Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī

Background

Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1056–1111) — sometimes transliterated al-Ghazāli or Algazel in Latin scholastic texts — was a Persian jurist, theologian, philosopher, and Sufi mystic, one of the most influential figures in the history of Sunni Islam. Griffel summarizes his stature: Al-Ghazālī "was one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunni Islam" (SEP intro). He wrote, Griffel adds, just as Sunni theology emerged from its formative consolidation into a period of sharp challenge from Ismāʿīlī Shiite thought and from the Arabic Aristotelian tradition (falsafa).

Al-Ghazālī studied Ashʿarite theology under al-Juwaynī at the Niẓāmiyya Madrasa in Nishapur. In 1091 Niẓām al-Mulk appointed him to the prestigious Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad, where he composed the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa — his systematic critique of Avicennan philosophical theology. A spiritual crisis in 1095 led him to abandon his chair, travel to Damascus, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and produce his masterwork the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Kalam Cosmological Argument — the historical antecedent of Craig's contemporary argument. Griffel describes the Ghazālian cosmology as "a cosmology where in each [moment] God's decision determines what happens," terminating in "a First Cause, which is itself uncaused" (SEP §7).
• Tawhid vs Trinity — al-Ghazālī is the Ashʿarī articulator of the classical doctrine of tawḥīd framing the Muslim reply to the Christian Trinity.
• The Inimitability of the Qur'an (i'jaz) as Evidence for Islam — supplies the prophetology in which the Qur'an's miracle (muʿjiza) grounds "Muhammad's prophecy," a fundamental doctrine, since for al-Ghazālī "neither reason nor revelation can be considered false" (SEP §4).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: None of al-Ghazālī's primary works are currently ingested as body text. (The file raw/by-tradition/islamic/ghazali-alchemy-happiness.txt in our ingestion mis-filed an unrelated public-domain novel; logged in meta/gap-report.md.) His position is anchored via: - SEP 'al-Ghazālī' by Frank Griffel — the comprehensive secondary source. - SEP 'Cosmological Argument' §1 — situates al-Ghazālī's temporal cosmological argument in the mutakallimūn tradition.

Principal critics

• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) — Tahāfut al-Tahāfut ("Incoherence of the Incoherence") is the classical philosophical reply to al-Ghazālī (not in corpus; see SEP 'Ibn Rushd').
• David Hume — Hume's Part-9 critique of a priori cosmological arguments applies structurally to the Ashʿarī argument.
• Graham Oppy — contemporary naturalist critic of kalām (not in corpus).

See also

• William Lane Craig — the contemporary recoverer of al-Ghazālī's argument.
• Thomas Aquinas — the Christian Dominican whose per se cosmological argument offers a structurally different alternative.
• Ibn Sina (Avicenna) — the principal Muslim philosopher whom al-Ghazālī critiques in the Tahāfut (SEP 'Ibn Sina').
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) — al-Ghazālī's Muslim philosophical critic.