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 he is written sometimes. 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 influenced Thomas Aquinas who cited one of his works 31 times.

His 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 to a Sufi friend when he died, 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'). However, he grew sceptical about the possibiliy of any certainty in knowledge and this uncertainty eventually resulted in a crises that was to change his life.

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 later wrote that .............Having provided for his family, he renounced his position, and 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. He told colleagues that he was going on the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. Most implored him not to leave. He left for Damascus, where he lived in seclusion in the city's principle minaret, and then on to Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock, and Hebron. He went on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in 1096 and subsequently travelled widely to Baghdad and Egypt and many other places. Finally he returned to his hometown of Tus. During this time Ghazali had written his most important work, Ihya ulum al-din (The Revivication of the Religious Sciences), which again immediately singled him out as the most important theologians of the day. He ended his seclusion for a short lecturing period, at the behest of Fakhr al-Mulk, the vizier of the Seljuk ruler of Khorasan, at the Nizamiyyah of Tus in 1106. Here he wrote his autobiography al-Munqidh min al-dalal. Here he remained until his death in December, 1111.

Ghazali, throughout his life, also 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 Incoherence also 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 (most notable among them Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who drew intellectually upon the Ancient Greeks. Ghazali bitterly denounced Plato, Socrates and other Greek writers 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. 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 Word. Rather, belief in these is an act of faith based on revelation.

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)—that he refutes the falasifa on their own terms, by employing philosophical models of his own.

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

It is, however, clear that Ghazali self-identified as an Asharite throughout his life, and also that by the time Ghazali's writing that Asharite theology was appreciably more rationalistic than it had been at its inception, 120 years before Ghazali's birth. Therefore although it has often been assumed that with Ibn Rushd's funeral the truly philosophical elements of Islamic culture died, it is clear that on closer inspection it is perhaps more sensible to look for these philosophical traits within the tradition of Asharite theology.

This debate does, however, seem to fade into insignificance, on the realisation of Ghazali’s eventual association to the Sufi way of thinking. His adoption of Sufism in the later stages of life seems to indicate, as Ghazali himself professes, that this mystical path was in fact the only verifiable way of coming to terms with the divine presence. His conclusion, as it appears in his autobiography (al-Mustafa min ‘ilm al-usul), seems to suggest that Ghazali found fault with both a purely faith based approach and a purely rationalistic approach. The problem was that each of 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.

Works

Islamic theology

• al-Munqidh min al-dalal, "Deliverance from Error"
• 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
• 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)

Fiqh

• 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)

Literature

• Laoust, H: La politique de Gazali, 1970
• Campanini, M.: Al-Ghazzali, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman, History of Islamic Philosophy 1996
• Watt, W M.: Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali, Edinburgh 1963
• Marmura: Al-Ghazali The Incoherence of the Philosophers, (2nd ed.). Brigham: Printing Press. ISBN 0-8425-2466-5.
• Frank, Richard: Al-Ghazali and the Asharite School, London, 1994

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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