Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Philosophical
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41 In his Book of the Forty , al-Ghaza¯lı¯ adds that God’s decree ( qad.a¯ 7) is both the same as His eternal will and the same as His providence for His creation, which is expressed through the order that He creates. 42
not delve as deeply into the nature of human actions as Revival does. Yet al- Ghaza¯lı¯ also makes clear here that God creates everything in this world, in- cluding human actions. He creates the action as well as the place (or substrate,
ditions for the action’s reception and whatever else contributes to it. 43 God re- quires humans to “make themselves open” to the outfl ow of God’s mercy upon them, to the creation of benefi cial knowledge in them that will lead to praise- worthy actions. 44
In The Highest Goal, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ shows the same ambivalence as in Revival with regard to the necessity of the system God creates. God cannot create any- thing whose conditions for its existence are not fulfi lled. 45 If anything were to be changed in God’s order, the order itself would become void. 46 If the harmful crea- tions in the world were to be removed, then the good that they produce would be done away with and harm far worse than what currently exists would then come about. 47
¯d ) requires the “perfect achievement of the utmost good whose existence is possible.” 48 Yet here in the Highest Goal , as in many of his other writings, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ distinguishes God’s knowledge of how the optimal creation is achieved from God’s will to create the optimal. God’s actions are not random or coincidental but refl ect both his wisdom and his deliberation. 49
The Niche of Lights : The Philosophers’ God as the First Created Being The Niche of Lights ( Mishka¯t al-anwa¯r ) is a work from the same period as The
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¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y we cannot say precisely when. Because it is one of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s most mystical works, earlier chronologies of his output have dated the Niche of Lights to the end of his career. It was assumed that during his life, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ developed a progressively stronger inclination toward Sufi sm, with his most mystical works being his last. 50 Such a supposition, however, is unwarranted, and the Niche of Lights could have been composed at any time after 490/1097. We do know that it was composed after The Highest Goal . 51
not attempt to give full justice to its complexity. Rather, I will focus on a passage at the very end of the book, known as the Veil Section. Soon after the Niche of Light fi rst appeared in print in 1322/1904–5, this section, which is the last of three in that book, inspired suffi cient controversy among Western interpret- ers to the point that they disputed its authenticity. 52 This skeptical position, however, was based on an incomplete view of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s theology, and today there can be no doubt that all parts of the text of the Niche of Lights , as we have it today, are authentically al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s. 53
The Veil Section at the end of the Niche of Lights is not immediately related to the two earlier parts of the book and can be viewed on its own, to a certain de- gree. Averroes regarded it as the clearest evidence that al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s cosmology continues the tradition of the Aristotelian fala¯sifa . 54 The passage is a commen- tary on the noncanonical h.adı¯th : “God has seventy veils of light and darkness; were He to lift them, the august glories of His face would burn up everybody whose eyesight perceives Him.” 55 Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ aims to explain the veils of light and darkness that prevent people from grasping who or what God is. He clas- sifi es various religious groups according to the kind of veil that prevents them from understanding the true nature of God. In the fi rst division, he discusses those who are veiled by pure darkness ( mujarrad al-z.ulma ), and in the second, those who are veiled “by light along with darkness” ( bi-nu
Both groups are further subdivided. They contain a range of people, from plain unbelievers who hold nature ( t.ab ¶) rather than God to be the cause of the world, to heterodox Muslims who believe that God has a bodily form, to Mu ¶tazilites. In terms of cosmology, it is most interesting what al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says about the third division, those veiled by pure lights ( mah.d. al-anwa¯r ). 56 These are people who have gained some insight into God’s being. They are again divided into three subgroups that represent different levels of insight into the divine. As noted by Hermann Landolt, this division closely follows the narrative of Abra- ham’s discovery of and ascent to monotheism, as told in Sura 6, verses 75–79 of the Qur’an. 57 Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ introduces this story in an earlier passage from the Niche of Light . 58 According to the commentary literature on the Qur’an, the young Abraham grew up in a cave’s darkness in order to avoid the persecution of the Mesopotamian king Nimrod. 59 There, he starts searching for his Lord. When he leaves the cave at night, he fi rst sees a star going up in the east and concludes that this is his Lord. Once the star goes down in the west, however, he dismisses that notion. He next sees the moon rising in the east and assumes that this is his Lord. Again, when the moon sets in the west, he rejects this notion. The same happens with the sun: he sees it going up in the morning
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and thinks it his Lord until it sets in the evening. Finally, Abraham concludes that none of these celestial bodies is his Lord. Rather, the maker of them, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, is his real Lord, and only He should be worshiped. Abraham’s discovery of true monotheism by studying the heavens held great signifi cance for al-Ghaza¯lı¯, and he refers to it in other works. 60 In the third division of the Veil Section, he compares the three subgroups of scholars who are veiled by pure light to the three false levels of insight that Abraham had gained during his youth. Only a fourth group of people who are not veiled, “those who have arrived” ( al-wa¯s.ilu¯n ), represents the level of those who truly understand who the Lord is. Only this group has gained a proper understand- ing of God ( tawh.ı¯d ). Following the pattern of Abraham’s discovery, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ connects the false insight gained by each of the three groups with the celestial being that they assume is “the Lord.” These celestial beings come from the ten spheres and their governing intellects as they appear in al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s model of cosmology. The fourfold model in this section (three false groups plus one correct) combines philosophical cosmology with doxography or even heresiography. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says the lowest of these three subgroups are people who hold the opinion that the mover of the highest visible heaven, which is the next-to- outermost sphere, the sphere of the fi xed stars, is the creator of the world and the “Lord”: The fi rst among them is a group ( t.a¯ 7ifa ) that knows the meanings of the [divine] attributes properly (tah.qı¯qan ) and realizes that the nouns “speech,” “will,” “power,” and “knowledge,” and others cannot apply to God’s attributes the way that they apply to humans. In their teachings ( ta ¶rı¯f ) about God these people avoid using these attributes. When they teach about Him they draw upon the relationship [of God] to the created things just like Moses, peace be upon him, taught about God in his answer to Pharaoh’s question: “What is the ‘Lord of the Worlds’ ”? (Q 26:23). These people say the Lord, who is the Holy One and who is exalted over the meanings of these attributes, is the mover of the heavens and the one who governs ( dabbara ) them. 61
Compared to the groups mentioned earlier in the veil section—those veiled by some kind of darkness—this group has developed a proper understanding of the divine attributes and their transcendence. They understand that the Lord is exalted over all anthropomorphic attributes. When they use words such as “speech,” “will,” “power,” and “knowledge” to describe the Lord; they intend their meaning to transcend the ordinary sense of these words. This passage refers to the polemics between Ash ¶arites and Mu ¶tazilites. The latter are the highest group from the earlier part of those veiled by light and darkness and have just been discussed. Ash ¶arites criticized Mu ¶tazilites for assuming that the human understanding of justice, for instance, is the same as God’s under- standing. The group described in this passage has gained more insight than the Mu ¶tazilites and understands that all of God’s attributes are transcendent. 2 4 8 a l - gh a z a ¯ l 1
¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y When they are pressed by their opponents to explain who is the “Lord of the worlds,” they answer what Moses told Pharaoh, namely, that God is “the Lord of the heavens and the earth and all in between” (Qur’an 26:24) and that He is “your Lord and the Lord of your forefathers” (26:26). Pharao asked him about the essence ( ma¯hiyya ) of the divine, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ remarks earlier in the Niche of Lights , and Moses responded about the acts of God. 62 Likewise this group draws on God’s relation to the created things. Their understanding of divine tran- scendence leads them to the insight that the Lord is the one who moves and governs the heavens ( muharrik al-samawa¯t wa-mudabbiruhu ). The shortcomings of this position are still quite signifi cant, and they are highlighted in the discussion of the next higher group: The second group leaves these people behind insofar as it became clear to them that there is multiplicity ( kathra ) in the heavens, and that the mover of each single heaven is a different being that is called an angel, of whom there are many. Their (scil. the angels) relation to the divine lights ( al-anwa¯r al-ila¯hiyya ) is the relation of the stars. 63
sphere, whom they view as the governor ( mudabbir ) of the visible heavens and the cause for the existence of the heavenly bodies. They assume the existence of a single mover of one large heavenly sphere and are unaware of the exist- ence of multiple spheres, each having a mover who may also be called an angel ( malak ). The last sentence in this passage about the angels’ relation ( nisba ) to the divine lights has proved diffi cult to understand. The sentence is incomplete or at least elliptical, as it analogizes the angels’ relationship to the divine lights with the stars’ relationship to . . . nothing. A clue to understanding it can be found in al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Decisive Criterion ( Fays.al al-tafriqa ). There, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ re- ports that some Sufi s interpret the Qur’anic narrative of Abraham seeing the star, the moon, and the sun and identifying them as his Lord in terms of “lu- minous, angelic substances” ( jawa¯hir nu
“star, moon, and sun” refer. These substances are purely intellectual and not perceived through the senses, and they have advancing degrees of perfection ( daraja¯t mutafa¯wita f ı¯ l-kama¯l ). The passage ends with the sentence: “The rela- tion ( nisba ) of the amount of differences between one another is like the relation between the star, the moon, and the sun.” 64 Here in the Veil Section, the relation of the angels to the divine lights—most probably a reference to God—is the same as the star’s relation to the real Lord in Abraham’s vision. To complete the elliptical sentence, the words “to the true Lord,” or something similar, should be added to its end. Although this sentence remains enigmatic, it is clear that the fi rst level of insight into the divine is likened to the one Abraham reached when in Q 6:76, he erroneously discovers that the star ( al-kawkab ) is his Lord. In the Veil Section, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ adopts a distinctly philosophical perspective and looks at the world with eyes trained in philosophical cosmology. His fi rst subgroup is defi ned by its failure to understand the “multiplicity in the heav- ens.” We will see that the next group can be roughly identifi ed with Aristotle and c os m olo g y in wor k s w r i t t e n a f t er THE REVIVAL 2 4 9
his followers. It seems that when he envisions the fi rst group, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ uses the widespread typology of his time for understanding the history of philoso- phy, visualizing that group as typifying a pre-Aristotelian stage of philosophy. The supposed failure to recognize multiplicity in the heavens indicates a group that did not believe in the existence of more than one heavenly sphere. The Jewish Aristotelian philosopher Maimonides (d. 601/1204), who wrote three generations after al-Ghaza¯lı¯, ascribes this view to a group of ancient natural philosophers. In his Guide of the Perplexed ( Dala¯lat al-h.a¯ 7irı¯n ), he comments on the cosmology of the earliest generations of philosophers who lived at the times of the Sabians, the pagan polytheists with whom Abraham struggled: The utmost attained by the speculation of those who philosophized in those [early] times consisted in imagining that God was the spirit of the sphere ( ru
body of which the deity, may He be exalted, is its spirit. 65
istotle’s Physics . The reference is not entirely clear, since Ibn Ba¯jja neither dis- cusses the cosmology of the early philosophers nor mentions the Sabians. Ibn Ba¯jja, who wrote one generation after al-Ghaza¯lı¯ in the Muslim West, com- ments on Aristotle’s refutation of the teachings of earlier Greek philosophers, most notably Parmenides and Melissos. These early philosophers taught that all that exists is the manifestation of a single unchanging and unlimited princi- ple. There are no real processes in the world, Parmenides taught; rather, what really exists—meaning, what exists on the level of intellectual forms, unaf- fected by sense perception—is unchanging. Refl ecting on Aristotle’s writings on these teachings in Book 1 of his Physics , Ibn Ba¯jja says that Parmenides and Melissos saw no differences between different existing beings and treated them as if they were all of one kind. This was before the time when Aristotle alerted philosophers to the fundamental difference between beings. 66 But de- spite Aristotle’s attempts to defi ne physics as a science that analyzes processes, the teachings of these earliest philosophers prevailed. The mutakallimu ¯n , Ibn Ba¯jja complains, hold basically the same teachings. He implicitly refers to the occasionalism of the Ash ¶arites. The mutakallimu
ral dispositions ( al-t.iba¯ ¶) , Ibn Ba¯jja says, and claim that everything consists of atoms. The views of the mutakallimu
Ba¯jja; rather, they have developed these views unsystematically in their internal polemics. 67
Ibn Ba¯jja’s remarks on pre-Aristotelian science are part of a larger tradition of Physics commentary in Arabic. 68 In Avicenna’s discussion of the Physics in his Healing, he also connects the teachings of Parmenides and Melissos with the theory of atomism. 69 According to Avicenna’s analysis, pre-Aristotelian theories of physics and the opinions of the classical Ash ¶arite mutakallimu ¯n are errone- ous for the same reason: they disregard the substantial differences between beings that underlie Aristotelian physics, such as the difference between a sub- stance and an accident or the difference between composed beings in the sub- lunar sphere and uncomposed beings in the heavenly spheres. The atomism
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¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y of the Ash ¶arite mutakallimu ¯n —and by implication, their occasionalism—is just one expression of this disregard for the Aristotelian distinctions between beings. For an Ash ¶arite occasionalist, all beings consist of indistinguishable smaller parts that are equally close to God’s creative activity. The fi rst group’s failure to understand that there is multiplicity ( kathra ) in the heavens may have a more subtle meaning than just the acknowledgment of numerous spheres. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ may have adopted the Aristotelians’ position regarding early theories of cosmology. Pre-Aristotelian cosmology was marred both by the failure to understand that there are numerous spheres as well as by a lack of distinction between different types of beings. The cosmological beliefs of this fi rst group seem to identify them with this early group of phi- losophers. Additionally, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ may be writing on a naive understanding of occasionalism. Such an occasionalism would simply assume that all things are composed of atoms and accidents and would deny, for instance, the existence of self-subsisting intellects. The failure to understand the “multiplicity in the heavens”—a deliberately unspecifi c description—may be meant to refer both to an early philosophical approach by pre-Aristotelian thinkers and to a naive occasionalist understanding of the universe. The fact that the fi rst subgroup in this division has a proper understanding of God’s transcendence implies its identifi cation with Ash ¶arism. According to their own view, the Ash ¶arites were the only group of Muslim theologians to under- stand the transcendence of the divine attributes. In his works, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ tirelessly stressed the transcendence of the divine attributes. In the Arabic doxographic tradition, early philosophers also held the view that God is transcendent. The Arabic doxography of pseudo-Ammonius, which was available from the middle of the third/ninth century, reports that pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales and Pythagoras taught the transcendence of the divine attributes, attributes that neither the human intellect nor the soul is able to comprehend. 70 A generation after al-Ghaza¯lı¯, al-Shahrasta¯nı¯ repeats these reports in his Book of Religions and Creeds . 71 Since this fi rst group is characterized as understanding the transcend- ence of God’s attributes while misunderstanding the composition of the heavens and perhaps also of the world, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ may have had been referring either to the Ash ¶arites or to the pre-Aristotelian philosophers or perhaps even to both. Compared to this fi rst subgroup, the second subgroup of those veiled by pure light is described as possessing superior insight and believing that the next higher celestial being—the mover of the highest sphere—is their Lord. I have already quoted the passage detailing the group’s understanding that there are many heav- enly spheres and that each sphere has its own mover. The passage continues: Then it became evident to them that these heavens are inside another celestial sphere that moves all the others through its motion once during [every] day and night. They said the Lord is the mover of that celestial body which is furthest away and which envelops all celestial spheres since multiplicity is denied to Him. 72
In comparison with the fi rst group, this group has an adequate understanding of astronomy and the celestial spheres. Here al-Ghaza¯lı¯ describes the introduc- c os m olo g y in wor k s w r i t t e n a f t er THE REVIVAL 2 5 1
tion of the primum mobile , the outermost starless sphere, as fi rst theorized by Ptolemy. 73 This group’s Lord is the mover of the primum mobile . Given that there are no physical movements above this sphere, this Lord himself is the Download 4.03 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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