Most Famous Islamic Philosophers
Islamic philosophy denotes the philosophical tradition that arose in the Islamic world from the 8th century onward, drawing on Greek philosophical sources transmitted through Arabic translation and synthesizing them with Islamic theology and law. Its golden age, roughly the 9th through 12th centuries, produced figures including al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes. Central concerns included the relation of reason to revelation, the nature of God, the soul and the intellect, and the integration of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought with Islamic doctrine. Islamic philosophers played a decisive role in transmitting and developing classical philosophy, and their work shaped medieval Christian and Jewish thought through Latin and Hebrew translations. The tradition continues today through both classical schools and modern reformist currents.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Rumi
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was a thirteenth-century Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi mystic, born in what is now Afghanistan and settling at Konya in Anatolia. After his transform...
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Ibn Hazm
Abu Muhammad Ali Ibn Hazm was an Andalusian polymath, jurist, theologian, philosopher, and poet, one of the foremost minds of medieval Islamic Spain. He served briefly as vizier...
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Averroes
Averroes, known in Arabic as Ibn Rushd, was a 12th-century Andalusian Arab philosopher, jurist, and physician of the Islamic Golden Age, the most influential medieval commentato...
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Muhammad Iqbal
Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an Indian-Pakistani Islamic philosopher, poet, and political thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely regarded as the spiritua...
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Al-Ghazali
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was an 11th and early 12th-century Persian Sunni Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and Sufi mystic, regarded as one of the most influential thinkers i...
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Al-Biruni
Abu Rayhan al-Biruni was a Persian polymath of the Islamic Golden Age, often counted among the greatest scientific minds in the history of the medieval world. He worked extensiv...
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Ibn Taymiyyah
Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was a Sunni Muslim theologian, jurist, and reformer of Mamluk-era Syria and one of the most controversial and influential thinkers of medieval Is...
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Ali Shariati
Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist and Islamic political philosopher, trained at the Sorbonne under Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, who became the most influential inte...
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Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun was a North African Arab historian and philosopher, born in Tunis to a family of Andalusian scholars. His Muqaddimah, the prolegomenon to a vast universal history, l...
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Mir Damad
Mir Damad, the Master of the Damad, was an Iranian Twelver Shia philosopher and the founder of the School of Isfahan that would culminate in his pupil Mulla Sadra. Working in di...
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Sayyed Hossein Nasr
Sayyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian-American Islamic philosopher, university professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and one of the leading living exponents ...
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Al-Hallaj
Mansur al-Hallaj was a Persian Sufi mystic, preacher, and poet whose ecstatic utterances and public life made him one of the most controversial and revered figures of early Sufi...
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Al-Mawardi
Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi was an Arab Islamic jurist of the Shafi'i school and the principal classical theorist of Sunni political thought. Born in Basra and trai...
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Avicenna
Avicenna, known in Arabic and Persian as Ibn Sina, was a Persian polymath of the Islamic Golden Age, regarded as one of the most influential philosophers and physicians of the m...
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Al-Ashari
Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Ashari was an Arab Sunni theologian and the founder of the Ashari school of kalam, the dominant theological tradition of medieval Sunni Islam. After early ad...
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Ibn Arabi
Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi was an Andalusian Sufi philosopher, mystic, and poet, often called the Greatest Master. Born in Murcia, he traveled extensively through North Africa and t...
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Ibn al-Haytham
Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, known to the Latin West as Alhazen, was an Arab mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher and one of the greatest scientific minds of the medie...
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Al-Razi
Abu Bakr al-Razi, known to the Latin West as Rhazes, was a Persian polymath, physician, alchemist, and philosopher, and one of the most original minds of the Islamic Golden Age....
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Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi was a Persian Sunni theologian, philosopher, and exegete of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and one of the most prolific Islamic intellectua...
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Al-Kindi
Abu Yusuf al-Kindi was an Arab philosopher, mathematician, and polymath, often called the father of Arab philosophy. Working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the Abbasid ...
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Ibn Bajja
Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Yahya Ibn Bajja, known to the Latin West as Avempace, was an Andalusian polymath, the first major Islamic philosopher of the Iberian peninsula after Ibn Ha...
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Al-Farabi
Abu Nasr al-Farabi was a Persian philosopher and one of the greatest figures of the Islamic Golden Age, known to later tradition as the Second Teacher, after Aristotle. He produ...
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Fazlur Rahman
Fazlur Rahman was a Pakistani-American Islamic philosopher and the most influential modernist interpreter of the Quran in twentieth-century Muslim thought. After studies at Oxfo...
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Al-Junayd of Baghdad
Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd of Baghdad was a Persian Sunni Muslim mystic and theologian and the principal founder of the school of sober Sufism that traces its lineage through him. T...
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Allameh Tabatabai
Sayyid Mohammad Husayn Tabatabai, known as Allameh Tabatabai, was an Iranian Twelver Shia philosopher, theologian, and Quranic commentator, professor in the Hawza of Qom and one...
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Hassan Hanafi
Hassan Hanafi was an Egyptian philosopher and Islamic intellectual of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, professor of philosophy at Cairo University and one of...
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Ibn Tufayl
Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Tufayl was an Andalusian philosopher, physician, and statesman, court physician to the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf and a patron of the young Averroes. H...
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Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, philosopher, and engineer, the founder of the Republican Brothers, a small but intellectually powerful movement that defend...
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Miskawayh
Ahmad ibn Muhammad Miskawayh was a Persian Islamic philosopher, historian, and bureaucrat at the Buyid court in Baghdad, and the most important Islamic moral philosopher between...
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Mohammed Abed al-Jabri
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri was a Moroccan philosopher, long associated with Mohammed V University in Rabat, and one of the most influential Arab thinkers of the late twentieth centu...
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Mulla Sadra
Mulla Sadra was a Persian Shia Islamic philosopher and the most important figure of the Iranian School of Isfahan. Synthesizing Avicennan philosophy, Suhrawardi's illuminationis...
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Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was a Persian polymath, philosopher, and astronomer who served first the Ismaili Nizari rulers of Alamut and then, after the Mongol conquest, the Ilkhanid c...
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Sadiq Jalal al-Azm
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm was a Syrian philosopher, professor at the University of Damascus and at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and one of the most uncompromising secula...
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Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the leading living voices on African philosophy, Islamic thought, and translat...
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Suhrawardi
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi was a Persian philosopher and the founder of the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy. Drawing on Avicennan philosophy, ancient Persian wisdom, ...