Al-Ghazali

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In the autumn of 1095 the most celebrated teacher in the Islamic world stopped being able to speak. Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali held the most coveted chair in Sunni learning — the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, given him four years earlier by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk — and at the height of it his tongue failed in the lecture hall, his appetite went, and the physicians declared the cause beyond their medicine. He had probed his own motive for teaching and found it hollow: not consecrated to God but driven by the appetite for honor and reputation. One day he resolved to leave the city and surrender everything; the next he relapsed. Caught between, as he later wrote in his own account, the world holding him in the chains of covetousness and the voice of religion crying that his life neared its end, he at last broke the chains, gave out that he was leaving on pilgrimage, distributed his wealth, and walked out of Baghdad. He did not return to a public chair for eleven years. The man who left was the foremost jurist and dialectician of his age; the man who came back had remade the relation of Islamic law, theology, and mysticism, and the settlement he reached still holds.

Tus, Nishapur, Baghdad

Al-Ghazali was born around 1058 in Tus, in Khurasan, the northeastern province of greater Iran. The Latin schoolmen who read him in translation called him Algazel. His father, a man of modest means and Sufi sympathies, died while he and his younger brother Ahmad were children, leaving them to a guardian’s care and an education in the law. Al-Ghazali studied first in Tus and Jurjan, then went to Nishapur, the intellectual capital of Khurasan, where he became the student of the leading Ash’arite theologian of the era, al-Juwayni — known by the honorific Imam al-Haramayn, “leader of the two sanctuaries.” Under al-Juwayni he mastered kalam (dialectical theology), Shafi’i jurisprudence, logic, and the philosophy of the falasifa, and his gifts were such that his teacher reportedly called him a fathomless sea.

On al-Juwayni’s death in 1085 al-Ghazali attached himself to the camp of Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful vizier of the Seljuk sultans and the founder of the network of state madrasas that bore his name. In 1091 Nizam al-Mulk appointed him, still in his early thirties, to head the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the premier teaching post in Sunni Islam. For four years he lectured to hundreds of students, issued legal opinions, and wrote against the Isma’ili “Batinis” at the caliph’s request. It was the summit of a public career — and it was from this summit that he walked away.

The withdrawal

After 1095 al-Ghazali lived as a wandering ascetic. He went to Damascus, where he is said to have secluded himself in the minaret of the Umayyad Mosque; to Jerusalem, where he prayed in the Dome of the Rock; to Hebron; and on the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, which he performed in 1096. Eventually he returned through Baghdad to Tus, where he founded a small madrasa and a khanqah — a Sufi convent — and lived in retirement among a circle of disciples. The years of withdrawal were the years of his greatest writing. In 1106, pressed by a son of Nizam al-Mulk and persuaded that the religious sciences had fallen into decay and that he might be the renewer the age required, he broke his retirement and returned to teach at the Nizamiyya of Nishapur. He taught there only a short while before retiring again to Tus, where he died on 19 December 1111. Later tradition honored him as Hujjat al-Islam, the Proof of Islam — the title under which Sunni piety has venerated him ever since.

The Incoherence of the Philosophers

Before the crisis, al-Ghazali had turned his energies against the falasifa — the philosophers of the Islamic world who had absorbed the Greek inheritance, above all al-Farabi and Avicenna, and built from it a Neoplatonized Aristotelianism in which the cosmos flows from the First by emanation. To attack them fairly he first set out their doctrine without comment, in the Maqasid al-Falasifa (The Aims of the Philosophers), a lucid digest of Avicennan logic, metaphysics, and physics. The book was so faithful a summary that when it reached the Latin West in translation, shorn of its preface, readers took it for al-Ghazali’s own philosophy and filed Algazel among the Aristotelians — a misreading that survived for centuries and inverted his actual purpose.

That purpose he delivered in 1095 in the Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). Across twenty discussions he examined the central theses of the falasifa and argued that on their own terms — by the standard of demonstrative proof they themselves claimed — their metaphysics did not hold. He granted the soundness of logic and much of natural science; the failure, he held, lay in their pretension to demonstrate, as if by geometry, conclusions about God, creation, and the soul that no demonstration could reach. Of the twenty theses he ruled seventeen to be heretical innovation. Three he condemned as outright unbelief, kufr, placing those who held them outside Islam: the doctrine that the world is eternal and so needs no creator in time; the doctrine that God knows only universals and not particulars — and therefore does not know each person; and the denial of bodily resurrection, the philosophers having reduced the afterlife to a survival of the rational soul alone.

The most consequential single chapter is the seventeenth, on causation, where al-Ghazali set out the Ash’arite doctrine that would later be called occasionalism. The connection between what custom takes for a cause and what custom takes for its effect, he argued, is not necessary: it carries no logical entailment. Fire does not burn cotton. When fire touches cotton and the cotton blackens, the burning is the immediate act of God, who has established a habit — ‘ada — of creating combustion at the moment of contact, but who is in no way compelled by it. The agent of every event is the divine will, working directly and continuously; the regularities of nature are God’s custom, not nature’s law. This was no skeptical flourish but a theological commitment, and it had a precise polemical edge: it cleared the metaphysical ground for prophetic miracle, which Avicenna’s necessary causal chains had threatened to make impossible.

The Revival of the Religious Sciences

The Tahafut cleared away what al-Ghazali judged a false certainty. His constructive work was the Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), the labor of his withdrawal and his enduring monument. In forty books, arranged in four quarters — acts of worship, the customs of daily life, the vices that destroy the soul, and the virtues that save it — the Ihya’ draws the whole of Muslim life into a single discipline. It begins from law and ritual, the outward observance every jurist taught, and carries it inward, book by book, to the purification of the heart, the diseases of pride and envy and love of the world, and the stations of the Sufi path: patience, gratitude, fear and hope, poverty, trust in God, love, and the final reckoning with death. Its achievement was to show that the inward, mystical life of Sufism was not a marginal enthusiasm but the very interior of the law — that the jurist’s fiqh and the Sufi’s dhikr were two ends of one road. After the Ihya’, Sufism could no longer be dismissed as the suspect practice of fringe ecstatics; it had been given a secure place inside Sunni orthodoxy by the most authoritative jurist of the age. Al-Ghazali’s brother Ahmad, the love-mystic and preacher, belonged to that current too, but it was Abu Hamid’s vast synthesis that fixed Sufism’s standing in the mainstream.

He distilled the same vision in Persian for a wider readership in the Kimiya-yi Sa’adat (The Alchemy of Happiness), an abridged reworking of the Ihya’ in his mother tongue, and in the autobiographical al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Deliverance from Error). The Munqidh is one of the rare first-person narratives in medieval Islam: al-Ghazali recounts how a thirst for certainty drove him through the claims of the dialectical theologians, the philosophers, the Isma’ili “authoritative teaching,” and at last the Sufis, and how he came to see that the highest truth is reached not by proof but by tasting — by dhawq, the direct experiential knowing that argument can describe but never supply. Of the Sufis he wrote, in Claud Field’s 1909 English rendering, that their aim is “to free the soul from the tyrannical yoke of the passions … in order that in the purified heart there should only remain room for God and for the invocation of His holy name.”

The Niche of Lights

The most metaphysical, and the most apophatic, of his works is the Mishkat al-Anwar (The Niche of Lights), a short treatise expounding the Qur’anic Light-Verse — “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth” — and the tradition of the seventy thousand veils that screen the divine. Here al-Ghazali speaks not as the jurist but, in his translator W. H. T. Gairdner’s phrase, as a man overheard speaking aloud to his own soul. The verse he glosses opens with the declaration he takes as the key to everything: in Gairdner’s 1924 translation, “Allâh is the Light of the Heavens and of the Earth. The similitude of His Light is as it were a Niche wherein is a Lamp: the Lamp within a Glass: the Glass as it were a pearly Star.” God is the one Real Light from which all other lights are borrowed; created things are luminous only by participation, dark in themselves. The structure is unmistakably Neoplatonic — light descending in degrees from a single source, the soul ascending the ladder rung by rung — and at its summit stands a thoroughgoing negative theology: the closing “Veils” section ranks souls by the veils of darkness and light that hide the One Real from them, and the highest knowing turns out to be the knowledge that God cannot be known. This is the same apophatic grammar that runs through Islamic Neoplatonism and the wider tradition of negative theology: the affirmation that the divine essence, al-dhat, lies beyond every name, even as the ninety-nine names and the negations among them — the Holy, the Living — keep a positive anchor in the Qur’anic revelation. The light-symbolism of the Mishkat would feed directly into the metaphysics of illumination that Suhrawardi made the center of his school a century later.

Reception and the long argument

Al-Ghazali’s verdict on the philosophers did not go unanswered. Nearly a century after his death, in Almohad Córdoba, Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) composed the Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), a point-by-point rebuttal that quotes the Tahafut in full and defends the falasifa against each charge, accusing al-Ghazali of misrepresenting Aristotle and of confusing the demands of demonstration with those of dialectic. The two books together became the classic statement of the quarrel between revealed theology and philosophy in Islam — though the chronology forbids any picture of contemporaries in debate: Averroes was answering a man dead for decades. In the European reception, where al-Ghazali had been miscast as an Aristotelian on the strength of the Maqasid, his real arguments nonetheless circulated and pressed on others. His critique of necessary causation prefigures the occasionalism later European thinkers would entertain; his apophatic theology and his analysis of the divine attributes resonate with the negative theology that Maimonides built into the Guide of the Perplexed; and through the Latin debates over the eternity of the world and the limits of demonstration, his presence is felt at the edges of the scholastic synthesis, including in Thomas Aquinas.

A durable later judgment, especially in the West, cast al-Ghazali as the man who halted Islamic philosophy — who, by branding the boldest metaphysics of the falasifa with unbelief, closed the door that al-Farabi and Avicenna had opened. The picture is too simple. Philosophical activity in Arabic falsafa continued after him, in Averroes most obviously but also in the illuminationist and later schools, and al-Ghazali himself absorbed more Avicennan logic and psychology into orthodox theology than any predecessor, smuggling the tools of the philosophers into the seminary even as he condemned their conclusions. What he did was narrower and more lasting than a verdict on philosophy as such: he drew the line where demonstrative reason must stop and where the heart’s tasting must take over, and he wrote that line into the spiritual constitution of Sunni Islam.

Texts and study

The Arabic corpus is vast and edited many times over; the entry below points to the public-domain English and the standard scholarship.

• The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The standard parallel Arabic–English edition is Michael E. Marmura, The Incoherence of the Philosophers: A Parallel English-Arabic Text (Brigham Young University Press, 2000), the basis for most current discussion of the twenty discussions and the three charges of unbelief — BYU Studies notice.
• Deliverance from Error. Claud Field’s The Confessions of Al Ghazzali (London: John Murray, 1909) is the first complete English rendering of the al-Munqidh min al-Dalal and is in the public domain; the full text is hosted in the Library at /library/sufi/field-confessions-ghazali/.
• The Niche of Lights. W. H. T. Gairdner’s Al-Ghazzālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār (“The Niche for Lights”) (Royal Asiatic Society, 1924) remains a standard English version of the Mishkat, with a substantial introduction on its light-metaphysics; it is hosted at /library/sufi/gairdner-mishkat-al-anwar/.
• The Alchemy of Happiness. Henry A. Homes’s The Alchemy of Happiness (Albany: J. Munsell, 1873), made from a Turkish version of the Kimiya-yi Sa’adat, was the earliest English access to al-Ghazali’s mystical thought; Claud Field issued a fuller selection under the same title (London: John Murray, 1910).
• Biography and analysis. Duncan Black Macdonald’s “The Life of al-Ghazzālī,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 20 (1899), 71–132, established the modern chronology; the reference resource at ghazali.org reproduces it. W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali (Edinburgh University Press, 1963), and Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2009), are the indispensable modern studies; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a current overview at iep.utm.edu/al-ghazali.

What al-Ghazali settled was not which doctrine wins but where the borders of each kind of knowing fall. The geometer’s certainty governs logic and number; demonstration falters at the threshold of the divine; and past that threshold the road is the one his Ihya’ maps — observance deepening into discipline, discipline into the purified heart, the heart into the tasting of what argument can only point toward. He had begun as the man who could out-argue anyone in Baghdad. He ended as the man who taught the law to kneel.

→ In the library: Field — The Confessions of Al Ghazzali (1909) · Gairdner — Al-Ghazzālī's Mishkāt al-Anwār (1924)

→ Related: Avicenna · Averroes · Al Farabi · Islamic Philosophy · Islamic Neoplatonism · Sufism · Emanation · Maimonides · Thomas Aquinas · Apophatic Theology