al-Ghazaalii Abu Hamid (1058–1111). Islamic philosopher, theologian, jurist, and mystic. He was born in Khurasan and educated in Nishapur, then an intellectual center of eastern Islam. He was appointed the head of a seminary, the newly founded Nizamiyah of Baghdad, in which he taught law and theology with great success. Yet his exposure to logic and philosophy led him to seek a certainty in knowledge beyond that assumed by his profession. At first he attempted to address his problem academically, but after five years in Baghdad he resigned, left his family, and embarked on the mystic’s solitary quest for al-Haqq (Arabic for ‘the truth’, ‘the True One’). As a Sufi he wandered for ten years through many of Islam’s major cities and centers of learning, finally returning to Nishapur and to teaching theology before his death.
Al-Ghazali’s literary and intellectual legacy is particularly rich and multifaceted. In the catholicity of his work and the esteem in which he is held within Islam he may be compared to Aquinas and Maimonides in the Christian and Jewish traditions respectively. His Revivification of the Religious Sciences is considered to this day a major theological compendium. His mystical treatises also have retained their popularity, as has his much celebrated autobiography, The Deliverance from Error. This book chronicles his lifelong quest for truth and certainty, and his disappointment with the premises of dogmatic theology, both orthodox Sunni and heterodox Shiite thought, as well as with the teachings of the philosophers. The light of truth came to him, he believed, only through divine grace; he considered his senses and reasoning powers all susceptible to error. It was this pervasive sense of skepticism that led him, while still in Baghdad, to investigate philosophy’s claims to knowledge. He first composed a summa of philosophical teachings, based primarily on the views of Avicenna, and called it The Intentions of the Philosophers. He later published a detailed and penetrating critique of these views, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Averroes arose later in Muslim Spain to defend philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, calling his book The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes’ work was more appreciated in the West, however, which also preferred al-Ghazali’s Intentions to his Incoherence. The former, shorn of its polemical purpose and thus appearing as a philosophical summa, was translated by Dominicus Gundissalinus as Logica et Philosophia Algazelis, giving al-Ghazali a reputation in the West as at least a sometime advocate of philosophy. His attack upon the physics and metaphysics of his day, which was an amalgam of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic doctrines, was firmly rooted in Aristotelian logic, and anticipates Hume in understanding the non-necessary nature of causal relationships. For al-Ghazali, the world as a whole proceeds not by any eternal or logical necessity, but by the will of God. That will is indefensible on philosophical grounds, he believed, as is the philosophers’ notion of divine omniscience. Their god cannot on their terms be related to the world, and is ultimately redundant logically. What is regarded as miraculous becomes possible, once nature is understood to have no autonomy or necessary entailments. See also ARABIC PHILOSOPHY , SUFIS. A.L.I.