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Al-Ghazali is one of the well-known Muslim philosophers of the 11th century. Al-Ghazālī expressed the distaste of the orthodox in his Incoherence of Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa), in which he showed that reason could be used to destroy reason and that the philosophers could not prove the ideas which Islam condemned. In this work, Al-Ghazali refutes the philosophers and unveil the inability of philosophers to affirm God. It was al-Ghazālī who won an ascendancy in the Muslim world which ranks him as perhaps the greatest single force in Islam after the Prophet himself.
Al-Ghazālī (1059-1111) was influenced by an atmosphere of Sufi mysticism, but turned, before the age of twenty, to the study of theology and jurisprudence. Joining the service of the Seljuq wazir Nizām ul-Mulk, he was appointed to the Madrasa in Baghdad and was soon recognized as the greatest contemporary authority on theology and law (Watt 20, 22). But he found no spiritual satisfaction in either (Watt. Reason merely destroyed reason; it proved nothing. Al-Ghazālī lost his faith and in his despair, he could no longer teach. Finally, he turned to Sufism and in mystical communion with God found peace and certainty.
Al-Ghazali supposes that whatever exists, except God’s essence and attributes, is created, that is to say, it comes into existence from nonexistence and is not eternal. As proof, he uses the tradition of the Prophet. As proof too, he underlines that the world changes and is a place of many vicissitudes. Whatever is of this description is not eternal, and whatever is eternal does not change (Watt 143) Madrasa We know that there is one real mode of existence—that of God’s essence and attributes and there is no way for change in that mode. And Almighty God is capable of extinguishing the world.
After existence, it passes away. Although God can annihilate in the twinkling of an eye, those who do not die will know that God is the creator of the world who has brought it into existence from nonexistence because, since the world is not eternal, the meaning of creation is that it was not and then it was. Whatever was of that order must have had a creator to bring it from nonexistence into existence because if it was created from itself it must always have been. Since it did not always exist, it was not created by itself but by another (watt 141). The Creator of the World must be eternal. If He were not eternal He would be created. He would be of the world, not the self-existent Creator of the World. Al-Ghazali states that:
the philosophers disagree among themselves as to the eternity of the world. But the majority of the philosophers – ancient as well as modern – agree upon its eternity, holding that it always coexisted with God (exalted be He) as His effect which was concurrent with Him in time – concurrent as an effect is with the caus” (Al-Ghazali).
That is to say that the world’s existence is by reason of its own essence and not by reason of something other than itself. But the world needs something other than itself and whatever needs something other than itself is not fit for lordship. This is typical of his approach to theological issues and evidence of the stronghold of the Holy Law upon the religious imagination of Muslims (Watt 146)
For the orthodox, fire burns wood because God creates inflammability in the wood when it comes into contact with the fire. Nature is not an order, it is a succession of individual Divine decrees. Space is a series of untouching atoms and time is a succession of untouching moments (Bello 41). All change and action in the world are produced by God deciding to maintain or destroy these atoms.
“If it were possible for the Eternal to acquire a special relation to one of the two contingencies, then it would be absolutely untenable to say that the world, which has a particular shape at present, could possibly have some other shape instead of the present one” (Al-Ghazali).
For example, God creates in man’s mind the will to write; at the same moment He gives him the power to write and brings about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen, and the appearance of the writing on the paper. No one of these is the cause of the other. God has brought about, by creation and annihilation of atoms, the requisite combinations to produce these appearances (Watt 137). “So, we will say: Did God have the power to create the highest sphere as larger by a cubit than the size He has actually created? If they say No, that will show God’s inability” (Al-Ghazali). Hence there is no idea of natural law. The universe is sustained by perpetual Divine intervention—in a sense, by a perpetual miracle (Najjar 2006).
As al-Ghazālī’s achievement suggests, there is room for a wide variation of belief and practice within the ambit of the Law. The principle of the consensus of the community has in practice permitted the tacit and peaceful acceptance of the change. Muslims have usually been reluctant to extrude anyone from their society who subscribes at least to the simple basic testimony. There has always been a hope of further education in the true Faith. This wide tolerance was to prove a major asset in the survival and expansion of the Muslim community (Watt 131). Poverty meant the stripping away of every wish which could distract men’s thoughts from God. Patience meant both patience in misfortune and patience to refrain from those things which God has forbidden to mankind.
Trust in God betokened confidence in His grace toward the sinful pilgrim and satisfaction means for the pilgrim, eager acceptance of Divine decree. All these stages or stations were arrived at through the efforts of the pilgrim. The later part of the journey toward God was only made possible by the gift of God Himself (Watt 152, 153). Indeed the light of intuitive certainty by which the heart sees God was a beam of God’s Own Light cast therein by Himself. “So our answer to the fantastic supposition by the Imagination of temporal possibilities before the existence of the world is the same as your answer to its fantastic supposition of spatial possibilities beyond the world. There is no difference” (Al-Ghazali). The two supreme states were annihilation and subsistence. Annihilation means a transformation of the soul through the utter extinction of all passion and desires, Ibn Rushd’s also underlines that:
the contemplation of the Divine attributes, and the cessation of all conscious thought. our knowledge of the world leads us to know the existence of God. The arguments that convince people of God’s existence are universal and simple and are two in number: the argument from design or providence (Dalil al-‘Inaya) and the argument from invention or creation” (Najjar 2006).
Following Bello (1989) most Sufis were insistent that the individual human personality was not annihilated in this state. Some said that in this state the Sufi becomes like a drop of water in the ocean. Upon this follows subsistence or abiding in God. This can mean either, or all, of three things— union with one of the activities symbolized by the names of God, union with one of the attributes of God, or union with the Divine Essence. When the Sufi has attained annihilation and subsistence, the veils of the flesh, of the will, and of the world have been torn aside, Truth is beheld and man is united to God. The mystics like al-Ghazālī recognized that this supreme experience could not be expressed in words; others ignored the limitation of language and scandalized the orthodox while often failing to communicate their own experience.
Al-Ghazālī made the personal, emotional relation of the individual to God the core of popular Islam. Man’s perfection and happiness consist in trying to imitate the qualities of God, in trying to do His Will (Watt 153). This Will he may discover from theology—but few are equipped to follow that severe discipline.Rather is he likely to discover the real attributes and purposes of God by mystical experience? In winning over Islam to this view, al-Ghazālī won for Sufism an abiding home in Muslim orthodoxy. In doing so, however, he pared away some of the more extreme forms of mystic expression. He refused to try to express what he himself had experienced. Al-Ghazālī held Sufism back from pantheism; at the moment of supreme illumination, there is still a distinction between God and the mystic. Following Al-Ghazali:
The intellectual judgment of possibility has a known thing – in the sense in which coloureds or animality or any other universal judgment is, according to the philosophers themselves, an established fact for reason. No one can say that known things do not correspond to these kinds of knowledge”
There are difficulties in this conclusion (Bello 34). For, if, after comprehension and conversance with the eternal knowledge, intentions, decree, and ordination of God, it is conceived that it is not the (really) man who brings actions into existence, that conclusion will be reached because it is realized that if God knew from all eternity that a particular action must be performed by a particular individual, that action must therefore be so performed, whether without that individual’s choice, as in compulsory motion, or with his choice. If the action was optional (in form), the individual did not have a choice either in his decision or in his action. Furthermore, although the individual may have had a choice in his action, yet he did not have any choice in its first beginnings (Bello 49)
In sum, in order to prove his arguments against the philosophers, Al-Ghazali deposed jurisprudence and theology from the position they had held within Islam, teaching that the intellect should only be used to destroy trust in itself. Philosophy could not reach the ultimate reality. Al-Ghazālī did not reject dialectic; rather was he prepared to use it in defence of traditional dogmas. For him, the ultimate source of all knowledge was a revelation from God, which reason may elucidate but cannot challenge. Hence he devoted himself to the study of tradition. After al-Ghazālī, the chief function of scholastic theology was defensive— to support and explain the doctrines of the Quran and the Sunna—particularly the absence of any original theological works and the concentration on Quranic commentary and the study of the hadīth. Al-Ghazālī recalled Muslims to obedience and devotion to God in their daily lives. By impressing upon Muslims that every action and social activity should be an act of worship and of humility before God, the Sharīa nurtures the interior spiritual life while tilting the balance against the vagaries of individual religious intuition or individual speculation about the nature of God. Inability to affirm the Creator involves consciousness of its imperfection and absence of desire for it, not merely that a man should say when he likes a thing. Al-Ghazali underlines that the philosophers wrongly imagine that annihilation signifies loss of essence and destruction of personality and that subsistence indicates the subsistence of God in man; both these notions are absurd.
Works Cited
Bello, I.A. The Medieval Islamic controversy between philosophy and orthodoxy, Brill Academic Pub, 1989.
al-Ghazali. Tahafut al-Falasifah. Incoherence of the Philosophers. Web.
Najjar, I. Y. Ibn Rushd’s criticisms of the theologians’ arguments for the existence of God. 2006. Web.
Watt, W.M. Muslim Intellectual; A Study of Al Ghazali. Edinburgh, 1963.
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