2
Humanism and Islamic Ethics

Normative Islam develops in three phases: the Qurānic or scriptural phase; its elaboration in the adīth, that vast literature of sayings and doings ascribed to the Prophet; and the comprehensive system of law (fiqh), which adds new tributaries to the stream, drawing anew on the ancient floodplain of ethical and juridical culture that had from the outset fed the wellsprings of Islamic norms. The first section of this chapter aims to consider the shape that Islamic practical ethics takes under the impress of scripture, tradition, legal theory and practice, and theological theories of action. Having done that, I’d like to focus on two key thinkers. The first is the humanist ethical philosopher, historian, and courtier Amad ibn Muammad Miskawayh (ca. 932–1030), a learned and articulate exponent of falsafa and adab, the Islamic traditions of philosophy and literary culture. The second is the Sufi-inspired theologian, jurist, and philosophic critic of falsafa, al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), who spoke up as a friend of music in chapter 1. Ghazālī’s ethics builds systematically on Miskawayh’s work, but with telling revisions for the fate of Islamic humanism. A word or two first about Sufism, falsafa, kalām, and adab. That will lead us back to some thoughts about Qurān and adīth and their roles in framing the practical norms of Islam.

To committed Sufis, Islamic mysticism has seemed, since its inception in the contemplative practice of Muslim saints and their appropriation of the mystical traditions of their non-Muslim predecessors, to spring straight from the Qurān, the practice of the Prophet, and the life he ordained. Conceived as a meditative quest, Sufism, despite its motivating interest in direct acquaintance with the Divine, has been more a way of life than a way of knowing. Its conceptual and theoretical dimensions are ancillary to its steeply graded experiential pathways and its vivid, if dreamlike, visionary imagery. Sufis themselves, when they schematize their values, place praxis ahead of cognition. And Sufi practice, traditionally, has been communal rather than private. The practical bent and communal shape of Sufism have broadcast Islamic ideas and ideals far more widely than any sheerly speculative or doxastic system could be spread. The Sufi orders articulate and intensify an Islamic ethos, disseminated through channels of transmission and chains of authority that are at once literary and charismatic, transgenerational, and transcultural.

Falsafa, philosophy proper, was grounded in the Arabic translations of the great works of Greek philosophy and science sponsored by the Arab princes and potentates of the eighth to the tenth centuries.1 As the name suggests, falsafa was viewed as a foreign import, a Greek enterprise, although its findings, perspectives, even many of its methods were to be naturalized. The philosophical ideal of individual thought, of walking and working the highwire of metaphysics without a safety net, was just as foreign as the Greek language in the precincts of nascent Islamic traditionalism, and far more threatening. Yet falsafa. then as now, was attractive to independent spirits. Most of those drawn to it were confident that reason would lead them more surely by far, if less securely, to the very heights that religion sought—or higher, since religion offered ritual and symbolic surrogates of the truths that only a trusting commitment to untrammeled thought could fully and faithfully deliver.

Kalām, Islamic dialectical theology, was a long-lived endeavor, born, perhaps, in the intercommunal debates that followed the Islamic conquests. It continued on a massive scale among the hundreds of Islamic movements, sects, schisms, parties, factions, divisions, and opinions that reflect the diversity in backgrounds and commitments of the early adherents of Islam.2 It was Falsafa that branded kalām dialectical, meaning that it was anchored in stipulative premises extracted from an adversary or (even more suppositiously) from scripture. The mutakallimūn or practitioners of kalām, for their part, long distinguished themselves from the falāsifa, philosophers, by shunning the philosophers’ most powerful tool, Aristotelian syllogistic. Perhaps recognizing the naturalism implicit in Aristotle’s logical scheme, the mutakallimūn relied on hypothetical reasoning that often seemed suspiciously ad hoc. Their approach may hark back to the earlier, Stoic rejection of Peripatetic logic.3

Over the centuries the mutakallimūn carried their debates from a primitive yet conceptually radical and often exciting doggedness about core theological values to a pitch of high scholastic seriousness addressing a wide range of metaphysical and cosmological issues. The ramifications of these debates included sustained critical discussions of theistic subjectivism and objectivism, voluntarism and determinism, the sanctions and consequences of virtue and vice, obedience and sin, faith, and faithlessness. What emerged were sophisticated, if ultimately etiolated, discussions of moral epistemology and the anatomy of action.

Adab was the literary tradition of the secretarial or administrative class, the culture of the professional literati who looked past the lampoons and boasts, self-deprecations and self-vaunting of the desert poets to the more urbane values of the court and chancery. Arabic prose was their creation. Manners were their mores, and history was their meat. They loved style and relished wit, as we saw with Hamadhānī. They respected refinement and revered statesmanship. But they also had an eye for slumming and a taste for decadence. They knew how high a man could climb in the world, and how fast and far he could fall. Theirs was not the closed world of the Qurānic dispensation.

What then of the Qurān, the revelation vouchsafed to the Islamic prophet? Orphaned young and reaching maturity in the caravan town of Mecca in inland Arabia, Muammad (570–632) gained financial independence with his marriage to the merchant widow Khadājah. His meditations and his moral abhorrence of the rude ways of his contemporaries led him to visionary pronouncements of divine judgment, the first phase of a prophetic message modeled on the admonitions of the Hebrew prophets, whose imagery and idiom he adapted in his Arabic Qurān—that is, a Bible, an ecstatically received, liturgically recited revelation of God’s word.

The Islamic era is dated from 622, the year of the hijra, Muammad’s emigration from Mecca to the neighboring city of Yathrib, or Medina as it was later called. He was invited, as a spiritual figure, to mediate a tribal feud; but he became the leader of the place, suppressing its tribalized Jews and turning its formerly warring Arab factions against the caravan trade of Mecca, whose denizens had failed to follow his lead or heed his message. After the hijra the revelations become more legislative than sheerly hortatory. The visions of apocalypse gradually recede before the delineation of a society ruled under the dispensation of Islam.

Uniting his followers under the banner of their common faith and law, the Prophet made a triumphal reentry into Mecca, which sacred history pictures him as having fled. By the time of his death, just ten years after the hijra, he was the ruler of Arabia. His lieutenants, the khalīfahs, deputies and successors to the executive and military dimensions of his authority, rapidly brought to heel the fractious tribes who imagined that the Prophet’s death had somehow canceled their oaths of fealty. They then turned the united power of the armies of the faithful outward, stunningly overturning the immense Sassanian Persian empire and wresting Egypt and Syria from the Byzantines. Within a century of the Prophet’s death the tier of lands from the Indus and Central Asia to the Pyrenees had been brought under Islamic rule.

While Spain, in the course of seven centuries, would ultimately expel the Muslims, the rich lands of Byzantium, after centuries of siege, would finally be subdued. Sicily and much of the Balkans and India would be Islamized. Trade, slaving and missionarism—often hand in hand—extended the faith deep into Africa, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The government of all Islamic lands belonged in principle to the Commander of the Faithful, the khalīfah or caliph, the imām qualified to lead the people, defend the faith, and apply its laws. In practice the many rival and warring Islamic states were led by military governors, dynasts, ambitious vassals, court intriguers, freebooters, slave soldiers (mamlūks), and charismatics.

Despite the fanciful image of the oriental despot, Muslim princes and caliphs did not, of course, wield absolute power. They could be cruel and did exercise a wide discretion. But they were answerable not only to the claims of conscience but also in some measure to the Law, as interpreted by their judicial appointees and by the more independent of the ulamā, the religious scholars, whose preaching could powerfully move the populace. Muslim princes, like any others, had to answer, in a different sense, to the practical limits that constrain all political claims. They were subject to the pressures of rival rulers, tribal, sectarian, or ethnic rebels, and pretenders, often of their own kin, who might find powerful sponsors in the armies, the ministries, or the harem. Kingmakers might manipulate or depose the caliph or hold him in the harem, at once an ornament of legitimacy and a reproach to the very notion of an unbroken Islamic line.

In principle, Islamic Law, the Sharīa, was the proper law of any state that laid claim to the heritage of the Prophet. But tensions could hardly fail to arise between the demands of such a state and the ideals of the jurists and legal scholars. Scripture itself did not stand static and alone in that interaction. It was elaborated in systems of morals and codes of law that sought embodiment in the lives of the faithful. The resultant demands readily became maximal, in view of their divine source and sanction. Small wonder that rival dynasts claimed Islamic legitimacy or that charismatic rebels made claims of their own, often apocalyptic, pledging to restore and renew the primal faith that flourished in the days of Islam’s dramatic rise. Small wonder too, that the very identity of more than one Shīite pretender was sublimated, transforming a vanished imām into a cosmic figure or a hypostatic ideal.

Because the Prophet’s ecstatic visions and legislative oracles responded so powerfully, even violently, to what he saw around him, Qurānic ethics is often presumptive, in much the way that Qurānic narrative is allusive.4 Legislatively, the scriptural foundation will look open textured, like a constitution, ready to be filled in with concrete institutions. But the scope and reach of its claims gives the Qurān, like any other monotheistic scripture, an ethical fullness well beyond the sketchiness of mere rules in a law book.

Muammad’s scripturally inscribed moral vision is a distinctive hybrid of puritan revulsion and earthy permissions: Gambling, alcohol, fornication, and faithlessness are forbidden, anathema in God’s eyes. The heedless, who give the lie to the Prophet and reject God’s word, await bitter torments in the Hereafter. But believers are allowed four wives (provided they are treated fairly)—and unspecified concubines. Most of the Jewish dietary restrictions (except for the one on pork) are removed, aiding the Prophet in distinguishing Islam from the religion of the Jewish contemporaries among whom he had once sought followers. Of similar effect is the decision to face Mecca rather than Jerusalem in prayer. Muammad accommodates the indigenous Arab culture by retaining the Kaba as a sacred site, taking over the Arab pilgrim festivals and sacrifices, and even introducing into the Qurān verses, soon canceled, that acknowledge pagan goddesses.5 Never canceled was the peopling of the land with familiar spirits, the jinn.6 The biblical and rabbinic heritage remains evident in the scriptural and midrashic narratives of the Qurān and its laws of inheritance, prayer, charity, and adultery—which last, in Islam, requires four eyewitnesses to the overt act, in view of the gravity of the offense and its capital sanction.

The Qurān, to the believing Muslim, is revelation, God’s ipsissima verba, transmitted to his prophet by the angel Gabriel, capping and sealing the work of all prior prophets. It authenticates God’s earlier revelations and is vouched for by them. But should the followers of sister religions balk at the contents or the provenance of Muammad’s revelatory dicta, they are dismissed as scoffers and deniers. Any disparities between their scriptures and the Qurān result from ancient and impious tampering with the texts of revelation.

In the early days of kalām, the Mutazilite theologians adapted an old Stoic argument, claiming that God’s justice made revelation a moral necessity. The argument may have aimed at adversaries who rejected the very idea of special revelation. “Brahmins,” in the Muslim sources, are often said to have done just that. But the torque of the recast argument, like so much else in Mutazilism, came from theodicy: How could God (justly) punish or reward His servants without warning them of their duties and the consequences of their acts? Later mutakallimūn, of the Asharite school, plainly faced a different problematic. They were affronted at the notion that mere humans could assay God’s justice, let alone bind the Almighty to some human sense of duty. They denounced the voluntarist Mutazilites for making mere mortals the “creators” of their own acts. And they condemned as heresy the view that the Qurān was created at all. Borrowing from ancient Jewish notions of God’s eternal word or wisdom, as manifested in the Torah, and from the related Christian idea of an uncreated Christ, traditionalists framed an Islamic orthodoxy, in part by making the uncreated Qurān an article of faith.7 They too celebrated the Qurānic revelation but spoke of its eternity rather than its moral necessity.

The veneration for scripture attested by both sides in this bitter controversy is shared by all faithful Muslims.8 Against that background, one might imagine that fundamentalism would be a powerful force in Islam. But strictly speaking that expectation would be mistaken. Fundamentalism as we know it is a modern movement arising in the humanism of the European Renaissance and in the Protestant demand for clarity in theology, plainness in exegesis, and simplicity in Church norms. Fundamentalist biblicism reacted against what seemed overgrown and casuistical in canon law, allegorical interpretation, philosophical metaphysics, and scholastic theology. Even the fundamentalist notions of inerrancy and literalism are the reflex of modernist ideas of the plainness and openness of truth.

Islam, like Judaism and Catholic Christianity, did not reject its own post-scriptural elaborations but cherished them as organic supplements to revelation. Subtlety was not the enemy. The early faith, conceived as a pure and ascetic path, has been repeatedly brandished as a challenge to decadence, permissivism, tolerance of non-Muslims and of backsliders, and insufficient rigor in prosecuting the cause and fostering the spread of Islam. But Islamic militancy has not sought to separate the scriptural faith from its juridical elaboration. Falsafa may be condemned, but dogmatics is not rejected. Even when suspicious of the dialectic of kalām, Islamic theology has remained a scholastic enterprise. Literalism there has been, and simplicity has been an ideal, but the arbiters of practice have turned for guidance far more often to the adīth than to the Qurān.

Against the expectation that Islamic norms would simply flow from Qurān to adīth, and thence to the body of fiqh, we find the reverse. The Qurān retains the highest authority in principle, but the ultimate arbiter of practice, as Brannon Wheeler has shown, is not the highest but the most proximate authority. For “the authority of a canon,” as Wheeler puts it, “depends upon its traditional interpretation.”9 In the Islamic case: “The applicability and thus authority of the Qurān is fixed by the sunnah, the sunnah by the opinions [of the early jurists], and the opinions by subsequent scholarship.”10 That does not license an arbitrary manhandling of the sources. Far from it. Taking the anafī school as his model, Wheeler explains:

The anafī scholar does not interpret the revelation alone or even directly, but instead interprets how generations previous to him interpreted the revelation. . . . Using previous scholarship as examples of how to apply the revelation, the Hanafī scholar must compare the context in which the revelation was interpreted in precedented cases to distinguish what is specific to each of the cases from what the cases have in common. Through this type of reasoning, the anafī scholar induces a general principle of the revelation from the different precedented cases. . . .

Postclassical scholarship is primarily a pedagogic enterprise, teaching future Hanafī scholars the epistemological and methodological bases of the Hanafī school through a step-by-step commentary on how previous scholarship interpreted opinions. . . . This scholarship focuses upon the notion that the authority of a given definition of practice is less about the interpretation of the revelation than about being able to demonstrate that a given definition is justified in the light of earlier tradition11

The same is true, of course, mutatis mutandis, for Talmudic or American constitutional law. Impressions to the contrary are artifacts of analysis: The Constitution or the Torah oversees case law and in that broad sense explains it. But the principles that may warrant or inspire a law always underdetermine the concrete provisions of practice. The dictates of scripture itself will be understood, ultimately, in terms of day-to-day decisions.12

Consideration of the disciplines that foster Islamic norms prepares us to assay the content of those norms. For each of these disciplines affirms its own distinctive notion of reason and the reasonable. Reason in Islamic law, as in law everywhere, will mean analogy with precedent. In kalām it will mean dialectical, hypothetical inference, anchored in some seeming common ground. In falsafa reason will mean something more: rational intuition and its discursive exposition in syllogistic argument.13 But in adab reason will mean sound judgment, deference to experience, that is, to the history, learning, and wisdom of the nations, which Islamic civilization has inherited from its predecessors and made over in new form. And in Sufism, reason itself will be sublimated into a pietist sensibility that trumps the work of philosophy in framing the parameters of a culture.

Islamic Ethics in Theory and Practice

Like biblical Judaism, Qurānic Islam does not sharply distinguish between law and morals. Nor does it draw hard and fast lines between ritual symbolism, spiritual expression, and communal engagement. Like biblical Christianity, it places faith in the forefront of piety. Faith is a matter of trust, but even more, of allegiance. Addressing a community of believers—at first a beleaguered minority, later a triumphant authority—it envisions worship as a public exercise and adopts a legalist, rigorist tone in setting out its devotional requirements and ethical expectations, preferences, requirements, distastes, and prohibitions.

Unlike Marx, or even Plato in some moods, but like the scriptural ethics of Judaism and Christianity, Qurānic ethics does not countenance breach of its standards in pursuit of its aims. Unlike Aristotle or Nietzsche but like biblical ethics, Qurānic ethics is framed in a language of imperatives. Its primal aim is a way of life charted by divine commands. The scriptural law, as in Judaism, will define an ethos; but obedience to God’s commands is clearly an end in itself. That opens the door to a kind of legal positivism, which is to say, antirationalism, quite characteristic of scriptural legal systems. Not that Islamic ethics is everywhere inflexible in its development or that scriptural legislation in general is without its inner tensions. But, normatively speaking, the exceptions to scripturally sanctioned rules must be built into the rules themselves. Inner tensions must remain implicit, to be worked out by scholar/jurists, or (for moderns) the conscience of the morally sensitive or ritually scrupulous. The legislative challenge here is not one of adjusting communal norms in the face of new problems but of resolving apparent discrepancies—or submerging the problematics from which they arise.

Seeking to distill the ethos of the Qurān, Majid Fakhry focuses on birr, piety, godliness, or devotion, the one term “that expresses the moral and religious spirit of the Koran better than any other.”14 An oft quoted verse helps him to help delineate the aim:

It is not piety to turn your faces East or West. True piety is this: to believe in God and the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the Prophets, to give of one’s substance, out of love of Him, to kinsmen and orphans, the needy, the wayfarer and those who ask, to ransom slaves, keep up the prayers and pay the alms tax. It is those who keep their bond when they have given it and who bear with fortitude misfortune, hardship and danger—these are the faithful. These are the godfearing. (Qurān 2:177)15

Acts of righteousness and charity join with worship in giving faith and love of God their clearest expression.16 The immediate circumstances of the revelation highlight those actions that support the needs of the community and the claims of its leader. He presses the bivalent idea of piety, in a manner long precedented among the prophets of Israel,17 to urge his followers onward from ritual to spiritual, moral, and practical commitment. The proud generosity of the old Arab ideal is channeled to socially preferred and institutionally legitimated uses. It is no longer a noble abandon but a steadfast, even humble response to genuine need.18 The old Arab sense that life is transitory has become a righteous dread of final judgment. Earnestness replaces what Izutsu calls the desperate hedonism attested in the poetry of the Jāhiliyya. Loyalty to the nation of Islam displaces (or supervenes upon) tribal allegiance,19 The paramount commitment is to a covenant, a spiritual as well as social contract. God is now a party to every undertaking, and good faith means purity of intent, a conscience and consciousness open to His scrutiny.20 Courage has become steadfastness, and the long-suffering that we saw in Imru’ al-Qays is fortified no longer by bitter irony or sweet memories but by hope in visions of the hereafter.21

Obedience to God’s will is the clearest mark of faith. But faith itself is the Islamic way to salvation. The cardinal sin is kufr, faithlessness, unbelief, an ultimately unforgivable ingratitude for God’s manifold blessings. Unbelief is arrogance, collapse before the passions and caprices that blind the eyes to understanding and lead on to actual mockery of God’s revealed message.22

The Qurānic ideal of surrender to God’s sovereignty raises theological issues at the sensitive border crossing between the realms of divine and human action—issues that the Qurān itself only glancingly addresses. For the Qurān, as Montgomery Watt rightly notes, is not a work of systematic theology. Many of the problems that would vex the mutakallimūn were unseen by the Prophet, or far from the center of his visual field. The Qurānic rhetoric of divine immediacy, omnipresence and absolute control butts heads with the equally insistent stress on divine justice and human accountability. But the work of reconciling human choice with God’s decree is left to the divines. Their efforts meet with varying success. Often they testify more eloquently to the candor of the theologians’ commitments than to their skills at conceptual synthesis.23

Just as Islam did not stop at the original audience of the Qurān, Islamic ethical teachings do not keep to their Qurānic base. But theology was neither the first pathway nor the broadest avenue in their expansion. The medium of adīth allowed the appropriation and canonization of a wide range of folk and traditional materials, now heard from the mouth of the Prophet (whereas God was the speaker in the Qurān). Moral attitudes, advice, restrictions, and interpretations never voiced in the sacred text find expression here and acquire an authority second only to that of the Qurān itself.

The word adīth means literally a piece of news, a report of the sayings and doings of the Prophet and his circle, as relayed by his companions and the generations of traditionists. In practice, adīth was used to justify the regionally divergent practices of diverse schools of law, projecting back their usages into sacred history.24 So the repertoires of the great early collectors soon held hundreds of thousands of adīths. Winnowed to its tens of thousands, the corpus grew more manageable in bulk and thematically more coherent. The reports, gathered in collections of varying authority and classified by theme, became a source of ethical, juridical, and ritual exempla and precepts that is still studied for edification and outright implementation and emulation.25 Indeed, Sunnī Islam takes its name from the claim to orthodoxy embodied in the ideal of adhering to the practice (sunna) of the Prophet as discovered in the adīth. And Shīī Islam, while stressing the inherited charisma of its living or vanished leaders, also upholds the precedent of the Prophet and stoutly maintains its own body of adīths.

The adīth speaks in a welter voices. It is far from representing a cult of personality—unless allowance is made for the projection of a prophetic persona that is itself, in some measure, an artifact of the adīth. But adīth does frame an ethos expressive of the spirit of the Islamic community in its formative centuries. Individual items may echo the Gospels, Midrash, Gemara, Persian wisdom literature, or Arab proverbs of pre-Islamic days. But the nisus emergent from the processes of selection and elaboration is toward the puritan and the supererogatory: Rigor becomes an ideal at a level of detail that no revealed scripture acting alone could enunciate. The expressions of liberality or good humor assigned to the Prophet become striking marks of release of tension and self-demand. Pietist ideals take root and exfoliate, woven about the dicta and events of the Qurān. To borrow the image of a recent Talmudist, it is as if the new canon had introduced its own set of categories, making every act and experience a devotional occasion.

From the sea of the adīth it is impossible to extract a single essence, but the salt flavor of the whole does pervade every part. There are treatments of faith, knowledge, purification, hygiene (including how to wipe one’s shoes, trim one’s beard, and clean one’s teeth), prayer, funerals, charity, fasting, business, marrying, divorcing, freeing slaves, visiting the sick, paying debts of guilt and honor, making the pilgrimage, and fighting the holy war. Detailed prescriptions are given as to permitted and forbidden foods, clothing and ornaments, modes of address, sitting, standing, laughing, sneezing, yawning, and sexual congress. At the heart of ethics, Bukhārī’s collection reports the words of the Prophet: “None of you truly has faith if he does not desire for his brother what he desires for himself.” And again, “The Prophet of God said, ‘Help your brother Muslim, be he oppressor or oppressed.’ People asked, ‘Messenger of God, if he is oppressed we shall help him, but what if he be the oppressor?’ He replied: ‘Prevent him from oppressing.’” The adīth here looks back to the biblical and rabbinic formulations of the Golden Rule, but also ahead to political problems undreamed of by Muhammad. At no time is the Prophet found wanting in teachings of paramount import to the issues of the age.

The Qurān itself speaks to the issue of obedience to authority: “O ye who believe, obey God and obey his Messenger and those who hold command among you!” (Qurān 4:59). The theme is taken up in the adīth. Both Bukhārī and Muslim record the words so often ascribed to Muammad: “Whoever obeys me obeys God . . . Whoever obeys the Commander of the Faithful obeys me.” In the same vein: “Hear and obey, though an Abyssinian with a head like a raisin be placed over you.” But a tradition as rich and varied as the adīth will not leave even so categorical a command unqualified. So the caveat is heard, still in Muammad’s voice: “—But only so long as one is not ordered to disobey God.” Then “there is no hearing and no obeying.”

Sometimes the Prophetic persona adopts a world-weary tone. Authority, the Prophet advises, is “a good suckler but a poor weaner.” That’s gentler than Lord Acton’s saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it reflects a similar experience and responds by softening the strident call to obedience heard in the Qurān. The tension is readily blurred, but not so readily erased. Of course, the faith exhorts its followers to principle. But does that mean resistance to usurped authority? Or do the counsels of prudence join with realpolitik and the claims of peace, tipping the balance toward acquiescence? For the hadīth, government (al-sulān) is the shadow of God on earth; all of God’s servants who are downtrodden shall turn to it. When it is just it will be rewarded, and the flock must be grateful; when it is oppressive, the burden of its wrongdoing redounds to its own account, but the flock must bear it patiently. The sentiments smack of Hobbes—just as Asharite theologians sometimes sound like Calvin. For Calvin, like the Asharites, is protective of God’s sovereignty, and his theology is caught up in questions of grace. Hobbes, like the adīth, is transfixed by the horrors of civil war and anarchy. “If anyone sees something hateful in his commander,” the Prophet is made to say, “let him bear it patiently. For no one breaks with the community by even a handsbreadth without dying the death of the Jāhiliyya.” But then we read the iridescent advice: “If two caliphs are given the oath, kill the second!”

Standards like these left and still leave gaps wide enough to march armies through. Clearly they knit a network of norms that catch hold of the individual conscience and lace the communal ethos with a sense of resignation powerfully seconded by the predestinarian moment in the Qurān. But passive obedience is not the only possible response to thoughts of God’s omnipotence. “Kill the second!” puts a sharp edge on seeming docility.

Normatively there is no fatalism in Islam, if fatalism means thinking that human choices make no ultimate difference. Even the most predestinarian of Muslim theologians held vigorously to Qurānic accountability, the promise and the threat. That seemed to lay the fate of one’s immortal soul squarely in one’s own hands. Asharites saw the act of faith itself as a gift of grace and an outcome of God’s eternal plan. Even so, from a practical standpoint, the belief that God ordains all events is powerfully bivalent. It can urge acceptance but also formidable effort and resistance. All depends on what is seen as the working of God’s will. Theologians who called God the creator of our acts could readily explain that God acts through us—creating motion, sin, or sickness in us, not in Himself, yet acting all-powerfully nonetheless, as in the Qurānic (8:17) paradigm: “When you shot it was not you who shot but God.” We are accountable, the Asharites argued, because we appropriate a choice, not because we “make” it. We remain responsible, even if we do not “create” our actions. But—here is the hidden, distinctively medieval sting—each of us is responsible in his own sphere: Every one of you is a shepherd and must answer for his flock, the Prophet urges: the Imām for the people, a man for his household, a woman for her husband’s house and children, a slave for his master’s goods.

The Qurān (3:104) wraps many of its norms in the broad injunction to “ordain what is right and forbid what is wrong.” What is wrong here is called munkar, wicked, disreputable—literally, unspeakable (cf. the Latin nefas); what is right, ma rūf is just the opposite: proper, appropriate, respectable.26 Much of the militancy that has marked Islam stems from this sweeping Qurānic mandate in behalf of moral decency. For it is not the law alone that does the ordaining and forbidding. Rather, those who are subject to the law are commanded to do so, the community at large. The rub, as legal positivists would quickly stress, is that what counts as right and wrong is not textually defined but still presumptive here, as are the modalities of enforcement.

The Qurānic command, of course, was never abstract in practice. Over time, it was glossed concretely by the juridical schools, who, as we have seen, made the breaking up of musical instruments a paradigm case of what was called for. The open-ended demands of morals and the special expectations of custom, ritual, and propriety now acquire some of the force and stringency of legal statutes, and the law acquires some of the concreteness and open endedness of morals. The Islamic legal schools and traditions array themselves in the diversity of their understandings of just who is responsible for implementing the proper standards, how it is to be done, and how far public authorities and private individuals should press in this regard.

Energy in fulfilling the obligation to institute right and forbid wrong was (and in the most traditional Islamic circles remains) both a standard of legitimacy for governments and a rallying cry for dissent. Rebels found no sharper lance to fling against the states they deemed corrupt than the charge of failing to institute the canons of authentically Islamic practice. And the defenders of a regime found no stouter shield than an image of public piety. A widely cited adīth proclaims: “The highest form of holy war is speaking out truthfully before an unjust ruler, and being killed for it.”27 Admiring stories are told of those who died in this way. One such martyr, a goldsmith, was said to have appeared at the court of Abū Muslim (d. 755), the architect of the Abbāsid revolution, boldly denouncing the nascent regime. The moderate jurist Abū anīfa is pictured as warning the outspoken goldsmith that the obligation to ordain the right and forbid the wrong is a public charge, not one that an individual should attempt alone, since that would only mean throwing away one’s life. Rebels, Abū anīfa held, can cause more harm than good. The story may be a back-projection designed to explain why Abū anīfa did not himself speak out against what was later perceived, at least by the tellers of the tale, as a corrupt and corrupting polity. The fact is that there were rebel causes that Abū anīfa did approve. But even the quietist dictum ascribed to him, as Michael Cook points out, gave dissidents (or activists) the moral high ground:

What we see here is the presence, within the mainstream of Islamic thought, of a strikingly—not to say inconveniently—radical value: the principle that the executive power of the law of God is vested in each and every Muslim. Under this conception the individual believer as such has not only the right, but also the duty, to issue orders pursuant to God’s law, and to do what he can to see that they are obeyed. What is more, he may be issuing these orders to people who conspicuously outrank him in the prevailing hierarchy of social and political power.28

Even as a matter of theory the doctrine proved a powerful double edged sword, defending established regimes if they seemed to serve proper Muslim values but assailing regimes that seemed too lax or tolerant. And, of course, the doctrine was never a matter of sheer theory. It was often held forth as a standard for daily life. It was cited, for example, when Egyptian Islamic Jihād issued a fifty-four-page document entitled “The Neglected Duty,” aimed at justifying Anwar Sadat’s assassination.29 And, as with the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the doctrine was not confined to human targets or offending regimes. The anbalites, who took it most seriously, gave the Qurānic mandate to enforce the good and suppress wrongdoing concrete application in their war against the lute, the drum, and the unbūr, a kind of long-necked mandolin. They used it against wine and other forms of alcohol and against public fraternizing between the sexes. If a young man rode behind a woman or a druggist was seen chatting too freely with a woman customer, or a man divorced his wife but still lived with her, that became a matter for action and reproach. Chess and backgammon are targeted in Ibn anbal’s responsa, as are casual and hasty prayers, the display of images, exchanges of gossip or insults, even noisy and overzealous keening. Everyone, even a slave, must take action against the wrongs he sees: Passersby should break up a fight among boys in the street, and a wife should warn her husband that if he does not keep up his prayers she will pursue a divorce.

The adīth assigns the obligation to command the right and forbid the wrong to the hand, the tongue, or the heart. Ibn anbal prefers the more active of these interventions. He hopes that an unspoken mental condemnation of wrongdoing will satisfy the Qurānic demand; but speaking out is better, whether that means counsel, exhortation, censure, direct orders, or shouting at the wrongdoer. With one’s hands, one may smash musical instruments and wine bottles, overturn chessboards and scatter the pieces, evict an ex-wife, threaten or beat a youthful offender. But Ibn anbal draws the line at swords or other weapons, and he cautions those who contemplate coming to blows with adult offenders with the one word reminder, al-rifq, civility!30

Fear for one’s personal safety can legitimately keep fulfillment of the obligation pent up “in the heart.” But one should not hesitate to seek the help of neighbors, if singing, for example, is persistent. Nor should one be afraid of insults, or of making a scene. The burden of civility, in that case seems to fall on the offenders. But there are bounds of privacy. One doesn’t (like some zealots) climb over walls to surprise neighborhood sinners. But if one sees liquor in a jug while visiting a friend’s house, one really ought to spoil it, by pouring in salt. Musical instruments left in plain sight should be destroyed, but concealed ones are the subject of various opinions, rather like our own divergent laws about concealed and displayed weapons.31

The early anbalites, Cook notes, did not typically go about reviling or assaulting Mutazilite preachers or raiding brothels. Still less did they take on the authorities. A militant but hardly ascendant minority, they kept their heads down. Ibn anbal’s advice was to stay clear of the ruler, since “his sword is unsheathed.”32 Only rarely does this jurist endorse attempts to enlist the state in a campaign for decency—perhaps in opposing the use of frogs or mice as bait, but not in most other cases. Even an incorrigible wrongdoer should be turned in only if one knows that the authorities will apply the statutory penalties and not overreact, as they so often seemed to do.33

Later anbalites swung like a pendulum between the private activism of the master and the Savonarola-like exploits of Barbahārī (d. 941) and his successors, who harassed the Baghdad populace for two and a half centuries, into the Būyid and Seljūq eras, only gradually relaxing their vigilance as the anbalites came in time to better terms with the state. Ibn al-Jawzī, for example, tones down Ghazālī’s activism, requiring government permission before resorting to threats or blows or vigilante action to enforce the standards of decency. Where Ghazālī had commended outspoken censure of slack rulers, Ibn al-Jawzī speaks for tact, arguing that harsh or rude criticism will only provoke its targets and entrench their attitudes.34

Ibn Taymiyyah, citing the Qurānic (2:217) dictum that fitnah, seditious intrigue, is a graver offense than mortal combat, argued that the Islamic state has a divine mandate to suppress unbelievers who obstruct its purposes. Jihād here becomes part of the duty to command right and forbid wrong, a notion pursued today by the bloody minions of bin Laden. The goal in any just war, Ibn Taymiyyah holds, is to establish God’s will—as he puts it, to render all judgment unto God.35 The same broad mandate applies in civil affairs, extending, as one modern commentator explains, to “the legislative, judicial and economic affairs of the Community” and to “its religious and moral life.”36 For Ibn Taymiyyah, that means the excommunication of heretics, astrologers, slackers, and, of course, Sufis who ape Christian practice by venerating the graves of their departed saints. The Fāimid regime in Egypt came in for particular condemnation, not only for holding heretical views but also for appointing non-Muslim state officials and fostering an atmosphere in which intercommunal celebrations and cross-cultural contacts were all too close, and syncretic influences, all too evident. The remedy, Ibn Taymiyyah argued, was strict enforcement of the so-called Pact of Umar, under which Jews and Christians, as People of the Book, are to be humiliated, albeit not oppressed—protected, but never suffered to forget their abased and inferior status.37

Ibn Taymiyyah does weigh the obligation to activism against the risks. He often seems to favor leaving enforcement to the authorities, political, spiritual, or intellectual. But power brings responsibility. The energy and efficiency that leaders show in enforcing public and private decency will bolster or undermine their legitimacy in the eyes of the pious.38 That thought has not been far from the minds of such modern claimants to Islamic authority as the Wahhābite founders of the present Saudi regime, the ālibān in Afghanistan, and the Ayatollahs in Iran.39 It was the Afghan Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice that shut down the Kabul office of Shelter Now, a Christian aid organization, and arrested its workers on capital charges of promoting a religion other than Islam.40

None of the first four caliphs, writes the jurist al-Māwardī (d. 1058), needed courts of equity. In their day, he explains, the faith was strong; mere admonitions sufficed to halt wrongdoing—aided, in the case of wild beduins, perhaps, with a little strong-arming. But as Islamic society grew larger and more complex and outrages by the great against the small became more frequent, equity courts were established, with their judges, jurisconsults, guards and bailiffs, scribes, and witnesses. The statutory penalties were exacted for apostasy, fornication, theft, wine-drinking, and other offenses. But even the rise of institutional law and order did not exempt the rank and file from their Qurānic charge to command what is right and forbid what is wrong. To speak out or take action against individual wrongdoers is the duty of every competent witness. Where the wrongdoing is by a group or is in some sense socially sanctioned, Māwardī explains, most authorities advise discretion: Seek allies, do not squander your life in bootless effort. Bide your time, but countenance nothing that you are capable of ending.41

In the same spirit al-Juwaynī (d. 1085), Ghazālī’s teacher, classed the obligation to require fit behavior as a public one: Where the wrongdoing is flagrant, the duty to put a stop to it, by word or deed, falls on everyone, as the Sharīa has by now long held. Where a legal ruling is required, the scholars and jurists must act. But at a level of finer detail, a well-ordered society will have suitable officials in every marketplace, to whom it delegates the communal responsibility to enforce decency.42

Such an official is called the mutasib, literally the censor (from the Arabic for counting), a man of upright and incorruptible character, fit to serve as the tongue of the qāī, as Ibn Abdūn puts it (ca. 1100).43 The mutasib’s task is to ensure that what can be mended need not be endured: He sees that beggars are kept from the mosque and that no beast is left to foul its entrance. He regulates schoolmasters and the discipline they mete out. He polices the cemeteries against drinking, depravity, and lovers’ trysts. He keeps storytellers and other disreputables out of people’s homes, ensures that milk is sold only by honest people, undiluted, and from wooden or crockery vessels, not copper, lest it be tainted by verdigris. He sees that market vegetables are washed in the river, not ponds or pools, that poultry are put up for sale with the tails plucked, and rabbits, skinned—to show at a glance what is fresh or spoiled. He sees to it that eggs are tested when sold; abattoirs, enclosed and sanitary, with proper records of the ownership of slaughtered beasts. His inspections should ensure that market women do not turn town gardens into brothels. He must regulate the sale of grapes, lest they be used for wine, and must oversee the professions, especially medicine, to keep its practice clear of impostors. He must see to it that the baths and bathmen too, are covered up, that no Muslim gives a massage to a Jew or Christian, or does menial work for one. The mutasib must ensure that Muslim women are not debauched in churches, those dens of wine and fornication, that Jews butcher no meat for Muslims (although they say the name of God in the act of slaughter as the Sharīa requires), that Christian priests are circumcised—by force if necessary, since they are hypocrites to profess the sunna of Jesus yet go about uncircumcised.

Villagers must have their long hair cut or shaved on coming into town, and country youths must be disarmed. Church bells may not sound in Muslim territory, and learned books may not be sold to Jews or Christians. Usury must be suppressed, and foreign currency kept from circulation—lest it cause inflation of the legal tender. Schools must be managed by men of proven piety; and daggers (the handguns of the day), banned from manufacture: “for no one buys them but ruffians, good for nothings, and wicked men.” Prostitutes from licensed houses (a telling admission this, in view of the Qurānic outrage against fornication) must wear veils when they go out and must be kept from teaching their wiles to married women and from attending wedding parties, even when invited. Catamites must be expelled from the city. Christians, Jews, tax farmers, and police agents must be identifiable by their dress and not allowed to dress as dignitaries. And the dhimmīs, as we have seen, must wear a special badge to distinguish and disgrace them as “the party of Satan” (Ibn Abdūn cites Qurān 58:20). Boxing and martial arts must be barred to boys, since they foment quarrels; and frivolities like chess and backgammon, to everyone, since they are forms of gambling and, as we have learned, distractions from the thought of God and our ultimate destiny.

It is the mutasib’s job (somehow) to prevent anal intercourse and other wicked practices and to see that the Qurānic demand for public humiliation of the tolerated minorities is implemented institutionally—much as we might delegate to a special office some of our concerns about equal opportunity or nondiscrimination. Fair trade, public health and safety, and private propriety all fall under the same general heading. The idea that personal morals or private dealings somehow escape the reach of law, or the detailed requirements and regulations derived from the unwritten spirit of the law, is clearly foreign to the principles and tenor of Islam—as it is in most traditional polities. But Ibn Abdūn’s somewhat idealized job description testifies to the variety of abuses, ranging from privilege and peccadillos to open or secret outrages against public piety that Islam cast into the shadow between normative perfection and day-to-day experience.

Ethics takes on a more speculative cast in the works of the mutakallimūn, the Sufis, and, of course, the falāsifa. Kalām, for its part, is less concerned with the morals of positive prescription than with the philosophy of action, metaethics—that is, the metaphysic of morals—and the underlying issues of theodicy. Many a mutakallim was a faqīh or jurisprude, but of all the speculative thinkers of Islam only Sarakhsī was a mutasib. He wrote on literature, geography, and art history, on music, as we have mentioned, and on the history of the star-worshiping Sabians, among many other subjects, including apparently two works on fraud. Those last are germane to his government post. But he held it for less than a year before falling out of favor.44 Issues of normative ethics were generally left to the legal schools, where they did not typically elicit the conflicts of metaphysical values that spurred the theologians to action as dialecticians. But kalām disquisitions on the theory of action remain fascinating today, even to philosophers who do not share the motivating theological itch of the mutakallimūn.45

Although the Mutazilites were hardly liberals, their kalām is, in many ways, a form of humanism. For it preserves human free will and deems human reason competent to judge justice and injustice, even on God’s part. On both counts the Mutazilite outlook was found objectionable by the defenders of tradition: Human ideas of right and wrong were mere opinion. Better to trust God’s good pleasure or steady custom than a will-o’-the-wisp like human moral notions.46 And voluntarism was an affront to divine sovereignty. How could a human choose between faith or faithlessness, when the faith that promises salvation could only come by grace? In a characteristic twist of terms, the Asharites called their adversaries fatalists (qadariyya), on the grounds that their affirmations of human freedom and moral judgment in effect tied God’s hands. Real voluntarism was focused on God’s freedom.

The Mutazilites, and the falāsifa in turn, could readily retort that the Asharites made God an arbitrary despot. Indeed there is some evidence that Asharite theology was influenced by a desire not to provoke quarrels with constituted authority.47 But other values were at stake as well. Abū l-asan al-Asharī (873/4–932) founded the school in theological reaction to the Mutazilite doctrine in which he had been trained and for which he had debated publicly for years before his conversion to the legalism of Amad b. anbal and to the theological orthodoxy that his own views helped constitute.48 He and his followers saw Mutazilite theodicy, which deduced God’s actions and requitals from the a priori given of His goodness, as pollyannaish, a refusal to take seriously the fact of natural evil. In arguing for God’s freedom to act and choose at His pleasure, they too, in their own way, were defending human moral perceptions. For to free God’s will from human moral notions was also to maintain the internal integrity of those notions: God need not hew to human standards, but we need not pretend that all is well by those standards. Thus the Asharites refused to discover concealed goods behind every apparent evil and held fast by a kind of positivity about the way the world is. For centuries, with varying intent, they argued (even sparring with the great Asharite Ghazālī) to show that this world of ours is not the best that was in God’s power to make—or why would the air of the Damascus basin be so impossibly polluted?49 Even as regards naturalism, the Asharites make welcome contributions. For it was Asharite voluntarism, as applied to God, not humankind, that motivated Ghazālī’s critique of the Neoplatonic rationalists’ deductivism about causality. That critique may have undercut causal necessity, but it also fostered the idea of a more open universe and a more empiric notion of discovery than was known to the falāsifa.50

Regrettably, what stuck in the minds of Ghazālī’s readers through the centuries, however, was not the potential he left behind for the opening of the universe but the rhetorical emphasis on God’s ultimate causality, at the expense of proximate causes. Orientalists, influenced by Averroes’s riposte to Ghazālī in behalf of naturalism, tend to read Ghazālī’s critique as an outright dismissal of causal judgments. And some Muslim extremists even try to put such a dismissal to practical (or pedagogical) effect. Thus Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist from Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, complains that educational guidelines once issued by the Institute for Policy Studies in Pakistan urged that physical effects should not be ascribed to natural causes: “You were supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created.”51

The Mutazilites held that human beings act and choose by God-given powers—thus that we are justly held accountable for our acts. Naturally the doctrine commends itself to moralists. It was complemented by a sophisticated theory of degrees of freedom: Our choices may limit (or enhance) our future effectiveness and capabilities for choice. A development of Stoic theory, this Mutazilite thesis about natural accountability was prominently used by Jewish philosophical ethicists including Saadiah and Maimonides.52

The Asharites conceded that we act by capacities, scotching the Aristotelian objection that an act for which one has no capacity must be impossible. But capacities, on the Asharite account, are created by God at the very moment of the action. They have no prior existence (as mere dispositions or unactualized potentialities), and they are not polyvalent. If the capacity for an action predated the act, Asharī argued, then the act would already have taken place. And if capacities were polyvalent, they would yield opposing acts.

Grounded in a strikingly Megarian insistence that only the actual is real, Asharī’s dogged counteroffensive against human voluntarism and moral objectivism never quite loses its ad hoc tang. But a welcome by-product was a kind of behaviorism that put a brake on spiritual militancy: The Khārijite predecessors of the Mutazilites had denied that grave sinners could be faithful Muslims; as renegades, they must be slain in this world and damned in the next. The Mutazilites balked at that extreme and sought a middle ground on the vexed question of the salvation of sinners—again a stance fraught with political meaning. But in the days of Mutazilite ascendancy, traditionalists had found themselves beset by a kind of inquisition, the notorious Mina, which sought to gauge the authenticity of their Islam. The Asharites responded with the doctrine that human inferences from overt actions to the crucial matter of inner faith, once again, would tie God’s hands, arbitrarily restraining the dispensation of His grace. Since capacities are coterminous with acts, they argued, a person can be judged humanly only for what he has actually done.

Mutazilites might urge that dispositional predicates are well attested in the Qurān, as when the daughter of Shuayb (the biblical Jethro) describes Moses as “strong and faithful” (28:26). But Asharī responds that Shuayb (“the Teacher of the Prophets” in Islamic tradition) did not let her words pass without reproof but immediately objected: “Daughter, you know his strength from what you have seen of him”—for Moses had watered their flock, unfazed by the shepherds whose presence had intimidated the young girl—“but how do you know that he is faithful?” She answered, fittingly, that Moses had said (28:25), “Walk behind me and direct me.” He was so pure that he feared to see her figure outlined by the wind if she walked ahead to lead the way. So the virtuous maiden judged only what she had seen.53

The fanciful supplements to the austere Qurānic narrative, pinned midrashically to the otherwise puzzling “Walk ahead and lead me,” are introduced here by Asharī solely to support the behaviorism on which the theology of salvation seemed to rest: A simple profession of faith (“There is no god but God, and Muammad is His prophet”) suffices, as Ghazālī puts it, to “save the necks” of those who utter it. We cannot “pry open the hearts” of those who profess the faith, to test the sincerity of their conviction. Verbal conformity is enough. The higher or deeper levels of faith, beyond or beneath the outer husk of lip service will be judged by God alone.54

Sufism develops a dialectical duality of its own, not between voluntarism and predestination but between expansiveness (inbisā) and constraint (inqibā). The poles here are a sense of elation that seems to engulf the cosmos and a sense of anguish, shrinking and depression bordering on self-extinction. Such moods occur naturally, of course. But they are heightened or deepened by the meditative exercises of tasawwuf (Sufi practice). Here arise the rival Sufi life-styles (and theologies) classically described as drunken or sober. Sober Sufism seeks a discipline to curb the conflicting extremes and map the proper place of each along the upward path of Sufi states. It puts each mood to work to set a limit to the other and assign its proper measure. But the intoxicated tradition is no lover of means and moderation. The extreme it seeks, as we have seen, is no mere dying unto self and rebirth to eternal life in God but a dissolution of the boundaries between self and God. Here pantheism takes on the colorations not of a Wordsworthian naturalism but of that deeper immanentism that the heresiographers call incarnationist: The object is not contact or communion but fusion of identities with God.

Mysticism may be personalist in its Hellenistic and romantic phases, but the ancient forerunners and medieval heirs of the tradition organized their quest on communal and corporate lines—Sufi orders in the Islamic case, following the rule and example of charismatic leaders and the train of their successors, a classic routinization of charisma. The Sufi orders pursue a nexus of activities ranging from the dhikr and samā, with their meditative repetitions of the names and epithets of God, often accompanied by the whirling, vertiginous dancing of the dervishes, to the feats of self-mortification and wonder-working of the faqīr (literally, mendicant), to the exploits of militant and military orders, to the missionary outreach that spread Islam deep into Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, far beyond the reach of the original Arab armies of conquest.55

For many Sufis the use of hashish was not excluded. Nor did the metaphysical construction placed on inbisā exclude an urge to flout established norms, rebelliously mocking the pervasive, highly structured societal controls. Sufi art and poetry, as we have seen, are enthralled with the symbolic impact of wine, and of gazing at the face of the beloved, figured in poetry and painting as a moon that reflects a still more perfect light. Wine drinking and the sublimated or not so sublimated practice of gazing into the faces of beardless acolytes might signify ecstatic abandon, or serve as a focal point of poetic paradox and ambiguity. But even when such acts became sensuous excursions into libertinage, they might still claim the license of a higher truth and privilege of a higher station. Puritans would fulminate, but they never did wholly put a stop to the abuses or quench the lambent aura of sanctity projected on such semiotically freighted acts—any more than they succeeded in halting all veneration at the shrines of Sufi saints.

Ghazālī spoke for sober Sufism in the institutional and intellectual mainstream of Islam. His guiding lights took Sufi themes in a pietist direction, where mystic monism grounded a life of reliance upon God. Thus Ghazālī argues in his Iyā’ Ulūm al-Dīn, Reviving the Religious Sciences, that the highest monotheism—kernel of the kernel, as he puts it—sees nothing in existence but God.56 Makkī had pioneered in drawing the ethical implications from this sort of monism, which was taught by the great teachers of sober Sufism, al-Junayd (d. 910) and al-Muāsibī (781–857):57

Junayd relates on the authority of Yayā b. Abū Kathīr: It is written in the Torah, “Cursed is he whose trust is in a creature no better than himself” (cf. Ps 118·8). Junayd says that this applies to anyone who says, ‘If it hadn’t been for so and so I’d have died.’ It is said that for a man to say, ‘If things hadn’t worked out as they did—’ is idolatry. And it is said, “Many a time has ‘If only—’ begun the work of the Devil.” . . . If you trust God as He ought to be trusted, God will provide for you as He does for the birds that start out each day empty and return full. The hills will shower you with their bounty. Jesus said, “Behold the birds of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, neither do they store away, yet God provides for them day by day” (Matthew 6:27).58

As the promiscuous quotations from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources reveal, Makkī’s is a cosmopolitan pietism. Its themes are borne along not only by Ghazālī but by Bayā ibn Paqūda59 and numberless other Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics for whom the ideal of self-surrender gives a practical meaning to the sense of unity that monistic mystics experience. The idea is close to the heart of Islam. For it means giving over one’s will to God’s plan, resigning all desires, hopes and fears, with perfect acceptance and implicit trust in God’s grace.

Among the philosophers proper of Islam, the falāsifa,60 we find a vibrant interest in ethics, especially in the earlier members of the school, before logic and metaphysics come fully to the fore in the more systematic thinkers. Kindī steps gingerly into ethical philosophy by way of a psychological prescription against anxiety and grief, with the Platonizing advice to attach one’s desires only to the permanent, intellectual goods, which alone are ever truly ours.61 That intellectualist advice stands in striking contrast to the counsels that the mystic pietists were giving at the same time about the proper focus of human hopes and longings. And yet there is more than a passing family resemblance between these two expressions of ethical otherworldliness.

The independent minded Rāzī (d. 925 or 932), like Kindī a physician, re-reduces the ethical counsels of Plato toward a somewhat ascetic Epicureanism, urging that to maximize pleasure is to minimize desire.62 Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes, the three greatest philosophers of Islam, develop the ethics of Aristotle and the politics of Plato against the cosmological backdrop of the spheres, the physiology of the humors, and the psychology of rational cognition. But the ethical contributions of these men are eclipsed by their larger achievements in metaphysics and logic and, in Fārābī’s case, by a sophisticated philosophy of language and culture, in Averroes by a magisterial philosophy of nature, and in Avicenna by a powerful synthesis of Greek rationalism with Islamic mysticism. The best ethical work by a Muslim thinker in the classical age came from the hands of the courtier philosopher and historian Miskawayh, whom we shall encounter again when we turn, in our final chapter, to the emergence of Arabic universal history. Miskawayh is of special relevance to this volume’s theme, since he was the most explicit and self-conscious exponent of philosophical humanism in Islam.

Miskawayh’s Courtly Humanism

In 945 the caliphs of Baghdad fell under the control of Buyid dynasts risen from the ranks of the Daylamite soldiery. The century that followed climaxed a period of fragmentation for the no-longer-young Islamic state. But it was also an era when ambitious princes and wazīrs sought the patina of a higher culture and the trappings of stability through patronage of poets, painters, scholars, scientists, and philosophers. Commercial and administrative skill, military prowess and discipline were avenues to fortune. Such worldly virtues were widely prized, even as pietism and traditionalism were framing a response. The individualism, occasional secularism, rare skepticism, and even rarer liberalism to be found among the pensioners of the Islamic courts support comparisons of the era to the European Renaissances of the twelfth century and beyond.63 Underscoring the parallel is the systematization of Arabic and Islamic studies during the period. The catalysts and often the seeds for thought in both eras were translated texts of Greek philosophic, scientific, and technical works.

Thinkers trained in Arabic letters and in the Greek sciences laid open by the translation movement took Aristotle seriously. But they were also imbued with the values of the court, the chancery, and the military camp. Theirs was the culture of adab, the literature of courtesy and urbanity. Secular values—the distillate of Hellenistic, old Persian, Arab, Byzantine, Jewish, and Syriac traditions, with a leaven of Indian fable and the vivid naturalism of Chinese portraiture and figure painting64 for critical distance—stood alongside the law and faith of Islam and, like the philosophic outlook of the Greek teachers, claimed the power of interpreting and judging it. The philosophers of the period, a small group, many of them friends, colleagues, rivals, master and disciple, freely invoked a humanistic ethical discourse and ideal. Among the most articulate and long lived (he lived a century by Muslim count), was Miskawayh, described by Khalidi as “a prolific author, a philosopher of very broad interests, an accomplished poet and adīb, as well as a universal historian.”65 His On the Refinement of Character has been called “the most influential work on philosophical ethics” in Islam.66 But the influence takes a curiously underground route: Miskawayh’s ethics were substantially taken over by Ghazālī, whose polemic against Neoplatonic Aristotelianism in Islam, The Incoherence of the Philosophers and monumental Iyā Ulūm al-Dīn led to his being called the Proof of Islam in traditional Islamic circles. The Iyā, a spiritualizing summa that draws on many sources, leans heavily on Miskawayh for its treatment of the virtues. But the slant is altered tellingly.

Miskawayh was born in Rayy near present day Tehran; he died at Isfahan. His ancestors were Zoroastrian Persians. The scion of a wealthy family, he lost his father when young and got on poorly with his stepfather, who was much younger than his mother.67 Like Fārābī and the Sincere Brethren of Basra, Miskawayh was a Shīite. His patrons were Shīite princes and potentates, and he wrote in a Shīite vein, with respectful reference to the person of Alī. He was also a vocal advocate of Persian culture in its struggle with Arab hegemony.

While still in his teens Miskawayh came to Baghdad. He entered the service of the wazīr al-Muallabī, a self-made man of ancient Arab family, who was now a bilingual maecenas known for his wit and culture, and who sought to recapture the glories of the fabled Abbāsid court in Būyid Baghdad. The patron of Abū l-Faraj al-Isfahānī (897–967), author of the celebrated Book of Songs, in which were gathered so much of the old Arabic culture and tradition, Muallabī was a poet and prosodist in his own right. His well-placed benefactions, in Miskawayh’s words, “gave new life to forgotten sciences.”

Working by day in the chancery, Miskawayh joined the wazīr’s salons by night. Here in the wazīr’s palace, with its gardens overlooking the Tigris, where eminent qaīs and other worthies regularly lost themselves amidst the song girls, poetry, and wine, Miskawayh dazzled the assembled literati with his learning. Hard as he worked and played, he was intent on broadening his range. He was immersed in poetry from an early age; now he studied the History of abarī, under the tutelage of the qaī Ibn Kāmil, a pupil of the author.68

After his patron’s death in 963, Miskawayh returned to Rayy as librarian and boon companion to the wazīr Ibn al-Amīd, a scholar statesman and warrior whom he calls the Chief Ustadh. Miskawayh remained at his side “day and night” for seven years. Rayy was known as a center of learning, prosperous, well fed, and well watered. Maqdisī, the historical encyclopedist, praises even its police.69 The poet Mutanabbī called Ibn al-Amīd “an Arab in speech, a philosopher in judgment, a Persian in manners.”70 He was also proud, selfish, temperamental, and power hungry. Miskawayh admired his vast memory, his erudition in philosophy and poetry, his skill in art, verse and engineering, tactics, and administration. Treasured for his command of the ancient sciences, Miskawayh taught the wazīr’s son Abū l-Fat and presided over some hundred camel loads (twenty to fifty tons) of manuscript folios. After his palace was sacked by Khurasanian raiders, Ibn al-Amīd was left for the time without a chair to sit on or water jug to drink from and had to get by with borrowed furniture and bedding. But his face lighted up when he learned that his books were intact: “All my treasures,” he told Miskawayh, “can be replaced but these.”71

In the wazīr’s great library, Miskawayh delved into the works of the Muslim philosophers—Kindī, Rāzī, and Fārābī—and the translations of their Greek predecessors. He read Plato and Aristotle, Porphyry, Simplicius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias. Philosophy joined hands with literary and historical studies in Miskawayh’s enlarged conception of the culture of the adīb. And the talented wazīr’s skills with siege engines, flaming arrows, long distance burning glasses and the like, along with the more civil machinery of administration, gave Miskawayh a living model for his vision of the ideal man, who would unite thought with action, grace, and effectual power.72

Ibn al-Amīd, died in 970, and Miskawayh stayed on in the service of Abū l-Fat, who at twenty-three succeeded his father. Although dubbed the “Doubly Competent,” for his mastery of the arts of war and peace, Abū l-Fat showed a decadence and extravagance disturbing to his teacher. By 976 the young man had been deposed and imprisoned. His sovereign Rukn al-Dawla died in the same year, and Miskawayh returned to Baghdad in the service of the new ruler, the greatest of the Buyids, Aud al-Dawla, who was intent on rebuilding and enlarging the fortunes of his house.

As a court favorite, Miskawayh traveled with the ruler in the field and on embassies in his behalf. In 978 he was sent with a treasurer to inventory the goods of a fortress taken from the rival amdānids, which had been betrayed by its venal officers. Ordered to honor the turncoats and humiliate the captured slave commander, one āshtam, Miskawayh balked. He was moved by āshtam’s character and piety and pleaded with his prince to take the captive into his own service, for the prince had promised not to harm the man. But Aud al-Dawla argued that many more forts remained to be reduced; it would not do to favor foes the same as helpers. āshtam, he insisted, was rightly paraded in disgrace before the holdouts, to scotch any pretense that the fortress was still unconquered. The policy was not unprecedented. Muwaffaq the brother of the caliph Mutamid, had similarly displayed the captive leaders who had held out in the Zanj slave rebellion of 870–83, as Miskawayh well knew from abarī’s History. Reminding Miskawayh that he had promised only that āshtam would not suffer at his hands, not that he would protect him from all others, Aud al-Dawla sent him back to the master he had served so loyally, and as all three men knew, to certain death at the amdānid’s decree. Neither a Metternich nor a martyr, Miskawayh ruefully acquiesced.73 The booty of the fortress came to twenty million dirhems.

Aud al-Dawla founded a hospital at Baghdad in 982, and Miskawayh took advantage of the physicians assembled there to master the art of medicine, which he had probably first studied in Ibn al-Amīd’s library. Still serving as a librarian and sometime confidant and secretary to the ruler, he began the universal history that he would dedicate to Aud al-Dawla.74 When that ruler died in 983, Miskawayh is said to have gone into hiding, under the protection of his friend and trusted guide in philosophy, the physician asan ibn Suwār (d. 1017), known as Ibn al-Khammār. Tawīdī takes credit for lending him some philosophical works at this time, and Miskawayh seems to have found solace in philosophy, after losing his positions of greatest influence. He went on to serve Aud al-Dawla’s son amām al-Dawla, and after his death, his fractious brother, Sharaf al-Dawla, and his successor Bahā’ al-Dawla, who died in 1012. Finally, with a group of friends, he joined the entourage of the Khwarizmshah, ruler of Khiva on the Oxus, as a court physician.

Here he completed his history and composed what F. E. Peters calls “the first systematic rethinking of a humanistic ethic since the Stoics left off the task in the second Christian century.”75 His standing in ethics was hard won. For by his own account he had to overcome the sensuous and cynical values of the court and culture in which he had come of age, the same culture in which Avicenna was now coming to maturity. But the story that Miskawayh answered the young man’s disrespect by picking up a copy of The Refinement of Character and throwing it at him seems out of character for the refined bibliophile. The story may have been circulated to highlight the one area in which Miskawayh surpassed his formidable successor.

Miskawayh knew the philosopher al-Āmirī (d. 992) and anthologized some of his thoughts, perhaps making a point. For the prickly Tawīdī had blamed him for learning little from this valued local source. But it is possible that Miskawayh, like Avicenna after him, did not think overmuch of Āmirī’s philosophy.76 He spoke respectfully of his learning but also observed that Āmirī himself had seen that he had much to learn from the renaissance statesman who was their master.77

Āmirī’s ethics was a kind of call to higher seriousness,78 and that will have mattered to Miskawayh. But ultimately such a call must come from within. After all, Miskawayh knew Hamadhānī too, who so brilliantly sang the secular counterpoint to the Islamic figured bass. Miskawayh took up the humanistic text beneath that counterpoint and gave it the dignity and structure of philosophy. His motifs came from in the courtly ethos, epitomized in the image of the scholar gentleman. As Peters writes:

The old Bedouin virtues of generosity, graciousness and eloquence were still part of the portrait, now urbanized by their contact with Iran and given solid intellectual foundations by Hellenic ethics. More bookish than the Greeks, far more elegant and sophisticated than the contemporary European Christian, the tenth-century Muslim intellectual could still gracefully shuttle between pen and sword, mosque and cup, without notable signs of guilt or self-doubt.

Not everyone was enchanted, of course. On the streets outside the splendid salons were Hanbalites who read only blasphemies in the books of the Greeks and the humanistic ethics of Miskawayh.79

To forge a serious ethics, Miskawayh needed to move beyond the superficiality and supercharged sensuality of the salons and rise above the ribaldry that rejected Islamic gravitas but by so doing, paradoxically, acquiesced in the traditionalists’ dismissive appraisal of all that was merely humanistic. Just as the anbalites hijacked the topoi of secular love in their kulturkampf with erotic mysticism, so Miskawayh, without succumbing to their reactionary culture shock, found that he had something of moment to learn from the high seriousness of scriptural ethics.

His mentor here was not Āmirī but Ibn al-Khammār, the best-known Muslim disciple of the Jacobite Christian Yayā ibn Adī (d. 974). Yayā was a translator and commentator of Plato and Aristotle, a disciple of Fārābī and of the Nestorian philosopher Abū Bishr Mattā (d. 940). Like his father, Yayā was a copyist by profession; by avocation, he was a collector of manuscripts. His home was a veritable school of translators and philosophers, Christian and Muslim, including the Boswell of the age, al-Tawīdī (d. 1023) and others of his circle—commentators of Greek works, physicians, theologians, litterateurs, even the son of the famous wazīr Alī ibn Īsā. The bibliographer al-Nadīm (ca. 936/7–ca. 987/8), a bookseller by trade, relied on Yayā for booklore and for the erudition stored in Yayā’s beautifully penned library catalogue. Mattā had been confronted by the Mutazilite mutakallim Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāī (d. 933, the son of Asharī’s Mutazilite teacher), with the notion that logic, as its name seemed to imply, was just a way of ordering words. The claim was still being bruited in Miskawayh’s time. He told Tawīdi what Mattā could have said: that if that much could be inferred from etymology, one could equally well conclude that a mutakallim was just a talker.80

Miskawayh defended the Greek sciences against all forms of parochialism, but the cosmopolitanism he imbibed is perhaps best voiced in a passage from Ibn Adī’s ethics urging that our highest perfection lies in the universal love of humankind as a single race, united by humanity itself. The core of that humanity, our crowning glory, is the divinely imparted rational soul, which all men share, and by which indeed all are one.81 Miskawayh may soft pedal the monopsychism, but he shares with Ibn Adī the view that a chief goal of ethics is control of our natural irascibility, allowing our deeper unity to surface in acts of love and compassion.82 For Miskawayh the means to that goal is human fellowship, and the most enduring basis of fellowship is virtue.

It was Ibn Adī who brought virtue ethics to the forefront of Arabic ethical writing, arguing that the aim underlying the commands and admonitions of scripture is the refinement of character. That view will be adopted not only by Miskawayh, and Ghazālī in his train, but also by Maimonides. It becomes a significant leaven to the legalism and legal positivism that might otherwise dominate scriptural ethical thinking.

Virtue ethics is an ethics of tendency rather than strict prescription. For the human virtues, classically, are means to happiness, understood as fulfillment of one’s nature, or (in the more dramatic imagery favored by the Stoics), of one’s calling as a human being. Character, whether virtuous or vicious, reflects the general nisus of our choices and tenor of our acts. Particular acts do matter, but their impact is felt in the aggregate.83 Thus Aristotle argues, “acting unjustly does not necessarily imply being unjust. . . . a man is not a thief, yet he stole, nor an adulterer, yet he committed adultery.”84 For even acts that enhance or diminish our fulfillment do not suffice to establish or destroy it: “one swallow does not a summer make, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”85

The sense of sin recedes into the background here.86 Ibn Adī has a properly Christian sense of original sin, as witness his discovery of vices like cunning, deceit, cajolery and envy infecting even the use of reason, which Greek philosophers might have supposed, in its purity, to be immune. But the sense of sin is much less prominent in Ibn Adī’s ethics than in, say, Augustine or Anselm. It becomes the simple, biblical admission that no mortal man is perfect, or possessed of all the virtues, without a trace of weakness. And as a remedy for human faults, Yahyā turns not simply to the Christian redeemer but to the laws and institutions that seek to educate and civilize humankind and rein in our naturally overweening appetites and passions. What humans share in universally is not a corrupted nature but divinely imparted reason.87 Wrong choices stem not from an externalized Corruptor, but from the (Platonic) vices of concupiscence and irascibility.88 Miskawayh takes up the thought when he urges that by Satan and the other demons so often spoken of in the utterances of popular piety, what the philosopher means is moral backsliding, a result of conflict between the rational soul and the irrational animal and irascible souls.89

Like Aristotle, Yayā prized the spontaneity that arises once virtue is a part of character and thoughtful choices have become a matter of natural and easy habit rather than agonized moral crises. He follows Plato in the belief that just and sound choices must be the work of reason, governing, as Aristotle shows, through the traits of an established character. Even virtues like thrift and mercy reflect the work of reason, holding appetite and irascibility in check and finding the right balance between self-assertion and self-denial. Even vices like levity and rashness reveal the insufficient governance of reason. But, like Aristotle, Ibn Adī finds that what should count as vice or virtue depends in part on one’s circumstances. The young, but not the old, should be eager for praise. Adornments are rightly sought after, by women and potentates, but not by monks or clerics. With wealth, the golden mean is to be neither too avid in the gathering nor too stingy in the disbursing, whether in one’s own behalf or that of the needy.

By situating the virtues in the thick of their social and cultural context, virtue ethics affects ethical theory profoundly in three ways quite beyond opening it up to more latitudinarian norms than a strict command ethics affords: (1) It creates a scale of attainments (indeed, a number of such scales) by which we may gauge ourselves (and one another) for moral progress or regress, as judged by specific traits that are valued or disvalued socially or personally. (2) The plurality of scales makes way, in some degree, for self-invention and the emergence of individuality, disengaged from a uniform and stereotypic communal ideal, as the members of a culture choose among the constellation of the virtues those that best fit their innate strengths and freely enacted preferences. (3) By the respect it shows for moral wisdom, virtue ethics opens itself to a canon of cultural resources, in literature, history, and life experience, where exemplars are discovered that seem useful in the work of self-cultivation. Those exemplars can be tellingly unparochial.

Virtue ethics tends to the humanistic, then, precisely because the canon of its moral objectivism is pluralistic and potentially cosmopolitan, because its sense of the individual is invested in the idea of personality, and because it values a refinement grounded in learning, social skills, and thoughtful self-development. The philosopher Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī (ca. 912–ca. 985), himself a pupil of Mattā and Ibn Adī, boldly captured the humanist ideal when he transmuted a radical monotheist trope about the shoreless sea of the divine, to say: “He who swims in our sea has no shore but himself.”90 It was the humanism of self-cultivation that Miskawayh most clearly valued in Yayā, as is reflected in the traditional assignment to his chief ethical work of the same title as was borne by the ethics of Ibn Adī: On the Refinement of Character.

For Miskawayh, clearly, learning was no mere passport to a courtly role and no mere ornament to philosophy. His masters shared his view that statesmen can learn from the actions of past rulers and from the recovered culture that Miskawayh was to lay out in a greater and lesser treasury of ancient knowledge, and in his works on ethics, happiness, moral education, logic, the natural sciences, divinity, arithmetic, alchemy, and cooking. His intellectual savoir faire is still fresh in Tawīdī’s records of interviews with the learned courtier. Miskawayh’s stance toward alchemy, an art that he had looked into with more than casual interest while at the court of Ibn al-Amīd, shows the tenor of his ethics: Alchemy is an esoteric science, taught by hints. So only philosophers have access to it. Its secrets may seem dangerous. For if they fell into the hands of the ignorant, so it is feared, men would abandon cooperation, pursue power only in the form of domination, and pleasures only of the lowest sort. The charge, reflective of a perennial pietist anxiety over homo faber, is still made against technology today, and not without cause.

Miskawayh’s reply is worthy of a Bacon, a Descartes, or a twentieth-century respondent to Heidegger’s alarm at technological nihilism: Real alchemy, of the sort pursued by Rāzī, is simply a branch of mineral science (i.e., chemistry). Its object is not riches but understanding. And it need not be hermetically confined to an esoteric elite. For those who learn are no longer ignorant. Since mastery of the art depends on philosophic understanding, we can be confident that its practitioners will not misuse it. The reassurances reveal a transcendent faith in learning—in the linkage of the natural and human sciences and in the transparency of the will to the goods that illuminate its path. That last, the intellectualist refusal to isolate act from understanding, is authentically Socratic. As for the faith that proper values arise in insight and are prerequisites of scientific understanding, that brings the sciences under the broad tent of the humanities. Our word for the confluence of faiths that we discover here in Miskawayh is humanism. His own word, of course, is adab—manners, culture, the root and substance of ta’dīb, education, discipline, culture.

Adab in the narrow sense, as literature, was the prime vehicle of the refinement that Miskawayh had counted on from the start of his career. Thus his writings on the pure style in poetry and on usage and manners. But adab had long meant much more than literature and had moved far beyond mere usage. The tradition of literary humanism, cultivated, as Joel Kraemer puts it, “by litterateurs, poets, and government secretaries,”91 was also their means of cultivation. It was the core of a higher secular culture, needful not just to the secretarial class, who were its champions, but also to “rulers, viziers, soldiers, mystics and contemplatives, and even court jesters and raconteurs.”92 As Bosworth explains, it “embraced all the traditional Islamic linguistic, religious and legal sciences, together with the whole stage of human history as it was known to the Muslims.”93 Adab, as Miskawayh puts it, is the content of wisdom—knowledge tested by experience about the good life and its means of attainment. Without it, reason is not reason.94

The sum of human culture, then, actively assimilated and lived by, now provides the background demanded by Aristotle’s phronesis. It broadens experience with the aid of literature, and it disciplines experience by framing a princely science, the study of history. For the lessons of history now underwrite in the language of worldly wisdom the sense of style that is nurtured by the norms of usage and comportment made visible in literature. But Miskawayh’s idea of adab goes far beyond mere rhetoric, history or belles lettres. Like the Sincere Brethren of Basra, he accedes to the drive for comprehensiveness and supplements literature and history with philosophy and the sciences. He thus transforms polite letters and courtly etiquette by fusing them with what Kraemer calls a “philosophical humanism,” a humanism made more acute and systematic by its embrace of “the scientific and philosophical heritage of antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal.”95 It is this wider horizon that enables Miskawayh to become a philosophical alchemist, welding seemingly disparate ideas and values into a coherent ethics and a harmonious way of life. We can see the product of that alchemy most clearly in Miskawayh’s work on ethical philosophy. As Majid Fakhry writes: “the subtle way in which Miskawayh has woven together such diverse Stoic, Cynic, Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Pythagorean, and Arabic-Islamic elements in his eclectical ethical system could only have been achieved, in the first instance, by a scholar whose knowledge of the Greek ethical tradition must have been very extensive.” Fakhry speculates that Porphyry inspired Miskawayh’s synthesis, through a work we know of only from the Arabic sources, a lost commentary on the Nicomachaean Ethics. But, as Fakhry clearly recognizes, Miskawayh himself was no mere copyist; he carried the work of philosophical synthesis beyond what he received. And he carried his value synthesis beyond the realm of formal philosophy. Hence Fakhry’s mention of what Miskawayh gleaned from Arabic and Islamic culture. We can catch a Persian, barberry savor too, as when Miskawayh makes the first Sassanian emperor Ardashir (r. 226–241) a model of political wisdom and practice.96

Miskawayh makes the manners and mores of a universal human culture crucial to our fulfillment as individuals and as a species. He places letters and learning in the key role when he calls adab (in his expanded sense) the nourishment that gives substance to the mind, as food gives substance to the maturing body. Like Makkī, his pietist contemporary whose spiritual vademecum was entitled Food for Hearts, Miskawayh seeks inner sustenance. But Miskawayh does not find the substance he seeks in the devotions of the heart but in the clarity and learning of the mind, the rule of reason, nourished not by the sunna of the Prophet but by paideia, the adab of humanity.

In his traditional foreword, setting out the task of an Islamic ethics, Miskawayh offers a Mutazilite, voluntaristic reading of one of the Qurān’s characteristic oaths: “By the soul and that which shaped it and breathed into it its wickedness and impiety”—the passage might seem to give comfort to predestinarians; but Miskawayh reads on—“he who keeps it pure prospers, and he who corrupts it fails!”97 Miskawayh reads the verses (91:7–10) as mandating a Socratic tendance of the soul: The same metal might be forged into a perfect or a worthless sword (35). The Creator affords the matter of our humanity, but it is we who must work up that material, through art and culture.

Society, Miskawayh argues, is our means to this end: Each of us is necessary to someone else’s perfection, and all of us must cooperate to provide the material base necessary to humanize our existence (14). Once the bare necessities are secured, higher and more intellectual plateaus are sought—each of us advancing in the measure of his capacities and all of us shoring up the weaknesses of the rest (118, 123; cf. 64). The social virtues, then, of friendliness and cooperativeness are necessary to human well being, as Aristotle showed. Ascetics are mistaken in seeking perfection outside human society: The life of the anchorite or vagabond stunts our humanity and thwarts our nature. Such men are neither temperate nor just. Indeed, they lack the social theater in which such virtues might be developed (25–26, 139).

In the spirit of Ibn Adī, and in perfect agreement with Aristotle, Miskawayh argues that love is the basis of all society. Friendship is a more intimate and fellowship a more diffuse form of love (cf. NE VIII 9). Humanity itself is named for fellowship (deriving the Arabic insān from uns), and not, as one embittered poet sarcastically pretended, from nisyān, forgetfulness. Even public worship is devised by the religious law to foster human fellowship, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, and (in the Pilgrimage to Mecca) among the Islamic community throughout the world. It was with this thought in mind—that religion does not isolate but unites humanity—that the wise Ardashir called religion and monarchy twin brothers (125–28).

In cataloguing the virtues, Miskawayh distinguishes piety from devoutness. The devout honor God and His chosen ones (21–22). But piety is the performance of acts of virtue that enhance and perfect the soul (19). The virtues in general are defined by Miskawayh on the same Aristotelian model, as avenues toward happiness, varying in their demands from person to person and situation to situation. Circumstances must be weighed with the aid of experience and addressed by way of art (22). The virtues are perfections of character. They are not, as a command ethics might seem to suggest, matters of mere adherence to stringent behavioral rules.

Popular religion, Miskawayh argues, is a vulgar attempt to trade self-denial in this world for sensory gratifications in the next—as though a transcendent God would simply serve human appetites and passions (39–40). Like Rāzī, Miskawayh follows Galen in arguing that all sensory pleasures presuppose some prior lack and pain.98 He goes on to argue that the ethics of the common mass is (on the model he adapts from Plato) conflicted, for it rests on an inner contradiction: Philosophers understand that what is most divine is what furthest transcends the material conditions of pleasure and pain. But popular morality simultaneously celebrates the successful hedonist and abhors the conditions of his success. It is in awe of the seeming ascetic, yet detests his way of life. Without philosophy to reconcile our ascetic and hedonic impulses and direct them toward the higher longings and purer pleasures of the intellectual life, the vulgar oscillate between self-indulgence and shame, never knowing the source of their embarrassment, let alone its remedy (41, 43, 113, 136).

Like Fārābī99 Miskawayh sees religion platonically, as a mode of poetry and practice that instills the proper ethos in a people. He does not seek literal truth in scriptural rhetoric, just as he does not find categorical commandments in religious laws. Rather, he sees religious symbolism as a hortatory paradigm, and the laws as a discipline, inuring us to virtue. Miskawayh evinces more concern about the quality of a young man’s drinking companions than about the fact that young men break the religious law by drinking (53). Before coming to philosophy, he confesses, he himself grew up less in the wholesome ethos of the Qur’ān than in the immoralism of the pre-Islamic poets like Imru al-Qays and Nābigha, who flaunt the raffish ethos of the desert. When romantic ideals of passion and self-assertion are held up to admiration by one’s parents and the spirit of such poets is most prized by one’s prince, it is hard to escape their grip. Only gradually, Miskawayh admits, did he break free of the sensuous and wanton values of the Jāhiliyya poets and wean himself—with the aid of philosophy—from the way of life their songs instilled (45–46).

Manners, Miskawayh argues, make the man. By nature a boy is bad—a liar, cheat and tattletale, spiteful, meddlesome, importunate, jealous, and malicious—a danger to others and even more to himself. But by training, suitable reading, well-placed praise and private reproof (lest he become shameless under the blast of condemnation before his fellows), proper diet and discipline, decent demeanor, comportment, dress, companions, and play that is neither exhausting nor debilitating, he can be made a man (51–55). Courtesy (adab again) is not external but organic to morals—as means serve ends in an organism. Even among the lesser animals, the highest are those that come closest to culture: the sexually reproducing species and those that nurture and train their young (and so are amenable to domestication). Man is the highest of the animals because in him the capacity for education is clearest, allowing human intelligence to reclose the arcing circle from Creator to creatures, reuniting with its Source (61–62).

Like Ibn Zura (943–1008), another disciple of Ibn Adī’s, who called humanity a horizon,100 Miskawayh makes humanity (al-insāniyya) the goal of ethics, to be achieved through the perfection of our identity (dhāt) as human beings. The speculative sciences and practical arts of philosophy give us the means to that perfection. Aristotle collected and organized the relevant arts in much the way that physicians have collected and organized the materia medica that God scattered for us around the world.101 Closely following Fārābī and a tradition that has been traced back to the Alexandrian Peripatetics,102 Miskawayh catalogues the arts and sciences, showing in detail how theory and practice support one another.

It is sometimes supposed that when Aristotle praises the speculative life and the intellectual virtues as what is most distinctively human he is setting his highest good in the contemplative, over and against the eudaimonia attained through exercise of the moral virtues.103 But the dichotomy is a false one. Thought is sterile and friendless without action, and action is barbarous and blind without thought. For Aristotle, even the appetites and passions of man must have specifically human forms. So their proper care and feeding demand distinctively human strengths: We can live as befits our humanity only through the use of reason. What that means is that the moral virtues, far from competing with the intellect are both presupposed in its development and dependent on its use.

Since the actual is always ultimately prior to the potential, the properly Aristotelian view is that understanding of the principles necessary to guide the virtues must be present—not necessarily in the mind of every person who acts virtuously or every adolescent who learns virtue, but clearly in the mind of the statesman or legislator who plots the values to be tie dyed into the fabric of a society or ethos of a community. Miskawayh shows his sensitivity to the dovetailing of theory and practice by treating character as the matter to be informed and refined, not by sheer discipline but by the arts and sciences, which articulate the principles behind virtue and train us to use them in the forum of experience. Culture here, literary and philosophical culture, becomes the educator of character that Plato had sought and Fārābī had found, at least for the many, in religion.

Some of the ancients, Miskawayh remarks, recognizing that happiness depends on transcendence of the physical, went so far as to deny that happiness is attainable in this life. It is in this sense, evidently, that Miskawayh reads the notion (which Aristotle takes as a springboard to his holism) that no man may be called happy while he lives. It would be disgraceful, Miskawayh insists, to suppose that a living man who performs good deeds, holds sound beliefs, serves his fellow men, and thus in all ways acts as God’s deputy is not objectively happy. Real happiness is possible here on earth, even if transcendent felicity is not. To be sure, intellectual perfection reaches higher than mere moral perfection of our worldly nature; and only intellectual perfection, as Aristotle allowed, endures beyond the grave. But the moral virtues are necessary means to the higher intellectual end. The spiritual goal that is the ultimate aim of philosophy is not attainable by any other means. There are no shortcuts to felicity, bypassing the avenues of moral and intellectual self-perfection, as some Sufis of ecstatic and perhaps antinomian drift might suppose. For the key premise of mysticism, as of all asceticism that pursues a spiritual goal, is that the soul requires purification. And clearly, Miskawayh argues, again citing Aristotle (now on the need for experience), purification is not achieved without living through the stages of our natural human development—undergoing the discipline and acculturation that are the object of our existence in this world (74–83). A school is not life, but life is a school.

Ghazālī’s Appropriation

The fate of Miskawayh’s ethics is emblematic of that of Greek philosophy in general in the Islamic milieu: The volume of material absorbed is immense, and orthodoxy does not reject it but works the inherited materials into its house, much as the early Islamic builders appropriated the structures and stones of Greek basilicas that had been pagan temples and later used their architectural principles to construct new, distinctively Islamic mosques and palaces. No sentence of Miskawayh’s ethics is left unexamined when Ghazālī takes over the work. But Miskawayh’s courtly humanism is systematically expunged. Walzer and Gibb showed Miskawayh’s influence on Ghazālī, and others have shown his impact on later authors like Naīr al-Dīn al-ūsī (1201–1274), the Shfite polymath who defected to the conquering Mongols in 1247.104 But in emphasizing Miskawayh’s formative role and Ghazālī’s openness to philosophic ethics, Walzer and Gibb rather overstated Ghazālī’s dependence, slighting his selective preferences for other philosophers’ ideas when they better suited his purposes and glossing over his displacement of Miskawayh’s humanistic themes in favor of traditional Islamic sources and Sufi pietists like Muhāsibī and Makkī.105 It is as though an archaeologist were so thrilled to find the lineaments of a Greek temple in a mosque that he ignored the Muslim worship going on inside.

The most telling effect of Ghazālī’s use of Miskawayh’s ethics is the now almost invisible weave of virtue ethics into the fabric of a scriptural command ethics. Indeed, we can see Miskawayh’s hand in Ghazālī’s pietist affirmation that the study of ethics is more important than fiqh, the science of law, because ethics, or as he calls it (avoiding the language of the Philosophers) “the study of the states of the heart” deals with character and not just behavior. For character is the foundation, of which our actions are the outward expression.106 But, while Ghazālī appreciates the powerful methods and edifying conclusions he finds in Miskawayh, he discards the fruit along with the argumentative branch that sustains it when the conclusions are not to his taste. In general, he likes to use traditional texts to support and thereby naturalize philosophic ideas. Perhaps the most impressive instance is his book-length Neoplatonizing gloss of the Qurānic Light and Darkness verses.107 But his deracinating of Aristotelian ethical theses, excising their argumentative nerve, has a more systemic impact.

Rejecting Miskawayh’s polemic against Sufi austerity, Ghazālī suppresses Miskawayh’s Aristotelian rejection of the life of solitude as subhuman or superhuman—although he follows Miskawayh closely in the passages that precede and follow. He rejects Miskawayh’s social rationale of public worship and suppresses his Platonizing proposal that happiness requires the youthful study of mathematics, to accustom us to truth and truthfulness. In all, Muhammad Abul Quasem estimates that about a third of Miskawayh’s ethics was unacceptable to Ghazālī and dropped as quietly as the rest was adopted.108 Walzer mentions the changes but calls the elements of adab that are dropped “merely formal and superficial.”109 Hardly. Whatever was outspokenly humanistic or secular in Miskawayh was dropped by Ghazālī, just as he took issue with the Muslim philosophers where he found their metaphysics too naturalistic.

Ghazālī follows Miskawayh and the Platonic tradition in identifying wisdom, courage, and temperance as the virtues of the rational, irascible, and appetitive faculties and in treating justice as the master virtue that integrates the three; he follows the later Greek and prior Islamic tradition in listing the remaining virtues under the four cardinal virtues. It is evidently because justice engulfs the other virtues that Ghazālī does not, as Miskawayh does, assign it subvirtues at the level of family, household, community, and friends. Ghazālī’s is not an assertive, rights-claiming theory of justice. But his ethical writings do distinguish a political sense of justice and set out an idea of distributive justice, overseen by the regulative activities of the conscientious ruler.110 He follows Aristotle in rejecting Plato’s claim that justice is no mere compromise and agrees with Miskawayh in describing justice as a mean between doing and suffering wrong—all the while retaining Plato’s notion that justice is the sovereign virtue that uses wisdom to assign a proper scope to all other goods. Like Miskawayh, then, Ghazālī does not reject the Aristotelian idea that justice is a social virtue involving give and take—in Islamic terms, proper and improper acquisition. He is as prepared as Miskawayh was to bracket the more radical claims of Socrates about the preferability of suffering injustice to committing it—despite the Islamic admiration for martyrdom and the spiritual disclaiming of worldly ends. For Islam is a polity, not merely an otherworldly quest.

Miskawayh identifies the intellectual virtues subsidiary to wisdom rather cognitively as intelligence, retentiveness, reasonableness (conformance of our notions to reality), inferential power and quickness, clarity with abstract concepts, and capacity to learn (ease in grasping theoretical matters). Ghazālī, as the tenor of his work demands, takes a more spiritual tack: He parts company with Aristotle but follows pietist and mystic tradition, by separating the love of God from knowledge and placing that love ahead of the knowledge that in Aristotle was its very essence. Mysticism siphons off the naturalistic content that had given divine knowledge its scientific and worldly roots. Ghazālī does place speculative wisdom, whose true aim is knowledge of God, above practical wisdom, as Aristotle does. But he treats even practical wisdom as a mean—placing it between the overclever guile that uses cunning for base purposes and the stubborn stolidity that keeps the lower passions from attaining their proper natural goals.

In place of intelligence, among the less rarefied intellectual virtues, Ghazālī lists excellence in deliberation, following Fārābī and Aristotle’s account. Like Aristotle he reasons that practical wisdom is not mere cleverness in finding means to ends but a virtue that deduces what is most conducive in the pursuit of noble aims. He ignores Miskawayh’s interest in memory and conceptual clarity and substitutes discernment in matters of controversy (cf. NE VI 10) and penetration. In place of reasonableness he puts insight, the ability to hit upon the truth without recourse to proof—a virtue of holymen. To cap his list in the Iyā, Ghazālī adds an intellectual virtue not found in his earlier ethical work: self-scrutiny, apprehension of the subtle movements and hidden evils of the soul, a pietist virtue par excellence.111 Without it we would never know our own motives, and even with it they may remain obscure.

Where Aristotle relies on reason, the virtue of practical wisdom, to locate the appropriate mean in concrete circumstances and direct us toward the doable good, Ghazālī argues that without recourse to God in prayer and without God’s help we mortals would never succeed in finding, let alone habituating in our characters that disposition toward choice in accordance with a mean that Aristotle defined as virtue. Ghazālī is a follower of the Philosophic school when he reads the Fātia, the opening prayer of the Qurān, as invoking God’s aid in finding the mean, when it beseeches God (1:6) to “show us the Straight Path.” But he insists that we are powerless to find and hew to that path by our own insight and virtue. Underscoring the point, he cites the Qurānic dictum traditionally held to imply that everyone will spend at least part of eternity in hellfire.112

Turning to the moral virtues, we find that under temperance Miskawayh lists modesty, composure (the ability to keep one’s soul at rest when the passions are stirring), liberality, integrity, contentment, delicacy or gentility, orderliness, personableness, dignity, godliness, and an accommodating or conciliatory disposition—all virtues of a courtier. He defines contentment as moderation in food and drink; integrity, in terms of licit and illicit gain; piety, or godliness, as steadiness in fair doings, by which the soul is perfected. Ghazālī lists modesty and liberality under temperance, following Miskawayh, Fārābī, and Ibn Abī Dunyā, the author of the censures of worldly things. Compare Aristotle, who treats modesty as an emotional surrogate for virtue, appropriate in the young but not a virtue in itself. Ghazālī also lists forbearance here, the virtue of Job and other prophets. Forbearance is the fruit of steadfastness, the ability to bear sufferings and losses, which Ghazālī locates under courage. Following Miskawayh and Avicenna, Ghazālī defines forbearance broadly—not confining it to its familiar construal, as patience, but enlarging it to include resistance to all the passions, whether of pleasure or of pain. He reserves this Qurānic virtue for special discussion among the avenues to salvation. Under temperance again he includes another form of self-restraint, foregoing some of our due, using a definition Miskawayh had included under liberality. But Ghazālī adds that such virtues are relevant only for those who are still attached to worldly things. Similarly with thrift and Miskawayh’s virtue of orderliness. Even with liberality we can see the same thrust: Ghazālī dwells on the dangers of preoccupation with a livelihood, to the detriment of concern with our ultimate destiny. If one must choose between poverty and generosity, he argues, citing Muāsibī, one must prefer poverty. For it is less entangled with worldly things.113

Ghazālī shadows Miskawayh in defining godliness in terms of good action done for the sake of the perfection in it; but he adds: and for the sake of coming nearer to God. The effect is to render Miskawayh’s eudaimonism more starkly theocentric. In this he retains, but subtly shifts the balance of Plato’s famous exhortation (Theaetetus 176) to perfect our humanity by becoming as like to God as humanly possible. Miskawayh himself equates actions done for their own sake with actions done to please God. But that is a symmetry, not a reduction. It means that we are pleasing God when our motive is the goodness intrinsic in an act. In Ghazālī such symmetries are dangerous. In a sense they are the ultimate danger, since they seem to remove the moral gaze from God. God alone, Ghazālī argues, gives without any expectation of a return. We humans can approximate such liberality if we are generous for God’s sake, or for the sake of an eternal reward. Ghazālī is wary of any merely social object of moral concern; and he is chary of dismissing canonical eschatology, as Fārābī tends to do, as a mere symbol of something higher. He shows no qualms about making divine favor and immortality moral incentives. The deontologist’s idea that virtue is its own reward and that it is nobler to choose the right for its own sake rather than for some benefit is foreign to his axiology. For that seems to place virtue, a human good, ahead of immortality, the ultimate value that God Himself sets before us.

In his properly ethical writings Ghazālī follows Miskawayh and Avicenna in defining contentment as a virtue involving moderation. But in the Iyā he seizes upon the general Aristotelian proviso that virtues must be exercised in the right way, to make contentment an ascetic principle demanding that we not seek to provide for our needs beyond a single day—a month at most—and give away all that we have beyond that. Even the Aristotelian social virtues of cheer, affability, and good humor, are modified in the same sense—made over to conform to the ideals of sobriety and sedateness: One should not laugh unreservedly but emulate the Prophet, who preferred smiling to laughter.114 Jesting, Ghazālī urges, again citing the Prophet, leads to falsehood: Muammad “did jest, but he spoke only the truth.” The saintly asan al-Barī, Ghazālī reports with admiration, did not laugh for thirty years.

Miskawayh expatiates on liberality, the brightest virtue in a courtier’s firmament—and one on which his fortunes depend. He expands liberality to encompass altruism, magnificence, appreciativeness of great achievement, and certain forms of self-denial, as well as beneficence and bounty—which last means spending more than one really should, a favorite virtue of the Arab poets.”5 Ghazālī, for his part, expatiates on the dangers of speech, listing twenty evils of the tongue. He recognizes the Aristotelian mean of cheerfulness and good humor, between the morose and the clownish. But he also notes that exchanging pleasantries at a party or graciously acknowledging the casual remarks of acquaintances can be a duty and a chore. Seclusion is preferable, and we must look to the model of the Prophet to see how social occasions may be borne with good address. Likewise with tact: we must learn to forego contention and find the mean between pettishness and obsequiousness. But Ghazālī complements this advice by reverting to Aristotle for a virtue that neither Miskawayh nor Avicenna included in their catalogues, righteous indignation, here defined as grief at the undeserved good or ill fortunes of those we know or with whom we have something in common. This virtue must be sharply set apart from envy and spite, which are strictly forbidden but similar in appearance. The true guide in distinguishing the virtue from the vice is the intent—worldly versus otherworldly goals. A similar canonization of intention is familiar to philosophers in Spinoza’s distinction between piety and ambition. Ambition seeks approbation and emulation, where piety (also called humanity by Spinoza) seeks the genuine welfare of our fellow human beings. As Spinoza intimates, comparable subtle differences of intention run all through the catalogue of moral strengths and weaknesses. And the pietist theme of scrutiny of our intentions remains prominent in the ethics of Kant.

Ghazālī follows Miskawayh in defining delicacy or gentility as an attachment to what is fair or fine; he follows him again in defining personableness, as Yahyā ibn Adī does, in terms of dress, the one aspect of outward appearance, beyond demeanor, that one can regulate for oneself—and with clear impact on one’s mood. Miskawayh says simply that personableness is a love of complementing the soul with fair adornments. One can almost picture him interviewing would-be aides and explaining the importance of self-presentation, the signs that properly or improperly chosen clothing give about the inner man. But Ghazālī puts greater emphasis on clothing. The Iyā devotes a full chapter to the Prophet’s mode of dress: He wore whatever came to hand, saying that he was just a slave and so dressed as a slave. Our clothing is best made of the coarsest stuff, affording just the necessary coverage, and sturdy enough to last no longer than a day and a night—an outward sign of trust in God that brings to the surface of ritual expressiveness the tenor of one’s inner state. Few but the most saintly will attain the ideal, but lavish clothes are never acceptable. The mean, presentability without luxury or ostentation, is no longer an optimum but a compromise.

Under courage Miskawayh lists great spiritedness (disdain for the trivial, an Aristotelian ability to bear both honor and humiliation), dauntlessness (confidence in a crisis), fortitude (in bearing and overcoming sufferings, especially those that cause terror). To these he adds ilm (Aristotle’s mildness or gentleness, now assimilated to the Arabic counterpart of the Roman dementia, from which it takes its name—a virtue cultivated by the caliph Muāwiya, who said that if a single thread bound him to his fellow he would not relax his grip on it: “If he pulled I would yield, but if he yielded, I would pull”). He also adds steadiness (especially valuable in fighting to defend one’s womenfolk or the religious law), gallantry (eagerness to do great deeds and win glory), and perseverance (sustained command of the soul over the body, applying it like a tool to a task).

Ghazālī quotes Wahb b. Munabbih as saying that he had read in the margins of the Torah itself: “No treasure is more beneficial than knowledge” and “No wealth is more profitable than ilm.” These apothegms sound like paraphrases of Pirkei Avot, which might loosely be called a set of marginalia to the Torah. For that tractate of the Mishnah ascribes to Ben Zoma the words, “Who is wealthy, he who is contented with his lot,” and “Who is mighty, he who subdues his impulse” (Avot 4.1). But Ghazālī’s treatment of courage is as much a riposte to Miskawayh as an appropriation: He uses the Aristotelian notion that every virtue has its proper sphere to urge that the Realm of Islam is not the proper arena for the courage that is a mean between recklessness and cowardice and quotes God Himself in support: “Muammad is God’s Apostle, and those who are with him are strong against unbelievers but merciful among themselves” (Qurān 48:29).

Despite the chauvinism, Ghazālī’s interest in courage is less military than Miskawayh’s. Like others of Sufi persuasion, he shifts the focus away from warfare, where Aristotle had found the paradigm case of courage, and onto the greater jihād, against the passions. He omits the martial arts from his educational program and treats sports as means of strengthening the body rather than of teaching valor. Fear is actually a virtue when applied to God. Its proper object is hellfire.

Among the subvirtues of courage, Ghazālī expands on Miskawayh’s list, adding magnificence here, perhaps because courage is needed in making great expenditures. He adopts Aristotle’s notion that magnificence is properly shown in honoring the divine and in public works—building mosques, roads, hospitals, and bridges—although such activities and the entanglements necessary to support them are not compatible with the self-denying life of the ascetic. He adds nobility and benevolence as well—the former modified from Miskawayh’s anatomy of liberality, and the latter defined (as Spinoza will define humanity) as wanting for all men what one desires for oneself.116 In defining ‘dauntless,’ Ghazālī follows Aristotle’s definition of courage as a mean in facing danger and death—a mean, he says, between recklessness and helplessness or desertion. But he redefines gallantry to make goodness and eternal life its goal, rather than glory.

ilm is a crucial virtue in Ghazālī, as in Miskawayh and Ibn Adī, because it offers control of anger. It can be simulated, but its true nature acts in cooling the blood, whose heat is necessary to life, but harmful in excess. We are attuned, Ghazālī argues, to arousal in defense of ourselves and what is ours; but, if our claims go beyond bare necessity, we must curb our ire and possessiveness over all that is extraneous. Thus self-control is placed in service to abstemiousness and resignation. Similarly, Miskawayh’s virtue of dignity, which in his work as in Yayā’s means little more than grave demeanor, is redefined by Ghazālī to become a form of self-respect grounded in a proper sense of one’s worth. It lies at a mean between vanity and abjectness. All the same, like most medieval ethicists, Ghazālī insists that humility, not pride, is our proper virtue.

In describing greatness of soul, Ghazālī goes back to Aristotle for the recognition that the great man is not beguiled by honors. Recognition may be needed for effective leadership, but the Sufi ideal demands renunciation. Ghazālī dwells on the dangers inherent in the love of fame and condemns avidity for honors. The point was critical in his own life. For the crisis that tested and fired his faith involved his recognition that much that passed for piety, in others and even in himself, was sheer self-seeking. As he wrote, “I examined my motive in my work of teaching and realized that it was not a pure desire for the things of God. Rather the impulse moving me was the desire for an influential position and public recognition. I saw for certain that I was on the brink of a crumbling bank of sand and in imminent danger of hell-fire unless I set about to mend my ways.”117

In seeking God in place of worldly regard, Ghazālī observes, some pursue apparent humiliation and disgrace. The reference is to Sufi practice, and here too Ghazālī senses the danger of excess. Seclusion, isolation, and migration to lands where one is unknown prove preferable alternatives to what may become a theatrical pose. Again Ghazālī reflects on his own life history. For seclusion and even exile and (temporary) obscurity were his own resort, when his role and reputation threatened to overwhelm him. Humility must displace the quest for greatness. One must choose between this world’s goods and those that are more real and more dear.

It is always ambiguous, of course, how far the efforts of a Ghazālī can succeed in extinguishing the sort of worldliness that he found in the spiritual leaders of his day and even in himself. For the closest self-scrutiny can be deluded, mistaking for spirituality what is in fact mere sublimation of social instincts and acquisitive urges. The verbally adept will readily find a new vocabulary of selflessness in which to voice their old ambitions. And the socially adept can similarly devise new spheres for emulousness and self-aggrandizement, even projecting all lack and evil on the other and thus, as we suggested in the introduction, becoming fanatical and hate-filled. Selflessness plainly has self-deceptions of its own. And even the sincerest renunciation bears a price.

Aristotle thought that the great man does claim the honors due for his achievements. Cicero confessed that he would never have undertaken his struggles in the public interest (which did, in the end, lead to martyrdom) without the love of glory and hope of fame. The spiritual gains from Ghazālī’s type of abnegation will remain invisible in the nature of the case, but the material harm of the devaluation of glory can be seen in every land that otherworldliness has touched.

Ghazālī is drawn to the idea of the mean. He uses Aristotle’s caveats about appropriateness and context to naturalize virtue ethics far more effectively than Miskawayh could by treating it as an exotic offshoot of the rare and foreign plant Philosophy. In Ghazālī’s ethics, Asharite worries about volitions, intentions, bivalent capacities, and dispositions resident in human character are quietly forgotten, along with the fact that the ethical gaze of the Qurān and adīth is fixed not on virtues but on commands and the example of the Prophet. But in making the virtue schematism at home in its new context Ghazālī modifies it both in form and in content: Virtue is redirected back to positive practice, dispositional tendency is deemphasized, and the mean is often made a second best to ascetic extremes of a sort that Aristotle and such medieval successors as Saadiah, Fārābī, and Maimonides actively combated.

The idea of the mean anchors Aristotelian ethics in social and biological naturalism. But Ghazālī senses an insistent tug from the transcendent. And the goals of that higher realm gain specificity from the rejection of the very appetites and impulses that a worldly eudaimonism like Miskawayh’s seeks to channel and modulate but never to deny. Thus Ghazālī’s commanding urge to suppress the humanism he finds in Miskawayh. It leads him to ransack Fārābī, Avicenna, Aristotle, or Plato, dig deep into the canon of adīth, and plumb the oracular verses of the Qurān for readings of the virtues more closely in tune with his own Islamic ideal.

The resultant values do take root in a way that Miskawayh’s do not. Their pietist colorations mask the foreign origin and structure of the underlying Greek ideas about the mean and the good life and deeply penetrate the ethical thinking of generations of Muslim thinkers of orthodox stamp. The ancient architecture is strikingly preserved—Aristotle’s profound and profoundly original conceptualization of the virtues. But, like the mosaics in the Byzantine basilicas, the faces are erased or plastered over: Where the lithe forms of pagan demigods once danced and later the spiritual lineaments and heavenward gaze of late antique piety and paideia could once be seen in the tesserae of the mosaics, the space is filled with painted sayings from the Prophet and his Book.

The humanism of a Miskawayh, like the intellectualism of Fārābī and Avicenna, or the even the prudential and ascetic hedonism of Rāzī are vanished, displaced by Sufi sayings, canonical dicta, and the dialectics of kalām. The channels that still run beneath the ground may be of Greek construction; but the classic motifs at the surface of the font are subtly altered, and the waters that flow forth show no sign of how far they have traveled. To the drinker the taste is local. The free spirit of Miskawayh, the musky flavor that his odd Persian name suggests, is gone. Rarely in the later history of Islamic ethics will the like of his humanistic views and speculative excursions be seen again.

In Ghazālī, as in Aristotle and Miskawayh, the aim of ethics remains the perfection of the individual. But the social and cultural milieu so critical in defining and refining our humanity is altered. In the new milieu we find the very ideal of isolation that Aristotle rejected and that Miskawayh so spiritedly fought. The perfected individual is no longer one who directs his life by habits of reasonableness and whose highest aim is contemplation of nature and its transcendental meaning, but the spiritual seeker, who has, as it were, cut away the middle term and reached directly—as Miskawayh warns one cannot do—for the divine. The discipline now is not simply moderation and self-refinement but ascesis; the contemplation is gnostic and ecstatic—a quest more of the heart than of the understanding, leading not to mastery or even self-mastery in this world, nor to a naturalist’s inductive synthesis and practical command, but to detachment from the world and ever closer attachment to the supernal realm and preparation for the hereafter.

We are in no position to romanticize Miskawayh as the last best hope of a cosmopolitan humanism in Islam. It was not simply narrowness, ignorance, or backwardness that grounded the acceptance of Ghazālī’s ethics and rejection of its more secular and humanistic prototype. Miskawayh’s was a courtier’s ethic; and, like his life, it shows the biases of his nature and his role. As in his historiography so in his ethics, Miskawayh is a conspicuous ego. He was criticized in his time for name dropping and trouble making; and his penchants for both, alongside a certain tendency to flatter, are still visible in his writing—even though the ability to make trouble can be a virtue in a philosopher, where it is not in a courtier. The flaws of his ethics—its tendency to promote conformity and to breed a cohort of refined but superficial time servers—were as visible to his successors as the character flaws that favored such biases were plain to his contemporaries. It was in part a recognition of such biases that led Ghazālī and others to seek authenticity and depth in the canon, to take refuge in Islam from an ethic that had come to seem to them as empty and superficial as the counsels of the courtier Polonius may seem to us.

Ghazālī too has faults, also mirrored in his ethics. The exile and partial isolation that he made a virtue were in part a necessity for him, and in part a desertion, to use his own terms, when the patron who had sponsored his polemics against the Ismaīlī sect fell to assassination, the tactic that gave that sect the name by which it became best known in the West. Ghazālī’s meditative ethics is itself escapist in part. It renounces worldly aims on the eudaimonistic grounds that it knows of something better. But it does not attain perfect selflessness for any living subject of its counsels, and it does tend to leave the world’s wounds to fester. Humanistically inclined Muslim and Arab scholars today may look back yearningly to Miskawayh’s ideals of culture, community, and individuality. One can see that yearning vividly in Constantine Zurayk, the Lebanese translator of Miskawayh. Its presence is perhaps more muted in Majid Fakhry’s learned appreciation of Miskawayh’s work. But its sense becomes vocal in Mohammed Arkoun’s appraisal:

One is always agreeably struck by the serenity of Miskawayh’s tone, by a very clear, very accessible and at the same time very rigorous style. When he describes the social and economic consequences of Būyid policy, or when he reports an abstract philosophical theory, he always succeeds in avoiding the use of technicalities which discourage the reader and the pedantry which obscures the subject. He also combines philosophical seriousness, scientific competence and concern with didactic communication, to the point that all these writings recall those of the best modern Arab prose writers. . . . It is through philosophical adab that religious reason was able to assimilate certain contributions of philosophical knowledge without provoking the rejection constantly repeated by the jurist-theologians who were champions of “orthodoxy.” From this point of view, Miskawayh and the intellectuals of his generation remain of current importance in Arabic and Islamic thought; faced with militants of religious orthodoxy who are more numerous than ever, the philosophical attitude and knowledge, as in the 4th/10th century in Baghdād, Rayy and Isfahan, would allow one to pass by dogmatic conflicts whose religious vocabulary conceals principally political stakes.118

But yearning, of course, does not breathe life into forgotten arguments, or redistill the clarity that dissolves false political pretensions. Juxtaposing Miskawayh’s humanistic ethics with Ghazālī’s recasting of it into a Sufi mold, one can feel a poignant sense of loss for the values Miskawayh sought to establish in Islam. Ghazālī does preserve much of the structure and some unmistakable relics of the ancient humanism—but as if in amber.

Pietism is not as welcoming a medium as courtesy for the nurture of a new and lively humanism. Arkoun’s rather somber appraisal of present circumstances rests on a painful realism, grounded in the recognition that the politics of radical reaction readily outbids and often outguns the humanism of a Miskawayh. Miskawayh has something precious that serious and committed Muslims and non-Muslims too would like to regain. Yet one cannot go back in time. If there is something to be recaptured in the humanism of Miskawayh, it will have to be recast once again, perhaps even re-created. Courtliness has had its say and its day, and if a new humanism is to emerge it will require new voices. Its authors may yet find instruction in Miskawayh’s “didactic” writings, but they will also need to build and plant afresh; and if Miskawayh’s achievement is to be a model for them, they will learn from his synthetic method, and not just from an echoing of his personal quirks and preferences. Indeed, they will have much to learn by seeking to balance his courtly humanism against its counterpart in Ghazālī. We have the work of Spinoza and of Kant to show us that even mysticism and pietism can anchor a humanistic ethics, if a philosopher of clear enough intelligence undertakes the task of construction.