…the suitable, and anger for repelling what is harmful. On that basis they built their ethical philosophy, saying that desire and anger must both be disciplined, each kept midway between excess and deficiency. The mean of desire they named chastity, the mean of anger they called courage, and the just balance between the two they termed justice. These three, they claimed, are pursued so that the soul may be perfected by theoretical, speculative wisdom; human perfection, in their view, thus consists of four things: chastity, courage, justice, and knowledge.
A number of later writers who entered Islam adopted this line of thought, supporting it with what they found in the Quran, the hadith corpus, and the sayings of the early generations that praise such virtues. Those who authored works on ethics and right conduct along these lines—for example, Abū Ḥāmid’s “The Scales of Actions,” the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, the books of Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-ʿĀmirī, and others—base their discussions on this very foundation.
Yet they erred, for the “knowledge” that Allah and His Messenger praise is not the speculative knowledge upheld by the Greek philosophers. Rather, ḥikmah (wisdom) is “a term that unites knowledge and acting upon it in every community.” Ibn Qutaybah and others said: “In the language of the Arabs, wisdom is knowledge together with practice.” Mālik was asked about wisdom and replied: “It is understanding the religion and acting upon it.”
Every nation therefore has a wisdom that corresponds to its own knowledge and religion: the Indians have their wisdom, though they are idolatrous unbelievers; the pre-Islamic Arabs had a wisdom, and among them were the sages of the Arabs while they were idol-worshippers; the Greeks likewise had a wisdom of their own.
The sages of each group are indeed the most knowledgeable and upright within that group, but this does not of itself make them praiseworthy before Allah and His Messenger. Those whom Allah and His Messenger commend are only the believing Muslims—those who believe in Allah, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the resurrection after death; who worship Allah alone without associating anything with Him; and who neither deny any of His prophets nor any of His scriptures.