The World and the Soul in Islamic Thought: The Philosophy of Al-Kindi as a Case Study

Abstract

Islamic thought, especially for Al-Kindi as a model, and by extrapolating the concept of the world in terms of its occurrence and its relationship with the Creator, and analyzing the concept of the soul in terms of its essential nature, its relationship with the body and its fate after death, and seeking to reveal the dialectical relationship between the world and the soul in his thought, and highlighting its intellectual originality in reconciling the Greek heritage with the Islamic faith, leads us to a number of conclusions and recommendations, the most important of which is that Al-Kindi believes that the world is an accident and created from nothing by the will of God, unlike Aristotle's view of the antiquity of the world, based on mental and mathematical evidence that proves the finitude of the universe, while the soul has a simple divine spiritual essence, contrary to the body and completely independent of it, and it is able to survive after the death of the body, and the relationship between the world and the soul is based on the fact that the soul is the cognitive bridge that connects man to the external world, and that its happiness and perfection are achieved by rising above the material world and attaching to the divine upper world..