Eastern philosophy during the Middle Ages

The destinies of the West during the Middle Ages were partly determined by the Arab conquest which, extending from India to Spain and advancing to the south of Italy and the Greek islands, formed a sort of screen between Europe and Asia: we know how, in a century (from 635), the domination of the Arabs spread in a lightning way, only stopping, at the end, at Poitiers in 732 and Chinese Turkestan in 751. They brought with them a language and a religion which remained, from then on, the language and religion of immense territories. The Koran and its exegeses imposed themselves on these countries of old Hellenistic culture, Syria, Egypt, Persia, where we still saw, in the 6th century, philosophers busy commenting on Plato and Aristotle. Such an event had an influence on the course of the history of ideas.

Historians tell us how few were the original Arabs in these vast territories, which they occupied militarily, but in keeping the administrative and social frameworks of the conquered countries; in the dislocation which divided the empire into independent sovereignties, the caliphs of Baghdad, for example, placed at their service the entire financial and political organization of the former Persian sovereigns. (1) A similar fact seems to be observed in the intellectual domain: converted to Islamism and writing in Arabic, Muslim “philosophers”, many of whom are not themselves of Semitic origin, find part of their methods and themes of meditation, either in the Greek works, which the Nestorian Christians, who populate Asia Minor and Persia, translated from the 6th century into Syriac and Arabic, or in the Mazdean traditions living in Persia and with which the thought of India is intimately mixed (mysticism of the Sufis ).