Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in the Works of Early Muslim Scholars

Implications for its Contemporary Theory and Practice

Abstract

“Psychology has a short history, but a long past” in which people have sought to solve the enigma of human nature and establish and preserve psycho-physical health. A significant psychotherapeutic heritage has accumulated with the ideological blueprint of its cultural milieu; a prevailing anthropology and epistemology that differs significantly from that of the new science of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Following the global trend of culturally reinterpreting Western-dominated psychotherapeutic forms, Muslim psychologists who promote the idea of indigenous Islamic psychology seek a general methodology for integrating contemporary psychotherapy into the Islamic worldview. Some find the axioms of this integrative synthesis in the intellectual legacy of early Muslim scholars, during whose time a uniquely expressed scientific spirit prevailed. This study explores the most prominent of these scholars regarding the fundamental principles of contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, and identifies general principles with which to outline and apply a new indigenous iteration.