Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Philosophical
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al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s harsh condemnation. In my book Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam , I present the development that led to al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s verdict on philosophy, and I document some of the reactions from the side of the philosophers. In recent years, I have returned to the problem of cosmology, aiming to re- solve the academic impasse between the different interpretations put forward by Frank and Marmura. Although I was fi rst drawn to this subject through Frank’s work, the reader will note that my current conclusions about al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s cos- mology differ widely from Frank’s conclusions. The path my results have taken from those of Frank and Marmura seems to me a fi tting example of what G. W. Hegel called a dialectical progression. While Frank’s and Marmura’s works are the thesis and the antithesis (or the other way round), this book wishes to be considered a synthesis. In truly Hegelian fashion, it does not aim to reject any of their work or make it obsolete. Rather, its aim is the Aufhebung of these ear- lier contributions in all meanings of that German word: a synthesis that picks up the earlier theses, elevates them, dissolves their confl ict, and leads to a new resolution and progress. In this book, I try to offer a consistent interpretation of the different motifs in al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s thinking about how God creates the world and how He governs over it. Of course, this interpretation is not the only possible way to read al- Ghaza¯lı¯, as we saw from Marmura and Frank. Yet I believe that these other readings do not give appropriate attention to all the motifs that al-Ghaza¯lı¯ con- sidered important. Frank, for instance, accuses al-Ghaza¯lı¯ of being deceptive when he writes that God is a free agent who has a free choice in His actions. Marmura neglects to take full account of the handful of passages in which al- Ghaza¯lı¯ writes that God’s actions are necessary. I present a reading that tries to reconcile these two apparently contradictory statements—and some other statements in al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s works that seem equally irreconcilable at fi rst. Perched between the Ash ¶arite and the Avicennan poles, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ devel- ops his own cosmology. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ was a very systematic thinker, and given that the Avicennan system is much more systematic than the Ash ¶arite one, it is unsurprising that his synthesis owes much more to Avicenna than to al- Ash ¶arı¯. Through his analysis, he fi nds a very elegant path toward adopting 1 2 a l - gh a z a ¯ l 1
¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y Avicenna’s determinist cosmology while remaining a Muslim theologian who wishes to preserve God’s free choice over His actions. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s solution as to how a theologian might adopt a deterministic cosmology is just as relevant today as it was at the turn of the sixth/twelfth century. Modern cosmology has become part of physics, yet contemporary cosmological systems leave room for the belief that given the existing laws of nature and an existing confi gura- tion of energy at the starting point of this universe—usually referred to as the Big Bang—all later developments of subatomic particles, atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, life on some planets, humanity, and even me, is, in fact, a necessary effect of the fi rst moment and could not have been altered once the process started 14 billion years ago. 32 As a theologian, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ would have accepted this determinist statement. In fact, his view of the universe was quite similar, though defi ned by the parameters of Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmos in which the beginning of the world is marked not by the Big Bang but by the primum mobile ( falak al-afl a¯k ), the outermost, starless sphere and the intellect that governs it. 33
tained that God acts freely and that He is the only “maker” or effi cient cause in the whole universe. Every event, even the beating of a gnat’s wing, is willed and created by Him. This book is divided into two main parts. The fi rst part is a close study of the sources on al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s life, and the second offers an analysis of his cosmol- ogy. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s cosmology introduces us to a wider range of philosophical and theological subjects. Though the Ash ¶arite and the Avicennan positions on cosmology have mutually exclusive views of how God relates to His crea- tion, they share many similarities as to the consequences these two cosmolo- gies have on God’s creatures. It is this similarity that al-Ghaza¯lı¯ exploits when he develops something like a synthetic position between these two poles. His views on the confl ict between human free will and divine predestination, on the generation of human acts, on prophecy, on the parallels between the human microcosm and the macrocosm of the universe, and on the question of whether God could have created a better world than this are all connected to the position he takes on cosmology. All these subjects will be discussed in the second part of this book. The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapters one and two belong to the fi rst part of the book, covering al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s life and his most important students and early followers. The second part starts with the third chapter. Rela- tively short, the third and fourth chapters lay the groundwork for a thorough analysis of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s treatment of causality by explaining his position on the role of falsafa in Islam as well as his “Rule of Interpretation” ( qa¯nu¯n al-ta 7wı¯l ), the epistemological principle that al-Ghaza¯lı¯ applies to cases in which the re- sults of a demonstrative argument clash with the literal wording of revelation. In these two chapters I summarize results of my previous studies, in particular, my German book Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam . The following chapters are again original, proceeding almost chronologically through the different texts that al-Ghaza¯lı¯ wrote on matters relating to cosmology. After explaining the rel-
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evance of cosmology in Muslim theology and the theological problems related to it in the fi fth chapter, I discuss al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Incoherence of the Philosophers in the sixth chapter. This is his fi rst and most comprehensive treatment of the issue. Chapter seven discusses works stemming from the Incoherence that respond to questions left open in al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s very programmatic critique of philosophy. These are mostly his Standard of Knowledge ( Mi ¶ya¯r al- ¶ilm ) and his Touchstone of Reasoning ( Mi.hakk al-naz.ar ). Chapter eight takes a close look at the Revival of the Religious Sciences ( I.hya¯ 7 ¶ulu¯m al-dı¯n ), in which the most explicit statements on cosmology and the generation of human acts can be found in its thirty-fi fth book, “Belief in God’s Unity and Trust in God” ( Kita¯b al-Taw .hı¯d wa-l-tawakkul ). The ninth chapter deals with works that were published after the Revival . Here I focus on three subjects: Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s famous comparison between God’s universe and a water clock, the equally famous “Veil-Section” in The Niche of Lights , and his last and probably most explicit statement about how God creates and how He acts upon His creation in Restraining the Ordinary Peo-
only days before he died. Initially, when I started writing this book, I planned to include an inventory of those texts of al-Ghaza¯lı¯ that are relevant to his theology. The fi le of that in- ventory kept expanding; and when I realized that any satisfactory treatment of such a list would make up more than half of this book, I postponed its publica- tion and decided not to load this work with a heavily footnoted bibliographical study requiring detailed analysis of numerous manuscripts. I also realized that it would have taken much more time and effort than I fi rst thought. Maurice Bouyges, who undertook a pioneering work on the cataloging and dating of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s writings during the 1920s, did not think that he had ever fi nished the task, and his bibliographic study was published not until after his death in the 1950s. Since Bouyges’s study, numerous new texts and manuscripts have become available that support many of his fi ndings while challenging others. There was also a signifi cant change of opinion among scholars of al-Ghaza¯lı¯ about the range of teachings his texts support. The canon of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s works is a particularly contested subject. Although there is an acknowledged core of writings unequivocally ascribed to him, numerous texts attributed to him in manuscripts are not fully accepted as genuine. Carl Brockelmann, Maurice Bouyges, ¶Abd al-Ra .hma¯n Badawı¯, and other researchers formed their opinions about the Ghazalian corpus largely on the basis of the work undertaken by the Muslim bibliographer H . a¯jjı¯ Khalı¯fa (d. 1067/1657) and by other, earlier bibli- ographers such as Ta¯j al-Dı¯n al-Subkı¯ (d. 771/1370) or al-Wa¯si.tı¯ (d. 776/1374). Since the 1950s, new methods of determining which of the works attributed to all-Ghaza¯lı¯ were actually composed by him have been suggested, but most have not been very successful. I believe this particular fi eld of study has always suffered from a certain lack of understanding of what al-Ghaza¯lı¯ truly teaches in his core texts. The most reli- able method of determining the authenticity of works that are not unanimously accepted as being those of al-Ghaza¯lı¯ is to develop a detailed understanding of the teachings in the core group and use this understanding as a yardstick to measure 1 4 a l - gh a z a ¯ l 1
¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y the ambiguous works. Given that most of the works of doubtful authenticity such as The Epistle on Intimate Knowledge ( Risa¯la Fı¯ l- ¶ilm al-ladunı¯ ), The Book to Be
or Breathing of the Spirit and the Shaping ( Nafkh al-ru ¯ .h wa-l-taswiya )—a work also known as the Small Book to Be Withheld ( al-Mad.nu¯n al-s.aghı¯r )—can be described as Avicennan texts, 34 it is important to understand the distinctive markers of al- Ghaza¯lı¯’s theology and philosophy and how they differ from those of Avicenna. This study argues that al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s theology and philosophy are a particular kind of Avicennism. Only a thorough understanding of its precise kind of Avicennism will allow us to determine the authenticity of the disputed works. In order to start this fi rst step and establish the teachings from the core group of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s books, I have limited this study to those of his works unanimously regarded as genuine by the aforementioned bibliographical au- thorities. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ refers to all of these works in his other writings, thus creating a network of authentic texts. 35 A further methodological question is how to obtain and verify reliable textual versions of these core works, a diffi cult task given that only one of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s books, The Incoherence of the Philosophers , is critically edited, while a number of others, such as The Balanced Book on What-to-Believe , The Highest Goal ( al-Maqs.ad al-asna¯ ), The Choice Essentials ( al-Mustas.fa¯ ), and The Deliverer from Error ( al-Munqidh min al-d.a¯la¯l ) are available in reliable “semi-critical” editions that use many man- uscripts but neglect to compare their importance relative to one another. 36
compare the text they print to more than just one manuscript source and to base it on a random sample of three or more manuscripts or earlier prints. In many cases, however, we simply have no idea how the text that we fi nd in print has been established. We must trust the claims of the editors that they faithfully present one or more manuscripts. These claims are sometimes quite portentous, as in a 1910 print in which the meritorious editor asserts “that the manuscript on which this printing is based is among the most im- portant ones, written by the hand of one of the great Muslim scholars during the seventh Islamic century (13th century CE).” 37
Unfortunately, many of the prints of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s works are not fully reli- able when it comes to textual details. As an example, the most widely used edi- tion of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Clandestine
Azhar scholar Sulayma¯n Dunya¯ of 1961. That edition, however, is not based on an independent study of manuscript evidence but takes its text from an earlier edition of 1901 that is a collation of three manuscripts from Egypt and Damas- cus. This amalgamation can lead to ambiguities, as when Dunya¯ reproduces a passage that says the unbelief ( kufr ) of a Muslim scholar is established when he violates one of the “foundations of the rules” ( us.u¯l al-qawa¯ ¶id ). This makes little sense, however, and another version of the text, which has “foundations of what-to-believe” ( us.u¯l al- ¶aqa¯ 7id ) in this passage, seems to express much better what al-Ghaza¯lı¯ may have had in mind. 38 Of course, without a critical edition that establishes a stemma codicum , one can only conjecture. But given that for in t roduc t ion 1 5
al-Ghaza¯lı¯, the unbelief of a Muslim implies the death penalty, fi nding out what exactly constitutes unbelief is no trivial matter. Among the available editions, the latter reading of the text is established only by Ma.hmu¯d Bı¯ju¯, who stud- ied two manuscripts of the .Za¯hiriyya Collection in Damascus and published his edition in 1993 in his own small publishing house in Damascus’ H . albu
¯nı¯ quarter. 39 In this case, the less widespread edition seems to offer a better text and should be preferred. Realizing that few of my readers currently have access to the better edition, I refer in the footnotes to both Dunya¯’s and Bı¯ju ¯’s texts and explain textual differences where they occur. The same applies to other works by al-Ghaza¯lı¯ such as his Choice Essentials of the Methods of Jurisprudence ( al-Mustas. fa¯ min ¶ilm al-us.u¯l ) in which case a recent edition byH.amza H.a¯fi z. is established on the basis of two manuscripts from Istanbul and an early print. This book was published in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), and because many readers may not have access to it, I also provide page references to the early print, which is more widely available and which, in principle, has become superfl uous by the new edition. Where no critical or semi-critical edition exists and where no thorough study of manuscripts has been undertaken, I prefer to use editions older than the ones that have appeared in recent years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s smaller texts were edited for the fi rst time, mostly in Cairo. The printers and scholars who prepared these editions often com- pared several manuscripts in order to establish the texts. 40 In the great majority of cases, later editions simply reprint these early editions and rely entirely on the manuscript studies undertaken by a group of early editors. Failing to make any improvements, some newer editions add punctuation, commas, paragraph breaks, and sometimes even textual emendations that distort the original. Fi- nally, the new typesetting often introduces new mistakes. In addition to these scholarly concerns, there are two practical reasons why I chose to work with editions that are often almost a century old. First, these editions are no longer protected by copyright, which facilitates their future availability through new media such as the Internet. Second, it can be hoped that the sheer antiquarian value of these prints will guarantee their preservation for future generations, something less defi nite with more recent printings. Wherever possible, I com- pare the printed text to a manuscript that has not been used in the process of establishing the print. My preference for older prints implies that when the only edition listed in the bibliography of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s works at the end of this book is a more recent one, the reader can assume that it has been established on the basis of an original study of manuscripts. Although I try to work with a text directly established from manuscripts, that principle could not be applied in the case of The Revival of the Religious Sci- ences. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s major work on ethics and human behavior was one of the fi rst books of classical Arabic literature printed at the Egyptian viceroy’s press in Bu ¯la¯q. Since 1269/1853, it has been continuously in print. 41 The textual his- tory of the Revival is almost completely unknown and urgently needs to be researched. In 1912, Hans Bauer remarked that all available prints of the work seem to generate from the Egyptian editio princeps . 42 Its supervising editor, 1 6 a l - gh a z a ¯ l 1
¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y Mu .hammad ibn ¶Abd al-Ra.hma¯n Qu.t.ta al- ¶Adawı¯ (d. 1281/1864), asserts that the Bu ¯la¯q printers took the text “from the best testimonies at the Khedival library.” 43
Since Bauer made his remark, however, the text has developed its own variants. Modern prints show small but sometimes signifi cant variations from earlier prints. For instance, the word mu ¯jiduhu (“the one who brings it into being”) in one passage became mu ¯jibuhu (“the one who makes it necessary”), or ¶aql (“intellect, rationality”) in another became naql (“transmitted knowledge, rev- elation”)—a quite considerable change of meaning. 44 Bauer had already discov- ered that the text included in the matn , the cited text, of al-Mur tad.a¯ al-Zabı¯dı¯’s (d. 1205/1791) commentary to the Revival offers a textual testimony independ- ent of the other available prints. 45 Al-Murtad.a¯ al-Zabı¯dı¯ collated this text from a number of manuscripts, and he notes their variants. This edition appears more reliable than any of the other available prints of the Revival . 46 It has since been used in the translations of Hans Wehr, Nabih Amin Faris, Richard Gram- lich, and Timothy J. Winter and should be consulted whenever one attempts to establish the precise meaning of the Revival . In order to encourage further research on the Revival , I refer to the text in a way that allows the reader to locate the passage in more than just a single edi- tion. I expect that scholars will eventually adopt a future “standard” edition for ease of reference; in this book, I refer to two editions that are likely to achieve the status of such a standard. The fi rst is a fi ve-volume edition published in 1387/1967 by the H . alabı¯ Firm, the successor of Mus..taf a¯ al-Ba¯bı¯ al-H . alabı¯ in Cairo. In 1306/1888, three brothers of the al-Ba¯bı¯ al-H . alabı¯ family—Mus..tafa¯, Bakrı¯, and ¶¯Isa¯—started to offer four-volume prints of the Re vival under their Maymaniyya imprint. Their editions established the by-now canonical prac- tice of printing supplementary texts by al- ¶Ira¯qı¯ (d. 806/1404), al- ¶Aydaru ¯s (d. 1038/1628), Shiha¯b al-Dı¯n ¶Umar al-Suhrawardı¯ (d. 632/1234), and al- Ghaza¯lı¯’s own Dictation ( Imla¯ 7 ) alongside the Revival . 47 The scholar, editor, and printer Mus..tafa¯ al-Ba¯bı¯ al-H.alabı¯, who took over the business in 1919, pre- pared a great number of print runs of the text through the end of the 1930s. He thus responded to the new demand for Revival printings created by the educational activity of the Muslim Brotherhood. 48 These four-volume editions have a similar, but unfortunately not identical pagination. 49 Given this possi- bility for confusion, I opted for the 1967 edition of the H . alabı¯ Firm, available in many Western libraries. 50 The second edition I refer to is the sixteen-parts set—originally printed in four volumes—of the Committee for the Distribution of Islamic Culture ( Lajnat nashr al-thaqa¯fa al-Isla¯miyya ). It was published in 1356–57/1937–39. 51
In the translations from Arabic and Persian, square brackets indicate ad- ditions or explanations on my part, while texts in round brackets are clarifi ca- tions that are required in the English translation in order to avoid ambiguity. In the transliteration of Arabic, I apply the standard of The Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE . In the case of Turkish names and names from other non-Arabic and non-Persian languages, I use a less stringent system of transliteration that tries Download 4.03 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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