Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī
Theologians (mutakallimūn) · Sunni · 1058–1111 CE
At a glance
| Category | Theologians (mutakallimūn) |
|---|---|
| Tradition | Sunni |
| Lifespan | 1058–1111 CE |
| Region | Khurasan |
| Work | Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn; reconciled law, theology and Sufism |
| Title | 'Proof of Islam' (Ḥujjat al-Islām) |
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī was born at Ṭūs in Khurāsān in 1058 and trained in the Shāfiʿī law and Ashʿarī theology of his day, studying at Nishapur under al-Juwaynī, the most eminent theologian of the eastern Islamic world. His ability brought him to the notice of Niẓām al-Mulk, vizier of the Seljuq sultans, who in 1091 appointed him — then in his early thirties — to the chief chair at the Niẓāmiyya college in Baghdad, the most prestigious teaching post in Sunni Islam. He lectured there to hundreds of students while working through the Neoplatonising philosophy of al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, whose arguments he came to regard as incompatible with revelation at several critical points.
In 1095 he broke off. By his own account in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (“Deliverance from Error”) he reached a crisis in which he could no longer trust the theology he taught, became physically unable to lecture, and left Baghdad on the pretext of pilgrimage; he settled his affairs, gave away his property and lived some eleven years as a poor Sufi in Damascus, Jerusalem, Mecca and finally back at Ṭūs with a small community of disciples. He returned to teaching at Nishapur in 1106, encouraged by friends who argued that the new Islamic century was owed a renewer (mujaddid) and that he was it. He died at Ṭūs in 1111.
His most consequential book is Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”), forty treatises that set out the whole of Islamic practice — worship, conduct, the vices of the soul, the path to God — as a single devotional programme. Its achievement was to give Sufism a place inside mainstream Sunni piety rather than at its margins, by grounding the mystical path in the law instead of setting it against it. Alongside it stand the Tahāfut al-falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”), his attack on the metaphysical claims of falsafa, prefaced by an admirably fair summary of the positions he meant to demolish; the Mishkāt al-anwār on the relation of mystical knowledge to other kinds; and late works on legal theory and creed. Of the four hundred titles ascribed to him perhaps fifty are securely his.
Both his contemporaries and later readers divided over him. Abandoning the Niẓāmiyya chair for a beggar's cloak won him followers and provoked accusations of theatre; his critique of philosophy was answered a century later, and directly, by Ibn Rushd in al-Andalus. He is titled Ḥujjat al-Islām, the Proof of Islam, and it is a commonplace of later Sunni writing that no author after the first generations shaped ordinary Muslim religiosity more; some modern scholars, Muslim and Western, have also blamed his success for a subsequent narrowing of philosophical inquiry, a judgement others reject as reading too much from one book.