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AbūBakr al-Rāzī (d. 925 or 935), the celebrated physician,philosopher, and heretic from Ray in northern Iran, was at pains to defend himself against the charge of disloyalty to the Greek philosophical tradition he claimed as his own. In fact both the charges against him and the defenses he deployed were derived from ancient Greek tradition.

In his book Doubts about Galen (al-ShukÅ«k Ê¿alā JālÄ«nÅ«s),he criticizes the great ancient master of medicine but insists, against anticipated fault-finders, that this is loyalty not ingratitude. He uses examples from the works of Galen, Aristotle,Theophrastus, and Themistius to demonstrate that the proper attitude of the philosopher is to subject the works of their antecedents to close and honest scrutiny, and to improve them where necessary. Rather it is those who blindly accept (taqlÄ«d) the doctrine of their teacher who have abandoned the customary practice of the philosophers (sunnat al-falāsifa). Similarly in The Philosopher’s Way of Life (al-SÄ«ra al-FalsafÄ«ya), the short work in which he defends his self-identification as a philosopher against charges of hypocrisy, he refutes those who mock the inconsistencies between his conduct and those of the ancient philosophers, in particular his imām (leader) and model Socrates. He says they neither understand philosophy nor the biography of Socrates. To defend himself in both works, al-RāzÄ« is deliberately using Arabic terms loaded with connotations from Muslimsectarian debate, in which the tension between the authority of revelation and the power of interpretation is pervasive.

Hi scountry man Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī wrote a thorough going refutation of his views based on their face-to-face debates, extant as The Proofs of Prophecy (Kitāb Aʿlām al-nubūwa), servin galso as a demonstration of the Ismaili doctrine of which he was a missionary. The book shows us what Abū Bakr was fighting against. In his arguments, Abū Ḥātim makes heavy use of an Arabic doxography called today that of Pseudo-Ammonius to show that the philosophers disagreed wildly with each other. The inconsistency of the philosophers, from Thales onward, is a proof of their invalidity. Truth depends rather on divine revelation, needing the divinely appointed Ismaili imām for its interpretation. Philosophy, for Abū Ḥātim, is at best derivative of revelation and brings only a variety of opinions. Here again the argument is an ancient one. For the doxography of Pseudo-Ammonius, which he employs so extensively, depends through unknown intermediaries on The Refutation of All Heresies by Hippolytus of Rome, in which the purpose of relating the views of the philosophers was just to demonstrate their mutual inconsistency. Hippolytus in turn depends on even more ancient criticisms of the philosophers (cf. Diodorus Siculus 2.29).

It is true that Abū Bakr al-Rāzī is a peculiar case as one of the very few Arabic authors effectively to deny religion directly. Most of his peer philosophers working in the Greek tradition in Arabic translation were Muslims, Christians, and Jews who made their religion and philosophy fit together one way or another. Few of them were so bold as to criticize their masters so directly. But by hi splacing himself in line with the ancient philosophers and against prophetic religion, al-Rāzī becomes vulnerable to attacks developed long before by the fathers of the Church against pagan philosophers and their followers. In the end, what appears to be a conflict between reason and revelation is a contest over sources of authority, but both approaches find it necessary to appropriate ancient Greek tradition.