Journal of the American Oriental Society (20, No. 1)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ...places cited has explained their relationship. The Maqasid is a compendious statement of the true teachings of the philosophers in all those subjects where doubt can enter, that is logic, physics, and theology. Arithmetic and geometry are excluded as resting on an absolutely demonstrable basis. You may be a believer or not, but you must accept their results in these subjects. All that he intended in this book was to state the facts as to the views of the philosophers. Then in the Tahdfut these views are overthrown ' Ibn al-Athir, A. H. 500; Houtama, al-Bonddri, 265; Weil, Chalifen, iii. 209. by argument; the aim is purely destructive. Finally, in the Qawa'id a system of positive truth is built up to take the place of the errors of the philosophers. Thus the three books follow and complement one another. If, then, the Qawa'id here spoken of is the book so called in the Ihya, written in the earlier part of his retreat, are we to see in the Maqasid and TahCtfut the results written at Baghdad of his study of philosophy there? This seems highly probable; we can then regard the Maqasid as in a sense notes of his two years' reading, and the Tahdfut as the fruit of his further year of meditation. To return to his stay at Damascus; that he taught the Ihya there may be taken as tolerably certain. Adh-Dhahabi (d. 748) gives us from Ibn 'Asfikir (but the SM. could not find it in Ibn 'Asfikir's text) that he used to sit a great deal in the corner (zdwiya) of the Shaykh Nasr al-Maqdisi in the Umawi Jami', which is on that account called the Ghazzali corner. This must be Abu-l-Fath Nasr b. Ibrahim al-Maqdisi, no. 41 in Wtistenfeld's Academien.' Ibn Shuhba (died at Damascus 850 or 851) says there (p. 5 of the Arabic text) that Abu-l-Fath became acquainted with...