GHAZALI, ABU HAMID
AL-
(AH
450-505/10581111 ca), named Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad; the
distinguished Islamic jurist, theologian, and mystic who was given the
honorific title Hujjat alIslam (Arab., "the proof of Islam").
Life. Al-Ghazali was born in the town of Tus, near modern
Mashhad (eastern Iran), and received his early education there. When he was
about fifteen he went to the region of Gorgan (at the southeast corner of the
Caspian Sea) to continue his studies. On the return journey, so the story
goes, his notebooks were taken from him by robbers, and when he pleaded for
their return they taunted him that he claimed to know what was in fact only in
his notebooks; as a result of this incident he spent three years memorizing the
material.
At the age of nineteen he went to Nishapur (about fifty
miles to the west) to study at the important Nizamiyah college under 'Abd
al-Malik al-Juwayni (d. 1085), known as Imam al-Haramayn, one of the leading
religious scholars of the period. Jurisprudence would be central in his
studies, as in all Islamic higher education, but he was also initiated into
Ash'ari theology and perhaps encouraged to read the philosophy of al-Farabi
and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). He later helped with teaching and was recognized as a
rising scholar. When al-Juwayni died, the powerful vizier of the Seljuk
sultans, Nizam al-Mulk, invited him to join his court, which was in fact a camp
that moved about, giving al-Ghazali the opportunity to engage in discussions
with other scholars.
In 1091, when he was about thirty-three, he was appointed
to the main professorship at the Nizamiyah college in Baghdad, one of the
leading positions in the Sunni world; it can be assumed that the appointment
was made by Nizam al-Mulk, the founder of the colleges bearing his name. After
just over four years, however, al-Ghazali abandoned his professorship and
adopted the life of an ascetic and mystic.
We know something of al-Ghazali's personal history during
these years in Baghdad from the autobiographical work he wrote when he was
about fifty, entitled
Al-munqidh min
al-dalal (The Deliverer from Error). This work is not conceived as an
autobiography, however, but as a defense of his abandonment of the Baghdad
professorship and of his subsequent return to teaching in Nishapur about a
decade later. It is also not strictly chronological but was given a schematic
form. In it, he describes his intellectual journey after the earliest years as
containing a period of skepticism lasting "almost two months," when
he doubted the possibility of attaining truth. Once he ceased to be completely
skeptical, he set out on a search for truth among four "classes of seekers
[of truth]," namely, the Ash'ari theologians, the Neoplatonic
philosophers, the Isma'iliyah (whom he calls the party of ta'lim, or authoritative instruction), and finally the Sufis, or
mystics. He writes as if these were four successive stages in his journey, but
in fact they must have overlapped; it is virtually certain that he gained some
knowledge of mysticism during his early studies at Tus and Nishapur. The period
of skepticism, too, could only have come after he had some acquaintance with
philosophy, since philosophical considerations were involved.
The first encounter, according to this scheme, was with
the mutakallimun, or rational
theologians. These were, of course, the Ash'ariyah, by whom he had been trained
and among whom he is reckoned. In the Munqidh
he complains that their reasoning is based on certain presuppositions and
assumptions which they never try to justify, but which he cannot accept without
some justification. In effect what happened was that he found in philosophy a
way of justifying some of the bases of Ash'ari theology. This can be seen in
his principal work of Ash'ari theology, Al-iqtisad
ft al-i'tiqad (The Golden Mean in Belief), where he introduces many
philosophical arguments, including one for the existence of God. Until the end
of his life he seems to have held that Ash'ari theology was true so far as it
went, and in his chief mystical work, Ihya'
'ulum al-din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), he includes an
Ash'ari creed of moderate length; this is known as Al-risalah al-qudsiyah (The Jerusalem Epistle) and was probably
composed before his extensive study of philosophy.
The second encounter of his intellectual journey was with
Greek philosophy and, in particular, the Arabic Neoplatonism of al-Farabi and
Ibn Sina. He had probably been introduced to philosophy by al-Juwayni, but he
began the intensive study of it early in his Baghdad professorship. Since
philosophy, with other Greek sciences, was cultivated in institutions distinct
from the colleges for Islamic jurisprudence and theology and was looked on with
disapproval, al-Ghazali had to study the books of the philosophers by himself.
He describes how he devoted to this activity all the free time he had after
lecturing to three hundred students and doing some writing. In less than two
years he managed to gain such a thorough understanding of the various
philosophical disciplines that his book, Maqasid
al-falasifah (The Views of the Philosophers), gives a clearer account of
the teaching of Ibn Sina on logic, metaphysics, and physics than the works of
the philosopher himself. After another year's reflection on these matters, al-Ghazali
wrote a powerful critique of the metaphysics or theology of the philosophers
entitled Tahafut al-falasifah (The
Inconsistency of the Philosophers). His argument against the philosophers is
based on seventeen points on which he attacks their views as heretical and on
three others on which he regards the philosophers as infidels. In discussing
the seventeen points al-Ghazali demonstrates the weaknesses of the
philosophers' arguments for the existence of God, his unicity, and his incorporeality,
and he rejects their view that God is a simple existent without quiddity and
without attributes, their conception of his knowledge, and some of their assertions
about the heavens and the human soul. The three points contrary to Islam are
that there is no resurrection of bodies but only of spirits, that God knows
universals but not particulars, and that the world has existed from eternity.
Underlying the detailed arguments is his conviction that the philosophers are
unable to give strict logical proofs of their metaphysical views. He therefore
turned away from them also in his search for truth.
His third encounter was with a section of the Isma`iliyah
who held that true knowledge was to be gained from an infallible imam. It seems
doubtful whether he seriously expected to gain much from such people. He did,
however, study their views carefully, partly because the caliph of the day
commanded him to write a refutation of them. He had little difficulty in
showing that there were serious inadequacies in their teaching.
His final encounter was with Sufism; he had already
realized that this mysticism entailed not only intellectual doctrines but also
a way of life. After four years in Baghdad he felt himself so involved in the
worldliness of his milieu that he was in danger of going to hell. The profound
inner struggle he experienced led in 1095 to a psychosomatic illness. Dryness
of the tongue prevented him from lecturing and even from eating, and the doctors
could do nothing to alleviate the symptoms. After about six months he resolved
to leave his professorship and adopt the life of a Sufi. To avoid any attempts
to stop him, he let it be known that he was setting out on the pilgrimage to
Mecca. Actually he went only to Damascus, living there as a Sufi for over a year,
and then made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1096. Some six months after that he
was back in Baghdad and then seems to have made his way by stages back to his
native Tus. There he established a khanaqah
(hostel or convent), where some young disciples joined him in leading a
communal Sufi life. The genuineness of his conversion to Sufism has sometimes
been questioned by Muslim scholars, and it has been suggested that he left his
professorship because he was afraid his life was in danger on account of political
involvements. To judge from his own account, however, religious considerations
were uppermost in his mind.
The Muslim year 500 (which began on 2 September 1106 CE)
marked the beginning of a new century. Muhammad was reported to have said that
God would send a "renewer" (mujaddid)
of his religion at the beginning of each century, and various friends
assured alGhazali that he was the "renewer" for the sixth century.
This induced him to take up an invitation from the vizier of the provincial
governor in Nishapur to become the main professor in the Nizamiyah college
there. He continued in this position for three or possibly four years and then
returned to Tus, probably because of ill health; he died there in 1111. His
brother Ahmad, himself a distinguished scholar, describes how on his last day,
after ablutions, Abu Hamid performed the dawn prayer and then, lying down on
his bed facing Mecca, kissed his shroud, pressed it to his eyes with the words, "Obediently I enter into the presence of
the King," and was dead before sunrise.
Works. Over four hundred titles of works
ascribed to al-Ghazali have been preserved, though some of these are different
titles for the same work. At least seventy works are extant in manuscript; it
is clear, however, that some of these, chiefly works of a mystical character,
have been falsely attributed to al-Ghazali, though in the case of one or two
the inauthenticity is not universally admitted. Certain of these works are
written from a standpoint close to that of the philosophers, and earlier
scholars, regarding them as authentic, were led to suppose that before his
death al-Ghazali came to adopt the views he had previously attacked, or else
that in addition to his publicly expressed views, he held esoteric views which
he communicated only to a select few. Since about 1960, however, scholars have
been aware of a manuscript written four years after his death, which bears a
colophon stating that the short
work it contains was completed by al-Ghazali about a
fortnight before he died. This work is
Iljam
al-'awamm 'an 'ilm al-kalam (The Restraining of the Common People from the
Science of Theology), and in it he writes as a Shafi'i jurist who, at least up
to a point, accepts Ash'ari theology. It is also known that just over two years
earlier he had completed a long and important work on the principles of
jurisprudence, Al-mustasfa (The
Choice Part, or Essentials); this was presumably one of the subjects on which
he lectured at Nishapur. These facts make it inconceivable that at the end of
his life al-Ghazali adopted the heretical views he had previously denounced,
and thus they strengthen the case for regarding as inauthentic works containing
views which cannot be harmonized with what is expressed in books like the Munqidh and the Ihya'.
The genuine works of al-Ghazali range over several
fields. One of these is jurisprudence, which is dealt with in several early
works, as well as in the much later Mustasfa
mentioned above. These are the works most often referred to in connection with
al-Ghazali during the two centuries after his death. Most of these legal works
were presumably written before he went to Baghdad. At Baghdad he turned to
philosophy, producing the Maqasid and
the Tahafut, the exposition and
critique of the Neoplatonic philosophers. About the same time, he wrote two
small books on Aristotelian logic and a semiphilosophical work on ethics
(which may, however, contain some interpolations). He also tells us that it
was in Baghdad that he composed for the caliph al-Mustazhir the refutation of
Isma'ili thought known after the patron as the Mustazhiri. His exposition and philosophical defense of Ash'ari
doctrine in the Iqtisad must have
been written either shortly before or shortly after leaving Baghdad.
For some time after that, al-Ghazali's literary occupation
seems to have been the composition of his greatest work, the Ihya' 'ulum al-din. It consists of four
"quarters," each divided into "books" or chapters; a
complete English translation would probably contain at least two million words.
The first quarter, entitled "the service of God," has books dealing
with the creed, ritual purity, formal prayer (salat), other types of prayer and devotion, almsgiving, fasting,
and the pilgrimage. The second quarter deals with social customs as prescribed
in the shari'ah and has books on
eating habits, marriage, acquiring goods, traveling, and the like; it concludes
with a book presenting Muhammad as an exemplar in social matters. The third
quarter is about "things destructive," or vices, and, after two
general books on "the mysteries of the heart" and how to control and
educate it, gives counsel with regard to the various vices. The fourth quarter
on "things leading to salvation" deals with the stages and aspects
of the mystical life, such as penitence, patience, gratitude, renunciation,
trust in God, and love for him. In most of the books al-Ghazali begins with
relevant quotations from the Qur'an and the hadith
(anecdotes about Muhammad, sometimes called traditions) and then proceeds
to his own exposition. His overriding aim seems to be to show how the
scrupulous observance of all the external acts prescribed by the shari'ah contributes to the inner
mystical life.
Al-Ghazali presents a simpler version of the way of life
to which the Ihya' points in Bidayat al-hidayah (The Beginning of
Guidance). Other works of interest from his mystical period are an exposition
of the ninety-nine names of God with the short title Al-maqsad al-asna (The Noblest Aim) and a discussion of light symbolism
centered on the "light verse" of the Qur'an (24:35) and entitled Mishkat al-anwar (The Niche for Lights).
There is also a Persian work, Kimiya'
al-sa'adah (The Alchemy of Happiness), covering the same ground as the Ihya' but in about half the compass.
Among the works of doubtful authenticity is a refutation
of Christianity with the title Al-radd
al-jamil 'ala sarih al-injil (The Beautiful Refutation of the Evidence of
the Gospel). Even if this is not by al-Ghazali, it is of course an interesting
document of roughly his period, and the same is true of the spurious mystical
works.
The Achievements of
al-Ghazali: Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism. At the present time it is still
difficult to reach a balanced judgment on the achievement of al-Ghazali. After
the first translation of the Munqidh into
a European language (French) was published in 1842, many European scholars
found al-Ghazali such an attractive figure that they paid much more attention
to him than to any other Muslim thinker, and this fashion has been followed by
Muslim scholars as well. His importance has thus tended to be exaggerated
because of our relative ignorance of other writers. This ignorance is now
rapidly decreasing, but care is still needed in making an assessment of
al-Ghazali.
Part of al-Ghazali's aim in studying the various philosophical
disciplines was to discover how far they were compatible with Islamic doctrine.
He gave separate consideration to mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics or
theology (ilahiyat), politics, and
ethics. Metaphysics he criticized very severely in his Tahafut, but most of the others he regarded as neutral in
themselves, though liable to give less scholarly persons an unduly favorable
opinion of the competence of the philosophers in every field of thought. He
himself was very impressed by Aristotelian logic, especially the syllogism. He
not only made use of logic in his own defense of doctrine but also wrote
several books about it, in which he managed to commend it to his
fellow-theologians as well as to expound its principles. From his time on, many
theological treatises devote much space to philosophical preliminaries, and
works on logic are written by theologians. The great positive achievement of
al-Ghazali here was to provide Islamic theology with a philosophical
foundation.
It is more difficult to know how far his critique of philosophy
led to its disappearance. Arabic Neoplatonic philosophy ceased to be cultivated
in the East, though there was an important Persian tradition of theosophical
philosophy, but there had been no philosopher of weight in the East since the
death of Ibn Sina twenty years before al-Ghazali was born. In the Islamic West
philosophy following the Greek tradition continued until about 1200 and
included a refutation of al-Ghazali's Tahafut
by Ibn Rushd (Averroes), so that the decline in the West cannot be
attributed to al-Ghazali.
Sufism had been flourishing in the Islamic world for over
two centuries. Many of the earliest Sufis had been chiefly interested in
asceticism, but others had cultivated ecstatic experiences, and a few had
become so "intoxicated" that they seemed to outsiders to claim unity
with God. Such persons often also held that their mystical attainments freed
them from duties such as ritual prayer. In al-Ghazali's time, too, yet other
Sufis were becoming interested in gnostic knowledge and developing
theosophical doctrines. For these reasons many of the 'ulama', or religious scholars, were suspicious of all Sufism,
despite the fact that some of their number practiced it in a moderate fashion
without becoming either heretical in doctrine or antinomian in practice.
Al-Ghazali adopted the position of this latter group and, after his retirement
from the professorship in Baghdad, spent much of his time in ascetical and
mystical practices. The khanaqah which
he established at Tus was probably not unlike a monastery of contemplatives.
His great work the Ihya' provides
both a theoretical justification of his position and a highly detailed
elucidation of it which emphasized the deeper meaning of the external acts. In
this way both by his writing and by his own life al-Ghazali showed how a
profound inner life can be combined with full observance of the shari'ah and sound theological doctrine.
The consequence of the life and work of al-Ghazali was that religious
scholars in the main stream of Sunnism had to look more favorably on the Sufi
movement, and this made it possible for ordinary Muslims to adopt moderate
Sufi practices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Two older books still have much of value, though they
make use of works probably falsely attributed to al-Ghazali: A. J. Wensinck's La pense de Ghazzali (Paris, 1940) and
Margaret Smith's Al-Ghazali
the Mystic (London,
1944); the latter includes a full account of his life. My Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali (Edinburgh, 1963) looks
at his life and thought in its intellectual context. In La politique de Gazali (Paris, 1970), Henri Laoust gives some
account of his life as well as of his political thought. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh's Studies in al-Ghazzali (Jerusalem, 1975)
includes among other things discussions of authenticity on the basis of
linguistic criteria. The fullest account of all works ascribed to him, with
extensive consideration of questions of authenticity, is Maurice Bouyges's
Essai de chronologie des ceuvres de al-Ghazali, edited by Michel Allard
(Beirut, 1959). (PDF) The following are a few of the numerous translations
available: My The Faith and Practice of
al-Ghazali (London, 1953) has translations of the Munqidh and Bidayat al-hidayah; Richard J. McCarthy's Freedom and Fulfillment (Boston, 1980)
has translations of the Munqidh and
"other relevant works" with introduction and notes; William H. T.
Gairdner's Al-Ghazzali's Mishkat al-anwar
(The Niche for Lights; 1924; reprint, Lahore, 1952) is a translation with
introduction of a mystical text; Muhammad A. Quasem's The Jewels of the Qur'an: al Ghazali's Theory (Bangi, Malaysia, 1977) (PDF), a translation of Jawahir
al-Qur'an, shows how the Qur'an was understood and used by Sufis; Robert C.
Stade's Ninety-nine Names of God in Islam
(Ibadan, 1970) is the descriptive part of Al-maqsad al-asna.
A general overview of the Ihya' is given in G: H. Bousquet's Ghazali, Ih'ya 'Ouloum ed-din, ou vivification des sciences de la foi; analyse et index (Paris, 1955).
Translations of separate books include:
[Webmaster's Note: The following books are available on
this site for download] Nabih Amin
Faris's The Book of Knowledge (book
1; Lahore, 1962); The Foundations of the
Articles of Faith (book 2; Lahore, 1963); The Mysteries of Purity (book 3; Lahore, 1966); The Mysteries of Almsgiving (book 5;
Lahore, 1974); The Mysteries of Fasting
(book 6; Lahore, 1968); E. E. Calverley's Worship
in Islam (book 4; 1925; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1981); Muhammad A.
Quasem's The Recitation and
Interpretation of the Qur'an (book 8; Selangor, Malaysia, 1979); D. B.
Macdonald's "Emotional Religion in Islam as Affected by Music and Singing"
(book 18), Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society (1901): 195252, 705-748; and (1902): 1-28; Leon Zolondek's Book XX of alGhazalI's Ihya' (Leiden,
1963); and William McKane's Al-Ghazali's
Book of Fear and Hope (book 33; Leiden, 1965).
(W. MONTGOMERY WATT)
Page last modified on 2007-07-04.
Page url is: www.ghazali.org/articles/gz-er.htm
Site � Copyright 2003 by al-ghazali Study Group, ltd. A not-for-profit organization dedicated to the study of Imam Ghazali and his works. Individual content may have its own individual copyrights. See copyright information.
Page created on 13 - May- 2003