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Al-Ghazali

Persian theologian, jurist, mystic and philosopher (1058–1111), a decisive figure in Sunni Islam, trained in Nishapur and appointed at a young age professor at the prestigious Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, a post from which he attained enormous intellectual and political prestige before suffering, around 1095, a profound spiritual and epistemological crisis that led him to abandon everything for years of wandering ascetic life. His most influential work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifa), is a systematic and logically rigorous attack on the rationalist philosophers of the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition in Islam, particularly Avicenna and al-Farabi, whom he accuses of committing twenty erroneous doctrines, three of them gravely unbelieving — denying bodily resurrection, denying divine knowledge of particulars, and affirming the eternity of the world — a blow that profoundly shaped, for centuries, the subsequent course of Islamic falsafa. Paradoxically, al-Ghazali thoroughly mastered Aristotelian logic and used it with great skill to dismantle the philosophers themselves, while on another level arguing that ultimate certainty is achieved not through discursive reason but through direct mystical experience (dhawq, 'spiritual tasting'), a conviction he set out with autobiographical intensity in The Deliverer from Error. His magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya' 'ulum al-din), is a monumental summa seeking to reintegrate Sufi spirituality within Sunni orthodoxy, while offering a detailed guide for the practical, ethical and devotional life of the Muslim. Regarded by many as the second most influential figure in Islam after Muhammad, he received the honorific title Hujjat al-Islam, 'the Proof of Islam'.

What are Al-Ghazali's main ideas?What is Al-Ghazali's most important work?How would you summarize Al-Ghazali's thought?

19 works

Themes addressed

The self and self-knowledgeReason and passion

Quotes

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