Imperial Iranian A cad. of Phil. Post-Avicennan Islamic Philosophy and the Study of Being Seyyed Hossein Nasr T HE HISTORY of the quest of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophers after the understanding of being differs markedly from that of Western philosophers following St. Thomas and other masters of Scholasticism. While in the West gradually the possibility of the experience of Being nearly disappeared and the vision of Being gave way to the discussion of the concept of being and finally to the decomposition of this very concept in certain schools, in the Islamic world philosophy drew even closer to the ocean of Being itself until finally it became the complement of gnosis and its extension in the direction of systematic exposition and analysis. If the final chapter of the history of Western philosophy, at least in several of its major schools, wed philosophy to external experience and experiment with the forces and substances of the material world, resulting in various forms of empiricism, in the Islamic world also philosophy became inseparable from experience. But in this case the experience in question was of a spiritual and inward character, including ultimately the vision of Pure Being, the tasting of a reality which is the origin of this sapiential wisdom or hikmah, a wisdom which for this reason is called hikmah dhawqiyyah, dhawq having the same meaning in Arabic as the root of sapiential (sapere) in Latin. 1. PRINCIPAL FIGURES The early Islamic philosophers such as Farabi and Avicenna, I who are called masters of discursive philosophy (hikmah bahthiyyah) rather than of sapiential wisdom, nevertheless established the conceptual framework within which later discussions of being took place, although often new meaning was given to the terms and concepts established by them. Farab! in his Kitab al-huruJ 2 and Avicenna in numerous works, especially the Shija', Najat and I Ibn Sina or Avicenna has in fact been called first and foremost a philosopher of being. See A. M. Goichon, "L'Unite de la pensee avicennienne", in Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, no. 20-21, (1952),290 ff. 2 This major work, edited for the first time by M. Mahdi (Beirut, 1969), has caused contemporary scholars to revise completely their views concerning the study of ontology among the earlier Islamic philosophers.