Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/148

 sect or school of thought. Other philosophical students were termed hakim or nazir.

The line of these falasifa forms the most important group in the history of Islamic culture. It was they who were largely responsible for awakening Aristotelian studies in Latin Christendom, and it was they who developed the Aristotelian tradition which Islam had received from the Syriac community, correcting and revising its contents by a direct study of the Greek text and working out their conclusions on lines indicated by the neo-Platonic commentators.

The first of the series is Yaqub b. Ishaq al-Kindi (d. circ. 260 A.H. = 873 A.D.), who began very much as a Mu'tazilite interested in the theological problems discussed by the members of that school of thought, but desirous of testing and examining these more accurately, made use of the translations taken directly from the Greek and then only recently published. By this means he brought a much stricter method to bear, and thus opened the way to an Aristotelian scholarship much in advance of anything which had been contemplated so far. As a result his pupils and those who came after them raised new questions and ceased to confine themselves to Mu'tazilite problems, and al-Kindi was their intellectual ancestor in those new enquiries which his methods and his use of the Greek text alone made possible. It is a strange fact that al-Kindi, the parent of Arabic philosophy, was himself one of the very few leaders of Arabic thought who was a true