they assert neither denial nor affirmation, while others accept nothing save what their senses perceive. One who truly understood the matter has rejected this report and said: The term al-sufistāʾiyya ⦗1⦘ is actually an Arabized Greek word whose root is sophistía, meaning “counterfeit wisdom.” For the element so in Greek signifies “wisdom”; accordingly they say philosophos ⦗2⦘, that is, a lover ⦗3⦘ of wisdom. The element fistía means “painted-over, spurious.” Aristotle ⦗4⦘—teacher of the later innovators among them—divided their discipline, namely their science, into the demonstrative, the rhetorical, the dialectical, the poetical, and the sophistical ⦗5⦘, the last being the category of fallacies, and he called it sophistía ⦗6⦘. The word was then rendered into Arabic as sufistā, after which some dialecticians imagined it to be the name of a man, whereas its origin is as just explained, even though the word
See: al-Tarifat by al-Jurjani, p.191, under the letter L; Kashf Istilahat al-Funun by al-Tahanawi, vol.2, p.311; vol.3, p.173; and al-Safadiyya by Ibn Taymiyya, vol.1, pp.97–98.
(1) In the original manuscript (S) the term appears as al-sufistaniyya; the printed edition (T) adopts the corrected reading.
(2) See al-Milal wa al-Nihal by al-Shahrastani, vol.2, p.58, for this meaning.
(3) In the manuscript (S) the verb appears as yuhibbu ("he loves").
(4) Aristotle ibn Nicomachus, the Greek philosopher known as the First Teacher, was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a Macedonian city about two hundred miles north of Athens. At eighteen he moved to Athens to complete his studies, joining Plato’s Academy for twenty years before diverging to develop his own doctrines. He authored numerous works across various disciplines and died in 322 BCE. See al-Milal wa al-Nihal by al-Shahrastani, vol.2, pp.119–120; The Story of Philosophy by W. L. Durant (trans. Fathallah al-Mushasha), pp.67–125; and Fi Sabil Mawsu'a Falsafiyya: Aristotle by Dr. Mustafa Ghalib, p.15 and following.
(5) In both the manuscript (S) and the printed edition (T) the term appears as mamawwih.
(6) In the printed edition (T) it appears as sufusqiya.