Search Results

Who can know? Who can merely believe on faith? Who should be kept in the dark entirely? This chapter considers various episodes from the history of philosophy—Locke, Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides, al-Ghazali—where one or another such division of epistemic labour has been affirmed. It ends by considering the case that can be made for keeping secret some philosophical doctrines.

Prior to Avicenna, philosophy in Arabic-speaking lands was identified with a Neoplatonized Aristotelianism; however, after him it was Avicenna’s philosophical vision that came to dominate, which itself incorporated the best of ancient Greek science and philosophy with the Islamic religion, law, and theology. Even among later Jewish and Christian philosophers, Avicenna was to have a significant influence. This chapter, thus, considers some of the more notable instances of Avicenna’s influence both on Judeo-Islamic philosophical theology and Christian scholasticism. The chapter gestures at Avicenna’s influence on such luminaries within the intellectual circles of Muslims and Jews as the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazālī, as-Suhrawardī, the founder of the Illuminationist school, and the renowned Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, while Christian philosophers in the Latin West inspired by Avicenna include Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus.

This chapter explores how Voluntarist jurists, who rejected Hard Natural Law, nonetheless developed their own natural law theory by fusing fact and value, but nonetheless upheld their voluntarist commitment to divine omnipotence. Soft Natural Law jurists relied on a theology of God's grace (tafaddul, fadl), and the authority of source-texts to fuse fact and value in nature, but contingently so. By fusing fact and value on the basis of divine grace (fadl), Soft Natural Law jurists allowed for the possibility that God may change His mind. Divine grace in Soft Natural Law permits the fusion of fact and value in nature, while at the same time rendering nature contingent in a way that Hard Natural Law theorists did not allow. The chapter provides an overview of different jurists' Soft Natural Law theories, illustrating both the core concepts of Soft Natural Law, as well as the different approaches to this type of natural law theory.

Earlier Western researchers have often assumed that the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy ended with Averroes at the turn to the 13th century and that al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy in his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa) was responsible for its rapid decline. In reality, however, al-Ghazali did not destroy the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy in Islam, rather he integrated it into the Muslim theological discourse and was thus an active part of the “naturalization” of the Greek science in Islam.

Reviewing the early sources on al-Ghazali’s life and comparing them with information that he himself gives in his Persian letters leads to the conclusion that he was born around 1056, roughly two years than usually assumed. His family was more prominent among the scholars of Iran than the Muslim historians like to admit. An early contact with his later mentor Nizam al-Mulk is likely. Al-Ghazali’s so-called “crisis” in 1095, when he left Baghdad, was the result of a log-lasting development and was triggered by his changed attitude towards the Seljuq state authorities. His subsequent “seclusion” was merely a deliberate absence from schools (madrasas) that were supported with state funds. He continued to teach, however, at small private madrasas and at no point did al-Ghazali seclude himself from his students and followers.

Al-Ghazali was the most influential writer about religious and philosophical subject during the 12th century in Islam. Every author of this period had to address his work, and in the most cases that happened quite prominently. This chapter explains the close connections of six important thinkers of the early 12th century to al-Ghazali. Abu Bakr ibn al-‘Arabi was his most important student who left us valuable descriptions about his teaching activity. Others, like Ibn Tumart and ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani never met al-Ghazali, but were heavily influenced by his teachings and made these popular in the Muslim west or among the Sufis of Iran. Finally, this chapters studies the lasting influence of al-Ghazali teachings in the substantive rulings of Islamic law (furu’) where the active teachings tradition in Nishapur moved to Damascus during the 13th century.

A number of philosophers, from the medieval period on (some of whom were occasionalists), have argued that a central feature of causal relations is a necessary connection between cause and effect. But they have also concluded that no such necessary connections are ever to be found among things or events in nature. This chapter examines this argument in its epistemological and ontological versions in al-Ghazali, Nicolas of Autrecourt, Malebranche, and Hume.

This chapter examines the views of Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī, a Sunnī Muslim scholar, mystic, jurist and theologian of the medieval world, about eating and hospitality. It begins with an overview of the concepts of disciplining the soul according to Ghazālī before offering a close reading of Ghazālī's text, Manners relating to Eating (Kitāb ādāb al-akl). It then analyzes Ghazālī's reflections on the virtues of hunger and fasting as well as frugality, humility, and patience. It also considers fasting, prayer, and almsgiving as virtues of abstention and generosity in both Christianity and Islam.

This chapter begins by noting that teaching “Islamic Mysticism” is problematic on several fronts. Any pedagogical strategy would do well to begin with identifying how the term mysticism can be applied to Islam. This being thoroughly vetted, the course focuses primarily on Sufism—which is a vast, broad system that has come to permeate Islam over the past 1000 years, and yet remains distinct from it, often being rejected as being “non-Muslim.” In addressing how to speak of Sufism, one must include not only an overview of its central historical developments, holy figures, and practices (e.g., the creative images and metaphors of al-Ghazali, the immortal poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the mystical visions of Ibn al-`Arabi), but also a discussion of controversial debates (e.g., are the methods used by Sufi holy figures truly Islamic? Do the creative and sometimes risqué interpretations of the holy texts that they preach go beyond the boundaries of strict monotheism?). Additionally, consideration will be given to how Sufism has provided the means for mass conversions to Islam and provided a creative ground for Islamic art and culture. Sample syllabus included.

This chapter attempts to place al-Ghazālī's political thought in the context of the Seljuq sultanate and the late Abbasid caliphate, based on the two premises: that al-Ghazālī's political thought is as important as his theological thought; and that it is understandable only in the light of the political developments of his time. The chapter begins by formulating an answer to the issue of whether the Seljuqs revitalised Islam. It is argued that the Seljuqs somehow brought a measure of order to the chaotic Muslim world; however, in doing so, they sacrificed the prestige and the role of the caliphate. It has been debated whether the Seljuqs were the defenders or the enemies of the caliphate. In a sense, they defended the caliphate as they have allowed it to endure for a few centuries but from another point of view, they were enemies of the caliphate as they imposed a secular image of power against the religious legitimisation of the caliphal power. In other words, while the Seljuqs protected the caliphate institution from enemies and adversaries, they however made it evident that the management of power in Islam was no longer a question of the Islamic state but rather of an Islamic mode of the state. These contentions are examined closely in this chapter.

Joshua Ralston frankly acknowledges Barth’s dismissive comments about Islam and the possibility of Muslim-Christian dialogue. Despite these comments, Ralston seeks to engage Barth as a conversation partner in comparative theological work by placing his dialectical understanding of revelation as the veiling and unveiling of God in conversation with Ash’arite Sunni thinking about God and revelation, specifically Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Al-Maqsad al-Asna (The 99 Beautiful Names of God). Both theologians affirm the particularity of revelation that comes only from God, and both reject the possibilities of any analogy of being (analogia entis). For both, to speak rightly about God is emphatically to speak “after revelation”—so analogy and reason may be used, but only in light of what God has first revealed (in Jesus Christ or in the Qur’an).

Burrell's life is interwoven with the University of Notre Dame, the Congregation of the Holy Cross and experience of teaching in America, Bangladesh, Israel and Uganda. Under the guidance of Lonergan, a deep relationship to the philosophical-theological approach of Aquinas acted as a preparation for the encounter with Maimonides and al-Ghazali. The importance of Jewish-Christian-Muslim engagement is exemplified by the Centre at Tantur and later by devotion to comparative theology as a vehicle for sharpening Christian theological understanding. This is drawn out by sections devoted to aspects of the theology of Trinity, Christology and Original Sin. The chapter ends with a call for intellectual humility as an essential component of the life of theology, dialogue and witness.

This chapter examines Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī's dialectic between active life and contemplation and how it relates to Moses Maimonides's vision. At the height of his theological career, al-Ghazālī, a Muslim religious judge and teacher, was beset by a crisis that caused him to leave his position and retire into contemplation. Ghazālī reveals that it was God who guided him to withdraw into seclusion and then return to teaching. What he discovered, he writes, was the true purpose and end of religious life: direct experience of the Divine. His experience speaks to the power of knowledge gained in contemplation to transform action in the world.

Joshua Ralston observes that the Christian tendency to place law in an oppositional relationship to love, grace, and/or the gospel has had unfortunate byproducts. It denigrates Judaism and Islam and misconstrues their conceptions of the Compassionate One who gives Torah and/or shari‘a for the sake of human flourishing. Thinking beyond such divisions, this essay explores points of convergence and divergence in the thinking of the Protestant reformer John Calvin and the Islamic jurist, mystic, and reformer al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali’s understanding of shari‘a as a pathway to the common good that is willed by the Compassionate and Merciful One resonates with Calvin’s third use of the law. Together, these revise the adversarial renderings of law in Calvin’s first and second uses. Christian theology might therefore embrace an understanding of gospel and law—or, better, the way or shari’a of God—that focuses on the path to flourishing.