Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers

Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers

Anthropology of Muslims' human sciences: a comparative study of Farabi and Ibn Khaldun

Document Type : Research Article / Original Article

Author
University of Tehran
Abstract
There is a good exemplar of ‘Islamic science’ in the first centuries of the Islamic civilization. This science had at least two different features. First, it had a logical framework to testify that it is Islamic. Second, its being Islamic was, to some extent, spontaneous. Thinkers of Islamic golden ages, between 3rd to 8th centuries, were not fully aware of other civilizational forms, so, their own sciences were essentially Islamic. Farabi, among philosophers (al-Falasifa), and Ibn Khaldun, among al-‘Asha’ira, both engendered sciences which were religious in all aspects of anthropology, ontology, and epistemology. In this article, we focused on an important point in the thought of Farabi and Ibn Khaldun. That is, what is the difference between Farabi’s and Ibn Khaldun’s philosophical anthropology? And whether it is possible to have a synthetic Islamic science based on the anthropology of the two thinkers? To answer this question, we chose historical-comparative approach, to find the differences between the two approaches to a so-called Islamic science.
Keywords

ابن خلدون، عبدالرحمن (1382). مقدمه ابن خلدون، ترجمه محمدپروین گنابادی، تهران: علمی و فرهنگی.
 
Volume 1, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
September 2011
Pages 73-87

  • Receive Date 26 July 2011
  • Publish Date 23 September 2011