The Philosophy A‐Z Series from Edinburgh University Press add up to an impressive addition to reference sources in their field. The series includes Christian and Jewish and Indian philosophy, as well as epistemology and the philosophy of language, mind, religion, and science. Others in the pipeline are aesthetics and Chinese and political philosophy. Peter Groff is a professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and he has produced, in the A‐Z under review, an intellectually fascinating work that maintains a clear philosophical perspective throughout. It is a series aimed at readers coming to “religion and philosophy” for the first time, and as a result is best targeted, by collection managers and teachers, at undergraduate students and others fresh to the field (including to both Islam and to philosophy itself).
The conjoint field of Islamic theology and Islamic philosophy is a legendarily complex one, not least of all because of their inseparability. What Groff has to offer is a consistently philosophical stance on the issues, and he develops this across a wide range of entries on figures and schools, concepts and topics and issues. The philosopher al‐Afghani (in Common Era chronology, a nineteenth‐century writer and political activist) argued for the “original moral force and essential rationality” of Islam: this rationality, and the extent to which it can and should be “harmonized” with Islam itself (as al‐'Amiri did in the tenth century, admittedly giving primacy to Islamic theology over its philosophy), is both a recurring theme in the book and, of course, in the history of Islamic philosophy itself.
The central strand, by this token, is Islamic theology but refracted and explained from a constant philosophical angle. So the “rational theology” debates associated with the “modernist” Ash'arite theology and the work of al‐Razi is analysed, in one of the numerous generous entries, with reference to philosophical issues like belief, the necessary existent, determinism and the freedom of God (Allah). The entry on the Ash'arites itself brings out the argumentation, taking place in early centuries, between their rationalism and the traditionalism of other schools like the Hanbalites. There are several long entries on God – attributes of, arguments for existence of, unity of – in which philosophy and theology cooperate in teasing out revelation and reason, the metaphysics of a First Cause, temporality in the world, and what is knowledge – where Groff keeps his eye on the philosophical issues of the case. There are also many highly relevant concepts, such as essence/existence (taking us on, for example, to thinkers like Ibn Rushd (Averroës) or al‐Suhrawardi, the latter celebrated for his “philosophy of illumination”) and others – causality and occasionalism.
These philosophical (and theological) dimensions emerge clearly, too, in the many key figures to appear in the work. It is a familiar list to anyone immersed in the field but, for beginners, a useful source for pinning down who the “dramatis personae” of Islamic philosophy are. Avicenna (or Ibn Sina) is examined for his interest in Neo‐Platonic and Aristotelian ideas (the impact of Greek ideas on Islamic philosophy and mediated by it is a key strand in history here) and for his arguments about God and insights into epistemology. Avicenna shared these interests with al‐Kindi, a polymath of the ninth century. Cross‐references in bold type are provided to guide readers to related entries. This approach is also taken where key theological matters (like the Qu'ran itself, like the many Islamic schools, like Sufism and like Sunnis and Shi'ites) are aligned so as to emphasize the philosophical implications. Entries on ethics and psychology provide useful starting points for inquiry, and an associated group of entries on political philosophy (including Islamism, Iqbal, and al‐Afghani) remind us of the close links between faith, thought, and political action.
It will come perhaps as a surprise to the newcomer that Islamic thought had a sophisticated understanding of philosophical and existential issues so early in its evolution. Readers will need the help of coherent histories of Islam to set all this in context – something an A‐Z is peculiarly unable to do – so that they get a clear picture of, say, Islam's perspective on humanism in what, for the West, were the Middle Ages, and, in particular, statements like “philosophy came to an end with the death of Ibn Rushd at the close of the twelfth century” (in the entry on al‐Tusi), that al‐Kindi was the first major figure of Islamic philosophy, that Mulla Sadra is the most important of modern Islamic philosophers, and so forth. This means, then, that such A‐Z reference works like this are best used in conjunction with coherent histories of various issues and periods, often as a checking device. On another level, above all for the more advanced student, it would be good to move beyond claims that Ibn Sina was the most important philosopher of all. While there are important figures in any field, it is good to know why.
The work comes up trumps on another score too. It successfully debunks the myth – if Saïd were still alive, he would have noted it for us – that Islam counterpoised theology to the rationalism of the West. History belies this false dichotomy (Islamic philosophy absorbed and developed the thinking from Classical Greece, and later its analysis of humanism remains important). With this in mind, readers will be pleased to see a coherent account of connections between Islamic philosophy and rationalism. It comes through in numerous intellectually impressive entries – on rationalism, traditionalism, modern Islamic philosophy, humanism, science, freethinking, and belief, and on figures like al‐Afghani, Muhammad 'Abduh, and Ibn Taymiyya. The last of these argued for a literalist approach to the Qu'ran “against a multiple front of sophistically rationalist critiques” (and did this in the fourteenth century). By the way, Islamic dates are provided as well as Common Era. The book extends up to figures like Muhammad Iqbal (1873‐1938), noted both for his interest in pan‐Islamism and Nietzsche: for more recent figures, readers will need to seek elsewhere.
Reference is made in the introductory material to Nasr and Leaman's history of Islamic philosophy, to a Cambridge companion to it, and to Leaman's own biographical encyclopedia of Islamic philosophy (Leaman, 2006). Leaman also contributed about twenty of the entries. The Edinburgh University Press A‐Z provides, especially in its paperback, a relatively cheap reference work that will give it appeal to the cash‐strapped (but specialist) small library and to the student. That said, the paper on which the book is printed is poor, despite a nice layout and typography, and it will obsolesce physically far more quickly than the intellectual content. Pity. Price the paperback at, say, £25 and improve the paper quality, and you would have a better product.
