The ancients
group · 4 works · 6 mentions · 8 anchored passages
القدماء · al-qudamāʼ · the ancients · al-Awāʾil · al-awāʼil · al-qudamāʾ · al-salaf · the Ancients · الأوائل · الاوائل
in the texts
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
The ancient learned, credited with four elements and with the supposition of a duality between force and matter, both of which modern science is said to have superseded.
” The elements in modern philosophy exceed seventy in number, after having been four among the ancients.
Force, then, although its secret has not appeared, is not separate from matter but latent within it, and there is no duality between the two, as some of the learned supposed in former times.
it is not a single independent cerebral function having a particular delimited place, as the ancients and the philosophers of Islam, such as Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd al-Andalusī (1) and others, held.
Kitāb al-Safīnah al-Nūḥīyah fī al-sakīnah al-rūḥīyah
The ancient philosophical authorities, al-Awāʾil, whose received account of spirit and soul, of celestial and terrestrial souls, and of the ranks of existents forms the substance of Gate Two.
[Accidents] — these are the basest and lowest of them, and they have existence and subsistence per se, that is, in their existence they do not require a substratum in any respect, unlike whiteness and blackness, which cannot exist except as subsisting in a substratum, which is the body or the substance.
For this reason they said that souls do not create bodies but only move them:
As for the spirit, what is understood by it among them is that it is a substance which is neither a body nor bodily, so that the intellects (ʿuqūl) and the souls both fall under it;
Adab al-wazīr
The ancients (al-qudamāʼ), cited as a collective authority for the long counsel on deliberateness and the avoidance of pitched battle.
do not hasten to open combat with the enemy so long as you find a way to stratagem, and never weary of drawing out the contest with your enemy, for in delay there is the awaiting of an opening and the winning of a weak point.
Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn
The earlier generations of the learned whose sciences astonish those who come after, and whose opinions and reports the author holds nothing is left to the moderns but to choose among.
To exhaust what the ancients said on *the question of the jinn*, and to survey the whole of it, stands in need of several volumes and an ample span of time;
Otherwise, the breadth of the ancients' learning is such as astonishes those who come after, and nothing is left to us but what is chosen of their opinions and what is picked out of their reports.
Whoever surveys what has been written and spends his effort in excavation will have pass before him, from the sciences of the ancients, what makes the flowers of the gardens needless for beauty and musk newly broken open needless for fragrance;