Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali, known in the Latin world as Algazel, was a Persian Sunni theologian, jurist, philosopher and mystic. He was born around 1056 or 1057 in Tus, in present-day Iran, and died there in 1111. He lived under the Seljuk Empire, at a time when Muslim thinkers were trying to reconcile inherited Greek philosophy with the authority of revelation. He matters because he shaped the debate between philosophy, theology and mysticism in Islam, and because his arguments on causality and the origin of the world later reached medieval Christian scholars.

He was trained in Tus, Gorgan and Nishapur, in the Quran, prophetic traditions, Islamic law and auxiliary disciplines such as grammar. His teachers included Abu Ali Farmadi, a Naqshbandi Sufi, and al-Juwayni, the leading theologian of Nishapur. After al-Juwayni died around 1085, al-Ghazali entered the service of Nizam al-Mulk, the vizier of the Seljuk sultan. In 1091 this patron appointed him professor at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the most prestigious academic post in the Muslim world of his time. From there he taught law, refuted heresies and answered questions from across the community.

In 1095 he went through a deep personal crisis. He gave up his chair and left his family, distributed his wealth and became a wandering ascetic. His journey took him to Damascus, where according to tradition he worked as a sweeper at the mosque and lived in its minaret, and then to Jerusalem, Hebron, Medina and Mecca. During these years he wrote much of his best-known work, including The Revival of the Religious Sciences, which aimed to restore vitality to a spiritual tradition he considered neglected. Around 1106 he returned to Nishapur and taught again at the Nizamiyya. He died in Tus in 1111 and was buried near his home.

His output is vast, with estimates ranging from around seventy to over a hundred and thirty titles. The most important is The Incoherence of the Philosophers, directed against Avicenna and al-Farabi. He used the same logical methods as the philosophers to expose contradictions in positions he considered incompatible with faith: the eternity of the world, the denial of resurrection, and the claim that God knows only universals. His critique of causation is famous. He observed that cotton burns when it touches fire, but that experience shows only succession, not necessary connection, so God is the ultimate cause of everything. For him reason had limits before the divine, and true knowledge was also reached through mystical experience.

His influence was twofold. He helped bring Sufism into the mainstream of Sunni orthodoxy and gave religious life a more inward dimension. His attack on philosophy is also cited by many historians as one cause of its decline in the Sunni world, though this view is debated. Nearly a century later, Averroes replied with The Incoherence of the Incoherence. In the Islamic world he is often compared with Augustine of Hippo, since he too wrote a spiritual autobiography, The Deliverer from Error.