There was a period of several years when Brigham Young University stood, in an important sense, in the forefront of work on classical Islamic philosophy and science, thanks to a project dreamed up by a BYU faculty member notorious for his perpetually seething hatred of non-Mormon religions (and, for that matter, of pretty much everything and everybody else) and his unashamedly shoddy pseudo-scholarship, which left him both an international academic nonentity and, rather mysteriously at the same time, an international laughing stock among real scholars.
The first book published by BYU’s Islamic Translation Series was al-Ghazali’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which appeared in a dual-language Arabic-English edition featuring a new translation by Michael Marmura, of the University of Toronto. The online description of the book — which was written, as I recall, by the religious bigot to whom I allude above — reads as follows:
Although Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali lived a relatively short life (1058-1111), he established himself as one of the most important thinkers in the history of Islam. The Incoherence of the Philosophers, written after more than a decade of travel and ascetic contemplation, contends that while such Muslim philosophers as Avicenna boasted of unassailable arguments on matters of theology and metaphysics, they could not deliver on their claims; moreover, many of their assertions represented disguised heresy and unbelief. Despite its attempted refutation by the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali’s work remains widely read and influential.
As it happened, the second book published in the Islamic Translation Series was also by al-Ghazali (an author for whom the lamentable pseudo-scholar mentioned above has always had considerable admiration). Like its predecessor, it appeared in a dual-language edition, with the Arabic original text and the English translation (by David Buchman, of Hanover College in Indiana) on facing pages. Below is the online description of the book, which the pseudo-scholar may or may not have written. (It doesn’t quite sound to me like his typical style.)
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali’s philosophical explorations covered nearly the entire spectrum of twelfth-century beliefs. Beginning his career as a skeptic, he ended it as a scholar of mysticism and orthodoxy. The Niche of Lights, written near the end of his illustrious career, advances the philosophically important idea that reason can serve as a connection between the devout and God. Al-Ghazali argues that abstracting God from the world, as he believed theologians did, was not sufficient for understanding. Exploring the boundary between philosophy and theology, The Niche of Lights seeks to understand the role of reality in the perception of the spiritual.