Philosophy

Al-Ghazali

c. 1058–1111 · Persian

Sunni Islamic theology (Ash'arism) and Sufism

Al-Ghazali was the most influential Muslim thinker after the first generations of Islam, a jurist and theologian who mastered the Greek-derived philosophy of his day in order to refute it. At the height of his career he abandoned the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world for eleven years of Sufi retreat, and then wrote the vast synthesis of law, ethics and mysticism that made Sufism respectable to the orthodox. Latin scholars knew him as Algazel.

How to spot them

▸Honorific Hujjat al-Islam, "the Proof of Islam"; Latin name Algazel
▸The attack on the philosophers, answered a century later by a Cordoban judge
▸Occasionalism: fire does not burn cotton — God does, at the moment of contact
▸The spiritual crisis of 1095, when he lost the power of speech and left Baghdad
▸Born and died at Tus in Khorasan; taught at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad

Key works

A demolition of twenty doctrines of the Greek-influenced philosophers, three of which are pronounced outright unbelief; a century later it was answered by a book whose title simply doubles its own (1095)

Tahafut al-Falasifa, The Incoherence of the Philosophers

A dispassionate summary of the very doctrines its author was about to attack, so faithful that Latin readers mistook him for a disciple of the philosophers (c. 1094)

Maqasid al-Falasifa, The Aims of the Philosophers — translated into Latin, which is why the West long thought "Algazel" a follower of Avicenna

Forty books in four quarters covering worship, custom, the vices and the virtues, written during years of wandering and retreat (c. 1105)

Ihya' Ulum al-Din, The Revival of the Religious Sciences — his masterpiece

A short spiritual autobiography of doubt, whose author reports distrusting even the senses and reason, and finding certainty only in a light God cast into his breast (c. 1108)

Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, Deliverance from Error

A treatise expounding the ninety-nine beautiful names of God, one by one (c. 1095)

Al-Maqsad al-Asna, The Highest Aim

A late work of mystical symbolism built on the Quranic verse comparing God to a lamp in a niche (c. 1106)

Mishkat al-Anwar, The Niche of Lights, on Quran 24:35, the Light Verse

Key ideas

Occasionalism: there is no necessary connection between what we call cause and effect; the two are merely habitually conjoined, and God creates each event directly
Three philosophical doctrines amount to unbelief: the eternity of the world, God's knowledge only of universals and not of particulars, and the denial of bodily resurrection
Certainty cannot be reached by argument alone; the philosophers, the theologians and the Isma'ilis all fail, and only the Sufi path yields knowledge by taste (dhawq)
Sufi practice can be reconciled with the sharia: inner purification and outward law belong together
Logic and mathematics are religiously neutral tools, and may be taken over from the philosophers without danger

Quick-fire facts

•Born at Tus in Khorasan (near modern Mashhad, Iran); his name is sometimes given al-Ghazzali
•Appointed by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk to head the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad in 1091, aged about 33
•In 1095 he suffered a crisis in which he could not speak or lecture; he left Baghdad, ostensibly for the hajj, and did not teach again for over a decade
•Carries the honorific Hujjat al-Islam, "the Proof of Islam"
•His argument that fire does not burn cotton — God does — anticipates Hume's problem of causation by six centuries
•His brother Ahmad al-Ghazali was a Sufi preacher and writer in his own right
•He is often blamed, probably unfairly, for ending the philosophical tradition in Islam
•Died at Tus in December 1111

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Sources

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Al-Ghazali
Frank Griffel — Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology