MALIK KAMRAN, HAFIZ HUSSAIN AZHAR, MUHAMMAD USMAN, AMRA BATOOL, HAFIZA UYAINA HUSSAIN
DOI: https://doi.org/Metaphysics has stood as the primary framework of philosophical inquiry since antiquity, serving as the definitive arena for investigating the nature of existence, causality, ultimate reality, and the divine. This comparative analytical study explores the structural, methodological, and ontological formulations of metaphysical thought across two distinct intellectual paradigms: Islamic philosophy (and theology) and non-Islamic Western philosophical traditions. Drawing directly upon foundational primary textual references, classical source works, and historical commentaries, this paper systematically evaluates the contributions of classical and modern thinkers. The inquiry begins with an examination of early Islamic thinkers, including Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Al-Razi, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, alongside modern reformist scholars such as Allama Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, and Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. Simultaneously, it contrasts these perspectives with the evolutionary trajectory of non-Islamic metaphysics, traversing Classical Greek philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Plotinus), Medieval and Early Modern European thought (St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel), and 19th-to-20th-century secular materialist or positivist critiques (Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell). By meticulously examining their respective treatments of necessary versus contingent existence, prime movers, divine attributes, spiritual transmigration, and empirical rejection, this article illuminates how Islamic metaphysics maintains a harmonized synthesis of rationalism, intuition, and divine revelation, whereas non-Islamic traditions incrementally bifurcated into transcendental idealism or absolute empirical materialism.
