In his book How to Philosophize in Islam? [2], Souleymane Bachir Diagne challenges the view that philosophy and Islam are incompatible. The Senegalese philosopher highlights the open and skeptical tradition that exists within Islamic thinking and wants to cherish and strengthen it. According to him, the concept of Islamic philosophy is not at all an oxymoron. From very early on Muslims felt the need to philosophize and should keep doing so in order to keep in touch with their own dynamical and intellectual tradition.
But it was the poverty of philosophy in the contemporary Islamic world that brought Diagne to become an expert in Islamic philosophy himself. Although 95% of the population in Senegal is Muslim, like Diagne himself, he was unable to find academic specialists on this topic. Initially his interest laid within the fields of logic and the philosophy of science, but the need of experts in Islamic philosophy brought the Senegalese professor to become the expert on which he himself had been waiting for several decades.
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