(corrections were made to this section so it is slightly more up to date than the book.)
Stephen Hawking in his book The Grand Design said that philosophy is dead, Imam al Ghazali (r.a) in his Incoherence of the Philosophers would concur with him, in it he dissects the nature and mechanisms of Philosophy and establishes it’s limitation in arriving at certainty in anything it claims, this is the nature of philosophy it is speculation derived from imagination. In Modern times the new word “metaphysics” is used to describe the relationship between the unseen world (Ghayb) and the physical world and they have come to relabel the works of Islams scholars by it and in doing so they attempt to call what they wrote as philosophy rather than science. This loose relationship between what modern philosophers call Metaphysics and the works of the scholars was not what Imam al Ghazali and Imam Ibn Arabi referred to in their works, through metaphysics you could claim anything without grounding that assertion with actual science and it is little more than philosophy loosely based on physics, today it has come to be a body of knowledge which takes its queues from many unsound sources while Islamic scholars followed the Quran and what it taught.
What happens when something in philosophy is established by science, does it stop being called philosophy and is relabelled science, in this we can see the separation between the two fields, the scholars never approached the subject from this perspective and spoke from speculation they always stayed within the bounds of science so what they said can never be relabelled philosophy, rather modern philosophers lack scientific training and are incapable of differentiating between scientific theory and philosophy, so everything is labeled according to their world view.
Scholars like Imam al Ghazali treated the subject of the unseen world as pure science with their own scientific terminology separate from the modern conception, what modern philosophers thought was philosophy in the works of scholars like Imam al Ghazali was rather his opinion based on the physics, mathematics and astronomy available at the time and the Islamic sciences he spent his life learning.
They have not learnt the Islamic sources of his arguments and cant identify them in his words because they are not trained in this knowledge so they incorrectly attribute his words to the closest things they studied, yet modern Islamic scholars can identify his sources with ease because they are taught the same scientific principles.
Metaphysics approaches the matter from a philosophical point of view first then tries to connect the spiritual and physical world with science, so metaphysics and Islam are not related because revelation is not philosophy and isn’t it’s source, to make that claim you would be accusing all the prophets of outright lying about their knowledge being revelation.
Do philosophers claim revelation is the source of their metaphysics? in this we an see how the two are separate.
In this way the word “ilahiyyat” found in islamic text, can not be translated as metaphysics by modern philosophers this is entirely wrong because the words don’t even relate. Literally the word meta-physics translates to the term “after physics” because that is what meta means, in arabic meta physics is called “ma ba’d al-tabi’a”, not ilahiyyat.
The word Ilah (deity) in ilah-iyyat means Devine, and in the Shahada (muslim testimony of faith) “la ilaha Illah llah” it means “there is nor Deity other than Allah”, it is often wrongly translated as “There is no God but Allah” or there is no God but God, but in english the name of the Judeo-Christian deity is God, so it is more accurate to translate it as there is no Deity other than Allah, ‘iyyat” in ilah-iyyat simply means “the things relating to” illah (or Allah). So “ilahiyyat” literally means “the Science of Divine Things” or the science of the Universe, the word should retain it’s original literal intended meaning and not be warped into meaning metaphysics. ilahiyyat is also directly related to revelation and Maarifa (Gnosis, knowledge from experience) which is the intended relationship by the scholars of Islam.
The two bodies of knowledge cant be associated with each other, philosophy is not derived from Maarifa (Gnosis and experience) and Maarifa is not philosophy, if it was then we would be claiming revelation is philosophy while in reality revelation is certainty, “His sight swerved not, nor did it go wrong” (53:17), “And worship your Lord until there comes to you the certainty” (15:99).
Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209) gives the definition of physics (ilm al-abi‘ah) as; “it is the study of material bodies that undergo change and are either in motion or repose”. When Imam Ibn Arabi, Imam al Ghazali, and Shaykh Abdul Qadir al Jilani (among many other scholars) identified the unseen world as the place our inner eye looks into and the place we experience while dreaming (relativity can explain why a 20 minute dream only takes 3 seconds in the waking world), they did not define that unseen world as imaginary (unreal) and philosophy, meaning separate from this universe and it’s laws.
They spoke of it in definite terms and specified and restricted it’s existence to the same universe we are in and the laws of physics that govern our universe. In fact they went even further and pointed to how we in our actions affect that world hence specifying it as the subatomic quantum world we know today. The philosophy of metaphysics can never be a part of what the people of Maarifa are talking about.
If some fear that in some parts of the scholars works, who lived hundreds of years ago, they where wrong in describing parts of the universe, and would rather find safety in redefining it as philosophy, then so what, which modern physicist does not have mistakes in their work no one ever tried to relabel a mistake as philosophy, the matter is scientific theory until it is proven by facts.
Albert Einstein denied the existence of Quantum Entanglement and made fun of it by calling it “Spooky Action at a Distance” which led to the biggest controversy in modern physics, later he said it was the biggest mistake of his career, now we are designing Quantum Computers which use Quantum Entanglement and established the existence of Quantum Teleportation, we are also looking for ways to exploit that law, which part of that argument was degraded by labelling it philosophy.
The Prophet (saws) who was given revelation said “I have been sent with ‘Jawami-al-Kalim’ (the shortest expression with the widest knowledge) and have been made victorious with awe, and while I was sleeping, I saw that the keys of the treasures of the world were placed in my hand.” Abu Huraira added: Allah’s Apostle has gone, and you people are utilizing those treasures, or digging those treasures out.’(Bukhari)
Muhammad (saws) said, Jawami’-al-Kalim means that Allah expresses in one or two statements or thereabouts the numerous matters that used to be written in the books revealed before (the coming of) the Prophet, this means his (saws) speech often had the shortest expressions, can that be said about any philosopher and his speech on any matter.
This manner of expressive speech we illustrated when said earlier about the substance that Jinn are created from and its connection to the human body “the Jinn are essentially emotions”, this is the shortest expression containing all the knowledge we mentioned. This is the best form of speech when you have to seek to both educated and uneducated people, this is because the Messenger of Allah (saws) said, “May Allah freshen the affairs of a person who hears something from us and communicates it to others exactly as he has heard it, for it may be that the recipient of knowledge understands it better than the one who has heard it.” (Tirmidhi)
Even if a scholars claim through Maarifa (Gnosis, knowledge from experience) is wrong, which scholars like Ibn al Arabi often spoke from, we have to concede he is approaching the matter through what he learnt from experience, and not theory and speculation which is philosophy.