Ghazali

The Revival of Islam

Eric Ormsby

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742052
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This fascinating work profiles Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the foremost Islamic scholar and mystic of the medieval period. Attracting the patronage of the vizier Nizam al-Mulk early in his career, he was appointed head of the Nizamiyyah College at Baghdad, and attracted audiences from across the Islamic world, who sought his teachings on Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence. Eventually renouncing his position due to a spiritual crisis, he went into self-imposed exile, during which he wrote the Sufi masterpiece, "Revival of the Sciences of Religion". Concise and lucid, this is a perfect introduction to the great man's life and work.

THE RISE TO RENOWN

A CHILD OF KHORASAN

On November 18, 1933, the English traveller Robert Byron visited the shrine of Mashhad and the ruins of nearby Tus. In his classic work, The Road to Oxiana, he described the site:

Mounds and ridges betray the outlines of the old city. An antique bridge of eight arches spans the river. And a massive domed mausoleum, whose brick is the colour of dead rose-leaves, stands up against the blue mountains. No one knows whom this commemorated; though from its resemblance to the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar at Merv, it seems to have been built in the XIIth century. It alone survives of the splendours of Tus.

Flanked by mountain ranges to the north and the great desert to the south, Tus was a bustling and prestigious city until its destruction by the Mongols in 1220. Its most illustrious son was the poet Firdawsi, who was born in the nearby village of Razan and died there at an advanced age in 1025; his tomb has remained a site of veneration for almost a millennium. In the tenth century, Tus was the second most important town of Khorasan after Nishapur, and was famed for products such as stone jars made of serpentine, for gold, silver, copper and iron, and for semi-precious gemstones such as turquoise and malachite. The area had a lively export trade, particularly of such luxuries as truffles and “edible earth,” a strange greenish clay, used for desserts.

Tus was an amalgam of two towns, Nuqan and Tabaran, and benefited from its proximity to the great garden in the village of Sanabadh, where both the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the eighth Imam of the Twelver Shi’ah ‘Ali al-Rida lay entombed. (Shi‘ite pilgrims customarily kicked the Caliph’s tomb, while calling down blessings on the Imam’s.) Whatever lustre the ruins of Tus now possess comes from the magnificent shrine of the Imam at Mashhad, still the object of pilgrimage and fervent veneration.

Firdawsi had been dead for almost thirty years when, in 1058, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Ghazali, later to be crowned with the honorific “The Proof of Islam,” was born in a nearby village. His origins remain obscure. According to some accounts, he came from a family of poor but respectable gentry; according to others, he came from a line of scholars and jurists; according to yet another, his father was a rather austere Sufi. He had a younger brother, Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126), who became a celebrated preacher and an influential Sufi theorist in his own right. But we know almost nothing of his background.

Even his name is a puzzle. Should it be spelled “Ghazzali” or “Ghazali”? According to the biographer Ibn Khallikan, born a century later, the double z, reflecting the use of the people of Khwarizm and Jurjan, is analogous with such names as Qassari or ‘Attari, that is, a name drawn from a profession, such as “fuller” (qassar) or “perfumer” (‘attar); in this case, the name would derive from the profession of “spinner” (ghazzal), but it may come from the place-name Ghazala, a village near Tus (Ibn Khallikan, 1:82). The latter – and more likely – form is commonly accepted and I’ll use it here.

Ghazali was and remained a child of Khorasan, the north-eastern Iranian province of legendary troublemakers and mavericks; from here came the armies which overthrew the Umayyad Dynasty in the 740s and established the long-lived reign of the Abbasids, founders of the city of Baghdad in 762. When the Spanish philosopher Ibn Tufayl sought to express his scorn for Ghazali, he referred to him as “that fellow from Tus” and the phrase suggests a disdain that goes beyond the merely philosophical.

Tus, where Ghazali’s roots lay, was a savagely contested city, where dreadful massacres had taken place in 1034, some twenty years before his birth. In that year, Tus declared war on Nishapur, but was defeated. The governor of the neighboring province of Kirman, who intervened with his cavalry, had 20,000 citizens of Tus rounded up, whom he “crucified on trees and along the roads” (EI², 10:742). The region suffered other upheavals: Nishapur, where Ghazali would later study, experienced a severe earthquake in 1045 and in 1053, a few years before his birth, the city was sacked and virtually destroyed by marauding Turks. In 1038, the Seljuq Tughril Bey had appeared in Tus with his forces, prompting the Ghaznavid Sultan Mas’ud to mount “a fast female elephant and set out for Tus with a detachment of the army,” according to one chronicler (Nishapuri, 37).

The troubled region offered opportunities to the venturesome. This was not only because the Seljuq regime sought out promising young scholars to promote its doctrinal agenda – a program which benefited Ghazali at the outset of his career – but also because the area had long had a rich intellectual and spiritual history. It was especially propitious for mysticism; many of the saints and mystics whom Ghazali would later quote and hold up as models came from Khorasan, including such ecstatic Sufis as Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 877), whose wild sayings included the shocking “Glory be to me!” (a formulation normally reserved for God), and the popular and much-loved Abu Sa’id ibn abi’l-Khayr (d. 1049), who had once stayed in Tus. Khorasan “came to be known as the land whose product is saints” (Keeler, 107). In this context, Ghazali’s later embrace of Sufism suggests a return to his spiritual roots. And it was to Tus, as well as to Nishapur, that he would actually return, as to his homeland, in the committed Sufi phase of his later years.

Sufism certainly prospered in Khorasan before and after Ghazali but in other areas of endeavor there seems to have been a strong sense of spiritual stagnation, of decline both in piety and learning. A generation earlier, another native, the great Persian poet, traveller, and Fatimid agent Nasir-i Khosraw (1004–1089?) lamented its fallen state in one of his odes:

The land of Khorasan once was culture’s abode

But now has become a pit of sordid devils.

Balkh was wisdom’s own dwelling-place but now

That habitation has turned to waste-land and capsized grandeur.

How has Khorasan, once the dominion of Solomon,

Now become a kingdom of devils accursed?

Divan, 79

Nasir-i Khosraw, as an Isma‘ili, had doctrinal as well as political axes to grind – his “devils” are none other than the Seljuq Turks – and yet, it isn’t religious deviation that he laments but the decline in culture, learning, and “wisdom” (hikmat: another term for philosophy). Among the Seljuqs, the prevailing sentiment was that the region was in spiritual and cultural disarray. A firm desire to re-assert “orthodoxy” (in Sunni form), along with an energetic reforming impulse in areas such as education, characterized the dynasty from its beginnings. Ghazali shared this zeal. It echoes in his lifelong calls for revival – the very term emphasized in the title of his masterpiece – as well as in his stated ambition to become the “renewer of religion” for his own age.

THE STAGES OF HIS CAREER

Ghazali died in 1111, at the age of fifty-three or fifty-four. It has become customary to divide his life into four or five significant stages, with 1095 as a crucial demarcation (Bouyges, 6). In this year, as we know, he experienced the breakdown which changed his life utterly and led him to Sufism. (I describe this crisis in more detail in Chapter Five.) These stages are:

Early years (1058–1085): encompassing his childhood and early education, as well as his first writings on law; in these years he studied with various masters in Jurjan and Nishapur; the period ended with the death of Juwayni, his greatest teacher, in 1085.

The “public” decade (1085–1095) found him teaching at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad and enjoying the patronage of Nizam al-Mulk, which gave him standing at both the Caliph’s and the Sultan’s court; during these years he wrote his first mature works on law, philosophy and logic, polemic and dogmatics.

The crisis and withdrawal from public life (1095–1106): these are the years following his breakdown when he embraced Sufism and left Baghdad for years of seclusion and wandering, first in Damascus, then in Jerusalem; he performed the pilgrimage; in the first two years, he composed the Ihya’, his masterpiece, as well as several other works on mysticism in both Arabic and Persian, along with his “Book of Counsel for Kings” (in Persian).

His second “public” period (1106–1109) saw Ghazali teaching in Nishapur; he wrote his autobiography, the Munqidh min al-dalal, and his final great work on legal theory; he acted as spiritual advisor to aspiring Sufis.

In his final years (1109–1111) of renewed retreat and seclusion, he reportedly established a Sufi “convent” and wrote works on eschatology and theology, the latter completed just days before his death in December 1111.

In this book, I will follow these stages loosely. In this chapter, for example, I touch on certain significant aspects of his early training and experience; in later chapters I will return to what seem to me the biographical factors most pertinent to an understanding of his thought. There is a reason for this erratic approach: a division into neat stages offers a convenient approach to a complex life; nevertheless, it is one which Ghazali probably would have rejected. Seen from outside, his life has swerves and detours; seen from within, it follows a hidden trajectory, with seemingly inevitable momentum. Perhaps this is how it presented itself to the eye of inner recollection when he came to write his spiritual autobiography, some time between 1106 and 1109. Not a series of fits and starts but a course dictated by the search for certainty, which disclosed its deepest coherence only after that certainty had been found. What is striking about Ghazali is that while he saw his life as broken in two by his terrible crisis, in retrospect he discovered an inner logic, a compelling momentum, in the course of his career, when viewed with the “eyes of the heart.” Seen thus, the earlier stages, when he struggled blindly towards the truth, oddly prefigured and mirrored the later. To give one example: in his early scepticism Ghazali questioned the reliability of the senses, but in his later, altered perspective, the senses themselves, mysteriously transfigured, proved to be the touchstones of truth. Taste, the least communicable of the senses, offered the final certainty, serving as a metaphor for the ultimate mystical experience.

EARLY STUDIES: SUFI MASTERS AND THEOLOGIANS

Ghazali was orphaned early; however, his father left enough money for him to begin the study of law under the Imam and Sufi master Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Radhakani (or Radkani) in Tus while still a child. This scholar came from the village of Radkan, which lies “halfway between Khabushan and Tus” (LeStrange, 394). Radkan was also the birthplace of the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, later Ghazali’s patron. Such regional connections with the learned and the powerful among the “Tusian mafia” would remain a constant in Ghazali’s later career.

Somewhat later, Ghazali travelled to Jurjan to sit at the feet of the Imam Abu Nasr al-Isma‘ili. Around the same time he studied with the Sufi master Ahmad ‘Ali al-Farmadhi, another scholar from Tus, who reportedly had studied under Ghazali’s father. Farmadhi, once a pupil of Abu al-Qasim al-Qushayri, the renowned Ash‘arite theologian and Sufi master, was himself a quite eminent Sufi whose early influence on Ghazali seems to have been profound. He mentions him with great respect twice, once without directly naming him in his anti-Isma‘ili polemic, the Mustazhiri (Goldziher 1916, 30 and 108), and later explicitly, in his treatise on the divine names (Maqsad, 162). Even Nizam al-Mulk – no respecter of persons – honored Farmadhi. According to the chronicler Ibn al-Athir, whenever Qushayri or Juwayni came into Nizam al-Mulk’s presence, the vizier would rise to greet them, only to return quickly to his seat but:

when Abu Ali al-Farmadhi came in, he would rise to receive him, seat him where he himself had been, and take his seat before him. This was remarked on to him, and he said, “The first two and their like, when they come into my presence say to me, ‘You are such and such,’ and they praise me for what is not in me. Their words increase my self-satisfaction and pride. The latter shaykh tells me of my soul’s faults and how wicked I am. My spirit is thereby humbled and I recoil from much of what I am doing.”

Ibn al-Athir, 257

In his later years, Ghazali too would speak with frankness to figures of authority, inspired no doubt by the example of this master of his youth.

JUWAYNI

Ghazali’s first decisive opportunity occurred in 1077, when he was around nineteen, when he joined the circle of the illustrious theologian and jurist Abu al-Ma’ali al-Juwayni in Nishapur. Though Ghazali had been introduced to Sufi teaching at an early age, the influence of the formidable Juwayni, one of the greatest figures in the history of Islamic theology, proved more decisive in the short term, and it was as a jurist and theologian that Ghazali first came to prominence and won powerful patronage.

Juwayni was at the height of his influence during Ghazali’s student years. Though he had once taken refuge for four years in Mecca and Medina as a result of a factional dispute in which the anti-Ash‘arite Seljuq vizier Kunduri played a part, his fortunes changed radically after Nizam al-Mulk – the rival vizier who later contrived to have Kunduri executed – instated an Ash‘arite agenda and furthered the establishment of “colleges,” or madrasas, dedicated to Ash‘arite and Shafi‘ite principles. Juwayni, who had earned the honorific “Imam of the Two Sacred Shrines” (Mecca and Medina) during his exile, now basked in official favor. If his early biographers are to be believed, Ghazali soon became a star pupil. His quickness of mind dazzled his fellow students. Even Juwayni, not lavish with praise, called him “a sea to drown in,” a standard compliment with a bit of an edge: though his teacher bragged about Ghazali, he is said secretly to have resented him. In an interesting prefiguration of Ghazali’s own later distrust of theology, Juwayni, who died in 1085, is reported to have turned in his final years to “the religion of the old women,” simple unquestioning piety rather than the pyrotechnics of dialectic. This is probably apocryphal; it is a well-known topos. Shortly before his death, St. Thomas Aquinas supposedly experienced a vision which showed him that his theological labours amounted to nothing but “straw,” and in the Islamic world, the later Ash‘arite theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209) reportedly repented of his lifelong devotion to theology on his death-bed.

Juwayni was a more rigorous thinker than his pupil. His theological works, especially his monumental Irshad, are characterized by precise formulations and tightly-constructed arguments. Throughout his technical works on theology and law, Ghazali followed his example, even as he refined and elaborated his master’s methods, particularly by the introduction of forms of argument drawn from Aristotelian logic. In this respect, Ghazali’s treatises furthered the development of a new form of theology destined to become dominant in the Sunni world; the construction of systematic, all-encompassing compendia, similar to the summae of scholastic theologians in the medieval Christian tradition.

But Juwayni’s legacy to Ghazali was not only formal. Certain fundamental principles link them, however much, in his later years, the pupil diverged from the master’s practise and example. One principle, articulated in Juwayni’s Irshad, is that “knowledge is the recognition of the thing known as it really is” (Juwayni, 8). (The formulation resembles the earlier philosopher Kindi’s dictum, drawn from Greek thought, that philosophy entails “a knowledge of the true natures of things in so far as this is possible to man.”) Ghazali restates this principle in the opening chapter of the Ihya’ (1:41). In elucidating the point, Juwayni points out that such knowledge is not simply “conviction accompanied by a feeling of certitude.” An ignoramus can feel certain of his conviction, but he isn’t knowledgeable; a simple person can claim to know something on the authority of another, but this too isn’t truly knowledge, because it does not guarantee certainty. “Certainty” (yaqin in Arabic) poses its own problems, not only in terms of how it may be attained but also of how it may be recognized when attained. Can certainty be gained through dialectic or through demonstrative reasoning or must it inevitably come through the guidance of a divinely inspired authority? The question would preoccupy Ghazali intensely in later years. Genui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Names and terms
• Chronology
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE RISE TO RENOWN
• 2 DEVOTION TO THE LAW
• 3 THE DOUBLE-EDGED DISCIPLINE: GHAZALI AND THEOLOGY
• 4 THE POISON OF PHILOSOPHY AND ITS ANTIDOTE
• 5 CRISIS AND RECOVERY
• 6 THE REVIVAL OF ISLAM
• CONCLUSION: KNOWLEDGE IN ACTION
• Bibliography
• Index