments. In 1979 Richard Frank argued that falsafa (the Arabic transliteration of the Greek term for philosophy, highlighting its foreign origin) is not immune to the influence of kalāmor Islamic theology, which had elaborated an ontology of its own. More recently, though controversially, he has argued that even al-Ghazālī, the famous author of the Incoherence of the Philosophers and the staunch protector of orthodox Sunni Islam, is himself deeply influenced by Avicenna.

The scope of this chapter is dauntingly broad, since Avicenna was the central figure in the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy. Before Avicenna, falsafa (Arabic Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy) and kalām (Islamic doctrinal theology) were distinct strands of thought, even though a good deal of cross-fertilization took place between them. After Avicenna, by contrast, the two strands fused together and post-Avicennian kalām emerged as a truly Islamic philosophy, a synthesis of Avicenna’s metaphysics and Muslim doctrine.

To talk about the sources, evolution, and influence of Avicenna’s ideas is, in fact, to talk about over two thousand years of philosophical activity. Avicenna’s sources begin with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. and include the late antique Greek Aristotle commentators, both Peripatetic and Neoplatonist. Avicenna himself was extremely prolific: between 40 and 275 titles have been attributed to him by bibliographers ranging from his student Jūzjānī to the late Egyptian scholar Georges Anawati, with approximately 130 reckoned to be authentic by the Iranian scholar Yahyā Mahdavī. What is more, his ideas evolved during the course of his career,with the result that, as with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, Avicenna’s philosophy will often resist our attempts to systematize it, and his position on a number of important philosophical issues will appear frustratingly underdetermined. As for Avicenna’s impact, it was felt acutely in both the Islamic world and in Christian Europe.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

The broadest periodization of medieval philosophy, in general, and of medieval Jewish philosophy, in particular, begins with Philo in the first century and comes to an end with Spinoza in the seventeenth century. This is the well-known periodization of Harry A. Wolfson, who explains:

Wolfson was in a sense correct. The problems and concerns of Philo were to a great extent those of the medieval philosophers. Yet, while it is helpful to think of the philosophy of Philo as the “Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” virtually all datings of medieval philosophy begin centuries later and in the case of medieval Jewish philosophy nearly a millennium later. The resistance of scholars to beginning medieval Jewish philosophy with Philo is not simply a result of their discomfort with beginning the medieval period in the first century. More importantly, if one begins medieval Jewish philosophy with Philo, there is no continuity. From Philo to the ninth century, there are no writings that may be considered Jewish philosophy. Moreover, although Wolfson can speak of the recurrence of Philonic views in post-Philonic Islamic and Jewish philosophy, Philo – as far as we know – was not translated into Arabic or Hebrew and accordingly had no direct influence upon Jewish philosophers until the Renaissance.

Abū al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (ca. 1126-98), who came to be known in the Latin West as Averroes, was born at Cordoba into a family prominent for its expert devotion to the study and development of religious law (shar'īa). In Arabic sources al-Hafīd (“the Grandson”) is added to his name to distinguish him from his grandfather (d. 1126), a famous Malikite jurist who served the ruling Almoravid regime as qādī (judge) and even as imām (prayer leader and chief religious authority) at the magnificent Great Mosque which still stands today in the city of Averroes' birth and where Averroes himself served as Grand Qādī (chief judge). When the governing regime changed with the success of 'Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-63), founder of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidūn) dynasty, the members of the family continued to flourish under a new religious orientation based on the teachings of the reformer, al-Mahdī ibn Tumart (d. ca. 1129-30). Although insistent on the strict adherence to religious law, Ibn Tūmart’s teachings were at the same time equally insistent on the essential rationality of human understanding of the existence and unity (tawhīd) of God and his creation as well as the rationality of the Qur'ān and its interpretation. This approach was embraced – even exploited – by Averroes in his own writings on dialectical theology and thereby played a role in the development of his thought on the nature of religious law and revelation in relation to philosophy founded on the powers of natural reason.

No one within the tradition of medieval Islamic political philosophy contests the notion that human beings are political by nature. Indeed, in a now famous passage of his Muqaddima, Ibn Khald un (1332-1406) cites a corollary of that adage - namely, “human social organization is necessary” - with approval, using it to focus on what the philosophers mean by “regime” (siyāsa), especially “political regime.” As contrasted to the way the term is understood by the jurists and theologians, the philosophers understand the “political regime” to encompass

The previous chapter has given some sense of the enormous impact of the translation movement during the 'Abbāsid caliphate, which rendered Greek works of science and literature into Arabic. The translation of what we would now consider to be properly philosophical works was only a small part of this movement. Translation of philosophy went hand in hand with the translation of more “scientific” texts, such as the medical writings of Galen and the astronomical and mathematical works of Euclid, Ptolemy, and others. Under the 'Abbāsids the most important group of translators, in terms of sheer output and the quality of their translations, was that of the Christian Hunayn ibn Ishāq (808-873 C.E.), and his son Ishāq ibn Hunayn (died 910 C.E.). Hunayn and his school produced many translations, including of works by Plato and Aristotle (especially the logical corpus); particularly important to Hunayn himself were translations of Galen, which formed the basis for Hunayn’s own treatises on medicine.

A second, slightly earlier group was that gathered around the person of Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qū b ibn Ishāq al-Kindī (died about 870 C.E.). Al- Kindī’s circle did not produce as many translations as the Hunayn circle, yet some of the works they did translate were of immense importance in determining the Arabic reception of Greek philosophical thought. It is quite likely that the choice of which texts to translate was guided in part by the philosophical concerns of al-Kindī and his collaborators.