ABSTRACT
The intellectual life of Islam and that of Christianity-the two sister civilizations-in the Middle Ages can be compared with each other to a large extent through the role that Aristotelian philosophy played in them. Peripatetic science and philosophy entered the Western world through translations from Arabic in the the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelth centuries and eventually became dominant to such an extent as to replace the Augustinian and Platonic wisdom of the earlier period only to be overthrown itself by the humanistic rationalism of the Renaissance. In Islam the attack of Sufis and theologians upon the rationalistic aspect of Aristotelian philosophy weakened its hold at the very time when that philosohy was gaining strength in the Christian West and was replaced in the Muslim world by two elements, the doctrinal Sufism of Mu1.tyi alDin ibn 'Arabi and the lfikmat al-ishriiql or illuminative wisdom of Shaykh al-Ishraq Shihab aI-Din YaJ:1ya ibn Habash ibn Amtrak Suhrawardi,2 both of which aimed at an effective realization of the "truth" and replaced the rationalism of Peripatetic philosophy by intellectual intuition (dhawq).
