Refreshing And Informative

By Muhammad Khan, *Life and thoughts of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali* - The New Nation - Bangladesh
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Books - Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology, by Frank Griffel, New York: Oxford University Press, pp408, 2009, HB, £34.00.

- Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, by Ebrahim Moosa, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp349, 2005, PB, $22.50

In his Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali (1962), the renowned British Islamicist W. Montgomery Watt wrote, "al-Ghazali has been acclaimed as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, and is certainly one of the greatest." If

Watt's assessment of al-Ghazali was an exaggeration (as the late Professor Muhsin Mahdi clearly thought it was), then it is difficult to disagree with late Dr Margaret Smith's view that "…at the present time al-Ghazali's works are still read and studied (and their teaching accepted as authoritative), more widely than those of any other Muslim writer, throughout the length and breadth of the world of Islam." (Al-Ghazali the Mystic, p. 236, 1944).

Today, almost nine centuries after his death, al-Ghazali remains one of the most widely read, researched and equally controversial scholars to have hailed from the Muslim world (I have around a dozen Ph.D. theses on him in English alone, not to mention those in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Bengali, etc). Given al-Ghazali's important contribution in a range of Islamic disciplines [most notably in theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafah), mysticism (tasawwuf) and jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh)], books on his life and ideas/thoughts will no doubt continue to proliferate, both in the East and the West.

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Ghazali was, according to the majority of his biographers, born in 1058 in Tabaran, which at the time was one of two main towns in the district of Tus. Despite being a famous scholar and writer, little is known about al-Ghazali's early life. So much so that even his date of birth is hotly contested by his biographers. Thus Frank Griffel, the author of the book under review, argues that he was actually born in 1056. The basis for Griffel's view is a letter al-Ghazali wrote to Sultan Sanjar in order to explain to the ruler why he was unable to appear before him, suggesting that he may have been born at least two years before his widely accepted date of birth. However, unlike Griffel, Ebrahim Moosa, author of the book under review, states that al-Ghazali was born in 450AH, corresponding to 1058-9CE, which is the majority view.

According to al-Subki's account, al-Ghazali lost his father when he was a youngster and was cared for by a Sufi friend of his father. Subsequently, he received training in Islamic sciences under several scholars including al-Radhakani, Ismail ibn Mas'ada al-Ismaili and al-Juwayni. As a talented student, al-Ghazali soon attracted the attention of al-Juwayni, who appointed him as his teaching assistant. During this period he received advanced training in Islamic sciences and aspects of philosophy, and also composed his al-Mankhul min Ta'liqat al-Usul (The Sifted Notes on the Methods of Fundamentals).

Al-Ghazali's intellectual brilliance, coupled with his polished oratory skills and powerful pen, soon attracted the attention of local scholars and lay people. As his popularity increased, Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful Seljuk vizier, appointed him professor at Madrasah al-Nizamiyyah in Baghdad when he was still in his mid-thirties. During his tenure at Nizamiyyah, al-Ghazali claimed to have written about seventy books. However, Griffel argues that most of these books, though published during his tenure at Nizamiyyah, were in fact written prior to his arrival in Baghdad. Be that as it may, al-Ghazali left Baghdad after teaching at Nizamiyyah for about four years.

Prior to his departure, he began to closely study the works of eminent Sufis like al-Junayd, al-Shibli, al-Muhasibi, al-Bistami and al-Makki and he became thoroughly familiar with the mystical dimension of Islam. This was followed by a crisis in his life and worldview which, as Moosa points out, forced him to resign from his professorship and he travelled around prominent Islamic centres "craving for the mystical realm and identified spiritual experience as the only path through which he could slake his thirst for certainty and inner peace. Throughout this intense struggle with his self, Ghazali continued to write large and small treatises on a range of topics. The achievement that crowned Ghazali's sufi phase was the writing of his magnum opus, Resuscitation of the Sciences of Religion; he also wrote notable texts on gnostic piety, legal theory, and theology." (p.6).

After more than a decade of travel and seclusion (uzla), al-Ghazali was asked by Fakhr al-Mulk, a son of Nizam al-Mulk, to teach at Nizamiyyah in Nishapur, which he did for around three years, before returning to his native Tus where he passed away in 1111 at the age of fifty-three although, according to Griffel, he was around fifty-five at the time.

Al-Ghazali completed his last book, Iljam al-Awamm an Ilm al-Kalam (Restraining the Masses from Speculative Theology), only a few days prior to his death. As Griffel points out, little is known about al-Ghazali's family or children although one report suggests he only had female descendants. Others say he had no prominent male successor to champion his work and legacy.

As it transpired, al-Ghazali's ideas and thoughts as formulated in more than fifty books soon became a monument in the annals of Islamic thought and scholarship, and this, more than anything else, has helped to immortalise him. In Griffel's own words, "Al-Ghazali was the most influential teacher of Islamic law and theology during the fifth/eleventh and the sixth/twelfth centuries. He had a particularly monumental impact on the intellectual of the century after his death. Indeed, his writings on the relationship between the philosophical sciences and Muslim theology profoundly affected all Muslim thinkers until the early twentieth century and still carry weight in the Muslim discourse on reason and revelation today." (p.61).

It was al-Ghazali's profound intellectual legacy and relevance to Muslim thought which prompted both Griffel and Moosa to pursue their research on his life and thoughts. Griffel's book seeks to critically explore al-Ghazali's philosophical theology. Although this aspect of his thought has already been analysed by several prominent scholars (such as Michael Marmura, Fadlou Shehadi and Richard M. Frank, among others), however, the value of Griffel's book lies in the fact that he was prepared to question many 'facts' about the life and thoughts of al-Ghazali. More importantly, I found the first two chapters of this book dealing with the life and works of al-Ghazali as well as his prominent students and early followers to be refreshing and informative.

Having said that, writing on al-Ghazali's philosophical theology is never an easy task given the fact that he, in the words of Richard M. Frank, "never composed a complete, systematic, summary of his theology" in the first place. Although it is true that al-Ghazali did not formulate his philosophical theology in a systematic way in one book, Griffel argues "when one considers his corpus as a whole, a quite cohesive picture of his theology emerges." (p.275). From this standpoint, Griffel, a Professor of Islamic Studies at Yale University, then proceeds to develop a coherent and integrative analysis of key issues in Ghazalian philosophical theology, focusing primarily on the latter's views on the role of falsafah in Islam, the relationship between reason (aql) and revelation (wahy), and a detailed discussion of al-Ghazali's acclaimed Tahafut al-Falasifah (Incoherence of the Philosophers), concluding with a survey of his theological views as expressed in his post-The Revival works.

In the Conclusion, Griffel argues, "Al-Ghazali teaches God's Omnipotence and His control over each event in His creation, and he still finds a way to reconcile fully these positions with the cosmological principle of creation through casual chains… Throughout his oeuvre, al-Ghazali constantly reminds his readers how easily humans can fail in their judgements." (p.286).

If Griffel seeks to present a comprehensive picture of al-Ghazali's cosmology, then Moosa (who was trained at an Islamic seminary in India and is now a Research Professor in the US), attempts not only to enter the heart of Ghazalian worldview to develop a comprehensive understanding of Ghazali's thoughts but he also seeks to re-engage with the latter's ideas so as to formulate a methodology (at once Islamic and yet modern) to enable Muslims to make the Islamic intellectual tradition relevant to modern and post-modern thoughts and vice versa.

Moosa's entire thesis revolves around the notion of threshold, or dihliz, an intellectual space which, contends Moosa, enabled al-Ghazali to engage with different schools of thought and philosophy in his life time without undermining his own Islamic worldview.

Starting from the premise that al-Ghazali was a multifaceted personality, Moosa argues, "He was a person committed to many political and intellectual causes. But his embrace of law, politics, mysticism, and philosophy did not follow a uniform path. His was a complex psychology, a life pattern that did not yield to the Homeric orderly succession and alternation of emotions. It was more akin to the 'simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.' If the unpredictability of life shapes the career of a great person, then it is significant that Ghazali's life was radically unpredictable and followed no logical pattern." (p.8).

This view is only true if one were to observe all the ups and downs of al-Ghazali's life in isolation. However, if his life, career and worldview were to be analysed, as Moosa seeks to do, from the threshold, then it could be argued that behind the form of all radical unpredictability and apparent lack of logical pattern there resides the thread of uniformity which enabled al-Ghazali to look at events and activities as well as different systems of thoughts in a detached manner without becoming a part of them. Far from being elusive, ambiguous and difficult to pin-down, al-Ghazali, according to Moosa, was an original thinker who, instead of creating synthesis and reconciliation, imagined new forms of knowledge which enabled him to uphold often contradictory views from the dihliz.

Consisting of nine chapters and an illuminating Introduction and Conclusion, this book is one of the most original and provocative study of al-Ghazali yet to have been produced by a Muslim. One may not agree with everything Moosa has to say but I would like to thank him for sending me a copy of his book.

Source: MusliM news. M. Khan is author of the widely acclaimed book, *The Muslim 100* (reprinted 2009) and *Against the Tide: Thoughts on Islam and Contemporary Issues* (forthcoming).