Ghazali and Modern Thought

A frustration encountered by anyone who wishes to come to terms with the thought of the great Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 CE) is the lack of solid scholarly treatment on the introductory level. With Eric Ormsby's Ghazali: The Revival of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008 [reprint 2012]), this void has finally been filled. Ormsby has spent enough time reading and thinking about Ghazali's thought, peculiarities of expression, and historical context that he is able to rescue hujjat al-islam (the "Proof of Islam," a traditional title for the Khorasani sage) from the apparent contradictions that beset his work.

The key to unlocking the mystery of al-Ghazali is, as Ormsby remarks on page 75, that he was both a radical skeptic and a passionate believer simultaneously. An aside: some years ago, I recall reading an article written by a Christian critic of Islam who smugly asserted that the Islamic tradition had yet to produce a Kierkegaard--an assertion that was intended by the writer to somehow prove Islam's inferiority to Christianity. What the author of the article did not know is: (a) the Islamic tradition did produce a Kierkegaard in al-Ghazali and (b) the Muslim Kierkegaard (unlike the "Christian" one--who denied to his dying day that he could be considered a Christian) is generally regarded as the St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas of the tradition. Few modes of discourse are as consistently tiresome as religious apologia--a mode that, I am sorry to say, was one of al-Ghazali's self-indulgences. Kierkegaard was also subject to this bad habit. It is an occupational hazard for anyone who would traffic in "theological" speculation.

Like Santayana (see post of 3/23/13 below), Ghazali struggled to construct a "wholly free and disillusioned" piety and, in so doing, "revived" Islamic tradition at a time when its direction was up for grabs (the crucial 11th-12th centuries CE). Consequently, Muslims can reply to misinformed critics such as the one I referenced above with the words of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus to Cranly: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" (see previous post). Kierkegaard eschewed all system; al-Ghazali, on the other hand, employed system in a fashion that Wittgenstein would later echo in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

In an interesting parallel, Ghazali asserted again and again in his writings what would become Wittgenstein's Tractarian conclusion:

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

[See, e.g., Ormsby pp. 136-137].

As difficult as he can be to interpret, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali is an indispensable thinker--and has been for the past 1,000 years. His "pre-modern modernity" is striking; he has never been more relevant than today.