Why this book?
- Challenges the common perception of Ghazali as merely a critic of philosophy.
- Examines the Avicennan roots of Ghazali's theory of mystical knowledge in a comparative manner.
- Analyzes concepts such as the heart, intellect, knowledge, unveiling, taste, witnessing, inspiration, and revelation.
- Provides a research framework for understanding the relationship between philosophy, mysticism, and theology in Islamic thought.
About the book
Ghazali the Philosopher by Alexander Treiger is a study of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's mystical epistemology and its philosophical foundations. The book's central problem is that Ghazali's relationship with philosophy cannot be reduced simply to his famous opposition to the philosophers. Through a study and comparison of Ghazali's works, Treiger shows that his thought, especially in explaining mystical knowledge, was influenced by the concepts and philosophical models of Avicenna.
The book focuses on concepts such as the heart, intellect, knowledge, knowledge of unveiling, taste, witnessing, inspiration, and revelation. The author seeks to show how Ghazali reworked elements drawn from the philosophical tradition within his own intellectual system and religious and mystical language. From this perspective, the boundary between philosophy, theology, and Sufism in Ghazali's thought is more complex than the simple opposition of "Ghazali versus philosophy."
One of the important issues in Treiger's research is the difficulty of arriving at Ghazali's final position. The diversity of his audiences and writing styles, the changing terminology, and certain apparent inconsistencies among his writings have made the interpretation of his thought a matter of scholarly dispute. Adopting a textual and historical approach, Treiger seeks to explain this complexity and reveal the Avicennan underpinnings of Ghazali's theory of mystical cognition.
Ghazali the Philosopher is suitable for students and researchers of Islamic philosophy, mysticism, theology, and the history of Islamic thought, and will be particularly useful for the reader who wishes to examine more precisely the relationship between Ghazali and Avicenna and the boundaries between philosophical reason and mystical knowledge.
"Ghazali is a versatile and prolific thinker who wrote in different styles and for various audiences. The difficult writing style, the set of 'unstable' and seemingly imprecise terminology, and the tantalizing allusions to 'unrevealed secrets' have made the precise interpretation of his thought extremely complicated. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Ghazali appears to contradict himself in his writings. Did he have a consistent position on important theological issues, and if so, how can this position be determined from the apparently contradictory evidence, or was he—according to the famous claim of his critic Ibn Rushd—'an Ash'ari with the Ash'arites, a Sufi with the Sufis, and a philosopher with the philosophers'? There is still no scholarly consensus on this important issue."