[p 180]

Ghazali's re-evaluation of the speculative traditions: kalam and Falsafah

It was only with Juvayni s disciple, Abu-Hamid Muhammad Ghazali (1058-1111), that the kalam came to make full use of the resources of Falsafah and was able to meet it on its own terms. But it was also with Ghazali that it received its rudest discounting as a means to truth. For Ghazali, the crisis in kalam finally led beyond kalam to a new approach to religion generally, on both personal and social levels.

Abu-Hamid Ghazali and his brother Ahmad (almost equally famous as a Sufi) were born at a village near Tus in Khurisan and were supported through their schooling by a small bequest left in trust by their father, whose brother (or uncle) was already established in the city as a scholar. Both boys had outstanding minds, and Abu-Hamid particularly rose fast. At about thirty­three years of age, in Iogl, the aged Nizamulmulk made him director of his Nizamiyyah madrasah at Baghdad. There, as a teacher of fiqh law as well as of kalam, he won great prestige even with quite Shari'ah-minded men. His innovations in kalam itself were incisive.

But he became personally dissatisfied with his very acceptable expositions. At length he found himself crippled by a persistent crisis of personal doubts, which coincided with but can hardly be reduced to a political crisis at Baghdad among GhazAli's friends after Nizamulmulk's assassination. Suddenly he left his post at the Nizamiyyah madrasah (1095) and fled his public, retiring secretly to Damascus and Jerusalem. (He even left his family behind, providing for them by way of public waqfs.) Only years later did he re-emerge, with a sense of personal mission, to teach publicly. Therewith he attempted, and carried through, a more fundamental revision of the foun­dations of Islamic thinking than a mere sprucing up of kalam. Such was his prestige that his opinions, fitting in well enough with the trend of the times to be sure, carried great weight; and while the development that followed was not all due to his work, it may be understood through an analysis of his line of thought.

Ghazali wrote a schematic little book in which he summarized the attitude he took (worked out in detail in other volumes) to each of the major traditions of life-orientational thinking in his time, Al-Munqidh min al-daldl, the Deliverer from Error. [See note: ] 15 This was put in the form of a sketch of his own life; but it was not a straight narrative autobiography. The intimate auto­biographical form was foreign to the Islamicate reticence about personal matters, and the Deliverer dealt, in fact, with intimate matters. Ghazali himself points out that he feels it impossible to describe all the living details relevant to his conclusions. The book did describe certain crucial moments in his experience. But this was done rather in the manner of the schematic

[Note: ] 15 AI-Munqidh min al-dalal, translated by William Montgomery Watt in The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (London, 1953); his is a better version than is an earlier one, but still more fluent than exact sometimes.

[p 181] autobiographies popular among those Isma'llis whom he wrote so many works to refute, as a dynamic statement of faith in terms of the facts of his own life.

The work began by presenting the intellectual helplessness of the human condition in itself. He described how earlier in his life he came to doubt not only all religious teaching, but even all possibility of dependable knowledge of any kind. He had overcome the problem for a time but then, at his personal crisis, he doubted the validity of all that he was teaching of religious lore; he could be healed only by accepting a moral decision to withdraw and lay new bases for his life through Sufi practices. The classical 'ulama' scholars, whether "exponents simply of hadith and fiqh or exponents of kalam as well, had discussed proper belief as if (once it was'correctly established) it were simply a duty which a good man accepted and a bad man rejected. Ghazali made it clear that this is not a matter of simple choice; doubt is beyond a person's deliberate control, and sound thinking is like sound health-a state of being rather than an act of will.

In particular, a state of total doubt, where one thinks about whether one can or cannot think, is existentially not so much an error in logic (which it is) as a mental disease. If it has blocked one, one must be restored by receiving fresh vitality from God, rather than by a syllogism. But even less drastic states of doubt, if at all radical, require more than purely intellectual in­struments for their healing. When doubt and error arise in religion, they must be looked on as diseases to be cured rather than just as sins to be condemned. The various available intellectual paths must be explored not merely for their informative value but as possible means of curing people of error. Hence, in principle, the Shari'ah-minded objection to kalam simply as an intellectual luxury cannot stand; the question becomes whether kalam can cure anyone of error. It was on this basis that Ghazali depreciated kalam.

Ghazali continued to be a major exponent of kalam, but he ultimately took, in the Deliverer, an attitude toward it that departed minimally from the feeling about it of such Hadith folk as Ibn-Hanbal (whom indeed he made a point of citing favourably in a relevant context). He denied that it led to any positive truth in itself. It was no use at all to the ordinary person whose faith was still sound (and such a person should be protected from exposure to its doubt-engendering argumentation). It was of use only with those who had come to doubt the truth and adopt errors that must be corrected. And, even as a corrective of errors, its function was limited. Its use was to confute various more or less trivial heresies, by showing that they are untenable on their own grounds; accordingly, it started from any assump­tions admitted by the heretics, without needing to question whether such assumptions be sound or not. But this made it appropriate only to such doubters as had not pushed their doubt in a truly philosophic direction. Kalam was useless for the truly independent mind. Thus Ghazali assured kalam a necessary but not very honourable niche in Islam. (Al-Ash'ari had [p 182] seen kalam in a somewhat similar light, but did not draw such weighty conclusions.)

In contrast, Ghazali allowed Falsafah great honour and even a basic role. This was muted by his attack on the crowning glory of its system, that is its metaphysics, which he insisted was false and dangerously misleading. But he attacked its metaphysics in the name of fidelity to Falsafah itself. He in­sisted that the very sort of reasoning that allowed Philosophy its triumphs in the natural sphere, in mathematics and astronomy, for instance, no longer served if one turned to seeking out absolute truths beyond the natural sphere of the mind and senses; that the Faylasnfs had been unfaithful to their own principles in making the attempt. (His masterly and minutely argued work, Tahafut al faldsifah, 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers'" is devoted to showing that the arguments the Faylasfifs used on the level of meta­physics lack the indubitable cogency the Faylasufs pride themselves on else­where; that, indeed, other equally sound arguments could lead to other positions, even orthodox Muslim ones, though they would admittedly not prove these latter either.) While rejecting Falsafah metaphysics, he held, therefore, that Muslims should accept the findings of the Falsafah sciences in their proper sphere-knowledge of nature-contrary to the attitude of many Shari'ah-minded persons. Moreover, he went on later to apply to the Islamic tradition itself a basic principle of Falsafah, that truth must be ultimately accessible to and verifiable by any individual human consciousness; he did not, however, call the principle 'Falsafah' at that point.

Yet even so, his attitude to Falsafah was informed by the spirit of the Hadith folk. The Hadith folk were radically utilitarian: a man should be concerned with living and believing correctly for the sake of divine blessings in this world and salvation in the other; he should not meddle in what does not concern him, and should seek knowledge only for its use as a guide to living, not out of idle curiosity. Ghazali used precisely such criteria in defining the scope and value of the Falsafah sciences: they were to be cultivated so far as they are useful, but the speculation of Falsafah was not to be tolerated merely because of its beauty. And, consistently enough, if the perils in Falsafah for any given person outweighed its utility, such a person should not be permitted to study it, lest he be led astray by the tempting delusions of its metaphysics in that point which is most important of all: correct religious belief. Therefore only qualified scholars should be allowed to dip into philosophic and scientific writings.

On such a basis, the populist sentiments of the Hadith folk were vindicated, in that Falsafah was declared dangerous because it could not be properly

[note: ] 16 Translated into English by Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophical Congress Publication No. 3, Mohammad Ashraf Darr, Lahore, 1958). The bulk of it is also trans­lated as a part of Ibn-Rushd's answer to GhazalI's book, Tahafut al-tahafut, 'The In­coherence of the Incoherence', translated by Simon Van den Bergh (Unesco Collection of Great Works, and E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, London, 1954).

[p 183] understood by the average man, whose religion was both sufficient and of paramount importance. Yet, as in the case of kalam, an exception was made in the condemnation, a niche was found for it. And because of the inherent consequence of Falsafah, the niche turns out to be of moment, for it implies, as the exception for kalam did not, an elite in the midst of common mankind: not an elite in anything essential to religion, of course, but yet an intellec­tually privileged minority.

The debate between kalam and Falsafah seems to end with both forms of speculation rather heavily discounted. But Ghazali had a broader perspective in mind than the men of kalam had normally had. His intention was to build a comprehensive foundation for effective religious life in an age which, as he put it, had degenerated not only from the simple purity of the pristine Medina but even from the relatively high moral standards of the scholars of al-Shafi'i's time. The new age needed a new religious awareness and com­mitment. This new religious life required a new intellectual basis; and in this, Falsafah was to play a larger role than Ghazali directly acknowledged in the Deliverer. Then it required a new pattern of religious teaching and guidance built upon that basis. (From Ghazali's viewpoint, of course, what was new in either case was merely that what could be left implicit in better times had to become explicit in his generation.)

Ghazali’s quarrel with the Isma‘ilis

The Deliverer embodies the key points of his intellectual foundation for the new life. If kalam gives correct answers but on a trivial foundation and if Falsafah rears a sound foundation but cannot yield correct answers to the crucial questions, the remedy for the disease of philosophic error and ultimate doubt must be sought outside either apologetic or rationalistic intellectual analyses. In the Deliverer, Ghazali suggested, in effect, a twofold solution. Ultimately, he had recourse to Sufism.

But for ordinary persons who have had the misfortune to lose their childhood simplicity of faith, he recommended a course based upon universal human capacities and leading to historical authority. He introduced this approach through a refutation of the position of the Shi'ah, more precisely that of the Isma'ili Shi is of his generation, who were then launching their great revolt against the whole Jama'i-Sunni order of the Seljuk amirs.

Ghazali's listing of the major traditions of life-orientational thinking of his time, to which the Deliverer is devoted, can be surprising at first sight: kalam, Falsafah, Sufism, and the doctrine of the Nizari Isma'flis; he assures us that truth must be found among these four schools of thought or nowhere. Three of these a modern person may generalize readily enough as theology, philosophy, and mysticism; but the fourth is a single doctrine held within a single sect-and even if one takes it as symbolic of authoritarianism generally, as if that were a way of seeking truth distinct from, say, theology, one might [p 184] suppose authoritarians were to be found closer at hand, such as the Han­balis. Other Shi'is, even other Jama'i positions, to say nothing of non­Muslim religious traditions, are ignored. The prominence assigned to the Isma'ilis, which reappears in many of Ghazali's works, has been explained as due to his dislike of authoritarianism-perhaps there was danger in attacking authoritarianism more directly, though he did directly oppose the imposition of conformity upon qualified scholars in deciding legal points. More cogently, it has been seen as a response to the urgent threat posed by the Isma'ili revolt. But the confrontation with Isma'ili teaching is too inti­mate, and is taken up in diverse forms too repeatedly, to be accounted for in a purely external way. He refuted the Isma'ilis over and over, I think, because he found something in their position to be persuasive-persuasive on a level with the other three positions he lists.

I think what this was may become clearer if we characterize the four schools of thought as forming, in their mutual contrasts, a comprehensive schema of life-orientational possibilities. Two of the schools represent exoteric, public positions, in which the seeker takes the whole initiative and his process of thinking can be followed at will by anyone else. Kalam was founded on dialectical argument on the basis of commitment to a historical revelation; Falsafah was founded on demonstrative argument on the basis of the timeless norms of nature. The other two schools represent esoteric, initiatory positions, in which part of the process of coming to understanding does not depend simply on the seeker and cannot be reproduced at will. The Isma'ilis appealed to a privileged historical institution, the imamate and the community that had been built around it. Like the men of kalam, they insisted on a kerygmatic vision, but that vision was on an esoteric rather than an exoteric plane. The Sufis appealed, as mystics, to privileged individual but potentially universal awarenesses. That is, like the Faylasufs, they appealed to present normative experience, not to any kerygmatic event; but again on an esoteric plane.

Each of the four spots in the schema (which is, of course, my schema, not Ghazali’s) was represented by the tradition that seemed best to exemplify it. (I would assume, for instance, that for this purpose the Hanbalis would appear-so far as they offered any argument at all-simply as a case of imperfect kalam, better represented by the Ash'aris.) Ghazali does not, finally, adopt one of the four positions to the exclusion of the others. Both the kerygmatic and the non-kerygmatic, both the exoteric and the esoteric have their place. What he adopts from Isma'ilism (without admitting as much, of course!) is elements that help show how a kerygmatic tradition can be validated on the basis of a more or less incommunicable personal experience, in which the historically revealed authority comes to be acknowledged without external proofs. Much of this viewpoint emerges directly out of the passages devoted to refuting the Isma'ilis, when he argues that Muham­mad himself fills the role of infallible imam; but the viewpoint is consum­mated [p 185] only in the role that he gives to the Sufis-who are assigned a function in validating a kerygmatic, historical vision as well as a more properly inward mystical role.

As it found itself losing out in the attempt to win the allegiance of the masses, Shi‘ism was forced into two alternative postures: accommodation, represented especially by the Twelvers, who often tried to win tolerance from Sunnis as a minor deviation; and defiance, expressed especially by the Isma'ilis. It was in this latter posture that the Shi i position could become intellectually most challenging. The Isma'ilis seem to have developed at that time a peculiarly trenchant simplification of the all-Shi'ah doctrine of ta'lim: of the necessity for exclusive religious authority in an infallible imam. One of their leaders, Hasan-e Sabbah, argued with telling subtlety a position which may be summed up thus: that for absolute truth, such as religion seemed to require, a decisive authority (an imam) is needed, for otherwise one man's reasoned opinion is as good as another's and none is better than a guess; that this proposition itself is in fact all that reason as such can furnish us with; finally then, that, as no reasoned proof could demonstrate who the imam was (only that he was needed), the imam must be he who relied on no positive, external proof of his own position, but only on pointing out ex­plicitly the logically essential but usually only implicit need; and as it was the Isma'ili imam alone that made so unconditional a claim, he thus stood as his own proof-by fulfilling the need in the act of pointing it out. [see note: ]17 (This was, in effect, to point to commitment to the Isma.'ili community itself and to its revelatory teaching. For, of course, it was not the imam in person that anyone found, but his authorized hierarchy; and then the truth the seeker would find was not merely the solution to a logical dilemma, but a moment of existential recommitment posed in logical form.)

Ghazali rejected this case for ta'lim authoritarianism, partly by pointing out its inherent elements of self-contradiction (he showed, as with kalam and Falsafah, that they could not prove their case, even though it might not be disproved); but primarily by putting forward a slightly different inter­pretation of reason. He granted that reason shows the need for an authority beyond reason; but he maintained (in effect) that reason could not only establish the need, but could at least begin to recognize when the need had been fulfilled: that is, it could recognize the true imam not merely through a logical impasse but through his positive qualities as a teacher. This true imam, he claimed, was none but the Prophet himself, whose teaching would be found valid in each person's own life. The need for an authority, of course, arises from the general human need for spiritual guidance; and Ghazali main­tained that if a person followed closely the advice and example of the Prophet, he would find in time that the spiritual needs he had confronted were being

[note: ] 17 For an analysis of this doctrine and of Jama‘a-Sunni responses to it see my The Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Isma‘ilis against the Islamic World (The Hague, 1955).

[p 186] met. In this way he could recognize a prophet, just as he could recognize a physician as a man able to meet medical needs. Indeed, the very personality of Muhammad in its kindness and concern, as it shone through Qur'an and hadith, would prove itself. (This was to invoke a sense of Muhammad's prophethood as comprehensive as al-ShafiTs, but closer in feeling to the 'Alid-loyalists' sense of heroic personality than to the legally exemplary figure posited by al-Shafi'i.) Not unrelated to this appeal to personal ex­perience was a secondary appeal made elsewhere to the very fortunes of the Muslim Ummah, which had come historically to be the dominant community (so it seemed) among mankind.

The Isma'ilis were right (Ghazali admitted implicitly and sometimes explicitly) in denying that any particular proof (for instance, any miracle) could indicate the man of true authority; and they were right in pointing rather to the authority's self-validation as head of the saving historical community, which would be discovered because it answered an inner need otherwise unmet. But the truth would be recognized not by way of a single existential dilemma but by cumulative experience, which the Isma'ili argument did not allow for. The experience Ghazali pointed to, both personal and historical (that is, derived from the history of the Islamic community as a whole), was such experience as every human being went through at least to some degree; therefore, if any person were fully honest with himself and serious in his search, he could discover who was the needed authority and, by following his teachings, be as sound in faith as any. What was needed, where doubt had sprung up, was healing grace from God, sincere endeavour on the part of the individual, and warning and encouragement by those who had come to the truth. [see note: ] 18

Here the Muslim community at large played a central role (as the Isma'ili community did for Isma'ilis). It guaranteed the truth for those of its members who were not afflicted with doubt and so need not think for themselves. And it provided the stimulus and guidance needed by those who were seeking. (It was perhaps this appeal to the living community that made Ghazali­and many later Sufi-influenced scholars-somewhat careless of proper isnad documentation in citing hadith reports. It was the present community, not that of Marwant times or even Medina times, that played the role of guarantor.)

In this way, the populist spirit of the Hadith folk, as well as its kerygmatic

[note: ] 18 The Christian theologian Paul Tillich, in Dynamics of Faith (New York, 1956), gives an existential interpretation of faith which, I believe, can be helpful toward under­standing what men like Ghazali have been confronted with and have achieved. Tillich's great merit is to have clarified certain common confusions which have led to misapprecia­tion of some religious writers. But in particular he sketches, from a modem perspective, the essentials of how reason leads to the need for ultimate faith but awaits revelation to carry it further. Though Ghazali cannot be called an existentialist in the modern sense, Tillich's analysis makes more sense of Ghazall's position (and the Ta'limis') than do some less sophisticated readings: it is not a matter of supplementing reason in its own realm but of complementing it in total experience.

[p 187] vision, was maintained-for no man's religion need be essentially better than another's; and revelation and the holy community were made indispensable. But at the same time, the basic principle of the Faylasufs, validation by universal human experience, was tacitly given its due among an elite.

Yet for the most perceptive, the cumulative experience that would verify the presence of the Prophet must be capped with an ingredient that Ghazali did not mention immediately in the Deliverer; for it need not be pointed out in advance for the general point to be made to the satisfaction of any but his most demanding readers, and these latter would perceive it themselves from what he had to say about Sufism and prophecy. That is: the requisite cumulative experience must include some touch of prophesying itself. One must be able to perceive the ultimate truth, in however slight a measure, in the same way the prophets perceived it, in order to verify definitely that they were prophets-just as one must be in some slight measure oneself a physician to judge of physicians. One must know what it is, to have not merely know­ledge about the truth but immediate acquaintance with it as prophets had. Otherwise, the cumulative experience would still allow only a superior sort of kalam, merely probably in its conclusions. A further way to truth was called for, beyond kalam, beyond Falsafah, beyond even an ordinary pursuit of an authority that would meet the needs that reason disclosed.

This lay in the Sufi experience. When Ghazali fled from his public eminence at Baghdad into retirement at Jerusalem, his purpose was to explore more deeply the Sufi way. He did not have major mystical experiences, but he had enough to convince him that there was indeed a sort of awareness that could not be reduced to Aristotelian syllogism and yet carried its own conviction; enough, indeed, to convince him that the claims of more advanced Sufis could be trusted.

For him this had the consequence that the Sufis' certification of the Prophetic message in its essentials was also to be trusted. And in Sufi experience he thus saw the challenge, posed by the Isma'ilis, finally met. It was through the psychological teachings of the Faylasufs, particularly Ibn-Sina, that Sufi experience could be so interpreted. Ghazali interpreted prophecy not as an unparalleled event but, in the Faylasufs' terms, as a special natural species of awareness which merely took its most perfect form in Muhammad. This awareness was of the same sort as the Sufis gained, though of a much higher degree. Hence Sufis were in a position to recognize full-scale prophecy when they saw it. Indeed, he went further. Just as prophetic awareness took a minor form among Sufis, so it might even be genuinely echoed in analogous experiences of ordinary people. Ghazali cited especially the sort of awareness that can come through dreams; which, however, Ghazali (like some of the Faylasufs) saw not as revealing uncon­scious forces, as moderns do, but unforeseeable external events-though perhaps the practical difference is less than it might seem. Thus though the Prophet was long since dead, a touch of prophecy was always present [p 188] and accessible in the community-as it was for the Isma'ilis with their imam.

The intellectual foundation of Ghazali's mission, then, was an expanded appreciation of Sufism. Kalam was relegated to a secondary role; and the most valuable insights of Falsafah and even of the Isma'ili doctrine of ta'lim authority were subsumed into the re-valorized Sufism, which now appeared as guarantor and interpreter of even the Shar'i aspects of the Islamic faith.

Ghazali recognized the dangers attendant upon Sufi freedom and warned against them-the Sufi, for all his special graces, must not imagine himself exempt from the common human obligations of the Shari'ah. The inward spirit (the batin) must not be allowed to displace the outer law and doctrine (the zahir). But the batin of the Sufis was indispensable. The Islamic faith could not ultimately stand without the continuous re-experiencing of its ultimate truths by the mystics. They did not merely know about truth on the Prophet's authority; they knew it directly, personally, within themselves. In every generation they alone could bear witness, to those willing to listen, to the truth not merely of such fragments as an individual might chance to verify in an ordinary lifetime, but of the whole of the Prophet's message. Thus the Silfis were assigned a crucial role in supporting the historical Muslim community as a body, as well as in guiding personal lives. (This was probably one reason why Ghazali was so insistent that Sufis were subject to the community law-only so could they serve the community as witnesses to its mission.)

Spiritual ministry and the gradation of knowledge

Having established an unimpeachable intellectual basis, appropriate to his age, on which the new religious life should be built, Ghazali had to work out a new pattern of teaching and guidance in which the consequences of his intellectual re-evaluations should be put into practice. This was probably central to his thoughts from a very early time.

Ghazali had long wished to become a religious and spiritual guide to his people. His restless exploration of every sort of opinion, his attempts to achieve Sufi experience (which had begun even before he was raised to the Nizamiyyah madrasah at Baghdad), the doubts he was repeatedly tormented with, all seem to have been directed not only toward achieving a personal religious certainty but also toward giving him a sound basis for religious leadership. Before his retirement from Baghdad he had spoken of founding an independent Sufi doctrine of his own. But it is perhaps even more con­sistent with his sense of mission that Ghazali was so persistently interested in intellectual method, much more so than in systems of ultimate truth for themselves-which could hardly be put in publicly accessible terms anyway. Even a work of his that has the appearance of Sufi speculation on the [p 189] cosmos, the 'Niche for Lights', is devoted primarily to elucidating ways of understanding words and symbols and doctrines. (Hence attempts to reduce

his thought to a set of cosmological conclusions are bound to miss the point of it and succeed only in making him look self-contradictory.) One of the achievements he was proudest of was a test to settle how far one can go in taking the Qur'anic images metaphorically as the Faylasitfs and the Isma'ilis were wont to do; he was rather naively sure that the justice of his 'scales' could not be denied and would settle most disputes if attended to.

During his years of retirement-during which he travelled a good deal, though probably settling down finally in Khurasan-he seems to have matured his ideas of what role he could play in the Ummah. He never resumed his chair at Baghdad, the most prominent teaching post in Islam­dom; perhaps because of the danger of assassination by the Isma ilis, whose revolt was still in full course; but probably also because his conception of his mission was no longer compatible with an outward career so prominent and controversial. Ghazali does seem to have regarded himself as called by God to the office of mujaddid: the renewer of Islamic faith that Muslims had come to believe God would send at the start of each new century of the Hijrah. In iio6 (499 of the Hijrah) he accepted the call from a son of Nizamulmulk, himself now vizier, to teach publicly again. But he did so only in Nishapur, not far from his home in T'fis, and ceased when his patron was assassinated. His teaching was such as required not so much a spectacular confutation of opponents as a pervasive influence, at many levels, of a very personal sense of life. It could be done as well at home and through his writings. [see note: ] 19

His masterpiece is the Ihyd 'ulum al-din, the Revival of the Religious Sciences (composed in Arabic, as was the Deliverer). Under Sufi inspiration, it interprets the whole Shari'ah corpus as a vehicle for a sober inward personal

[note: ] 19 Farid Jabre, La notion de certitude selon Ghazali dans ses origins psychologiques et historiques (Paris, 1958), has studied the structure of Ghazali's thinking with great care, and his works are the best point of departure for further study on him. (He is more penetrating than W. Montgomery Watt in Muslim Intellectual, see n. 13 above, a work which is too brief to allow Watt to counterbalance his oversimplified psychology of how people hold ideas with a close analysis of the data from the viewpoint he adopts; but Watt's work remains useful.) Jabre gives considerable bibliography. In his main theses, Jabre seems to me sound: Ghazali surely was committed throughout to the validity of revelation, and the certainty he was seeking was not a validation of intellectual processes for supporting it, as such, but rather a state of the soul to which such processes might or might not contribute. Yet I find Jabre's picture not very human: he makes Ghazalt unduly singleminded. A continuing commitment need not be incompatible with times and moods of intense doubt-and what is doubted is just the themes of the tradition to which one is committed; that one has come to certain conclusions early does not preclude a repeated rediscovery of them in the course of one's life, and the rediscovery may make a crucial difference. If Ghazali writes as a physician to heal others' doubts, if he stylizes his manner to meet the reader where he is, one must not take the resultant doctrinaire posture too literally. And perhaps Jabre does not sufficiently credit the degree to which critical rationality can enter into the understanding of historical revelation as well as of recurrent experience. My own understanding of Ghazali is a development from that of Duncan B. MacDonald.

[p 190] regimen. Every Shar'i rule is interpreted ethically and given a devotional dimension such that it can become the starting point for inner purification. The social implications of the Shari'ah become, if anything, more attenuated than before. (Ghazali relegated political life explicitly to the amirs and wrote a manual for kings-in Persian-in the Iranian tradition.) Ghazali was not writing for a judge or a muhtasib supervisor of markets, but for a private person concerned for his own life or charged with the spiritual direction of others. Some advice he gave presupposed a man (not a woman) whose trade allowed. him a fair amount of leisure during his day: a scholar particularly, though also, at need, a k$tib or merchant or even a craftsman working on his own account. Only a person whose time could be largely devoted to religion could afford to make use of the Shar'i life to the full as Ghazali interpreted it.

But the social implications of the Revival are nonetheless important: as Ghazali pointed out in the Deliverer, the sort of life led by the men of religion could become an influence to form the lives of Muslims generally. Thus indirectly the Revival might influence many more than the religious scholars. In, the Revival he grades society into three classes: those who believe the truths of religion without questioning; those who learn reasons for their beliefs-who are especially the religious scholars (particularly the men of kalam); and those who directly experience religious truth, the Sufis. This is a distinction not merely of knowledge but implicitly of moral function. For each class could teach those below it and might serve as an example to them. The Sufis, whose direct perception of truth was held to be akin to that of the prophets themselves, might have a mission, as Ghazali did, to infuse the religious forms of the time with spiritual life. It follows that the Shar'i men of religion had the responsibility to receive the Sufi inspiration so far as they could and to spread the inward spirit of religion, and not merely the outward doctrines, among the populace generally. Thus the high evaluation of Sufi experience as a vindication of truth had social consequences which Ghazali did not quite dare spell out but which he himself provided a living example of.

One may suspect that in a society where personal relations counted for so much, especially on the local level, such an outlook was eminently practical as a social programme. To a large degree, I think, it was in fact approximated in subsequent centuries, as we shall see in the next chapter, though the Sufis often had more direct influence on the populace than they did on the Shar'i scholars. In this sense, the work of Ghazali may be said to have given a rationale to the spiritual structure that supported society under the decentralized political order, the order that resulted in part from the work of his patron Nizamulmulk.

But such a programme presupposed a more or less hierarchical religious life, a gradation of men of religion from the viewpoint of their role in spiritual ministry to the Muslim community. This might be justified on the basis of the ancient principle that Muslims were to be graded-in point of dignity, at least-according to their degree of piety. But a hierarchism based on the [p 191] special sort of insight to which Sufis had access required, in turn, a crucial principle which would have horrified the early Muslims. Religious knowledge itself must be graded. Though the full and sufficient validity of the faith of the ordinary person was carefully safeguarded, much knowledge that was important, even in a way essential to the community, was not accessible to him; nay, it should be kept carefully concealed from him lest, misunderstood, it cause him to stumble.

This principle finds broad application in the Deliverer from Error. Thus the writings of the Faylasilfs should not be studied by the weak-minded lest, through respect for the writers, they be misled into sharing the writers' infidelity. But still more important, those who have not entered on the Sufi way under proper guidance should not be informed of the secrets that Sufis discover; they must receive only the general witness the Sufis can bear, that they know the faith is true. Ghazali was one of those who maintained that al-IIallaj's error in declaring 'ana 'l-hagq', 'I am the Truth', lay not in the sentiment itself, which represented a legitimate Sufi hal state, but in having uttered it publicly where it could confuse common people; for this he had to be punished lest the common people suppose that blasphemy was to be tolerated.

Indeed, in the very principle of using whatever argument might be most weighty with a given audience, Ghazali already illustrated what this ten­dency could mean on the level of common discourse. In the Deliverer itself, for instance, he appealed on occasion to the supposed miracles of the Prophet as evidence of his prophethood where he was speaking to those who might be expected to be convinced by miracles, though from other passages it is obvious that he had no real use for such 'proofs'. For the Deliverer was a book of kalam in Ghazali's sense-thus an instrument rather than a piece of infor­mation: the Arabic participle 'deliverer' in the title is intentional, for the book was designed to deliver from error by whatever means might be appropriate, rather than to state positively truth as such. Positive truth must be come to, as he makes clear, not by argument but in personal growth. In the tactical details of his argument, indeed, Ghazali hardly went beyond a practice that is always tempting to the dialectical polemist. But in en­dorsing more generally the principle that one is to keep concealed the more profound truths from all those unworthy of them, giving (in effect) the appearance of a simple orthodoxy despite one's own internally more complex approach, he endorsed a far-reaching ambiguity in religious truthfulness. He did not invent the principle of concealment. The Isma'ilis had systematically interpreted in this sense the general Shi'i principle of taqiyyah, of pre­cautionary dissimulation of faith; and the Faylasufs and especially the Sufis had developed a practical form of the principle which Ghazali was here taking over. In his writings it was generalized and legitimized as a basis of religious ministry.

In the end, the basic position of the Hadith folk had been maintained in [p 192] certain fundamental respects; Falsafah and Sufism both were re-evaluated in the light of Shari'ah-minded sentiment. Yet the introduction of Ash'arl kalam was almost a trifle to what was now being offered the `ulama'. Elitism in an extreme form was being superimposed upon Islamic populism. This had potential consequences Ghazali could hardly have envisaged. The tastes and needs of almost everyone might be accommodated within the limits of toleration of such a new Shar'i system. At best, the ground was laid for a full and varied intellectual as well as spiritual development with the blessing of Islam. But it might open the way to centrifugal licence. For it was done at the price of sacrificing the common and open exchange of opinion and infor­mation on which the `ulama' had depended for re-creating, in some measure, the intimate common life of Medina, and which the Shar'i movement itself had presupposed in its search for the Divine will.

With the establishment of the international Islamicate social order, how­ever, there had come into being new ways of ensuring the unity and even the discipline of Muslim society. The autonomous, private institutions of the towns depended on the Shari'ah, but also on other structures; and among these (as we shall see) were the forms of organization that came to undergird popular Sufism itself, which proved, in its flexibility, appropriate to the private and indefinitely varied character of the local institutions. By the end of the formative phase of the Earlier Middle Period, then, Muslims were ready for such a pattern as Ghazali offered. His moral authority seems to have been widely accepted even in his lifetime. And some such intellectual synthesis among kalam, Falsafah, and Sufism as he expressed became, in effect, the starting point of the intellectual flowering of the Earlier Middle Period.

Source: The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Volume 2: The Expansion of lslam in the Middle Periods. Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago 1974. pp.180-192.

Fair use act for educational purposes only. minor modification of the transliteration system, used letters with dashes on them in lieu of carrot: i.e. Ghazâlî becomes Ghazali.

Related from same book:

Imam Ghazali

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