Knowledge (ʿilm) has occupied a central place in the Islamic intellectual tradition. The religious incentive for this stems from the fact that the Islamic belief is grounded in a knowledge claim about God's existence and His revelation. The theologians (mutakallimin) consider knowledge as a prerequisite for religious belief (iman). A related question is God's knowledge of things—how God as the knower (al-ʿalim) knows particulars, which are subject to change, without change in His essence. To address this issue, Ibn Sinā had absolved God of the necessity of knowing every particular thing and event because this might introduce change in his unchanging essence. Ghazālī, in turn, accuses Ibn Sinā of denying God the ability to know particulars. The general consensus on God's knowledge of things, however, is that His knowing is a generative act in that He knows things by creating them. In this sense, God's knowledge of things does not follow their existence, which would be to attribute ignorance to God, but precedes them.
In philosophy, four major theories of knowledge have developed. The first is the concept of knowledge as abstraction (tajarrud). Following Aristotle, the Muslim Peripatetics define knowledge as the abstraction of the intelligible forms of things from their material properties. We know things through their intelligible forms—that is, only as universals. When the mind encounters a particular object, it abstracts its form and turns it into a conception in the mind. This, however, raises the question of whether what we know is a universal or the things themselves.
Knowledge as abstraction leads to what we might call the representational theory of knowledge, according to which knowledge is an imprint or picture (rasm) of actually existing things in the mind. When there is a perfect correspondence between the thing and its representation in the mind, we arrive at true knowledge.
The second theory is based on knowledge as a relation (idafah) between the thing known and the knower. The knower intends things in the extramental world, and this intending creates a relation between a person and his or her object of knowledge. Defended by some theologians, knowledge as relation fails to account for self-knowledge where the knower and the known are one and the same thing. When I say, for instance, that I feel pain, object and subject are the same. Otherwise, we would have to admit a relation between myself and myself.
The third theory defines knowledge as a property of the knower. Knowledge belongs to the knower as a state of the mind (hala nafsaniyyah). Combining elements from the above theories, this view reduces knowledge to concepts in the mind. It also seems to suggest that what the mind knows is its internal procedures rather than the things in the external world. The goal of knowledge, however, is to know things as they are, not simply as they appear to us.
The fourth theory of knowledge proposed by Suhrawardi and developed by Mullā Ṣadrā argues for what is called knowledge-by-presence (al-ʿilm al-huduri). Suhrawardi defines knowledge as presence rather as absence or negation, as the Peripatetic term "abstraction" implies. Ṣadrā takes this point further and equates knowledge with existence (wujud). According to him, knowledge is a mode of existence and knowing is a cognitive act of unveiling an aspect of the all-inclusive reality of existence. This leads Ṣadrā to his celebrated defense of the unification of the intellect and the intelligible.
Bibliography
Aminrazavi, Mahdi. Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination. Surrey, U.K.: Curzon, 1997.
Chittick, William. The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Rosenthal, Franz. Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970.
Mehdi Ha'iri Yazdi. The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Hossein Ziai. Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardi's Hikmat al-ishraq. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.
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