Al-Ghazālī

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī was born in 1058 in Tus, in Khorasan (north-eastern Iran). A brilliant student of law and theology, he was appointed in 1091 to head the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world. There he mastered philosophy so thoroughly that his summary of it, The Aims of the Philosophers, was read in Latin Europe as the work of a philosopher (“Algazel”).

The Incoherence of the Philosophers

In Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (c. 1095) he turned that knowledge against the falāsifa — the Aristotelian philosophers, above all Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). He examined twenty of their doctrines and argued that their demonstrations did not demonstrate. Three, he said, amounted to unbelief: that the world is eternal; that God knows particulars only “in a universal way”; and that there is no bodily resurrection.

Causation

In the seventeenth discussion, al-Ghazālī attacks the philosophers’ claim that causes necessitate their effects:

The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary… Take for example the contact between cotton and fire. We admit the possibility of the contact without the burning.

All observation shows is that the burning occurs with the contact, not through it. God creates each event directly; the regularity we see is God’s “habit” (ʿāda), which he can suspend — as in miracles. Seven centuries later, David Hume argued that we never perceive necessary connection, only constant conjunction — though for Hume the conclusion was scepticism, for al-Ghazālī divine omnipotence.

The Deliverance from Error

His autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl, is one of the great records of an intellectual crisis. He describes his thirst to know “the true nature of things”, his discovery that the senses deceive (the shadow seems still, the star seems small), his doubt even of reason — might there be a higher faculty that would show reason’s judgments false, as waking shows dreams false? He fell into a scepticism that lasted two months, until “God cured me of this disease… by a light which God cast into my breast”. Comparisons with René Descartes are irresistible.

In 1095, at the height of his fame, he suffered a crisis: his tongue dried up so that he could not lecture. He abandoned his post and family and spent about ten years as a wandering Sufi in Damascus, Jerusalem and Mecca, before returning to teach. He concluded that the mystics, not the theologians or philosophers, attained certainty — by “tasting” (dhawq) rather than argument.

The Revival of the Religious Sciences

His vast Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn integrated law, theology and Sufi spirituality into a guide for the whole of religious life, and became one of the most read books in Islam after the Quran.

Legacy

It was long claimed that al-Ghazālī “killed philosophy” in the Islamic world. Historians now reject this: philosophy continued vigorously, especially in Iran, and al-Ghazālī himself absorbed Aristotelian logic into theology. But his attack provoked the most famous reply in Islamic philosophy — Averroes (Ibn Rushd)‘s Incoherence of the Incoherence.