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“Making Falsafa in Modern Egypt” is an intellectual and institutional history of a phenomenon in colonial-national Egypt known to participants and observers as the “Islamic philosophy revival.” At the helm of this “revival” was an intellectually and politically diverse group of local scholars—shaykhs trained at Cairo’s venerable al-Azhar mosque-university as well as philosophers and Arabists with doctorates from the Sorbonne and Cambridge—united by a commitment to rehabilitating the legacies of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and other classical masters of the philosophical discipline known in Arabic as falsafa. My dissertation excavates the archive of this little-studied Egyptian revivalist movement to offer a situated intellectual history of the production, diffusion, reading, and uses of the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition in modern global thought. In so doing, I begin to address the neglected yet consequential question of how and to what end scholars in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Muslim world studied, taught, interpreted, and otherwise engaged their philosophical heritage in the modern era. In tracing the efforts of prominent twentieth-century Egyptian philosophers to reconstitute classical falsafa for modern thought and education, I rely on their published scholarship, conference presentations, personal papers, and articles on politics and education as well as archival records from the institutions where they worked and studied. I show that these scholars (re)made their philosophical tradition into a privileged subject and means of reform, taking its revival to be an essential precondition for Arabs’ modern becoming. By writing revisionary histories and building new archives of falsafa, they redefined its disciplinary bounds and canon as understood in Islamic and European scholarly traditions while also presenting novel genealogies of science, reason, and humanism that provincialized Western philosophy and configured its Islamic counterpart as an alternative universalism. As widely-read international scholars who studied and taught at universities across the Middle East and Europe, meanwhile, they played a crucial role in establishing “Islamic philosophy” as an object of international academic inquiry and a “world tradition.” Whereas the modern reconstruction of the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition is generally represented as a project internal to Orientalism driven by Europeans, my dissertation recasts this major hermeneutic enterprise as a chapter in the intellectual history of Islam and the Arab world. By tracing the meaning and making of falsafa in colonial-national Egypt through the works of its local revivers, I begin to document the formative role of colonized Arab and Muslim scholars in the global historical processes, networks, and debates that made their philosophical heritage into one of the most widely-studied thought traditions in the contemporary era.

Islamic Philosophy seems essentially to be a response to the challenge that reached the Muslim world from Greek thought. Various conflicts arose in early Islam from time to time with respect to certain principles in different sects and everyone adapted whatever new form seemed to be conducive to his thought. The conflict between the Muctazilite tradition influenced by rationalism and Ashcarite tradition dominated by 'faith' was virtually set at naught by the chief of the Ashcarites, Abū-Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111 A.D.), who found the culmination of tradition in mystical awareness. From the time of al-Ashcarī down to that of al-Ghazālī the Arabs assimilated the fundamentals of Hellenism, and Greek culture caused a vigorous philosophical renaissance represented by Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (died A.D. 950) and Abū-cAlī al-Husayn ibn-cAbd-Allāh ibn-Sīnā (A.D. 980-1037). Under the influence of their philosophical thought theology was shaken once more when confronted by the ideas of the Muctazila. Facts and phenomena had no ultimate significance beyond what they presented in experience. Men who were concerned with the refinements of philosophical speculations and the intricacies of metaphysical abstractions were greatly needed to work to the support of the dogmas of Islam and to nullify the conclusions of a philosophy inconsistent with it. When this colossal task appeared to be imperative, the Muslim world found their leader in al-Ghazālī who was capable of withstanding Hellenism and attacking its representatives. In addition to his being a philosopher who wished to counteract the unorthodox tendencies of his hellenising predecessors, al-Ghazālī was an eminent mystic, sufi and original thinker. In the Muslim world he was the great bridge between traditionalism and mysticism, activism and intuitionism. From the days of his youth he possessed an intense thirst for knowledge which persuaded him to study every form of philosophy and religion and to question all whom he met with regard to the nature and significance of their belief. He discussed problems of understanding, value of knowledge, learning, instruction, efficiency and duty. The ruthless iconoclasm practised by al-Ghazālī in destroying the revered images of Greek Philosophy which then held sway over the mind of many Muslims and his efforts to bring about a reconciliation between mysticism and orthodoxy crowned him with the title of Ḥujjat al-Islam.