REVIEW ARTICLE
Al-Ghazali and the Ash'arite School. By Richard M. Frank.
Pp. 168. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1994.
`[Ghazali's]
condescension to the Ash`arite school is on the level of language, not of
substance'.'
Two distinct approaches to the conflict of ideas
predominate in intellectual history, in Islam as in other civilisations. On the
one hand we have the dialectical approach, whereby perspectives have their
differences resolved through direct challenge and adversarial debate. On the
other hand we have the hermeneutic approach, whereby resolution is sought not
through direct opposition, but interpretation. The Trojan horse often proves
more successful than openly laying siege. It is clear that sometimes we can
disarm a person with a divergent point of view by pretending that we capitulate
to it, and we can counteract their way of thinking by apparently admitting it.
However, we admit it as a mere manner of speech, evacuated of real semantic
content. To give an example: an anarchist could present him or herself as a
good monarchist by interpreting the `divine right' of monarchs as a right to
call themselves monarch. But the right to operate as monarch is actually
withheld in this monarchism. Such a `rhetoric of harmonization', to use Frank's
excellent phrase, was according to him the true extent of Ghazali's Ash`arism.
Let us be in no doubt about the magnitude of the
claim being made. It is roughly as though we discovered that Plotinus was not
after all a Platonist. Ghazali is often represented as one of the greatest
members of the Ash'arite school - fashioning neo-Ash'arism, much as Plotinus is
credited with fashioning neo-Platonism. Moreover, if GhazalI stands as probably
the most important of the formative figures of classical Islam, given the
epochal title the `Proof of Islam' no less, what does it mean to discover that
Ash`arism had only a nominal role in his outlook? It can only mean that
Ash'arism's true role in broader Islamic culture from the sixth century AH was
correspondingly superficial - a merely emblematic, but not heartfelt,
'orthodoxy'.
All the same, it must be accepted that by
carefully distinguishing an authentic Ghazalian higher theology from the
doctrinaire Ash'arism of the Qudsiyya, Iqtisad, and other texts, Frank has at
one stroke resolved a deepening tension which has wracked Ghazali studies: how
to reconcile the fideist theology, causality, theodicy etc. of the Iqtisad (for
example) and the virtually neo-Platonic doctrines of Mishkat al-anwār and its
like?
Moreover, it is evident that Frank has confirmed
in his Ash'arism I higher theology distinction, the tiered hermeneutic Ghazali
himself broaches in Mizan al-'amal. This comprises three degrees of doctrine,
the first two of which are purely provisional: (1) the doctrine to which the
teacher gives his allegiance in public disputations (2) that which he gives in
academic instruction (3) that which is his real belief, pertaining to what has
been disclosed to him by God (ma inkashafa lahu min al-nazariyyat) 2
More satisfying still, Richard Frank has pored
over Ghazali's doctrinaire Ash`arite treatments themselves, notably the
Igtisad, and apparently found good evidence of equivocations and evasions which
in fact suggest an underlying philosophical (falsafa) position. And in a
seeming master stroke, Frank has brought to our notice the open condemnation of
Ash'arism by Ghazali at the end of his life in Isam al-'awdmm `an `ilm
al-kalam.
This feat of revisionism is accomplished in
barely 100 pages. And it is thoroughgoing in spite of its brevity. Frank uses
his thesis that an intimate study of Ghazali's works evinces his deep private
antagonism towards the Ash'arite schoolmen, to overturn many of the consensual
`facts' of Ghazali studies. He even uses it against the central event of
Ghazali hagiography - the famous CE 1095 crisis followed by the flight from
Baghdad. This is generally taken to be of huge importance in the formation of
medieval Islam, with its sustentative mystical dimension, such that Ghazali's
private discovery of the indispensability of Sufism is taken to herald the same
discovery for the whole religious civilization. Frank however considers that
this event was not so much triggered by `interior conflicts or doubts,
religious and intellectual, within himself', as by mere `contests for power
that characterized the political turmoil of the time or tensions within the
religious and academic communities' .1 This kind of studied cynicism, which
completely shelves Ghazali's own account in the Munqidh in favour of an
eminently mundane explanation, is a favourite recourse of revisionists. Frank's
view of this event in fact has an affinity with the (hopefully discredited)
suggestion that Ghazali fled Baghdad, not as a renunciant, but in terror of Nizari
assassination.4
There is no doubt however that Frank has weighed
the evidence with care. In the closing pages, for instance, he has organised
Ghazali's works into a chronology with a highly plausible account of their
inner rationale. Frank explains how doctrinaire Ash`arite works come where they
do in Ghazali's corpus, despite post-dating his supposed private rejection of
the school. Thus, the Ash'arite Qudsiyya is in the Ihya' basically to sweeten
the potentially hostile critics of Ghazali's magnum opus, which in itself is
far from Ash`arite. Qistas al-mustagim was produced at a time when Ghazali was
emerging from his Sufi retirement. So, even though it post-dates the Ihya',
Magsad al-asna, Kitab al-arba`in and Mishkat al-anwdr - all relatively esoteric
works - it was timely for Ghazali to produce a'more popular level work' '
Faysal al-tafriga and the Munqidh were again essentially apologetic works
written in connection with GhazalI's reemergence as a public lecturer at
Nishapur at the request of Fakhr al-Mulk. However, when Ghazali finally left
the academic world for good, prior to his death in CE 1111, he felt himself at
liberty to give `full vent to his animosity against the mutakallimun in the
polemic of lljam...'b
There is something
satisfying in such an account through which consistency appears in
the place of seeming inconsistency. Order has been imposed on a chaotic and
apparently self-contradictory body of thought. First the
crucial distinction is introduced between the artificial
'catechetic' level of doctrine, and the higher theology. Then, excellent
reasons are offered why Ghazali reverts to the former level, when he does. And
in all this there is the frisson of discovering a kind of conspiracy.
But clearly this is not the
only approach. Another will be to take it that Ghazali believed
in the ultimate compatibility of his Ash'arite and
mystico-philosophical doctrines. On this view, we no longer make the
sensational claim that Ghazali feigned Ash'arism when speaking as
an Ash'arite (there were
such dissimulators-SHahrastani, one of the greatest neo-Ash antes, has been shown
by W. Madelung to have privately embraced
Isma'Ilism, for example)? And not only do we forfeit the `sensation' value of Frank's thesis, but we are uncomfortably
forced to reconcile apparently antithetical perspectives - harder than leaving intact their all too obvious
differences.
Nevertheless, ultimately it
can be argued that this interpretation bears Ghazali out to have
been a rather more extraordinary thinker than the one which emerges from
Frank's account:
the representative of an overarching synthesis, rather than (at best) a mediocre Avicennan or `average Sufi' who feigned
Ash`arism for reasons of survival or advancement.
And above this something else may emerge. Our alternative reading will strongly imply that Ash'arism, which many
disparate voices join in disparaging, is capable of more subtlety than it is often credited with.
The dispassionate reader
will probably feel that two items of evidence are most powerfully
in favour of Frank's thesis, and all the rest of the evidence involves too much
interpretation to be decisively for or against it. The Iljam
is one of these apparently decisive items. Frank asserts that, finally
liberated from the need to `fit in' at the Madrasa Nizamiyya, and angered by the
intransigent attitude of his Ash'arite colleagues to his higher theology, Ghazali freely vituperates against the school in
this late work.' He effectively
argues in the work for the curtailment of the Ash antes, attacking the prevalent notion that theological enquiry is a
universal obligation, denying the intellectual
value of their doctrines, and insisting that their net result is confusing the
hearts of the masses (tashwish qulub al-`awamrn). We should point out, as Frank does not, that such talk was far more serious in Ghazali's
day than we might expect, given that the
Seljuq suppression of Ash'arism was still within living memory. The ban on Ash'arism implemented by Tughril-Beg's vizier
Kunduri was only lifted in the early 1060s
CE 'iot long before Ghazali joined one of the most famous victims of the suppression in question, the Imam al-Haramayn
Juwayni, as his student. Ghazali's threatening
words were thus far from idle.
But we must point out some real points of
awkwardness in using the Iljam as evidence of the radical incompatibility of
the Ghazalian `higher theology' and Ash'arism. Firstly, the way in which the
attack is couched is hardly akin to, say, philosophical disparagements of
kalam. It is in fact virtually Hanbalite in its tone, citing `Umar ibn
al-Khattab's condemnation of talking about predestination (al-gadar), and Malik
ibn Anas' condemnation of inquiry into the divine `session' (al-istiwa'). In
this, it is as though Ghazali was playing those who opposed him amongst the
Ash`arites at their own game. We may recall that Abu 'l-Hasan al-Ash`ari had
initiated his school in response to visionary dreams in which the Prophet had
warned him to abandon Mu`tazilism and instead `Defend the doctrines related
from me'. In the Iljam, Ghazali is therefore in effect outdoing his opponents
in the Ash'arite school at their own 'Ash'arite' censoriousness. Secondly,
Ghazali is happy to talk in terms of good and bad kalam. In Mihakk al-nazar
(which we note according to Frank is a higher theology work) he distinguishes
beneficial theology (al-kalam al-muftd al-mudih) from conventional theology
(al-kalam al-mu'tad). It is surely consequential that Ghazali is open to
referring to his higher theology as a kind of kalam, and we must balance the
condemnation of kalam in the 11jam with this fact.
Other than the 11jam,
the second item of Frank's evidence which one feels to be dramatically
in his favour is the observation that in Ghazali's work Mizan
al-'amal, we apparently find him fully accepting an `unorthodox'
eschatology .1
This would be an exceptional discovery, because in Tahafut al falasifa and in the Munqidh Ghazali explicitly condemns
the doctrine that the Hereafter is purely spiritual (ruhani), as
simple unbelief, along with the doctrine
that the world is beginningless and that God only knows particulars in a universal way. In the Mizan it
is instead as if Ghazali embraces the
condemned doctrine, which he attributes apparently favourably to the `Sufis and
the metaphysicians amongst the
philosophers', namely, that at the death of the body the soul immediately and irreversibly separates
from it, to experience entirely incorporeal
joys or agonies. What is presented by way of eschatological data in revelation
is an imaginal representation of intellectual - and inconceivable - realities,
and to this extent presumably requires interpretation.
This would indeed be
extraordinary evidence of Ghazali's departure from Ash'arism, even
on the most subtle or deepened reading of the doctrine of that school. It is
necessary however to point out the following provisos. Frank
himself admits that Ghazali is not completely straightforward in the Mizan
that this was his own private eschatology, saying instead that
`al-Ghazali appears to agree with the thesis'." Presently Frank confesses that, if this eschatology is the one
Ghazali privately adhered to and gave a glimpse of in the Mizan, he
seems to retreat from it in the Munqidh
and the Ihya' such that
'It may be that al-Ghazali came later to feel that he might have gone a bit too
far in what he had implied..
.concerning the resurrection...'."
Elsewhere Frank clearly
admits that if Ghazali does depart from Ash`arism in the so-called higher
theology, we would find precious little evidence of the departure in question in discussions of eschatology, because
this was a distinctively non-negotiable aspect of religious doctrine. Thus, `His views concerning the
resurrection and the next life ...
remain problematic, for it could not be
easily argued that this is a negotiable question and there was a level of conflict with the scholars which he
hoped to avoid."'
The question of Ghazali's
private eschatological beliefs, it seems, must therefore remain
open, and the burden of evidence is if anything on the side of `orthodoxy'. It
is also
indisputable that Ghazali held that the `orthodox' doctrines of the Punishment
of the Grave, the Resurrection with its
episodes, and the simultaneous spirituality and corporeality of the Afterlife,
were all unqualifiedly valuable in one particular sense. They were at the very least all-important objects
of contemplation for galvanising the believer's
soul to engage in the religious practices (mu`amalat) by which alone he would be saved. Another of Ghazali's final works
is worth noting in this respect. This is
the famous epistle on Sufi ethics, Ayyuha
'l-walad, which we may also accept as written by him after leaving his teaching at
Nishapur and thus as occurring in the same `liberated' context as his vituperation against the Ash`arites in I1jam. It repeats the approach of the Ihya' in bringing together a thoroughly
orthodox eschatology with the insistence that without Godfearing exertion in mu`amalat we
may hope for nothing at all. I take
this to be representative of his position in a way that the neo-Platonic hints
in the Mizan are not. For instance he says, `The meaning of
admonition is to talk of the fire of
the Hereafter to the worshipper, the failings of his ego in the service of the Creator, that he might consider his past life
which he has spent in what did not concern him, and consider what is in front of him by way of difficulties such as
the absence of firmness of faith in
his life's final moments, the nature of his state in the clasp of the angel
of death, and whether he will be capable of answering Munkar and Nakir, to worry about his state during the Resurrection and
its episodes, and whether he will cross
the Bridge safely or tumble into the abyss. The recollection of these things
should remain in his heart and upset
his apathy... "3 Earlier in Ayyuha
'l-walad GhazalI had quoted with obvious approval a story about
al-Hasan al-Basri, one of the patriarchs of Sufism, according to which al-Hasan could not help himself from fainting
when handed a cup of water, because he
was overwhelmed at the thought of the 'longing of the people of Hellfire when
they will say to the people of the Garden "Pour water down upon us, or
that which God has bestowed upon you"."' There can be no serious doubt that this kind of concrete anticipation of the
Afterlife in accordance with scriptural and Traditional depictions was held by Ghazali to be essential in producing
the determination (himma) without which spiritual progress
was impossible. e
Let us move on quickly now to the equivocations
Frank has uncovered in the Igti$ad, in respect of Ghazali's formal Ash`arism
itself." In this relatively lengthy section of the book, Frank has
gone through the Igtisad, carefully
weighing Ghazali's presentation of basic
Ash'arite doctrines such as the revealed (versus innate) basis for understanding moral obligations, the denial of
secondary causation, 'acquisition', God's attributes etc. It is astonishingly bold for Frank to have turned to a
formal Ash`arite tract by Ghazali in order to exhibit his
counter-Ash`arite thinking. This is not an easy - context in which to discover evidence for the higher theology. Some of
the counter-Ash`arism that we are
shown in fact comes down to Frank's interpretations of technical terms. Much also comes down to
arguments from silence, with Frank making a lot of what Ghazali fails to
say - in a word, arguing that Ghazali does
not `stitch things up' adequately on
behalf of Ash'arism, so that what he says does not contradict the higher theology. The psychological impact on
the reader of such an inquisitorial approach
is in fact to produce doubt about Frank's whole thesis. By the time we have yet
again been told that such and such a doctrine merely `sounds very much like
traditional Ash`arite teaching' ,'b we
begin to wonder if it is not after all really exactly that: traditional
Asharite teaching.
Not all the evidence is like
this however. In respect of the revealed basis of moral obligations,
Frank uncovers an
intriguing statement by Ghazali'" This
is on the specific moral obligation to reflect (=on God's existence, the wujub
al-nazar): 'I do not object to the notion that this being aroused to
inquire is from myself, but I don't know whether it is the product of
natural disposition and nature or is something required by the intellect or is demanded by the revealed law.'
In this statement Ghazali distinguishes the impulse to inquire itself, from the
trigger of the impulse to inquire. In regard
to this distinction he explicitly says he does not object to the idea that the
impulse itself is from within the
individual (='myself'), and he says
that the trigger of this impulse is
either again from the individual ('natural disposition' or `intellect') or it may be from the revealed law. In this statement,
then, at least half the responsibility for reflection, and quite possibly all of it, is attributed to the human
individual. We therefore apparently
are given more a Mu'tazilite position, than an Ash ante one, since the Ash'arites insisted on the central role of
scripture in obligations in general and the wujub al-nazar in particular.
Presently Ghazali offers a
similarly attenuated position when he says that though it was
not possible before the coming of revelation to know God and thank Him for His benefits
(i.e., to abandon kufr, thanklessness), knowledge
of the truthfulness of the transmitter of revelation, the Prophet, is only to
be had through intellect, and the impulsion
to seek salvation by following what the Prophet gives is due to our nature (al-tab`). Again, the role of revelation is somewhat played down, more in line with Mu`tazilism than Ash'arism.
But perhaps the best way to treat this is as a synthesis of Ash'arite and Mutazilite positions, a synthesis which was already under way
with GhazalI's teacher in Ash`arism, Juwayni.
Juwayni, who was on the one hand quite emphatic in his chapter 'On the Principles of Reason' (Bab ft Ahkam
al-Nazar) in the Irshdd that 'rational inquiry leading to knowledge is obligatory and the source
of its obligatoriness is the shari`a', had nevertheless already
begun a definite elevation of reason and `intellect' albeit on the basis of this scriptural imperative. We
encounter for instance, the following statement: 'The Community agree on the obligation of knowing God Most High,
and it becomes evident by way of the
intellect that one is not given to acquire knowledge except by reason. And that without which one has
no access to the obligatory, is obligatory!'
18 Let us note here that not only is
reason 'obligatory' because knowing God is, but it is the intellect not scripture which is said to dictate the
use of reason to obtain knowledge. So
to some extent the non-revelatory aspect of knowledge has been given a self-justifying role and effectively works in
tandem with revelation. '\
If we are beginning to see
the admission of a real synergy of 'human' iritellect and divine
revelation in such statements, Juwayni is careful a little later to strip the
human aspect of the synergy of the Greek notion of nature. He
presently says in the discussion of human knowledge in the
section 'Eternal and Temporal Knowledge': 'All acquired knowledge
is to do with rational inquiry and it is that which sound reasoning on evidence
entails. This is as God's custom persists - yet it is in the realm
of the possible to produce knowledge and to
produce the capacity for it without previous rational inquiry. Nevertheless, God's custom upholds that
all acquired knowledge is based upon rational
inquiry."'
This is surely a
significant refinement. Juwayni has undermined the dichotomy of supernatural
and 'natural' bases of knowledge by deploying the crucial Ash`arite doctrine
of God's custom (`adatAllah). According to this, God's
recreation of the world at every moment maintains it in a certain
pattern corresponding to the divine will. This pattern is what the philosophical
(falsafa) tradition called 'nature' (Greek, phusis,
Arabic tab`), but from the Ash'arite
point of view the concept of nature neglects to consider
adequately the world's perpetual dependence on God, and implies a factor which
falls outside of the divine omnipotence. Now if we apply the doctrine of God's
custom to epistemology, the opposition of natural versus
supernatural channels of knowledge disappears. The 'acquired'
knowledge which involves the production of reliable conclusions
from evidence in the premises is not independent of God, any more than scriptural revelation
is.
The whole treatment by
Frank of Ghazali's thought seems to neglect the central role in it of the idea
of God's custom and perpetual creation ('occasionalism'). One reason is that
Frank does not take Ghazali's deployment of Ash'arite terminology seriously anyway,
so that when for example Ghazali uses the word ikhtira`- a
term which in Ash`arism comes to mean perpetual creation - it is translated merely as 'initial creation'?°
It is most unlikely that this virtually deistic
interpretation of the word ikhtird' would have been intended by Ghazali. On the
contrary, the word is the formal kalam synonym
of what the Sufis tended to call 'the renewal of creation with every breath' (tajdid
al-khalq bi'l-anfas), and was used in this sense from the earliest
period of the Ash'arite school's
existence. For example in Ibn Furak's Mujarrad
maqalat a]-Shaykh Abi '1 -,Hasan
al-Ash`ari, an indispensable work
for accessing the original formulations of Ash'arl himself, we find ikhtira' used quite explicitly in
contrast to 'natural causation'. We are given
for instance the following important statement in the chapter called 'Another Section on the Elucidation of his
Doctrine regarding the Will and of what is Related to that in the way of Ramifications': '... [Ash`ari] used
to deny the doctrine of nature and natural disposition (al-tab` wa'l-tabi`a), and he
used to say that temporally originated
things are all the acts of God by His choice and His wish, His direction and determination,
nothing of them necessitating (mujib)
anything else, nor having a natural
disposition which engenders it. Rather all of that is His ikhtira` by way
of His free choice, according to the
manner in which he has chosen it and had foreknowledge of it.
I do not wish to get
involved in an
exhaustive discussion of the technical
nuances of 'creation' words in kalam, which
would be out of place here. But it is clear that if we read ikhtira` in
the way I suggest, which is almost certainly the sense in which Ghazali himself
meant it, we arrive at a seriously different interpretation of the Ghazalian
theory of causation from the one given
by Frank. For, when he explains that Ghazali views the divine decree (qada') in
terms of the ikhtira` of the
'universal causes' (al-asbab al-kulliyya)
- that is, the most general and transcendent
level of causation - this does not necessarily delimit God's role to the first moment
of time. I argue that we are not talking
about an initial creation of these
universal causes, but an incessant
creation of them throughout their
whole existence. We then at one stroke get far closer to what seems to be the real point: not that GhazalI
inwardly rejects Ash'arism in favour of a virtually deistic view in which God
originally makes the world, which then operates on the basis of secondary causes. But instead, that all these secondary
causes at every moment themselves
devolve on universal causes which are ceaselessly generated by absolute divine
fiat. This is an overwhelmingly
subtle synthesis of Avicennian naturalism and Ash'arite occasionalism!
Frank however, consistently prefers to see
Ghazali's thought as a veiled neo-Platonism rather
than a philosophically deepened Ash'arism. This, even when what Ghazali presents
is clearly at odds with the universe of the falasifa. For example, it is surely of substantial importance that the
celestial spheres in the Ghazalian scheme, were not as in Avicennian cosmology - each emanating in descending order from
the one above - but 'created directly by
God'22 Much more might have been
made of this. Again, what are we to
make of Frank's suggestion that the word sa'a involves an equivocation ('a kind of hedge') in
Ghazali's statement 'what exists in each sda
is another accident'? 23 This is arguably tendentious. Clearly, while sa`a could
mean 'hour' and is often so used, it
also just means "time' or 'moment', and is almost certainly only meant in
this way by Ghazali. Ghazali's
statement as quoted is just a classic encapsulation of the occasionalist view, no more and no less, and we
are not witnessing what Frank describes
as a 'vein of artful ambivalence'.'
However, Ghazali's analysis
of `created beings' in terms of indivisible atoms - another fundamental Ash ante doctrine - is more problematic. This is discussed by Frank in
the section 'Created Beings, Material and Immaterial Material Bodies'(sic. we needed a dash after 'immaterial'!)" Here
Frank introduces us to another apparently significant departure from Ash'arite
norms. The problem seems to be that Ash`arism
had a very simple understanding of 'substance' (jawhar), in fact too simple, on the face of it, to cover Ghazali's much more
heterogeneous view of 'substance, which is akin to that of falsafa. The
Ash'arite view of substance is given by dlhazali as though his own, in the tgtisad, 'jawhars form
a single class and their becomings, which are
particular modes of being in places, belong to a single class (mutamathila).'2b
But as Frank now points out, in the
Ihyd'('and later works') we apparently have a presentation of substance as of multiple kinds. Most
importantly, we have the whole philosophical idea introduced of immaterial or
'separate' substance - i.e., the
spiritual substances of the
translunar realm, the angel-intellects. Therefore Frank asks, understandably,
'If Ghazali in fact conceives the jawhar in
exactly the same way as did the Ash`arite school, if, that is he conceives the jawahir as forming a single
class in the sense that every jawhar
is essentially the same as every other jawhar,
or if he recognizes several distinct
subclasses, or if he uses the term equivocally?... "I
Charges of departing from
Ash'arism, inconsistency, and equivocation, however are not
necessary. Such charges would have Ghazali using the word jawhar to mean sometimes 'atom' in the Ash'arite sense (juz'), and to mean at other
times the sense translating the Aristotelian term ousia. But we must
distinguish such equivocation from actually
defining the Ash'arite jawhar itself in such a way as to comprehend the
translunar realm. And Frank himself,
without really taking the consequences, seems to supply us with good evidence
that this is precisely Ghazali's approach. Thus Frank notes that in stark contrast to Juwayni's presentation in the Shamil, Ghazali avoids speaking of the 'atom' in terms of volume (hajm) in the Igtisad.28 A single atom according to Ash`arite axioms is not a body anyway - it is thus strictly speaking, 'incorporeal'. And
let us remember that the decisive
requirement in something's falling under the definition of an atom (juz'
Id yatajazza') is simply that it be
indivisible, Now, it does seem that angel-intellects, and other immaterial
entities, could well be called 'atomic' when all this is considered. This is not equivocation, but a perfectly rigorous
application of the term as defined.
And there is good evidence that this is exactly how Ghazali sees intellects and souls; Frank confirms that
'at-Ghazali seems to consider the soul to be a single jawhar' ,29 and again, 'the terms he uses...to speak of the rational soul are those employed traditionally in the Ash'arite school to
speak of the atoms."' For instance in the Ihya' he says 'the Intellect ...
has neither length nor breadth..."'
The upshot of all this is
fascinating, and is clearly that Ghazali, through an amended definition, has
attempted to extend an Ash'arite ontology to cover an Avicennan kind of
cosmos: the sublunar corporeal realm together with the translunar incorporeal
realm are both comprehended by the new definition of atom, and
it is not the case that jawhar
is being used sometimes to mean 'atom' and
sometimes not. And Frank himself must ultimately
admit this: 'The statement, then, that the created universe is made up of 'bodies and jawahir' (Iqtisad, p. 26,8) and [Ghazali's] division of the universe into the terrestrial, which is the corporeal in nature, and
the celestial, which is spiritual (i.e. incorporeal), may be read as consistent one with the other if the
angelic intelligences which he ascribes to the celestial realm are understood
to consist each of but a single jawhar."'
It does seem that in
certain respects Ghazali not only tried to extend and deepen Ash'arite
doctrines, but he even intensified them relative to other members of the
school. Two examples may be given of this tendency, one mentioned by
Frank (though evidently not used as evidence), and one not. Firstly, we must note
Ghazali's position in respect of God's essential attributes. The
status of these was the subject of much thinking in medieval
Islam. To begin with we may distinguish a rigorously negative approach associated
with many of the Mu`tazilites. According to this position, to get completely
away from the problematic idea of fundamental qualities which God owns
apparently associated with Him from eternity, and compounding His identity - these theologians presented these qualities negatively or as
metaphors. God's 'knowledge' was an absence
of ignorance, for example, not a positive entity alongside of Him. On the other
hand the Ash'arite position reacted strongly against this for taking liberties
with scripture, and stripping God of
all positivity (=ta`til). Ash'arites
therefore asserted seven, sometimes
eight, essential attributes for God, which were co-eternal possessions of His.
Their opponents accused them roundly of ' associationism' (shirk), and compounding God as if He depended on things in His
identity. There was a Mu`tazilite grouping, however, known as the Bahshamiyya, who attempted to get away from the
terrible impasse of the two positions
just mentioned. They asserted that the attributes were perfectly real, but not extrinsic things possessed
by God. Rather they were 'modes' (ahwdl)
of the Essence Itself. Subtle
arguments were presented to explain this. Why, they asked, must we always explain something's character by referring
to an extrinsic attribute which it
owns? If this is a necessary way of going about such explanations, there is an obvious exception. The 'attribute' itself, is a thing with a character
that needs explaining. Perhaps we
have to give it, too, an extrinsic attribute? But then that new attribute needs its character to be
explained, so we get a vicious regress. Clearly it must sometimes be necessary for a thing's
characterisation to be intrinsic to its own identity. This is precisely the case with God's essential attributes?'
In due course, both before Ghazali in the case
of thinkers like Bagillani and Juwayni, and
after him in the case of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Ash'arites came to embrace the position of the Bahshamiyya because of its obvious
excellence, even though it was a formally
Mu'tazilite doctrine. What is astonishing is that Ghazali, who as we have seen is apparently generally inclined to subtilize
Ash'arism, is in fact vehemently opposed
to Bagillani and Juwayni in their adoption of the doctrine of modes. Frank not only notes this, but explains that this was
motivated by a desire to emphasize the role of God's Will in creation, against the philosophical idea that creation
`flows necessarily from God's essence
as such ... and therefore
eternally."" Clearly the attributes must be extrinsic to the Essence for creation (which occurs through
certain of them such as Will) to be
`distanced' from God's own eternal identity. Questions of motivation
aside, however, the rejection of modalism by Ghazali is simply ultra-Ash`arite.
The second example of
Ghazali's intensification of Ash'arite doctrine which one might mention
is what M. Schwarz has described in his account of `Acquisition in Early Kalam'
3s
According to this, the Ash'arite philosophy of action was trapped in a basic impasse. The Qur'anic terms iktisab / kasb (='acquisition') were used by Ash'arites to cover human action. The terms referred
specifically to the acquisition of merit and demerit through deeds. Now, according to Ash`ari the only aspect of the
acts in question which really belonged
to the human individual, was the merit and demerit of them, and nothing else (in the Luma' he argued that God cannot be described as the
'acquirer' (muktasab) in
respect of the act, but He can be described as virtually all else in
respect of it). But this only served to compound the feeling that Ash`ari's
whole approach to this was
incoherent. How could the act be so entirely attributed away from the human individual, except in
respect of his being punished or rewarded for it? This is simply unjust - to which Ash`ari replied that God, who 'makes the rules', is a
priori just. This was hardly satisfying.
Therefore, historically the tendency in later Ash`arism was to mitigate
the doctrine, again towards a slightly more Mu'tazilite approach which admitted that God did enable the human being to act (tafwtd).
The tendency came to a head with Ghazali's teacher Juwayni, who in his `Agida nizamiyya virtually rejects the
technical term kasb, in saying that it cannot disguise the fundamental
problem with Ash`ari's doctrine. He
instead frankly opts for the view that God empowers the creature. The careful analogy drawn by him is with a
servant, who is authorised by his master
to sell a part of his property. It is impossible for the servant to act
independently of this empowerment, and the master is in principle considered to
be the one transacting. Yet, in
practice the slave does actually transact.
However, Ghazali seems to have rejected his
master's approach, and he returns in the Igtisad to a strong rehabilitation of the doctrine of acquisition. He achieves
this by finally redefining kasb to
mean, not just the individual's acquisition of merit and demerit through
an act which in itself is always independent of him, but the acquisition of the act
itself. In this, Ghazali has extended
the sense of acquisition in order to retain it as a doctrine. It has been called a fulcrum in the history of the
concept. The formally satisfying
emendation is made that the deeds, as well as its value, are acquired by the human individual, achieving greater coherence for
the doctrine than before. All the same
the deed is ultimately still both `created' and `made' by God, and devolves to the human agent in its entirety. Whatever we think of this way of putting it,
the fact remains that it seems more
self-consciously Ash'arite than Juwayni's position, striving as it does to
retain the form and purport of Ash'arite terminology.
Thus, Ghazali was clearly
not just passively Ash'arite, but sometimes very actively so. Ghazali's
Ash`arism in its totality, doubtless, was far from straightforward. While there
was a rudimentary level to it in which Ghazali simply rehearsed the
school's credenda to enjoin conformity, and express his own loyalism, it
was not confined to thaf level. It would anyway be a mistake
to view Ash`arism as simply a matter of rote-learned creeds. Like
all revealed theologies, it is in some sense profoundly mysterious, and
sincerely aims at maintaining religious truth by dogmata that are precise while
'pregnant', uniform without being unidemensional. The
excellent distinguo
Frank has introduced into our thinking on
Ghazali - higher theology versus
catechetic theology should not necessarily lead us, as it seems to have led the
author himself, to identify the latter as exclusively Ash'arite, and the former
as exclusively counter-Ash'arite. At the risk of answering one provocative thesis with another, we might say that the
higher theology is to some extent a
higher Ash'arism.
TOBIAS MAYER
NOTES
1 Frank, p. 90.
2
Quoted by Frank, p. 96. 3 Ibid., p. 2.
4 See F. Jabre, Melanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'Etudes Orientales du Caire, 1 (1954), pp. 73-102.
5
Frank, p. 100.
6
Ibid.
7 'As-Shahrastani's Streitschrift gegen Avicenna and
ihre Widerlegung durch Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi'
in A. Dietrich (ed.), Akten des VII
Kongress ftir Arabistik and Islamwissenschaft (Gottingen,
1976), pp. 250 ff.
8 Frank, p. 80, p. 100.
9 Ibid., p. 95.
10 Ibid. (italics mine). I I
Ibid., p. 135. 12
Ibid., p.91.
13 `All al-Qaradaghi (ed.), Ayyuha 'l-walad (Cairo, Dar al-Nasr li'l-Tiba`a
al-Islamiyya,1983), p. 127.
14 Ibid., p. 94.
15 Frank, pp. 28-68.
16 Ibid., e.g.,
p. 44.
17 Frank, p. 32.
18 '...wa-ma
la yatawassalu ila al-wajib ilia bihi
fa-huwa wajib.' Imam al-Haramayn
al-Juwayni, Kitab al-irshad, ed. Muhammad Yusuf MCsa and `All `Abd al-Mun`im
`Abd al-Hamid (Cairo, 1950),p.11.
19
`...hadha ma istamarrat bihi al-`ada wa fi'l
magdur ihdath `ilm wa-ihdath al-qudra
`alayhi min ghayr tagdim nazar wa-lakin al-`ada mustamirra 'ala anna kull `ilm
kasbiyyin nazari.'
Ibid., p. 14.
20 Frank, p. 37.
21 `wa-kana
la yufarriq bayna al-mashi'a wa'l-irada wa-yunkir al-gawl bi'l-tab` wa'l-labi a wa-yaqul
anna al-hawadith kullaha afal allah ta`ala bi-ikhtiydrihi wa-mashi'atihi
wa-tadbirihi
wa-tagdirihi laysa shay' minha mujib li-shay' wa-la
labia laha tuwalliduhu bal ,pllu dhalika , ikhtira'uhu bi-ikhtiyarihi `ala
al-wajh alladhi akhtarahu wa-'alimahu.' Ibn Furall, Mujarrad
maqalat al-Shaykh Abi 'l-Hasan al-Ash`art, ed. D. Gimaret (Beirut, Dar al-Mashriq, 1987), p.
76.
22 Frank, p. 38.
23 Quoted by Frank, p. 51 from the Igtisad.
24 Frank, p. 46.
25 Ibid., pp. 48 ff.
26 Quoted by Frank,
p. 52. 27 Ibid.
28
Ibid., p. 53. 29 Ibid., p. 58. 30 Ibid.
31 Ihya' (Cairo,1957), 4: 487.
32 Frank, p.54.
33 Ibn Rushd adopts this line of thinking in Tahafut al-tahafut. See S. van den Bergh, Averroes'
Tahafut al-tahafut (Gibb Memorial Trust, 1954), 1: 197.
34 Frank, p°47.
35 Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition - Essays
presented by his friends and pupils to
Richard Walzer on his seventieth birthday, ed. S. M. Stern, A. Hourani and V. Brown (Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1972), pp. 355 ff.