Hegel on the Arabs and philosophy

Hegel seened only interested in the Arabs as receiving Greek intellectual culture and passing it on to the West. 

Nonetheless, he recognised their intellectual genius, the love of philosophy, and something of the character of the result. Hegel says, Philosophy, along with all the other arts and sciences, flourished to an extraordinary

degree…[It] was fostered and cherished among the Arabians…In the Arabic

philosophy, which shows a free, brilliant and profound degree of imagination, Philosophy and the sciences took the same bent that they had taken earlier among

the Greeks…Consequently it is the Alexandrian or Neo

-Platonic Idea which forms the essential principle or basis of the Arabian as well as of the Scholastic philosophy,

and all that Christian philosophy offers…[I]t will be found that the main dogmas of

this philosophy have much in common with those of the Scholastics

1590s, "of or pertaining to Scholastic theologians" (Churchmen in the Middle Ages whose theology and philosophy was based on Church Fathers and Aristotle)

Hegel says nothing, however, about what the Islamic philosophers changed in the Hellenic deposit so as to deliver it to the Latins in a different form than that in which they had received it. 

The most important of these transformations is characterised by Alain deLibera in terms of establishing the philosophical known world as a scientifically constructed totality over against what is made known by religious revelation. 

As de Libera puts it, the Arabs mediated the texts of Aristotle to the Latins 
 Bréhier shared Hegel‘s negative view of what both of them called the ―Oriental‖ and in

terms of which Hegel defined Islamic philosophy. He had written:

 We…see an utter inconstancy of everything; and this whirl of all things is essentially

Oriental. But at the same time, this is certainly also a complete dissolution of all that pertains to reasonableness, in harmony with the Eastern exaltation of spirit, which allows of nothing definite.

 Bréhier follows Hegel closely when he treats Islamic philosophy, something he does briefly

under the rubric of ―Philosophy in the East

,

 For him The Islamic concept of divine arbitrariness stands in sharp contrast to the concept of a rational order of development which the Greek philosophers introduced into the world.

Hellenistic thought, profoundly neoplatonised, had surreptitiously crept abroad

This is a very different view of philosophy from that which Aquinas found among either his Christian or his pagan Hellenic sources and sets the point of departure for the

SummaTheologiae, providing what moves him to establish for Latin Christians the basis of a secular humanism.

Hegel‘s treatment becomes deeply problematic— 

not to say polemical