Muhammad Ghazali
Abu Hamid Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad
al-Tusi al-Shafi'i al-Ghazali was born in 1058 A.D. in Khorasan, Iran. His father died
while he was still very young but he had the opportunity of getting education in the
prevalent curriculum at Nishapur and Baghdad. Soon he acquired a high standard of
scholarship in religion and philosophy and was honored by his appointment as a Professor
at the Nizamiyah University of Baghdad, which was recognized as one of the most reputed
institutions of learning in the golden era of Muslim history.
After a few years, however, he gave up his
academic pursuits and worldly interests and became a wandering ascetic. This. was a
process (period) of mystical transformation. Later, he resumed his teaching duties, but
again left these. An era of solitary life, devoted to contemplation and writing then
ensued, which led to the author- ship of a number of everlasting hooks. He died in 1128
A.D. at Baghdad.
Ghazali's major contribution lies in religion,
philosophy and sufism. A number of Muslim philosophers had been following and developing
several viewpoints of Greek philosophy, including the Neoplatonic philosophy, and this was
leading to conflict with several Islamic teachings. On the other hand, the movement of
sufism was assuming such excessive proportions as to avoid observance of obligatory
prayers and duties of Islam. Based on his unquestionable scholarship and personal mystical
experience, Ghazali sought to rectify these trends, both in philosophy and sufism.
In philosophy, Ghazali upheld the approach of
mathematics and exact sciences as essentially correct. However, he adopted the techniques
of Aristotelian logic and the Neoplatonic procedures and employed these very tools to lay
bare the flaws and lacunas of the then prevalent Neoplatonic philosophy arid to diminish
the negative influences of Aristotelianism and excessive rationalism. In contrast to some
of the Muslim philosophers, e.g., Farabi, he portrayed the inability of reason to
comprehend the absolute and the infinite. Reason could not transcend the
finite and was limited to the observation of the relative. Also, several Muslim
philosophers had held that the universe was finite in space but infinite in time. Ghazali
argued that an infinite time was related to an infinite space. With his clarity of thought
and force of argument, he was able to create a balance between religion and reason, and
identified their respective spheres as being the infinite and the finite, respectively.
In religion, particularly mysticism, he
cleansed the approach of sufism of its excesses and reestablished the authority of the
orthodox religion. Yet, he stressed the importance of genuine sufism, which he maintained
was the path to attain the absolute truth.
He was a prolific writer. His immortal books
include Tuhafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Ihya
al-'Ulum al-Islamia (The Rivival of the Religious Sciences), "The Beginning of
Guidance and his Autobiography", "Deliverance from Error". Some of his
works were translated into European languages in the Middle Ages. He also wrote a summary
of astronomy.
Ghazali's influence was deep and everlasting.
He is one of the greatest theologians of Islam. His theological doctrines penetrated
Europe, influenced Jewish and Christian Scholasticism and several of his arguments seem to
have been adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas in order to similarly reestablish the authority of
orthodox Christian religion in the West. So forceful was his argument in the favor of
religion that he was accused of damaging the cause of philosophy and, in the Muslim Spain,
Ibn Rushd (Averros) wrote a rejoinder to his Tuhafut.
