Al-Ghazali

File:Haruniyeh.JPG

Haruniyeh tomb, named after Harun al-Rashid. The present structure, located in Tus, was probably built in the 13th century. The great Sufi Sheikh Imam Mohammad Ghazali is also buried here.

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (Arabic): ابو حامد محمد بن محمد الغزالى for short: الغزالى ) (born 1058C.E. in Tus, Khorasan province of Persia, modern day Iran, died 1111C.E. in Tus) was a Muslim theologian and philosopher, known as Algazel to the western medieval world. Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, or al-Ghazzali as his name is sometimes rendered. Al-Ghazali is credited with reconciling legalistic and mystical Islam, and gained a reputation within Christian as well as Muslim circles for his piety and godliness. He is widely regarded as a renewer of the Muslim faith, raised up by God to revive the faith. He influenced Thomas Aquinas who cited one of his works 31 times. W. M Watt (1952; 1995) suggested that it is above all Ghazali's personality that inspires people and that the contemporary Muslim world may benefit from a study of Al-Ghazali as they wrestle with 'Western thought as' they 'once wrestled with Greek philosophy'. 'Deep study', Watt continued, '

may suggest to Muslims steps to be taken if they are to deal successfully with the :ontemporary situation. Christians, too, now that the world is in a cultural melting-pot, must be prepared to learn from Islam, and are unlikely to find a more sympathetic guide than al-Ghazali.

Similarly, S M Zwemer (1867-1952) in his book on Ghazali suggested that a study of Ghazali might awaken in non-Muslims 'a deeper sympathy for that which is highest and strongest in the religion of Islam', as his 'books are full of reverence for the teaching of Christ' (1920: 12). Ghazali tried to hold the internal and external aspects of religion in harmony, teaching that external deeds must flow from inner spiritual strenght. He was a harmoniser, not a polariser, in Muslim society. This also positively impacted on the treatment of non-Muslim subjects of Muslim rulers. It has been suggested that recent revived interest in the work of the more exclusivist thinker, Ibn Taymiyya has helped to fuel hostility towards the non-Muslim world, while Al-Ghazali's influnce has a more positive impact (Ruthven, 2001: xii).

His life

Early Life

Al-Ghazali is one of the greatest jurists, theologians and mystical thinkers in the Islamic tradition. Ghazali and his brother, Ahmad, were entrusted by their father, when he died while they were still in their childhood, to a Sufi friend, mainly so that they would receive an edcucation. The Sufi taught them reading and writing then arranged for them to attend a school, which provided both board and a stipend. He later joined the famous Nizamiyyah school in Nishapur were he was taught by Abul Maali al-Juwayni (d. 1085C.E.), who not only held a chair in Shafi law, but was sponsored by the vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092) who was one of the most powerful men of his day. Ghazali was trained in the Asharite school. He studied in Nishapur for eight years, until Juwayni's death. Ghazali's initial love was for Islamic law. Early on in his career he excelled as a lecturer in Shafi jurisprudence. Having been noted for his outstanding abilities, Nizam al-Mulk, following the death of al-Juwayni, appointed him head of the Nizamiyyah College at Baghdad in 1091. As a lecturer until 1095 Ghazali managed to attract literally hundreds of scholars, demonstrating his extensive contemporary popularity. He was the scholar per excellence in the Islamic world. His audience also included scholars from other schools of jurisprudence. This position won him prestige, wealth and respect that even princes and viziers could not match. He thus was justifiably referred to as Hujjat-ul Islam ('The Testimony of Islam'). His book on the incoherence of philopsophy earned him his scholarly reputation. However, he grew skeptical about the possibiliy of any certainty in knowledge and this uncertainty eventually resulted in a crises that was to change his life.

Spiritual Crises

Only four years after being appointed to the head of the Nizamiyyah College, he started to doubt the usefulness of his teaching career and comfortable life and became profoundly conscious of a struggle within himself between his spiritual thirst on the one hand and his attachment to worldly pursuits on the other. He no longer derived satisfaction from his teaching. He later wrote that he was 'deeply involved in affaits, and that the best of his activities', his teaching, 'was concerned with branches of knowledge which were unimportant and worthless'. Examining his motive for teaching, he found that it was not from a 'sincere desire to serve God' but that he 'wanted an influential position and widespread recognition', which he in fact did enjoy. He had no doubt, refelcting on this, that he 'stood on an eroding sandbank ...worldy desires were trying to keep' him 'chained' where he was. He would resolve to take to the road, to leave his post but then 'the mood would pass'. Satan would say, 'This is a passing mood ... Do not yield to it'. He was free from any financial or other worries and thought that if he did leave he would probably soon regret it and return. Six months went by in this manner, as he was 'tossed about between the attractions of worldly desires and the imppulses towards eternal life'. Then, 'the matter ceased to be one of choice and became one of compulsion'. 'God caused' his 'tongue to dry up so that' he 'was prevented from lecturing'. this 'impediment in' his 'heart produced grief in' his 'soul'(Watt, 1952: 136f; Zwemer, 1920: 102-3). Doctors were unable to help.

Wanderjuhr

He realized that the only solution was to leave his teaching and to search for inner peace through travel and spiritual inquiry. When he announced his intention to leave, his freinds tried to disuade him. He comments how, although he spoke of performing the haj (pilgrimage at Mecca), no one 'would admit that this sacrifice had a religious motive, because they considered my position as the highest attainable in the religious community, 'Behold, how far their knowledge goes' (Q53: 31) (Zwemer, 1920: 104). Having provided for his family, he renounced his position and his worldly possessions and left Baghdad. His brother Ahmad took over his teaching responsibility and he made sure that financail provision was made for the support of his family, reamrking that 'there is nothing more lawful in the world than that a learned man should support his family'. He then left for Damascus, where he lived in seclusion in the city's principle mosque, then he contined on to Jerusalem, to the Dome of the Rock, and to Hebron. In 1096 he performed the pilgrimage atMecca and also visited Medina and subsequently travelled to Egypt visiting Cairo and Alexandria. and many other places. He saw himself as searching for the truth. He had investigated many different schools of thought and found them wanting. It was finally among the Sufi's that his spiritual thirst was quenched.

Spiritual Illumination

Among the Sufis, al-Ghazali came to know the certainty that philosophy had failed to provide. He became convinced that knowledge of God results only from spiritual illumation, from the soul journeying back towards its source. he wrote:

I learnt with certainty that it is above all the mystics who walk on the road to God; their life is the best life, their method the soundest method' (Watt, 1952; 1995: 63).

Returning to his hometown of Tus, he took charge of a khanka (Sufi hospice or even monastery, which included a study house. There he taught what became the content of his most important work, the Ihya ulum al-din (The Revivication of the Religious Sciences. This work again singled him out as the most important theologians of the day. However, after eleven years away from his formal post, he again felt the complusion to teach, commenting that it was 'God most high who determined this move'. He began to ask colleagues whether he ought to return to teaching, as he now feared that it was love of retirement and of a life of ease that ws holding him barck from publci duty. His friends urged him to return to his own alma mata, Nishapur which had become lax, pointing out the promise of a renewer (mujaddid) towards the start of each new century (499)and that he was well equiped to take up that reviving role. He therfore ended his seclusion for a short period, at the behest of Fakhr al-Mulk, the vizier of the Seljuk ruler of Khorasan, to teach at the Nizamiyyah. He aslo gave some lectures on the Ihya in Bagdhah. During this time, he wrote his autobiography al-Munqidh min al-dalal (Deliverance from Error) and died in his native Tus in December, 1111.

Criticism of Philosophy

The Incoherence (Tuhafut al-Tuhafut), which Ghazali wrote while teaching in Baghdad, marked a turning point in Islamic philosophy in its vehement rejections of Aristotle and Plato. The book took aim at the falasifa, a loosely defined group of Islamic philosophers from the 8th through the 11th centuries. It especially singled out Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who drew intellectually upon the Ancient Greeks and al-Farabi. He takes their views as 'the authentic expression of their mis-leaders' (4), namely Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who had deceived Muslims by their claims that the 'principles they have discovered are unquestionable', thus reducing 'the positive contents of historical religion' to 'sanctimonious lies and trivilaity'(Gazali, 1963: 2). He bitterly denounced the Greeks philosopherps as mushrikuwn ('polytheist') and labelled those who employed their methods and ideas as corrupters of the Islamic faith. His criticism was that they cited the Qur'an to support their ideas but derived these from philosophy, not from revelation: 'What ... we assert is that the philosophers are unable to know these things by rational demonstration. If these things were true, the prophets would know them through inspiration or revelation; but rational arguments cannot prove them' (Ghazali, 1963: 163). The error is in trying to 'discover Hidden Things by deductive methods' (2). The Qur'an was window dressing. Reason and philosoply, he said, could not prove the existence of God or the createdness or un-createdness of the world. Rather, belief in these is an act of faith based on revelation. For example, the Philosphers denied the creation in favor of emanation (in Ghazali's view the Qur'an teaches creation but some cite "The Day We roll up the heavens with the same parallel of a scroll rolling up books; as We produced the first creation We repeat it, a promise We have undertaken, verily We shall fulfill it" (21: 104) to support emanation) on the basis that this would constitute causation, a change in the nature of God, and, since all moments of time are exactly the same, even God cannot choose a particular moment in time for creation. AI-Ghazali's retort is that God had decided to create the world in the eternal past, therefore creation did not require any change in God. According to Ghazali, God is the creator of time itself (Ghazali, 1963: 23).

Too often, philosophers drew their notion from observation (mushahadah). Muslims should 'accept the authority of the prohepts in regard to the fundamentals of these things and' should submit to that authority', without inquiring about 'the Why, and How Much, and What, for these things lie beyond the power of man' (Ghazali, 1963: 88). For example, their view of causality posited that a necessary cause and effect exists between fire and buring, light and sunshine. He argued that the relationship between these derives from the order in which God created them, not from any necessity and that either could exist without the other. Observation could not actually prove that fire causes burning, only that burning occurs where there is also fire. Ghazali argued that as a lifeless 'object', fire is not capable to perform any action so could not be the agent (al-fa`il) that causes burning (Ghazali, 1963: 186). What Ghazali disliked was formalistic observance and normative debate. External obedience (the zahiri, or outer aspect) had to be accompanied by inner conviction (the batini). Simply going through ritual was worthless. On the other hand, he also encouraged the Sufis to also comply with the external requirements of Islamic obedience, which they tended to neglect and were thus criticized by the legalistic scholars. He came to undertsand the human personality as having three parts, head, heart and limbs. Theology and philosophy could nourish the mind, mystical illumination could nourish the heart but it was the law that bound all three together into a whole.

His Ihya was in many respects his own answer to the Incoherency, since he details in four volumes and ten books how the religious life shoould be lived, what knowledge is beneficial, what knowledge harmful (or blameworthy) and how beneficial knowledge should be acquired and spread. He regards both the pursuit and the sharing of knowledge as profoundly Islamic, and suggests that knowledge is 'seeing things as they really are, which is one of the attributes of Allah' (Faris edition, Book One, Section Three: 1). Ghazali, throughout his life, identified himself with the Asharite kalam. This identification is bolstered by the fact that his teacher, al-Juwayni, was also in his lifetime a leading master of Asharite kalam. And this association affected much of his theological output. This is evidenced in his 11th century book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" which marks a major turn in Islamic epistemology, as Ghazali effectively discovered philosophical skepticism that would not be commonly seen in the west until George Berkeley and David Hume in the 18th century. The encounter with skepticism led Ghazali to embrace a form of theological occasionalism, or the belief that all causal events and interactions are not the product of material conjunctions but rather the immediate and present will of Allah, the Islamic divine being. Some regard that logical consequence of this belief in practice, and an outcome that has developed in part from it over the subsequent centuries, has been a turn towards fundamentalism in many Islamic societies. Ghazali probably did contribute to the decline of philosophy in Islamic thought. However, it can be argued that his criticism was not of philosophy per se but of an approach to philosophy that elevated reason, or even empiricism, over revelation. The problem was these established what to believe, but did not in themselves entail a living realization of faith. Ghazali therefore turned to a mystical approach to engage with the divine, which he thought transcended both of these and enabled the individual Sufi traveller to ‘taste’ the divine union – and therefore to experience annihilation of self-hood in the presence of God. Ghazali was thus instrumental in cementing the position of Sufism in mainstream Islamic tradition.

Though Ghazali was an Asharite and avowedly anti-philosophical it is notable—as pointed out by Ibn Rushd (Averroes), in his bitterly entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence)—(Tahafut al-Tahafut) that he refutes the falasifa on their own terms, by employing philosophical models of his own. It was his renown as a legal scholar within the Shafi tradition, that enabled him to convince others that mystical Islam was not heretical. Just as he challenged the legalists to develop an inner spiritual life, so he challenged Sufis to observe external requirements of fard (obligatory duties). Moreover, he explained that when such Sufis as al-Hallaj cried out, while intoxicated with a sense of Oneness with God, an-ul-haq (I am Truth, that is, God) and was executed for blasphemy in 922, his mistake had been both to attempt to describe his exeprience and to confuse a feeling of closeness with God with identity, thus he should have said 'the wine is as it were the wine glass', and not 'the wine is the wine glass' (see Peters, 1994: 343-4).

Some of his other works, most notably The Niche of Lights, in fact displays a definite affinity for the rational faculty, which would suggest that Ghazali saw a benefit in using reason to support living faith.

Al-wajiz fi fiqh al-imam al-shafi'i

Works

Islamic theology

• al-Munqidh min al-dalal, "Deliverance from Error" (translated by W. M Watt; http://www.ghazali.org/works/watt3.htm)
• al-1qtisad fi'I-i`tiqad
• al-Risala al-Qudsiyya
• Kitab al-arba?in fi usul al-din
• Mizan al-?amal

Sufism

• Ihya Ulum al-din, "The revival of the religious sciences", Ghazali's most important work; see Nabih Amin Faris's translation (Lahore, Ashraf, 1962) at http://www.ghazali.org/ihya/
• Kimiya?-yi sa?adat, "The Alchemy of Happiness"
• Mishkat al-anwar, "The Niche of Lights"

Islamic philosophy

• Maqasid al-falasifa
• Tahafut al-falasifa, "The Incoherence of the Philosophers", on which Ibn Rushd wrote his famous refutation Tahafut al-tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence)http://www.ghazali.org/works/taf-eng.pdfFiqh
• al-Mustasfa min ?ilm al-usul

Logic

• Mi?yar al-?ilm (The Standard Measure of Knowledge)
• al-Qistas al-mustaqim (The Just Balance)
• Mihakk al-nazar f'l-mantiq (The Touchstone of Proof in Logic)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Campanini, M. 'Al-Ghazzali', Nasr, S. H and Leaman,Oliver History of Islamic Philosophy London, Routlege, 2001 ISBN 0415259347
• Al-Ghazali Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut-al-Falsifah translated by Sabih Ahmad Kamali, Lahore, Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963.
• Watt, William Montgomery The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Oxford, Oneworld 1995 (originally publsihed 1952) 1851680624 (http://www.ghazali.org/works/watt3.htm)
• Watt, William Montgomery Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali, Lahore, Kazi Publication (2003; original Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1963) ISBN 1567447171 (http://www.ghazali.org/works/watt3.htm)
• Faris, Nabih Amin (translater) The Revival of the Religious Sciences,. Lahore, Sh.Muhammad Ashraf, 2003 (http://www.ghazali.org/site/ihya.htm)

Peters, F. E A Reader on Classical Islam, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994 ISBN 0691000409

• Ruthven, Malise 'Introduction' xi-xx, Ridgeon, Lloyd (ed)Islamic Interpretations of Christianity, NY, St Martin's Press, 2001 ISBN 0312238541

Zwemer, Samuel M A Moslem Seeker After God: Showing Islam at its best in the Life and teaching of Al-Ghazali, NY and London, Fleming H Revell, 1920(http://www.ghazali.org/books/zwem1.pdf),

Quotations

From 'The Way of The Sufi' by Idris Shah:

• Possessions - You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.

• Gain and Loss - I should like to know what a man who has no knowledge has really gained, and what a man of knowledge has not gained.

External links

• Al-Ghazali Web Site (really good site, has links to almost all of Ghazali's work avaliable online)
• Full text of The Alchemy of Happiness tr. Claud Field, 1909.

See also

• List of Iranian Scientists

ar:الغزالي de:Al-Ghazali fr:Al-Ghazali gl:Al-Ghazali id:Al-Ghazali ja:ガザーリー [[tr:{İmam-ı Gazali]]

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