Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd duke it out, verbally.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/126

The second book published by the Islamic Translation Series — part of BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI), a project that I conceived and for which I served as editor in chief until my expulsion from the Maxwell Institute in 2012 — was al-Ghazali’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

Ibn Rushd (aka Averroës, which is a Latin corruption of a Hebrew corruption of his original Arabic name) really did write a famous response to al-Ghazali entitled The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

I’ve actually taught a course at BYU based largely on reading the two books, back to back.

But there was no Incoherence of the Incoherence of the Incoherence.  And, of course, there was no Incoherence of the Stupid Mystics and Their Incoherent Faces, either.

I doubt that al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd would have descended so deep into Trump-talk territory in any case, but they couldn’t actually have had the kind of back-and-forth exchange depicted in the cartoon because — for one thing — al-Ghazali died in 1111 and Ibn Rushd, who died in 1198, wasn’t even born until 1126.

Thanks to Stephen Smoot for alerting me to this item.  Oddly, cartoons about twelfth-century Islamic philosophical theology are relatively rare in English — or any other language.