al-Ghazzālī

Muslim theologian

• Born: 1058
• Birthplace: Tūs, Khurasan, Iran
• Died: December 18, 1111
• Place of death: Tūs, Khurasan, Iran

Al-Ghazzālī is widely regarded as the greatest theologian of Islam. His thought and writing bridged the gap between the Scholastic and the mystical interpretations of religion and formed an enduring ethical and moral structure.

Early Life

Al-Ghazzālī (ahl-guh-ZAH-lee) was one of a number of children born to a prominent family of the Ghazala, specialists distinguished for their knowledge of Muslim canon law (Shariՙa). Although little is known of his childhood, his pattern of education strongly suggests that his family intended for him to follow its professional traditions. Much of his education and religious training was at home in Ṭūs, with some time also spent at the important intellectual center of Jurjan. His advanced education was undertaken at the major university city of Nishapur. In 1085, al-Ghazzālī visited the influential NizŃām al-Mulk, the most important vizier of the early Seljuk period and a major figure himself in the propagation of education and scholarship. In 1091, NizŃām appointed al-Ghazzālī to a professorship at the university he had established in Baghdad in 1065.

For several years, al-Ghazzālī remained in Baghdad as a popular and successful lecturer, whose classes drew students by the hundreds. Beneath it all, however, al-Ghazzālī was a deeply troubled man. His views became increasingly skeptical with respect to theology and deeply critical of the corruption often associated with administration of canon law . He took up a writing campaign against the Ismālī cult of the Assassins, a political-religious terrorist group of the time whose members, holed up in the mountains of Iran, had been responsible for numerous assassinations of administrative authorities and intellectuals who took issue with the Assassins’ eccentric views. NizŃām al-Mulk himself was among those who died at their hands.

Around 1095, according to some sources, al-Ghazzālī suffered a debilitating nervous illness that forced him to interrupt his career as a scholar and teacher. The illness was only a symptom of the intellectual and spiritual crisis his life had reached. Al-Ghazzālī experienced the sort of self-confrontation that inevitably reminds one of the youth of Martin Luther. He had arrived at a crossroads, and his decision was to change direction.

Al-Ghazzālī now abandoned his comfortable professorship in Baghdad (taking care to secure it for his younger brother) and embarked on years of wandering, during most of which he lived a life of poverty and celibacy as a Sufi, a Muslim mystic. After a short stay in Damascus, he went on to Palestine and thence to Mecca, participating in the pilgrimage at the end of 1096. By some accounts, he visited Egypt briefly and even contemplated a journey to the Almoravid court in faraway Morocco.

Life's Work

For more than a decade, al-Ghazzālī lived in solitude, meditating and performing mystical rituals. Near the end of this period, he produced his greatest work, Iḥyā ՙulūm al-dīn (c. 1103; The Revival of Religious Sciences, 1964). Around 1106, yielding to the entreaties of the new Seljuk vizier to return to academic life, he took up a professorship in Nishapur. Shortly before his death in 1111, however, he retired once more to a life of meditation at a retreat near Ṭūs, where he gathered a small band of ascetic disciples.

Evaluation of al-Ghazzālī's thought and religious doctrine is made difficult by the uncertain authorship of many works attributed to him over the centuries. His influence was such that historians of later generations have tended to identify almost any significant theological treatise of the time with him. Shortly before the end of his life, al-Ghazzālī composed a kind of testament of his religious opinions containing much material since inferred to be biographical. The evolution of his thought must be traced using only works indisputably his own.

Al-Ghazzālī's earliest writing, late in his Baghdad professorship, sought to expose contradictions between the beliefs of Sunni Islam and the philosophy of Arabic Neoplatonism espoused by the likes of al-Fārābi and Avicenna. He first wrote a dispassionate exposition of their beliefs that, ironically, became a welcome guide in lands around the Mediterranean, where Neoplatonism remained popular among Christian and Jewish communities. Al-Ghazzālī then produced a severely critical work titled Tahāfut al-falāsifah (1095; Incoherence of the Philosophers, 1958), which went so far as to brand certain aspects of Neoplatonism as anti-Muslim.

Al-Ghazzālī's most significant work was in the application of logic to Muslim theology, in preference to the intuitive and metaphysical components of Neoplatonic thought. In particular, he made use of the Aristotelian syllogism as a frame of reference and tool for argument. To make elements of logic and philosophical argument more available to Muslim clerics and judges, he produced several handbooks.

Throughout his writing, al-Ghazzālī calls for careful evaluation and awareness of the sources of religious knowledge. His stand on behalf of logic and his warnings about the seductiveness of emotional and occult movements to those insufficiently grounded in theology partly reflect the atmosphere in northeastern Iran during his life, exemplified by the Assassins, befuddled by hashish and wandering through the countryside in search of victims.

Al-Ghazzālī's largest and most important work is The Revival of Religious Sciences. For the devout Muslim, it offers a complete guide to spirituality and the pious life. It provides complex prescriptions for life according to the Shariՙa and explains how such a life, virtuous and devoid of sin, contributes to human salvation. About half of the work is concerned with what al-Ghazzālī regarded as the foundational concepts necessary to devote the mind to the Muslim way.

In the contemporary West, there is a popular tendency to regard al-Ghazzālī as a mystic, or at least as sentimentally disposed to mysticism. (It is with respect to this that scholars have raised the most doubts about the authenticity of works attributed to him.) His spiritual torment may have derived in part from mystical experiences. In fact, al-Ghazzālī's ideas made it possible for Scholastic Islam and its clerics to coexist with mysticism; here lies his crucial contribution. He argued that the revelations of saintly persons supplement those of the Prophet and give individuals some spiritual independence from the authority and worldliness of the clerics. Al-Ghazzālī always insisted, however, that Muḥammad and his way must be the final authority in this world. Obedience to the Shariՙa was the pathway to piety and salvation.

Whether al-Ghazzālī's ideas constitute a reconciliation between Sunni orthodoxy and mysticism is debatable; the great complexity of his writings makes possible many interpretations. On one hand, he is concerned to defend orthodoxy against the doctrine of Ismālī Shiism, which produced the Assassins and other splinter movements in Islam. On the other, al-Ghazzālī criticizes the pedantry and corruption of the clerics in administering the Shariՙa, as well as their preference for metaphysical explanations rather than careful, logical argument in Muslim apologetics.

The writings of this singular theologian were also essential to the development of later Islamic ideas of ethical government. Al-Ghazzālī held the conservative position that a righteous king is one who enforces the Shariՙa; one who neglects the Shariՙa fails as a ruler. Although he warned that Muslims must obey unjust rulers (without condoning their injustices), his implicit judgment of secular authorities on grounds of their lack of adherence to the Shariՙa opened the way for criticism of rulers and thus potential confrontation between religious and secular leadership.

Significance

In the Sunni world and beyond, al-Ghazzālī is widely regarded as the greatest and most significant Muslim after Muḥammad himself. The title Hujjat al-Islam (roof of Islam) is often applied to him. His work introduced a Greek philosophical strain into Islam that has persisted to the present. His impact on Islamic theology has been compared to that of Thomas Aquinas on Christian thought, in that he constructed an essentially Scholastic framework of explanation heavily dependent on Aristotelian reason. Indeed, his writings were so exceptionally popular that some had been translated into Latin by the middle of the twelfth century and so were known to Aquinas. Many other Christian and Jewish Scholastic theologians were influenced by al-Ghazzālī.

Some of al-Ghazzālī's critics suggest that the durability of Scholasticism in Islam, in contrast to the disintegration of this mode of thought in much of Christendom at the hands of Protestant theologians, has inhibited the adaptability of Islam to new ideas and conditions. Yet al-Ghazzālī gave legitimacy to mystical experience and promoted the devout life based on the Shariՙa, both of which strengthened Islam as a personal faith and helped to articulate standards of social and political justice. The interaction between these apparent dichotomies continues to make the writings of al-Ghazzālī of vital interest to Muslims and Christians alike.

Bibliography

Abrahamov, Binyamin. Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of al-Ghazālī and al-Dabbāgh. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. A study of the ideas of divine love in Sufism and in al-Ghazzālī’s mysticism. Extensive bibliography and an index.

Binder, Leonard. “Al-Ghazali’s Theory of Islamic Government.” Muslim World 45 (1955): 229-241. Explains that al-Ghazzālī argued for a balance of powers and clerical independence for the state. Al-Ghazzālī expressed nostalgia for caliphal power in Islam, which had waned seriously by his time.

Hourani, George F. “The Chronology of Gazali’s Writings.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 79 (1959): 225-233. Provides a framework to study al-Ghazzālī’s intellectual development by precise dating and sequence of works, supplemented by careful textual study of particular works.

Inglis, John, ed. Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon, 2002. Provides several chapters on al-Ghazzālī’s influence on the work of contemporaries such as Averroës. Places medieval Islamic philosophy in the context of classic philosophy. Bibliography, index.

Mitha, Farouk. Al-Ghazali and the Ismailis: A Debate on Reason and Authority in Medieval Islam. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001. Explores al-Ghazzālī’s attempts to discredit Islamic movements such as those of the Ismālīs. Bibliography, index.

Najm, Sami M. “The Place and Function of Doubt in the Philosophies of Descartes and Al-Ghazali.” Philosophy East and West 16 (1966): 133-141. Shows parallels between the two philosophers with respect to origin of doubt and the use of doubt to discover true knowledge.

Padwick, Constance E. “Al-Ghazali and the Arabic Versions of the Gospels.” Muslim World 29 (1939): 130-140. An example of how Christian apologists have used al-Ghazzālī. Argues that he accepted the divine revelation of the Gospels and rejected the idea that they had been tampered with.

Sharma, Arvind. “The Spiritual Biography of Al-Ghazali.” Studies in Islam 9 (1972): 65-85. This biographical study of al-Ghazzālī is important because it shows how he engaged in a personal rather than a merely theological quest for God and incorporated into his philosophy many tenets of the main intellectual and religious movements of his time.

Stepaniants, Marietta. Introduction to Eastern Thought. Translated by Rommela Kohanovskaya and edited by James Behuniak. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2002. An introductory survey of Eastern religious and philosophical thought, including the work of al-Ghazzālī and his contemporaries, Sufism, and the Islamic tradition in general. Bibliography, index.

Watt, W. Montgomery. The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali. London: Allen and Unwin, 1953. Contains a translation of al-Ghazzālī’s spiritual testament, written shortly before his death.

Watt, W. Montgomery. Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963. In this study concerned with influences on al-Ghazzālī’s development, the author suggests that he turned to mysticism because of the unsatisfactory state of theology and jurisprudence at the time. The author is critical of al-Ghazzālī for placing immediate experience above knowledge derived by rational means.