Al-Ghazali

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Iranian philosophy Medieval era
Name:	Al-Ghazali
Birth:	1058
Death:	1111
School/tradition:	sufi
Influences:
Influenced:	Shah Waliullah ^{[citation needed]}

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazâlî (ابو حامد محمد ابن محمد الغزالي), known as Algazel to the western medieval world, born 1058 in Tus, Khorasan province of Persia, modern day Iran, died 1111 in Tus, was an Islamic theologian, philosopher, and mystic of Persian origin. ^[1]

1 Biography
2 Works
- 2.1 Literature
- 2.2 Quotations
3 References
4 External links
5 See also

[edit] Biography

He contributed significantly to the development of a systematic view of Sufism and its integration and acceptance in mainstream Islam. Al-Ghazali was a scholar of orthodox Islam, belonging to the Shafi'i school of legal thought of Sunnite Islam and to the Asharite school of theology . Imam Ghazali received many titles: Sharaful A'emma (Arabic: شرف الائمه), Zainud din (Arabic: زین الدین), Hujjatul Islam, meaning "Proof of Islam" (Arabic: حجة الاسلام)

Al-Ghazali remains one of the most celebrated scholars in the history of Islamic thought. He lectured at the Nizamiyyah school of Baghdad (the highest ranked academy of the golden era of Islamic civilization) between 1091 and 1096. He was the scholar par excellence in the Islamic world. He had literally hundreds of scholars attending his lectures at the Nizamiyyah. His audience included scholars from other schools of jurisprudence. This position won him prestige, wealth and respect that even princes and viziers could not match.

After some years he distributed his wealth and left Baghdad to begin a spiritual journey that lasted over a decade. He went to Damascus, Jerusalem, Hebron, Madinah, Mecca and back to Baghdad where he stopped briefly. He then left for Tus to spend the next several years in seclusion. He ended his seclusion for a short lecturing period at the Nizamiyyah of Nishapur in 1106. Later he returned to Tus where he remained until his death in December, 1111.

He is also viewed as the key member of the influential Asharite school of early Muslim philosophy and the most important refuter of Mutazilites. His 11th century book titled "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" marks a major turn in Islamic epistemology, as Ghazali effectively discovered philosophical skepticism that would not be commonly seen in the West until George Berkeley and David Hume in the 18th century. The encounter with skepticism led Ghazali to embrace a form of theological occasionalism, or the belief that all causal events and interactions are not the product of material conjunctions but rather the immediate and present will of God.

The Incoherence also marked a turning point in Islamic philosophy in its vehement rejections of Aristotle and Plato. The book took aim at the falasifa, a loosely defined group of Islamic philosophers from the 8th through the 11th centuries (most notable among them Avicenna) who drew intellectually upon the Ancient Greeks. Ghazali bitterly denounced Aristotle, Socrates and other Greek writers as non-believers and labelled those who employed their methods and ideas as corrupters of the Islamic faith.

In the next century, Averroes drafted a lengthy rebuttal of Ghazali's Incoherence entitled the Incoherence of the Incoherence; however, the epistemological course of Islamic thought had already been set.

Ghazali's influence has been compared to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas in Christian theology (he has been called the "Thomas Aquinas of Islam" by some), but the two differed greatly in methods and beliefs. Whereas Ghazali rejected non-Islamic philosophers such as Aristotle and saw it fit to discard their teachings on the basis of their "unbelief," Aquinas embraced them and incorporated ancient Greek and Latin thought into his own philosophical writings.

Ghazali wrote two of his works in Persian: Kimyayé Sa'ādat (The Alchemy of Happiness) and Nasihatul Mulook (Counseling Kings).

[edit] Works

Theology

al-Munqidh min al-dalal
al-1qtisad fi'I-i`tiqad
al-Risala al-Qudsiyya
Kitab al-arba?in fi usul al-din
Mizan al-?amal
Faysal al-tafriq bayna al-islam wa al-zandaqa (The Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Heresy (or Masked Infidelity))

Sufism

Ihya'ul ulum al-din, "The revival of the religious sciences", Ghazali's most important work
Kimiya-ye sa'ādat, "The Alchemy of Happiness" (in Persian)
Mishkat al-anwar, "The Niche of Lights"

Philosophy

Maqasid al falasifa
Tahafut al falasifa, "The Incoherence of the Philosophers", of which Ibn Rushd wrote his famous refutation Tahafut al-tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence)

Fiqh

al-Mustasfa min ?ilm al-usul

Logic

Mi?yar al-?ilm (The Standard Measure of Knowledge)
al-Qistas al-mustaqim (The Just Balance)
Mihakk al-nazar f'l-mantiq (The Touchstone of Proof in Logic)

[edit] Literature

Laoust, H: La politique de Gazali, 1970
Campanini, M.: Al-Ghazzali, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman, History of Islamic Philosophy 1996
Watt, W M.: Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali, Edinburgh 1963
Marmura: Al-Ghazali The Incoherence of the Philosophers, (2nd ed.). Brigham: Printing Press. ISBN 0-8425-2466-5.