Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Impact of Greek Philosophy
The story how Greek philosophy was discovered by the Muslims and then transmitted by them to the West provides one of the most fascinating chapters in the book of mankind’s progress from ignorance to enlightenment. Though there was no dearth of Greek manuscripts in Europe, most of these lay hidden and undisturbed under dust monasteries. Roger Bacon tells us in his Philosophize that the custodians of those manuscripts were too ignorant or too indifferent to study them, and Latin translations were still nonexistent. Constantinople greatly su: passed Rome as a centre of intellectual activities, and it was chiefly through Constantinople and Persia that the Arabs acquired their knowledge of the Greeks.
After Alexander’s conquest of the Near East, Greek knowledge found a ready welcome even in some of the most distant outposts of his far-flung empire. By the fifth century A.D., many of the Christian scholars domiciled in the Byzantine Empire were driven out by religious schisms. The most important of these were

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the Nestorians, regarded by the Eastern Church as heretics. However, Persia and Mesopotamia received them, and it was in the latter century that they founded their famous school of Edessa. Some of them were Greeks, others Syrians, but it was Syriac, a language derived from Aramatic, into which they translated the countless Greek manuscripts that they had brought with them.
By the time, Mamun, son of Harun al-Rashid, became caliph in Baghdad (803), the Muslims were fully aware of the existence of the magnificent Greek patrimony, and it was their caliph who helped them to satisfy their new intellectual appetites. He dispatched agents to every country in which he suspected of translators, the existence of Greek manuscripts he founded a special academy for translators and many other men of science and arts, Dar al-Hikma, at Baghdad he gave employment to countless translators who put the Greek classics into Arabic. In all this work he employed Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. Study of the Greeks became a passion with the Arabs and their Persian fellow-Muslims. Gradually their translations and commentaries of the Greeks passed on from Baghdad to Sicily and to Spain where such Christian scholars as Michael Scott, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Gerard of Cremona and countless others studied them avidly. It was, in fact, a Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes, who interpreted Aristotle for the West, thus enabling Christian scholars, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas, to lay foundations for a Christian philosophy and theology. Of all the Greeks, it was Aristotle whom the Muslims venerated most as the fountain head of classical wisdom. Yet, in their purely philosophical pursuits as distinct from scientific ones, they referred not so much to Aristotle as to that mixture of Aristotle and Plato whose foremost exponents were Plotinus and his Neoplatonic school. The work that influenced them most was the theology of Aristotle which, in actual fact, consisted of the last three books of Plotinus’ Enneads.
The problems that preoccupied the Muslim philosophers were problems of unceasing concern to most Western thinkers: the apparent contradiction between a perfect God and an imperfect world: between one indivisible God and a universe of multiplicity; between free will and predestination; between divine goodness and the evil existing in the world. Though the approach of the Muslim thinkers to these problems was intellectual and rationalistic, they never allowed the findings of the intellect to override religious
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beliefs. Their aim, in fact, was to produce a synthesis of the truths of religion and the truths of science. Though they may not have succeeded fully in that task, they came as close to producing a valid synthesis as did any philosophers of the West, and they left a deep imprint upon Christian scholasticism and Western philosophy would not be what it is, if it had to dispense with the findings of a Farabi, an Ibn Sina, a Ghazali or an Ibn Rushd.
Before Islam brought forth great individual philosophers, it produced a number of intellectual movements which, though predominantly theological, provided, nevertheless, a sound foundation for the later work of the purely intellectual inquires into truth. Seen from a distance of over a thousand years, some of these movements appear rather primitive to us. Thus the Murjites, the Qadarites, the Jabarites tried to resolve the fundamental Qur’anic dichotomy of free will and predestination. However, rather than attempt a genuine intellectual solution, they were content with theological sophistries and plays upon words. In the Mutazilla, originating with the eighth century Wasil bin Ata, we are confronting, however;* a serious intellectual movement that makes use of all the philosophical tools available at the time. In al-Ashari (873-935), founder of the Asharite school, we find the seeds of many of the concepts utilized later by his more famous successors. While still concerned with the problem of free will, he also/dealt with such fundamental concepts as those of existence and of the self. He might even be said to have anticipated Kant’s doctrine of ’Das Ding an Sich”. Likewise his followers, the Asharites, developed a theory of Atomism which anticipated in some respects the much later theory of moands evolved by Leibnitz. A movement whose repercussions were felt not only in philosophy but also in Arab politics and in Islamic science in general was that of the Ikhwan-as-Safa (Brethern of Purity), whose universalist endeavours entitle them to be regarded as the first ’encyclopedists’.
Though the Muslims produced a large number of philosophers of unquestioned merit, only about half a dozen of them attained truly international status: Kindi, Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ghazali, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Arabi. Whether willing followers of the Greeks, or opposed to them (as was Ghazali), they all drank deep at the springs of Neoplatonism. Even those among them who tried to refute Aristotelian premises were compelled to use the logic, and often the terms, that Aristotle’s Organon put into their hands. Most of them

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also acJopted the formula, devised by Plotinus, according to which it was not God who was directly responsible for the universe and all the problems resulting from its existence but an intermediary agent who was called the ”Logos or Nous, the Universal Spirit or the First Cause.” But Plotinus’ ingenious solution of that fundamental dilemma left many loopholes, many questions unanswered. It was the Muslim philosophers who perfected his system and who gave it an intellectually irreproachable appearance. Though in its origins their philosophy is unmistakably Greek, they turned it into a system that is unmistakably Islamic, and that is never completely divorced from the tenets of the Qur’an. Though neither politics nor problems of morality pre-occupy the Muslim philosophers to any marked extent, whenever they do invite examination, it is within a distinctly Islamic framework.