Reading Montaigne in 1989 confirmed my intuition that, far from destroying faith, skepsis or honest doubt purifies faith by scrubbing it clean of credulity. I wanted to read more "religious thinkers" like Montaigne but discovered that he is rarely considered a religious thinker. This is partially due to the fact that Montaignean Christianity never really caught on.
Ironically, it was in Paris, in 1995, that I first read William Montgomery Watt's translation of al-Ghazali's Munqidh Min al-Dalal ("that which delivers from error") and, there, in what was ostensibly "Montaigne country," I encountered a religious thinker who, 500 years before Montaigne, had articulated what would become a Montaignean approach to religion. To my astonishment, I discovered, as well, that (unlike Montaigne's relation to Christianity) al-Ghazali is central to the Islamic tradition: he is, in fact, comparable to a St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas in the history of Islamic thought.
Reading Montaigne prepared me to read al-Ghazali. Re-reading al-Ghazali has prompted my return to Montaigne. Placing the two in "conversation" is rich, very rich.
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