Ma`rifat Falsafi

This article, as the first of its type to be written on this subject, tries to scrutinize Walzer’s idea about the political philosophy of Islam. Walzer’s preoccupation is to find out the relation between the political philosophy of Islam and that of the Greek philosophers. According to him, all of the ideas in the former (which he calls “Arab political philosophy”) come from the Greeks. He even supposes lost Greek sources for ideas in the Islamic political philosophy which are not found in the works of the Greek philosophers. The author argues that such an approach to Islamic political philosophy stems from the inaccurate hypothesis that Islamic philosophy is not but a copy of Greek philosophy, and does not believe in the ability of Muslim scholars to produce any philosophy at all. This article takes such issues of Walzer as “Greek Source-seeking”, “not distinguishing between Islamic and Arabic philosophy”, “Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Neo-Platonism”, and “being influenced by Jewish and Christian teachings” to reflect on and criticize.