The very first book published by BYU\u2019s (former) Middle Eastern Text Initiative, which I conceived, founded, and led until 2012, was by al-Ghazali<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bill Hamblin and I published the following article in the Deseret News<\/em> back on 19 October 2013:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In late 1997, Brigham Young University Press published a new translation (with the original Arabic text on the facing page) of a volume by the 11th-12th century Islamic thinker al-Ghazali. Titled \u201cThe Incoherence of the Philosophers,\u201d it ranks among the most important books ever written in the Islamic world.<\/span><\/p>\nMany of his faith consider al-Ghazali the second greatest Muslim after the Prophet Muhammad himself. His story is an interesting one with a distinctly modern ring to it.<\/span><\/p>\nAl-Ghazali was born within the borders of today\u2019s Iran but spent much of his life in Baghdad, the great capital of the far-flung Islamic empire. Superbly educated, he established himself at a young age among the keenest minds of his time and as a phenomenally popular lecturer on law and theology at the university in Baghdad, the Nizamiyya. What is more, he had the personal interest and patronage of Nizam al-Mulk, the remarkable prime minister of his day, after whom the school had been named.<\/span><\/p>\nYet, he was inwardly unsatisfied. And suddenly he simply couldn\u2019t go on any longer. (His crisis may have been provoked when his patron was murdered by a group known as the \u201cAssassins\u201d \u2014 from whom we get that unhappy word.) He gave up teaching, and literally couldn\u2019t speak for a time. His teaching seemed to him to have no real value. Most catastrophically, he began to doubt virtually everything.<\/span><\/p>\nFinally, he left Baghdad to try to put his life back together. And, fortunately for us, he eventually also left behind an autobiography titled \u201cThe Deliverer from Error,\u201d in which he recounts the path that restored him, in the end, to confidence, faith and conviction.<\/span><\/p>\nThere were, he records, four basic groups who claimed to provide the religious certainty he craved. The theologians, for example, said that by applying sound interpretive techniques and rigorous logic to the revealed text of the Qur\u2019an, they could lead their followers to indisputable truths.<\/span><\/p>\nBut al-Ghazali was not convinced. Even if they could prove to him that the Qur\u2019an taught such and such, how did he know that the Qur\u2019an itself was true? And if he was uncertain about that, no interpretation of the Qur\u2019an, no matter how carefully derived, could prove itself absolutely true. A stream cannot rise above its source. A building cannot be more firm than its foundation. Anybody can see that Homer\u2019s \u201cIliad\u201d says that Zeus is divine, but we non-pagans aren\u2019t obliged to agree. Homer has no particular authority for us.<\/span><\/p>\nThe same problem nullified the claims of the various groups in his day \u2014 the \u201cAssassins\u201d were among them \u2014 who said that they had an infallible religious leader and that one had only to follow him in order to be led, infallibly, to absolute truth. How, al-Ghazali asked, could a seeker after certainty know for sure which of the many \u201cinfallible\u201d leaders was the real thing? (They all disagreed among themselves.) And if the initial decision was doubtful, nothing depending on it thereafter could be certain.<\/span><\/p>\nThe philosophers of al-Ghazali\u2019s day, by contrast, claimed that their arguments were so airtight that anyone who really understood them could not doubt that their conclusions were true, just as anyone who understands geometry knows by definition that a circle has 360 degrees and a triangle 180. So al-Ghazali studied them, intensely. This resulted in a book summarizing their ideas titled \u201cThe Aims of the Philosophers\u201d \u2014 which, translated into Latin, ironically led Europeans to regard \u201cAlgazel\u201d himself as a philosopher. But once again, he was not convinced, and his great book \u201cThe Incoherence of the Philosophers\u201d explains in detail, using their own logic and methods, why the philosophers too could not deliver the kind of certainty that they promised.<\/span><\/p>\nFinally, he turned to the mystics of Islam, the Sufis. Here al-Ghazali found peace of mind. Through his own mystical experience \u2014 by personal revelation, one might say \u2014 he came to know that revelation was possible, that divine knowledge could be had and that life was meaningful. Such personal experience was, he said, like the sense of taste. A person knows what it is, and that he or she has experienced it, but the experience remains individual, personal and subjective. It cannot really be communicated to others. The believer can point in the correct direction, can explain how he or she came to faith, but, ultimately, seekers of truth and religious certainty must find it for themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 Bill Hamblin and I published the following article in the Deseret News back on 19 October 2013: \u00a0 In late 1997, Brigham Young University Press published a new translation (with the original Arabic text on the facing page) of a volume by the 11th-12th century Islamic thinker al-Ghazali. Titled \u201cThe Incoherence of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3823,66,2013,419,1776,1782,1779],"class_list":["post-71215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-al-ghazali","tag-islam","tag-islamic-mysticism","tag-islamic-philosophy","tag-islamic-translation-series","tag-meti","tag-middle-eastern-texts-initiative"],"yoast_head":"\n
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