Al-Ghazali and Averroes: Philosophy on Trial

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), a towering Persian theologian, jurist, and mystic who taught at the prestigious Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad before undergoing a spiritual crisis that led him to abandon his career and pursue Sufism, mounted the most influential medieval critique of philosophy in his Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). Trained thoroughly in the logic and metaphysics of al-Farabi and Avicenna, whom he treated as representative of falsafa generally, al-Ghazali used their own Aristotelian logical tools against them, formulating twenty theses on which he argued the philosophers' positions were rationally indefensible or religiously unacceptable. Of these, he singled out three as amounting to unbelief (kufr): the philosophers' claim that the world is eternal rather than created in time, their claim that God knows only universals and not particular events and individuals, and their denial of the bodily resurrection of the dead. Central to al-Ghazali's broader argument is a critique of natural causality itself: he contends that what appears as necessary cause-and-effect in nature, fire burning cotton, for instance, is in truth only God's habitual, freely willed pattern of action, a position close to theological occasionalism that preserves both divine omnipotence and the possibility of miracles.