A017 - Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

 

Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al- (Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali) (Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali) (Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali) (Algazel) (Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī) (1058-1111).  Muslim theologian, jurist, original thinker, mystic, and religious reformer.  His great work Revival of the Religious Sciences made Sufism an acceptable part of orthodox Islam.
 
Al-Ghazali is most famous for his contributions to Islamic philosophical theology (kalam), jurisprudence (fiqh), and mysticism (tassawwuf, or Sufism).  He is also known as Algazel in the West.  Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Shafi‘i al-Ghazali was born in 1058 in Tus [Khorman], near Meshed (Mashhad), Iran. Al-Ghazali was born into a family of scholars and mystics.  He was first influenced by his father, who was a pious dervish, and later by a Sufi friend of his father, not to mention his brother, who is recognized as a distinguished mystic.  Despite the presence of Sufis around him, al-Ghazali showed a great deal of interest in jurisprudence and speculative sciences.

Al-Ghazali’s father died while al-Ghazali was still very young but al-Ghazali had the opportunity of getting an education in the prevalent curriculum at Nishapur and Baghdad.  His studies at Nishapur were guided by al-Juwaini, the Imam al-Haramain, until the latter’s death in 1085.  Soon he acquired a high standard of scholarship in religion and philosophy.  

Al-Ghazali studied with such masters as Muhammad al-Radadhkhani al-Tusi, Abu Nasr al-Isma‘ili, as well as with al-Juwaini, -- the “Imam al-Haramain.”  Ghazali, who at one point was studying in the Nizamiyyah Academy, became the disciple of ‘Ali al-Farmadhi al-Tusi, through whom he became further acquainted with the theoretical as well as practical aspects of Sufism.  He then applied himself to austere forms of ascetic practices, but to his dismay did not attain the desired spiritual states.  This, in addition to the fact that al-Ghazali’s intellectual thirst was too strong to allow him to forget the intellectual pursuit of truth, contributed to his growing skepticism. 

Having gained an excellent reputation as a scholar, in 1091 al-Ghazali was appointed by Nizam al-Mulk (1018-1092), an ardent al-Ghazali admirer and the vizier to the Seljuk sultan, to teach at Nizamiyya University in Baghdad, which was recognized as one of the most reputed institutions of learning in the golden era of Muslim history.   

At this point in his life, al-Ghazali was the chair at the Nizamiyyah Academy and one of the supreme judges known for his numerous commentaries on jurisprudence.  Although having attained such titles as the “Proof of Islam” (hujat al-Islam), the “Renewer of Religion” (mujaddid al-dini), and the “Ornament of Faith” (Zain al-Din), Ghazali was inwardly going through an intellectual and spiritual crisis.   In his quest for certainty, he had begun to question the position of the scholastic theologians who derived the validity of their ideas from dictums of faith that they, the theologians, considered to be axiomatic.  His doubt soon spread to other facets of his belief, and the inner turmoil of teaching the orthodox positions on the one hand and questioning them on the other intensified his spiritual crisis.

Adding to his spiritual crisis was the fact that al-Ghazali’s patron, Nizam al-Mulk was assassinated in 1092 by Batinites (Isma‘ilis) who were terrorizing the eastern empire, supported by the Fatimid authorities in Egypt.

In 1095, al-Ghazali’s personal crisis of faith reached a climax. He relinquished his position, left his family, and became an ascetic.  This was a period of mystical transformation as al-Ghazali dedicated himself to the mystical quest, Sufism.   An era of solitary life, devoted to contemplation and writing then ensued, which led to the authorship of a number of enduring books.   

In the eleven years following his resignation, al-Ghazali traveled widely.  During this time, al-Ghazali visited Mecca, Alexandria, Jerusalem (which he left shortly before its capture by the Crusaders) and Damascus.  After ten years of wandering and meditation, he accepted another teaching position in Nishapur but left it shortly afterward and retired to Tus, where he composed his most influential work, the massive Ihya ulum al-din (The Revivification of the Religious Sciences). The work contains four volumes of ten books each.  The first volume opens with two books that discuss knowledge and the foundations of religious orthodoxy.  It then proceeds to a discussion of ibadat, that is, ritual purity, worship, the pillars of Islam, and other religious practices.

The second volume focuses on adat, the conduct of daily life, and the third and fourth volumes analyze the interior life.  The third addresses muhlikat, those practices that lead to damnation.  This is not a dry catalog of vices but an often subtle and astute inquiry into psychological and ascetic theory.  Volume four explores those actions that lead to salvation (munjiyat) in terms that resonate strongly with the stages and states of the Sufi mystical path of repentance, patience, gratitude, fear, and hope.

In 1106, the vizier Fakhr al-Mulk, son of al-Ghazali’s former patron Nizam al-Mulk, convinced him to return to public life as professor at the Nizamiyya in Nishapur.  Soon afterwards, al-Ghazali wrote his autobiography Al-munqidh min al-dalal (Deliverance from Error), which encapsulates his own personal religious crisis as well as his intellectual stance vis-a-vis Islamic philosophy and sectarian movements like that of the Batinites.  Al-Ghazali’s own training in philosophy had begun under al-Juwaini, but while teaching at Baghdad he had pursued privately a thorough study of Arab Neoplatonism exemplified in the works of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina.  Before his crisis he published a stinging refutation of their work in Tahafut al-falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers or The Destruction of the Philosophers). 

In his autobiography, al-Ghazali does not reject philosophy outright.  Logic and philosophical methodology are acceptable as long as they do not contradict the truth of God’s word, which is ultimately inaccessible to the fallible human intellect.  Al-Ghazali’s personal crisis convinced him that philosophical theology and law were by themselves inadequate means to knowledge of God.  It is mysticism that affords the seeker a true personal taste (dhauq) of the divine.  Both mysticism and the religious sciences must be pursued if one is fully to experience Islamic life. 

A short time before his death, al-Ghazali retired again to Tus, where he established a Sufi convent (a khanaqah).  There he taught his disciples and directed their spiritual progress. 

Al-Ghazali died on December 18, 1111.  He is revered by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as an intellectual giant who wedded philosophical method to theology and established mysticism on a firm intellectual base within the mainstream Muslim community.

Al-Ghazali made major contributions in religion, philosophy and Sufism.  A number of Muslim philosophers had been following and developing several viewpoints of Greek philosophy, including the Neoplatonic philosophy, and this was leading to conflict with several Islamic teachings.  On the other hand, the movement of Sufism was assuming such excessive proportions as to avoid observance of obligatory prayers and duties of Islam.  Based on his brilliant scholarship and his personal mystical experience, al-Ghazali sought to rectify these trends, both in philosophy and Sufism. 

In philosophy, al-Ghazali upheld the approach of mathematics and exact sciences as essentially correct.  However, he adopted the techniques of Aristotelian logic and the Neoplatonic procedures and employed these very tools to lay bare the flaws and lacunas of the then prevalent Neoplatonic philosophy and to diminish the negative influences of Aristotelianism and excessive rationalism.  In contrast to some of the Muslim philosophers, e.g., al-Farabi, he portrayed the inability of reason to comprehend the absolute and the infinite.  Reason could not transcend the finite and was limited to the observation of the relative.  Also, several Muslim philosophers had held that the universe was finite in space but infinite in time.  Al-Ghazali argued that an infinite time was related to an infinite space.  With his clarity of thought and force of argument, he was able to create a balance between religion and reason, and identified their respective spheres as being the infinite and the finite, respectively.

In religion, particularly mysticism, al-Ghazali cleansed the approach of Sufism of its excesses and re-established the authority of the orthodox religion.  Yet, he stressed the importance of genuine Sufism, which he maintained was the path to attain the absolute truth.

Al-Ghazali was a prolific writer.  His most noted books include Tuhafat al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Ihya al-‘Ulum al-Islamia (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), The Beginning of Guidance, and Deliverance from Error.  Some of his works were translated into European languages in the Middle Ages.  He also wrote a summary of astronomy.

Al-Ghazali’s influence was deep and enduring.  He is one of the greatest theologians of Islam.  His theological doctrines penetrated Europe and influenced Jewish and Christian scholasticism.  Indeed, several of al-Ghazali’s theses appear to have been adopted by Thomas Aquinas in order to similarly re-establish the authority of orthodox Christian religion in the West.  So forceful were al-Ghazali’s arguments in the favor of religion that he was accused of damaging the cause of philosophy compelling Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to write a rejoinder to al-Ghazali’s Tuhafat.

Al-Ghazali documented his internal struggle and the religious solution he finally achieved in The Deliverance from Error (or The Deliverer from Error), a work that has been compared to The Confessions of Saint Augustine.  In this work, al-Ghazali describes his examination of kalam (orthodox Muslim scholasticism), falsafa (metaphysics based on those of the Greeks) and t’lim (the doctrine of those who accept, without criticism, the teaching of an infallible Imam) before deciding for Sufism. 

Al-Ghazali’s great work is the The Revival of the Religious Sciences (The Revivification of the Religious Sciences).  In The Revival of the Religious Sciences, al-Ghazali presented his unified view of religion incorporating elements from all three sources formerly considered contradictory: tradition, intellectualism, and mysticism.  The work has been considered the greatest religious book written by a Muslim, second only to the Qur’an.

After having mastered the methods of philosophy, al-Ghazali set out to refute the Neo-platonic theories of other Muslim philosophers, particularly those of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), which were opposed to such orthodox religious doctrines as that of the creation, the immortality of the soul, and divine providence.  The resultant attack on philosophical theory and speculation, set forth in al-Ghazali’s Destruction of the Philosophers (or The Incoherence of the Philosophers), was in large measure responsible for the eventual decline of the element of rationalism in Islam. 

Assuming that reason leads to certainty and a firm ground upon which one can establish belief, al-Ghazali immersed himself in the study of philosophy.  To his dismay, he then discovered that reason goes only so far.  It fails to bring about ultimate certainty.  Al-Ghazali alluded to inconsistencies among the philosophers and discussed twenty points on which, according to al-Ghazali, they could be proven to be mistaken.

With his hope for attaining certainty dashed, al-Ghazali collapsed, physically and mentally going through an intense state of despair, losing his appetite and power of speech.  Having become convinced that truth is not attainable through the study of jurisprudence or philosophy, he began a mystical journey in 1095 when he left Baghdad for Damascus, where he practiced austere forms of ascetic practices.  al-Ghazali wandered in Islamic lands for eleven years, during which time he meditated and engaged himself in ascetic practices, until he returned to his native city of Tus.  From then on al-Ghazali either taught or spent time in seclusion.

In travelling on his intellectual journey, al-Ghazali questioned everything that can be questioned, searching for a truth which could not be doubted.  In his search for the indubitable truth, al-Ghazali questioned the original identity of the self or the “I” before the self is placed within the context of a given religion.  Believing himself to have found the “I” which serves as the foundation of knowledge, al-Ghazali touched on a number of epistemological issues.  He pointed to the dubious nature of sense perception and of reality itself.

Having criticized the traditional views of the Peripatetics’ epistemology, al-Ghazali went on to offer a critique of four classes of knowers: mystics, Batinis, theologians, and philosophers.  As to mystics, al-Ghazali was opposed to those Sufis who did not observe the religious law (shari‘a) and who propagated the Doctrine of the Unity of Being (wah dat al-wujud), which for him had pantheistic implications.  Al-Ghazali was vehemently against the Isma‘ili Shi‘ites, also referred to as the Batinis, for they rejected the shari‘a and argued that only an infallible Imam has access to truth.

According to al-Ghazali, theologians were blameworthy only for their methodology, and not for the content of their discussion.  Al-Ghazali (who in the opinion of many, remained a theologian for his whole life despite his criticism of them) found the attempt to establish a reason-based theology a futile effort.  Theology, he argued, does not begin with axiomatic principles, but with premises whose validity should ultimately be accepted on the basis of faith alone.

In the autobiographical al-Munqidh min al-dalal (The Deliverer [Deliverance] from Error), al-Ghazali describes how his intense pursuit of truth led him to investigate all academic disciplines available to an educated medieval Muslim.  None, including Sufism, satisfied him because, as he discovered, truth was gained only through immediate experience.  Oral instruction and the study of Sufism were no substitute for walking in the Way.  After agonizing self-examination, al-Ghazali resigned his post at the prestigious Baghdad Nizamiyya Madrasa. 

For more than ten years, al-Ghazali remained outside public life, opting for solitary reflection interrupted only by consultations with “men of the heart” -- consultations with Sufis.  However, al-Ghazali did not merely meditate he also wrote.  The resulting spiritual diary was a formidable book, one that surpassed all his previous literary productions in scope and insight. 

Entitled Ihya ‘ulum ad-din (The Bringing to Life of the Sciences of Religions or The Revival of the Religious Sciences, al-Ghazali’s diary is a survey of the entire range of Muslim theological, philosophical, devotional, and sectarian thought in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Christian era.  The mystical fervor of the Ihya is cloaked in a tight schematic garb.  It is divided into two parts, each of which has two quarters, the first two with matters of the heart, corresponding to the most common Sufi dyad, the outer -- the Zahir -- and the inner -- the Batin.  Each of the quarters, in turn, has ten books, for a total of forty books, a number whose symbolic reference to the forty-day retreat of Sufis was not lost on al-Ghazali’s contemporaries. 

The Ihya, despite its length of over one thousand pages, was widely read and quoted in Arabic.  Al-Ghazali himself rendered it into a Persian abridgment entitled Kimiya-yi sa’adat (The Elixir of Happiness).  Other adaptations, translations, and commentaries appeared throughout the medieval, and even into the modern, period.

Having mastered Greek philosophy -- in particular Aristotle -- as well as his Muslim counterparts, al-Ghazali wrote Intentions of the Philosophers (Maqasid al-falasifah) and a lucid exposition of Aristotelian philosophy entitled Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifah), in which by the dialectical method he attempted to destroy the philosophers’ positions.

Al-Ghazali divides the philosophers into three groups: the materialists (dahriyyun), who reject the existence of God and argue for the eternity of the world; the theists (ilahiyyun), who accept the existence of God; and the naturalists (tabi ‘iyyun), who are not necessarily opposed to the existence of a creator, but who argue against the immortality of the soul.

Al-Ghazali, whose thorough understanding of the philosophers’ position had led him to believe that pursuing reason alone would lead to the destruction of religion and morality, considered the philosophers to be heretical on three accounts: For accepting the eternity of the world, for denying God’s knowledge of particulars, and for denying bodily resurrection.

Acceptance of the eternity of the world entails making the world co-eternal with God, an unacceptable conclusion to the orthodoxy, al-Ghazali points out.  Philosophers argue that the eternity of the world follows by necessity from three fundamental axioms: (1) Nothing comes out of nothing, or to put it differently, something cannot come from nothing; (2) Given a particular cause, the effect necessarily and immediately follows; (3) A cause is different from and external to the effect.

Al-Ghazali offers a series of arguments against the axioms that philosophers regard to be self-evident.  In numerous arguments, he alludes to inconsistencies within these axioms.  The denial of God’s knowledge of particulars necessitates God’s relative ignorance, a position unacceptable by the Islamic credo.  Furthermore, the denial of bodily resurrection is contrary to numerous Qur’anic references concerning bodily resurrection.  The philosophers, al-Ghazali argues, make the following three claims as the basis for denying the belief in bodily resurrection: (1) There is no logical necessity that bodies be resurrected in their physical forms, (2) If there are no bodies in the hereafter, there can be neither pain nor pleasure in the other world, (3) Hell and Heaven in their physical sense do not exist, they are of a purely spiritual nature.

Al-Ghazali then proceeds to argue against the above premises, using the rationalistic method of the Peripatetics. Al-Ghazali specifically criticizes the philosophers for holding twenty fallacious opinions to which the use of reason has led them.  Among the fallacious views al-Ghazali attributes to the Peripatetics in his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifah):  The world has no beginning and no end; God did not create the universe ex nihilo; God is simple and has no quiddity (distinguishing character); God can know nothing but himself; God cannot know particulars; heavenly bodies have animal souls that move by volition; miracles are impossible; human souls are not immortal; and corporeal resurrection is impossible.

Al-Ghazali contends in his critique of the above notions that through faith and faith alone can one come to the truth.  The reliance on reason leads only to frustration and incoherence.

Al-Ghazali undertook a scathing attack against several philosophical positions, among them the theory of divine emanation.  Al-Ghazali meticulously demonstrates that the theory of emanation propagated by philosophers fails to achieve the very purpose for which philosophers have postulated it.  First, it does not solve the problem of how multiplicity came from unity and second, it fails to retain the divine unity that the theory of emanation is supposed to safeguard.

On the question of God’s knowledge of particulars, al-Ghazali is adamant that God knows all the particulars and anything short of this acknowledgment negates God’s omniscience.  Even Ibn Sina, who accepts God’s omniscience, is criticized by Ghazali for stating that even though God knows everything, he does so in a universal way, that is, in a way that is beyond the spatio-temporal (space-time) limitations of human cognition.

Knowing that philosophers base many of their arguments on the law of cause and effect, al-Ghazali critically analyzes it.  His criticism, which is very similar to David Hume’s argument, maintains that the relationship between a cause and the effect is not a logical necessity.  Knowledge of the causal relations between fire and burning or water and wetness is not based on reasoning about necessary relations, but on sense observation.

Having argued against the necessary connection between a cause and its effect, al-Ghazali uses this to offer an explanation of the phenomenon of miracle.  To those who argue for the impossibility of miracles on the ground that a miracle violates natural laws, al-Ghazali’s critique of causality explains how the continuity of the so-called “laws” of nature can be disrupted without violating any law.

Al-Ghazali elaborates extensively on ethics and moral problems.  Relying on the Qur’anic concepts, he uses Aristotelian notions to shed light on some of the complex issues.  One of the issues that al-Ghazali was particularly interested in was the problem of free will and determination and how that is related to the problem of human choices.

Al-Ghazali, both as a theologian and a jurist, believed that causal determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.  To solve the problem he offers an ingenious argument that contains three levels: first, there is the level of the material world, where events occur out of necessity; second, there is the sensuous world, where there is relative freedom of action; and finally there is the Divine realm, where there is absolute free will.

Al-Ghazali realizes the significance of having free will, since without it Heaven and Hell would be meaningless.  Having established the relative nature of human will, al-Ghazali discusses vices and virtues and man’s duty to exercise his noble gift of free will to do what is good.  He defines vices as desires of the flesh and ego (nafs) that lead to bodily excesses such as unrestrained sex; overindulgence in food; misuse of speech; love of wealth, position, name, and self-assertion.  There are also sicknesses of the soul that ought to be cured by such virtues as repentance; renunciation of the materialistic world; abstinence from giving in to the desires of flesh; spiritual poverty or emptiness, which signifies a desire and ability to be filled by divine truth; patience; reliance on God as the spiritual center of the world; and finally love, the most important of all virtues.  Love, for al-Ghazali, leads to an unmediated mode of cognition between the human being and God (‘arif).  This subject was extensively treated in the post-Ghazali period and it reached its climax in the School of Isfahan during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Persia.

Al-Ghazali has sometimes been compared unfavorably with his younger brother, Ahmad al-Ghazali, a Sufi Shaikh and consummate poet.  Both men charted new directions for the future course of Muslim spirituality, but to date the prolific and scholarly Abu Hamid al-Ghazali has attracted the greater attention.

History now records that Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was a major figure in the intellectual life of medieval Islam.  As a jurist, al-Ghazali defended the integrity of the Sunni creed, and was especially concerned to show its superiority to the system of the Nizari Ismailis, a Shi‘ite sectarian group whose speculations attracted and challenged him.  As a scholastic theologian, al-Ghazali inherited the Neoplatonic philosophical categories introduced into Islam through Arabic translations from Greek, popularized by the rationalist, free-thinking Mu’tazila movement and elaborated by the Turkish metaphysician al-Farabi and his Persian successor, Ibn Sina.  Al-Ghazali reworked the dialectical categories of earlier Muslim theologians such as al-Ash’ari and his own teacher, al-Juwayni, but it was as a mystic that he attained his greatest fame and effected his most lasting influence.
 
Philosophers rarely have an impact on the history of philosophy through their lives as well as through their ideas.  Al-Ghazali, however, is such a figure in that various phases of his life left an indelible mark on the history of Islamic philosophy by strengthening Sufism while curtailing the influence of rationalistic philosophy, particularly in the eastern part of the Islamic world. 
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
Ghazzali, al- see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
Algazel see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-
“Proof of Islam” see Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-