Falsafatuna

Falsafatuna (Arabic for "Our Philosophy") is a book by the Iraqi cleric and scholar Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, published in 1959. It was written in response to the growth of communist ideas among secular young people in Iraq, to whom it is dedicated. Its aim is to examine the main currents of social thought of its time from an Islamic standpoint and to offer an alternative philosophical foundation.

The introduction surveys four major schools: capitalism, communism, socialism, and Islam. For Sadr, capitalism lacks the philosophy on which any social system should rest and, although it is not built on an explicit materialism, it operates as a materialistic system. Its large producers need ever-larger markets, and the individual, with no aim beyond personal interest, lives in constant struggle. Regarding Marxism, Sadr acknowledges that Marx sought to correct the unjust distribution of wealth by reorganising society along socialist lines, but he argues that a communist economy clashes with human nature, since it removes the incentive to work beyond what is necessary. Against both, he proposes Islam as a way of reconciling personal motivations with social interests through a morality and ethics that direct every decision toward the satisfaction of God.

The first part is devoted to the theory of knowledge. Sadr examines Plato's doctrine of recollection, which he objects to because it does not justify the link between a pre-existing soul and the body; rationalism, which he partly supports in holding that innate ideas exist potentially in the soul; and empiricism, which he faults for offering no logical account of causality, a problem he believes Berkeley and Hume could not resolve from sense perception alone. He then analyses positivism, which he regards as an extension of empiricism and which, by dismissing philosophical propositions as meaningless, contradicts itself by invoking a metaphysical notion to deny metaphysics. The chapter concludes by recognising that rationalist philosophy supplies science with the principles and rules that allow the move from direct experience to general scientific law.