Al-Ghazali was a philosopher of great originality and critical acumen. He was deeply religious, a mystic as well as a penetratingly analytical thinker; a sceptic as well as a man of faith. His great desire was for a certainty that was unshakeable, a knowledge in which ‘the object is known in a manner which is not open to doubt at all’.1 He propounded a radical scepticism concerning the theory of knowledge embodied in the philosophical thought of his Arab predecessors and advanced a theory of his own that saw knowledge as direct and intuitive rather than as the product of demonstrative reasoning. In mid-life he abandoned his career as a professor of theology in order to adopt the way of life of Sufism.2 Subsequently he made it his aim to establish a form of Sufism that could be a bastion to orthodox Islamic doctrine but would at the same time correct the excessively legalistic tendencies of that orthodoxy by cultivating an inward spirituality in believers. His scepticism has been likened to that of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and of the logical positivists of twentieth-century European philosophy.
The development of al-Ghazali’s philosophy is closely bound in with the events of his life. He was born near Tus in Khurasan, in north-eastern Iran. His parents died when he was young and he was brought up by a devout Sufi who had been a friend of his father. He learned much of Sufism and studied theology and canon law. When he was about 20 years old he went to the Nizamiyyah Academy of Nishapur where he became known for his skills in debating and for the original quality of his thought. He questioned and tested everything, rejected all authoritative pronouncements and sought inspiration and enlightenment (though, he reports, without much success) in the practice of Sufist exercises. By the time he was 28 he was known and respected by the whole of the Muslim world of learning. He joined the court of Nizam al-Mulk, a vizier renowned for his generous patronage of scholarship, and at the early age of 34 was appointed to the much-prized chair of theology at the Nizamiyyah Academy of Baghdad.
As al-Ghazali’s outward triumphs in the world of learning multiplied and grew, so did a whole host of inner uncertainties. An important aspect of his work at the academy was the elucidation and defence of Sunni3 legal doctrine, along with all its corollaries and implications. As a consequence of this he became closely involved with matters of state. This meant that he was witness to and participant in a bitter conflict compounded of theological, legal, political and philosophical differences that was taking place between the Shi‘ite caliphate at Cairo and the Sunnite sultan Malikshah.4 Soon after Ghazali acceded to the chair at Baghdad this conflict became acute and extremely violent. He became deeply disillusioned with his work: sceptical of the dogma and authoritarianism of the theologians and contemptuous of the casuistic triviality that characterized many of the debates in the academy. He decided that reason alone was inadequate for the construction of a coherent theology and that all the sceptical conclusions now forming in his mind were entirely contrary to the doctrines he publicly espoused and taught. More radically still, he began to doubt the testimony both of the senses and of reason itself, arguing that there might exist, beyond reason, ‘a higher authority, which would, upon its manifestation, show the judgement of reason to be invalid’.5 This intense travail of heart and mind began in July 1095 and lasted for about six months. Al-Ghazali then relinquished his professorship, saying he wished to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. He in fact turned again to Sufism in order to seek the truth, certainty and peace of mind for which he yearned. There followed eleven years of ascetic practice, meditation, wandering and pilgrimage interspersed with periods of teaching and writing, during which he came to a resolution of his doubts and formulated a theory of knowledge that enabled him to accept the pronouncements of the Koran. When he returned to Tus, meaning to live there in seclusion, he was urged back into the world of the academy for a time. In 1106 he established his own seminary at Tus and it was there that he died in 1111. Five years before his death he wrote an autobiography, Al-Munqidh rain al-Dalal (The Deliverer from Error). It includes a critical study of the philosophical methods of the time and advocates a fearless scrutiny of every form of knowledge. It describes how al-Ghazali had ‘poked into every dark recess [and] made an assault on every problem’ in his endeavour to separate the true from the false. In a vein of thought which, five hundred years later, through the writings of Descartes, was to become familiar in western philosophy, al-Ghazali declared that he wanted to construct all knowledge from a simple foundation of certitude.
His attack on the philosophers was mounted in two stages. The first stage, contained in his Makasid al-Falasifah (Intentions of the Philosophers), consists of a masterly exposition of their doctrines that is so thorough and careful a study that when its translated version reached Europe towards the end of the twelfth century it was taken to be the work of an Aristotelian peripatetic. In fact it was simply al-Ghazali’s propaedeutic to a detailed critical examination of the Arab philosophers who had worked so assiduously to blend Hellenic with Muslim thought. His critique proper is Tahafut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). In the Tahafut he makes a threefold classification of the philosophers into materialists, naturalists (or deists) and theists. The materialists are those who deny the existence of God and assert the eternal existence of the material universe. The deists are those who reason from the orderliness of the universe to the existence of God, but deny the immortality of the human soul. The theists, among whom al-Ghazali numbers Plato, Aristotle, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, are the main target of his attack; not because they are the most vulnerable to criticism but because in their own work they had successfully revealed the weaknesses of the materialists and deists (though without, in al-Ghazali’s opinion, providing any satisfactory replacement for their theories) and were therefore his most formidable opposition. In particular, al-Ghazali addresses himself to the work of Ibn Sina who, he felt, had subjugated the facts of religion to the speculative reasoning of metaphysics.6 At first sight al-Ghazali’s position may seem to be no more than a dogmatic assertion of faith, but he argues his claims with great philosophical acuity, maintaining that religious tenets are not of the kind that can be either proved or disproved and that they must be recognized as such.
One of al-Ghazali’s main objections to Ibn Sina’s philosophy is the latter’s espousal of the view that the world has existed eternally. Ibn Sina had deployed Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality to argue that God, in the bestowal of forms on matter, is eternally bringing potential existence into actual existence. This is entirely contrary to the teaching of the Koran, which states that the world was created out of nothing by an act of God at a definite time in the past and that it was accordingly not infinite but finite. As already mentioned, al-Ghazali maintained that neither the Koranic nor the philosophic position could be established by reason. Accordingly he sees no need to make a reasoned defence of the religious account and concentrates instead on the task of systematically undermining Ibn Sina’s arguments.
Another substantial target of al-Ghazali’s critical onslaught is the concept of causality. He points out that the Muslim philosophers had accepted without question the assumptions, derived from Greek philosophy, that every event has a cause and that causes necessitate their effects. But all that can be claimed from the evidence of experiments, he says, is, for example, that cotton burns at the time of its contact with fire; not because of the contact with fire. Thus the relationship that can be asserted between the cotton and the fire is one of concomitance rather than causality. The wider context of this issue of causality is a debate concerning the will of God in which the orthodox Islamic view was that the uniformity of nature was the consequence of God’s will rather than a causal necessity flowing from his essential nature. Here, as in everything, al-Ghazali’s interest is theological: his concern is to contest any philosophical theory that contradicts or undermines the dicta of the Koran.
A third major object of al-Ghazali’s critical scrutiny is Ibn Sina’s doctrine that God knows the terrestrial world only in a universal way and has no knowledge of its particularities and individuals. This doctrine is a component of Ibn Sina’s broader conception, again derived from Aristotle, of the cosmos as emanating necessarily from God. It stands in direct opposition to the Koranic view that God knows every detail of the cosmos and that he directs its every change by means of acts of his will. AlGhazali regards the doctrines of the eternity of the cosmos, the limitation of God’s knowledge to knowledge of universals, and his denial of the resurrection of the body as wholly irreligious. He regards a further seventeen of Ibn Sina’s conclusions as heretical and innovatory and charges him with, among other things, failing to prove the existence, unity, simplicity and incorporeality of God.
No exact dates can be given for al-Ghazali’s polemical writings against the philosophers. It is thought that he composed them during the eleven years of his wanderings. Subsequently he wrote a lengthy synthesis of his views, the Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences), a work which has exerted an enduring influence on the thought of Sunnite Islam. His return to Sufism should not be seen as an escape from intellectuality into irrationality. His path to mysticism was carved out with the tools of reason and philosophy, a procedure that produced a paradox that has been much noted by commentators: al-Ghazali first declares that philosophical reasoning is unable to procure certitude, and then proceeds to use reason as a compelling means to demolish the reasoning of philosophy.
Al-Ghazali’s mysticism is never of the pantheistic and frenzied kind for which some Sufis were condemned. He manages to remain within the bounds of traditional Islam while at the same time infusing it with a fresh spiritual vitality. He tried, it has been remarked, ‘to make mysticism orthodox and . . . orthodoxy mystical’.7 His success in this is largely due to his well-conceived accounts of God and of the knowledge that is possible for believers. He affirms the absolute unity and power of God and says: ‘The First Principle is an omnipotent and willing agent. He does what He wills and ordains as He likes, and He creates in whatever manner He wills.’8 Al-Ghazali’s God is both transcendent and immanent. His presence is manifest in the beauty of his creation and his creatures may commune with him in virtue of the possession of soul. The human soul, al-Ghazali maintains, is an attribute through which humankind resembles God in that ‘both God and soul are invisible, indivisible, unconfined by space and time and outside the categories of quantity and quality’.9 The soul animates and wills the life of the body, and is the means of communion with God.
A danger of this doctrine is that it makes the human soul too much like God, so that the whole picture becomes open to the charge of being pantheistic, even though al-Ghazali is at pains to point out a fundamental difference between the human and the divine, namely, that God is entirely self-subsistent while humanity is wholly dependent on his will. The issue is a difficult one, since the total dependence of the world on God, from moment to moment and in all its aspects, may also be construed as a form of pantheism. What seems to be the case is that al-Ghazali’s own religious experiences were characterized by a sense of mystical union with God and with his creation, but that he was also aware of the doctrinal hazards of translating such experience into a philosophical account of the nature of the cosmos. The tension between the need to insist on the transcendence of God and the need to declare God’s intimate involvement with the minutiae of the lives of every believer has its counterpart in al-Ghazali’s theory of knowledge. He writes of the gradual and laborious ascent by means of the study of the particular sciences, to a knowledge which is veiled and obscure in its otherness but which, once it begins to be revealed, has the directness and wholeness of Platonic noesis10 as well as the incontrovertible certainty that al-Ghazali sought.
Al-Ghazali’s refutations of the arguments of his predecessors did not go unchallenged. In the latter part of the twelfth century CE, the rationalist approach of the philosophers he had opposed was cogently defended by the Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Ibn Rushd was a dedicated Aristotelian. His answer to al-Ghazali’s Tahafut is contained in a substantial work, the Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of ‘The Incoherence’), in which he comments systematically on al-Ghazali’s criticisms and reasserts and argues for a broadly Aristotelian account of God and the cosmos. Numerous other philosophers and theologians joined the debate, engaging in it with remarkable energy and passion. Some regarded al-Ghazali’s Sufism as thoroughly misguided. At one time in Spain all his books were burned and possession of them was forbidden. In North Africa, in the twelfth century, it was ordered that all his writings be destroyed. As is ever the way in human affairs, the liveliness of the debate and the zeal with which it was conducted guaranteed a widespread interest in its every aspect. The interest has continued unabated into the twentieth century.
1 In Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, London, Longman, 1983, p. 18.
2 A Sufi is a Muslim mystic for whom the inward, devotional life is of great importance. The name is derived from the word for the white woollen clothing worn by these mystics (suf = coarse wool).
3 Sunni is the majority sect of Islam. Its teaching places reliance on the Koran, tradition and community ruling. In contrast, the Shi‘a sect emphasizes the importance of a line of rulers descended from Muhammad the Prophet.
4 In spite of al-Ghazali’s disillusion with this kind of conflict and his subsequent abdication from involvement in it, he remained and still remains a thinker who is fully accepted within the Sunni tradition.
5 Fakhry, op. cit., p. 210.
6 See the essay on Ibn Sina in this book, pp. 22–26.
7 In M.M. Sharif, A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. I, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1963–1966, p. 617.
8 In Sahib Ahmab Kamali (trans.), Tahafut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Lahore, Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1958, p. 88.
9 Claud Field (trans.), The Alchemy of Happiness (al-Ghazali’s Kimiya-i Sa‘adat), London, Murray, 1910.
10 Noesis is Plato’s term for the highest kind of knowledge. It is a direct, intuitive comprehension of universals, unsullied by the particularities of sense experience.
(Over seventy works attributed to al-Ghazali are extant in manuscript. Some of these attributions are thought to be incorrect.)
Kimiya-i Sa‘adat (The Alchemy of Happiness), trans. Claud Field, London, Murray, 1910
Tahafut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), trans. S.A. Kamali, Lahore, Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1958
Ihya Ulum al-Din: Selections (Revival of the Religious Sciences: Selections), trans. Muhtar Holland, London, Latimer New Dimensions, 1975
For a commentary on al-Ghazali see:
Watt, W. Montgomery, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1962; revised edn, 1987
Muhammad, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Iqbal
Fakhry, Majid, A History of Islamic Philosophy, London, Longman, 1983
Sharif, M.M., A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. I, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1963–1966
Ward, Keith, Images of Eternity, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987
Watt, W. Montgomery, Muslim Intellectual, A Study of al-Ghazali, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1963