Islam and Rationality. The Impact of al-Ghazālī. Papers collected on his 900th Anniversary

364 Pages·2015·2.76 MB·English

by  Frank Griffel (ed.)

i
Islam and Rationality
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004307490_001
ii
Islamic Philosophy, Theology
and Science
texts and studies
Edited by
Hans Daiber
Anna Akasoy
Emilie Savage-Smith
VOLUME 98
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ipts
iii
Islam and Rationality
The Impact of al-Ghazālī. Papers Collected
on His 900th Anniversary. Vol. 2
Edited by
Frank Griffel
LEIDEN | BOSTON
iv
Cover illustration: Colored reproduction of a water-painting, probably lost, by the artist André Sevruguin
(also: Sevrugian, 1894–1996) from Ernst Diez’ Die Kunst der islamischen Völker (Berlin Akademische
Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion 1915). It shows the ruins of a building that we think is the mausoleum of
al-Ghazali in his hometown Tabaran-Tus in Iran. For more information on the building see p. 173 of this
book.
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ContentCsontents v
Contents
Preface vii
List of Figures and Tables xvi
List of Contributors xvii
Keys and Conventions xx
Part I
Al-Ghazālī’s Works and His Thought
1 Al-Ghazālī on Error 3
Taneli Kukkonen
2 Al-Ghazālī’s Concept of Philosophy 32
Ulrich Rudolph
3 Problems in al-Ghazālī’s Perfect World
Objections and Counter-Objections to His Best Possible World
Thesis 54
Stephen R. Ogden
4 Al-Ghazālī’s Teleology and the Galenic Tradition
Reading The Wisdom in God’s Creations (al-Ḥikma fī makhlūqāt
Allah) 90
Ahmed El Shamsy
5 Al-Ghazālī and Kalām
The Conundrum of His Body-Soul Dualism 113
Ayman Shihadeh
6 Al-Ghazālī’s Veil Section
Comparative Religion before Religionswissenschaft? 142
Anna Ayşe Akasoy
7 Is There an Autograph of al-Ghazālī in MS Yale, Landberg 318? 168
Frank Griffel
vi Contents
Part II
Al-Ghazālī’s Influence
8 Intuition, Intellection, and Mystical Knowledge
Delineating Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Cognitive Theories 189
Damien Janos
9 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Use of al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt in His Commentary
on the Light Verse (Q 24:35) 229
Jules Janssens
10 Ottoman Perceptions of al-Ghazālī’s Works and Discussions on His
Historical Role in Its Late Period 253
M. Sait Özervarlı
11 Al-Ghazālī’s “Demarcation of Science”
A Commonplace Apology in the Muslim Reception of Modern Science—
and Its Limitations 283
Martin Riexinger
12 The Revival of the Religious Sciences in the Twenty-First Century
Suʿād al-Ḥakīm’s Adaptation of al-Ghazālī’s Revival 310
Kenneth Garden
Indices
General Index of Names and Subjects 335
Index of Passages in Works by al-Ghazālī 340
Index of Verses in the Qurʾan 344
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PrefacePreface vii
Preface
One of the conditions of being a servile follower of other people’s views
(muqallid) is that one does not realize that one is a muqallid. Once one
finds this out, the glass of servile following (taqlīd) is shattered; an irrepa-
rable rift and disorder that cannot be pieced together or reassembled
(…).
al-Ghazālī, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, 15.
⸪
On 14 Jumāda II 505 / 18 December 1111, al-Ghazālī died, approximately 56 years
old, in his birthplace Ṭābarān in the district of Ṭūs in northeastern Iran. Almost
800 years later, in 1908, the Indian Muslim reformer Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857–1914)
addressed his followers in India and spoke about the merits of this great mas-
ter and what the Islamic scholars (ʿulamāʾ) of the modern age could learn from
his example. Nuʿmānī was a teacher and educational reformer at the turn of
the 20th century. He began his distinguished career as a professor of Arabic
and Persian at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, the cradle
of Muslim modernist thinking on the South-Asian Subcontinent. In 1892,
Nuʿmānī was a founding member of the Nadwatul Ulamāʾ, the association of
reformist Muslim scholars in India, and four years later one of the driving
forces when the organization founded its own school, the Dārul ʿUlūm
Nadwatul ʿUlamāʾ in Lucknow in northern India. In his vision for this reformed
school, Nuʿmānī was inspired by the example of Sayyid Aḥmad Khan (1817–
98), the founder of the Aligarh College, yet in comparison to him he had a
more traditionalist agenda. One of the objectives of the new Dārul ʿUlūm in
Lucknow was to teach the traditional discipline of kalām – rationalist Muslim
theology and philosophy – in accord with the traditional madrasa curriculum
in India. This curriculum, the so-called Dars-i Niẓāmī, was created in the early
18th century and included books on Qur’anic studies, ḥadīth studies, Muslim
* The author is grateful to Waleed Ziad who helped him with the Urdu texts used in this preface
and translated Urdu passages into English.
viii Preface
jurisprudence (fiqh), theology, philosophy and many other Muslim sciences.1
Nuʿmānī and his colleagues at the Dārul ʿUlūm Nadwatul ʿUlamāʾ believed in
the merits of this two-hundred year old course of study. However, they updated
it with new texts covering advancements in the natural sciences. The goal was
for students to develop skills that would be in harmony with traditional Muslim
education in India and could at the same time answer to the religious chal-
lenges of the modern era and its sciences.2
For Shiblī Nuʿmānī, being a Muslim in India at the early 20th century meant,
first of all, being confronted with modern sciences that were developed in
Europe and that were introduced into India through translations from English.
He, however, did not think that this situation was particularly new for Muslims.
Centuries before, Islam had already been challenged by a potent force of ideas
that came from outside. In the era following the Abbasid revolution of 750 CE,
the “Greek sciences” and Greek philosophy were introduced to Arabic litera-
ture and Muslim culture. The intellectual leader who, according to Shiblī
Nuʿmānī, responded most productively to the challenges coming from the tra-
dition of Greek philosophy and who created a reconciliation between Islam
and these set of ideas was al-Ghazālī.
Al-Ghazālī, according to Nuʿmānī, was the outstanding model of a success-
ful joining of old and new, of the coming together of Islam’s traditions with
Greek science and with philosophy (falsafa).3 In his Urdu address of 1908,
Nuʿmānī describes al-Ghazālī as the scholar who should be credited that the
Greek sciences and Greek wisdom took root in Islam. “For Shiblī,” writes
Christian Troll, “the past personification and his ideal for today is Imām
al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 CE). He is the outstanding model of (…) the joining of Islam
(…) with Greek science and philosophy as it had been propagated in his time
by the falāsifa.”4 In his address of 1908, Shiblī said that al-Ghazālī’s must be
credited for the fact that
the Greek sciences became Muslim sciences, with the result that today
no scholar (ʿālim) is considered one as long he is not an expert, not
only in ḥadīth and fiqh but also in the Greek sciences, i. e. in logic and
falsafa. Similarly, today the ʿulamāʾ must acquire together with the ʿulūm-i
1 Robinson, “Ottoman-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Systems,”
181–84.
2 Hashmi, Muslim Response to Western Education, 117–46.
3 Troll, “Muhammad Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857–1914) and the Reform of Muslim Religious Education,”
155.
4 Ibid.
Preface ix
ʿarabiyya the ʿulūm-i gharbiyya (the sciences of the West) and make a spe-
cial effort to establish a correspondence between the religious (madhhabī)
and the modern scientific questions. (…) I am convinced that as long as
the ʿulamāʾ do not make them their own and defend the new sciences,
these will continue to be loathed and opposed by the Muslims and will
fail to take root in our community (qawm).5
Shiblī Nuʿmānī’s view of al-Ghazālī in his 1908-address is reminiscent of a
notion about the relationship between the Greek sciences and Islam that in
Western scholarship was introduced many years after the speech, in the 1980s.
Two important articles were published in 1987, Richard M. Frank’s (1927–2009)
“Al-Ghazālī’s Use of Avicenna’s Philosophy” – based on a paper given at a
conference at Château de Morigny near Étampes (France) in November 1986
– and Abdelhamid I. Sabra’s (1924–2013) “The Appropriation and Subsequent
Naturalization of Greek Sciences in Medieval Islam.” Sabra was one of the first
scholars writing in a Western language who suggested that – in the words of
Shiblī Nuʿmānī – “the Greek sciences had become Muslim sciences.” For Sabra
this happened in a two-step development of first appropriating Greek sciences
in a process of translation and adaptation to a new cultural context, character-
ized by the use of the Arabic language and a Muslim majority culture, and
secondly naturalizing them so that the Greek origins of these sciences were no
longer visible. Although he did not work with Sabra’s categories, Frank’s article
of 1987 can easily be corresponded to Sabra’s suggestions. Whereas Avicenna’s
(Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037) philosophy is an expression of the process of appropria-
tion where the Greek origins of many of his teachings are clearly visible and
even stressed, al-Ghazālī, who adopts many of Avicenna’s teachings, obscures
their origins and thus contributes to – or maybe even initiates – the process
of naturalization. Frank’s article of 1987 launched a whole new direction of
research on al-Ghazālī. Earlier Western contributions on him highlighted his
critical attitude towards the teachings of al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. After Frank’s
contributions in 1987 and 1992,6 however, books and articles appeared that
would investigate what al-Ghazālī adopted from falsafa. A second subject also
became important – again initiated by Richard M. Frank in a monograph that
came out in 19947 – and this was al-Ghazālī’s conflict with the intellectual
5 Shiblī Nuʿmānī, Khuṭbāt-i Shiblī, 90. English translation taken from Troll, “Muhammad Shiblī
Nuʿmānī (1857–1914) and the Reform,” 155.
6 Frank, Creation and the Cosmic System. Al-Ghazâlî & Avicenna.
7 Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School.
x Preface
environment that he grew up in, most importantly the clash with his fellow
Ashʿarites in Khurasan.
Today, scholars in the field of Ghazali-studies are well aware that this great
thinker did not destroy philosophy in Islam. Rather, we know that he was an
initiator and an important instigator of the process of naturalization that Sabra
described in 1987. Sabra did not think of al-Ghazālī when he wrote his article
and he nowhere mentions him. Since his suggestion of the appropriation and
naturalization of the Greek sciences in Islam came out, however, it became
clear that kalām together with Sufism were the most important vehicles in the
latter process of naturalizing the Greek science into Islam. Today we readily
use words like “integration” and “fusion” when we describe what kalām did to
philosophy in the Islamic world and talk of a continuation of the Greek philo-
sophical tradition within kalām. Muslim theologians such as al-Ghazālī or
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) were experts not only in fields of knowledge
that were identified as “Arabic” and “Muslim” but also in falsafa and in the so-
called ʿulūm al-awāʾil (“the sciences of those who began”), meaning the Greek
sciences. For Shiblī Nuʿmānī they were role models of 20th century Muslim
scholars who must acquaint themselves with the “Arabic Sciences” (ʿulūm-i
ʿarabiyya) as well as those of the West (ʿulūm-i gharbiyya).
When Shiblī gave this speech in 1908, his contemporaries at universities in
the West had a very different impression of al-Ghazālī and his role in Muslim
intellectual history. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western
scholarship on al-Ghazālī followed the influential French scholar Ernest Renan
(1823–98), who had characterized al-Ghazālī as an opponent of reasonable
inquiry in Islam, responsible for its destruction. For Renan, al-Ghazālī was a
skeptic, “who undertook to prove the radical incapacity of reason.”8 In his 1852
book Averroès et l’averroisme, Renan introduces al-Ghazālī as “an enemy of
philosophy” who was behind the persecution of philosophers and “the war
against philosophy at the end of the 12th century.”9 Renan compared this war
with the almost two centuries of civil strife and warfare that followed the
Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century. According to Renan, Averroes
(Ibn Rushd, d. 595/1198) was the last exponent of philosophy in the Islamic
world. “When he died in 1198,” Renan wrote, “Arab philosophy had lost its last
representative and the triumph of the Qur’an over free-thinking was assured
for at least six-hundred years.”10 What relieved the Islamic world from the
8 Renan, Averroès et l’averroisme, 29.
9 Ibid. 29.
10 Ibid., 2.