Abn Hamed Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Tuse al-Ghazali (450.505 AH/1058-1111 AD) was perhaps the pivotal thinker in turning Islamic thought away from the tradition of Greek philosophical reason.

In order to appreciate the crisis of faith and reason encountered by al-Ghazali it is important to take into account his education under al-Juweyni in Mishapur for it set the epistemology which opened certain routes while closing others. This education had a number of characteristics. First of all and most generally it was intensively religious, built around a strong affirmation of God and the dependence of all upon Him. For al-Juweyni this carried two implications: first that in principle reality is God, and second that any other reality must be understood not only in terms of its proper nature — as, for example, human — but more precisely as God-given.

In the context of the Mutakallimun theology this carried a number of implications. First, there were no finite substances or beings which exist in themselves (in-se); instead all must be recreated at each moment. From this it follows also that human actions do not effect or cause things, that is, make them to be; rather on the occasion of human action it is God who brings them about as His effects.

This position of al-Juweyni was considered by Ibn Khaldün to be the decisive historical turning point in Islamic thought between "the ancients" and "the moderns" for it set strict limits to the role of reasoning. For al-Ghazali it was probably decisive in his choice of the mystical way over that of philosophy. He subjected the latter to severe criticism in his Tahafut al-Falasifa while at the same time his skeptical attitude to knowledge left him impervious to rational critique. For what effect could the careful reasoning and trenchant syllogisms of Averroes’s Tahafut al Tahafut have had — even had it been published before rather than after the death of Ghazali — if its deductively reasoned proofs were in principle ineffectual. In al-Ghazali’s occasionalism the way of philosophy was simply neither available nor retrievable.

Indeed, this was intimated in Ghazali’s description of a crisis he underwent before the age of 20. At the time he examined all roads of knowledge in search of certain knowledge, that is, knowledge which held the "soul so bound that nothing could detach it" (a description which would be echoed by Descartes over five centuries later). But when he found himself unable to differentiate the first principles from dreams (also echoed by Descartes) he fell into two months of despair. He soon regained his confidence in reason, but what is significant is that he considered this to be the result not of an objective deductive procedure, but of the light of God projected into his heart — again in the occasionalist manner.

Before proceeding to an examination of the personal intellectual history Ghazali recounted in his Munqidh it is important to take note of the complex political context in which his life and work were deeply engaged. The political conflict was between the Fatimids and the Abbasids. The Fatimids were shi-ite alides who promoted a batinism stressing the teaching of the Imam (ta‘limism). This had swept North Africa and had its capital in Cairo, whence the fatimids desired to achieve supremacy over all of Islam. However the Abbasid caliphs, whose sphere stretched from the Mediterranean east over Iraq, Syria and Khorasam, were Sunnite. In this context Nizam al-Mulk set up as a counter force many schools to teach Sunnite Shafeism and Asharism. The school in Baghdad was the center of this whole system.

Upon the death of al-Juweyni, the education of al-Ghazali was complete and he moved to the camp of Nizam. There he soon became the leading dialectician capable of besting the best minds in the region in spirited — later he would confess to arrogant — argument. As a result, at the age of only 34 (1091/484) he was appointed by the Nizam as director of the school at Baghdad. There he acquired a large and devoted entourage, greater even than that of the Ministers of State. But tragedy would strike the following year in the assassination of Nizam, and by early in the next year Ghazali left Baghdad.

A Surface Reading: considered only from the point of view of one interested in the modes of thought of the time, the work presents a review of the different sciences: Kalam, an apologetic approach to theology; philosophy, including both the thought of Plato and Aristotle and that of such Islamic scholars as al-Farabi and Avicenna who drew upon and continued their work; and teaching or ta‘alimites according to which all knowledge depended on presentation by the teacher.

Ghazali rejected all of these as unsatisfactory with regard to some very essential matters such as the spiritual nature of man and the union of the human spirit with God. Hence, he turned away from the outward search for objective truth as well as for worldly honors. Instead, he directed his attention inward to subjectivity and the work of the Spirit. There he sought a personal savoring of the truth, achieving thereby an unbreakable union with the divine.

At this point he left Baghdad for Damascus where he spent two years, basically as a hermit and principally in the minaret of the mosque. He continued this retreat for eight more years at home, then returned briefly to teaching; but upon the assassination of the son of Nizam returned finally home. There he opened a small residence for training people in the Sufi way and continue of his studies in fiqh.

Though true in its broad lines, there are reasons why this analysis remains too much on the surface and leaves open some crucial misinterpretations with regard to reason. Some would read it in an anti-intellectual light and see either Ghazali’s religious experience, Islam in particular or religion in general as an impediment to, or distraction from, knowledge and as unable to take account of human history and to advance with human progress. For others religious fidelity would mean opposing any political program as unfaithful to Islam. Hence it is necessary to take a closer look at the Munqidh in order to protect it from misinterpretation and to enable it to provide its proper light for the progress of religion.

Interpretations of the Munqidh: These can proceed on different planes: horizontally they might be social or personal in character, vertically they might be psychological and metaphysical.

Note that this is not only an individual issue, but one of the Providence of God for all his people. Ghazali looked upon the work of God as supporting the politique of Nizam against the incursions from Cairo. Ultimately, however, the assassination showed him that Providence was not merely political in nature.

It might be noted further that even late in his ten year period of retreat, when he was considering how to respond to the tepidity abroad in Islam, he considered it important to have an authoritative patron. This could be taken as an issue of protection. But it seems more probable that it was considered important as an element in the plan of Nizam to develop an alliance of faith and political power. This would protect against Batinism and promote the Sunnite Islamic faith. The assassination of Nisa meant, of course, the sudden collapse of this worldly hope. The Munqidh then may not be adequate history, but the work has survived because it focused not upon surface events that happen only once, but upon what is essential in the human pilgrimage and gives it ultimate meaning. Hence, after the assassination of the son of Nizam, Ghazali returned to his home and continued his life as a Sufi, a teacher and a scholar.

b. Others have seen the account not as social, but as personal and even egoistic. One interpretation would base this upon a supposed hope in the part of Ghazali to appear as a major reformer.

c. Others would condemn him by his own words in which he stated that his motivation had been a search for glory and renown. But this remark would be meaningless except in the context of a conversion from such motivation.

d. Yet others would consider the turn in Ghazali’s life to be individualistic in character. Some, writing from the individualistic Anglo-Saxon perspective, refer to this as an individualization of the Islamic faith. But the closed, self-centered character of individualism hardly does justice to the Sufi Way through the self to the Infinite source and goal of all. By abnegation one truly dies to self in order to be opened to the transcendent. Hence it would seem more true to speak not of an individualization, but of a personalization of the life of faith. This would no longer be the affair only of great leaders — caliphs or sultans — but of the millions of persons who practiced this religion. And if these cultic practices are carried out in unison by large bodies of persons they are seen by Ghazali as making the heart flexible and nimble for the Way which each must follow toward union with God. In other words, all was given new life by Ghazali’s work which described the Way to the divine Source and Goal of life. In turn this marks the character of each of the faithful and hence of the community of believers, Islam, as a whole.

The Crisis. In reality the vertical explanation which by a phenomenological route takes one into one’s personal psychology or subjectivity and thence to the center of one’s self and indeed to the absolute Self would seem to be the more appropriate. He does this through a deeper existential crisis which unveils the metaphysical reality of his life.

The account of this crisis by Ghazali in Chapter III of the Munqidh is most dramatic. It begins with a detailed description of his uncertain wavering between a sense that he must break away from his present life as head of the school with its accompanying honors and hesitance to leave his position:

I also perceived that I could not hope for eternal happiness unless I feared God and rejected all the passions, that is to say, I should begin by breaking my heart’s attachment to the world. I needed to abandon the illusions of life on earth in order to direct my attention towards my eternal home with the most intense desire for God, the Almighty. This entailed avoiding all honors and wealth, and escaping from everything that usually occupies a person and ties him down.

 

Turning to look inward, I perceived that I was bound by attachments on all sides. I meditated on all that I had done, teaching and instructing being my proudest achievements, and I perceived that all my studies were futile, since they were of no value for the Way to the hereafter. Moreover, what had been my purpose in teaching? My intention had not been pure, for it had not been directed towards God the Almighty alone. Had I not preferred to seek glory and renown? I was teetering on the edge of a precipice, and if I did not step back I would plunge into the Fire.

 

I thought of nothing else, all the time remaining undecided. One day, I would determine to leave Baghdad and lead a new life, but the next day I would change my mind. I took one step forward, and then one step back. In the morning I might have a desperate thirst for the hereafter, but by the evening the troops of desire would have stormed and defeated it.

 

This is followed by a dialogue between the angelic call to "take to the road" and Satan’s wiles to convince him by all and any means to stay:

My passions kept me chained in place, while the herald of faith cried, "Take to the road! Take to the road! Life is brief, the journey is long. Knowledge and deeds are nothing but mere outward appearance and illusion. If you are not ready at this very moment for the life to come when will you be ready? And if now you do not break your moorings, when will you break away?" At that moment, I felt impelled to go; my decision to depart and escape would be made.

 

But Satan returned, saying, "This is only a passing mood! Do not be taken in by it, the feeling will pass quickly. . . . If you give way to it, you will lose your honors, your well-established peaceful and secure position which you will find nowhere else. You will be taking the risk that you will change your mind again and live to regret it. It will not be easy to come back, once you have lost your position. . . ."

 

There follows a veritable paralysis, an inability to speak or even to eat, as the story builds to its climax:

This tug of war between my emotions and the summons from the Hereafter lasted nearly six months, from the month of Rajab 488 A.H. (July 1095 A.D.), during which I lost my free will and was under compulsion.

 

The fact is that God tied my tongue and stopped me teaching. I struggled to no avail to speak at least once to my pupils, to please the hearts of those who were attending my lectures, but my tongue refused to serve me at all. And having my tongue tied made my heart grow heavy. I could not swallow anything; I had no appetite for food or drink; I could neither swallow easily nor digest any solid food.

 

I grew weak. The physicians despaired of treating me. They said, "The malady has descended to the heart, and has spread from there to the humors. There is no other remedy but to free him from the anxiety which is gnawing at him."

 

Finally, there comes a new calm and soothing theme of personal peace as God gives him the power to break away:

Feeling my impotence, my inability to come to a decision, I put myself in the hands of God, the ultimate refuge of all those who are in need. I was heard by the one who hears those in need when they pray to Him. He made it easy for me to renounce honors, wealth, family and friends.

 

Jabre would see this as only a psychological issue of individual subjectivity, but in reality it is a psychology that deepens into metaphysics and an account of the divine spirit acting within.

Here the enlightening analogies would appear to be to Heidegger and to Shankara. For Heidegger Being burst into time through the dasein, that is, the conscious human being; Ghazali provides a rich account of just such a human consciousness in action. A more contemplative analogy would be to the thought of Shankara according to whom, through ascetic practice, the human self, spirit, Atman, is so perfected as to become translucent to the divine self or Brahman.

Ghazali provides us with a helpful roadmap in the section he writes on prophecy in Chapter IV of the Munqidh. There he distinguishes three levels of knowledge and contemplation each of which has a corresponding esthesis:

- The first is on the sense level; it is knowledge by belief based on the good opinion one has of the teacher. This was his situation when as a younger person he was attracted to Sufism which he admired, but was not then capable of realizing in his own life.

- The second is on the level of reason. This is indirect knowledge by verification or reasoning.

- The third level is that of prophecy which has both objective and subjective aspects, as we shall see below.

Reviewing these three we can follow with greater precision the progressive deepening of the experience of Ghazali. The first, sense, level of knowledge is not sufficient. This could be either the theory of the teacher (t’alimites) in which one waited for, and was ready to listen to, the teacher who was to come. It could be also his own early experience of admiring the Sufis. But in either case there was a major and decisive limitation, namely, that what was experienced remained external and could not be shared.

Second, there is the level of reason. He valued this and became himself one of the major philosophers of the time. His summary of philosophy was a standard source in the High Middle Ages in Europe a century later. Personally, he continued to work on the Islamic sciences till the very end of his life. He saw this as providing the basic truth which he had from the beginning and on which he never faltered. Nevertheless, he came to conclude that it had the crucial limitation that (at least in the thought of Avicenna and Averroes) it could not adequately state the spiritual dimension of the human person or especially its relation to the divine.

There remained then the reality of prophecy which had both objective and subjective dimensions. First of all it was needed in order to provide objective content to the human intellect with regard to the Transcendent or divine Being. Precisely as transcendent it went beyond the human mind and anything that could effect. Hence if the human person was to know its creator it must be the Creator who speaks its own objective reality to the human mind.

In the context of occasionalism this was doubly so. Of itself reason as theology could give only brittle formulas or proceed only externally, defensively and apologetically.

But to this objective content there must correspond an openness of heart or subjectivity on the part of the one who received the objective content of the message of the prophet. This must be prepared by asceticism to remove human impediments to opening the ear and the heart by cult as praying in union renders the heart nimble to the Spirit, and by meditation to open both mind and heart for the messenger and his message.

Through this openness of the human spirit to the Divine Spirit one achieves in the terms of Ghazali and Iqbal "a savoring" of God — a deep, rich, powerful and transporting experience of mind and heart. As a result one’s commitment is not external or limited, but open, inclusive and absolutely unshakable. Again, the union of Atman and Brahman in the thought of Shakaran may be the clearest analogy.

Such is Ghazali’s account of his crisis and his turn to the mystical path of the Sufis. It was a personal experience and his public account was so powerful that it redirected the main thrust of Islam in the centuries to follow. In so doing it situates squarely the issue of the relation of reason to faith, namely, can reason in its highest form, that is, as philosophy, develop a sense of the human person and its spiritual nature and destiny which is adequate for one who would in mind and heart be faithful to the rich sense of human destiny as depicted in the Scriptures and the message of the Prophet?

This crisis leaves two problems which will be treated in the following two sections: first is reason alien to religion and truly incapable in its regard, or is it more capable and closer to religion than the epistemology of al-Juweyni and Ghazali would allow? If so it would be capable of being developed even in the same medieval period as an effective collaborator with faith. Second, what can faith contribute to reason, especially if reason is now weakened by sin and is in poor estate.

1. "Editor’s Introduction" in al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error and Mystical Union with the Almighty, tr. M. Abulaylah, intro. George. F. McLean (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1999), pp. 31-60.

2. Farid Jabre in al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Beyrouth: Traduction des chefs d’oeuvre, 1950), pp. 41-51.