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al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd

al-Ghazālī (1059–1111) told in Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl) how his search began: “To thirst after comprehension of things as they really are was my habit and custom from a very early age … the bonds of mere authority (taqlid) ceased to hold me … for I saw that Christian youths always grew up to be Christians, Jewish youths to be Jews and Muslim youths to be Muslims.” Once broken, the old belief could not be had again: “the glass of his naive beliefs is broken”. He sorted those who claimed the truth into four: “(1) the Theologians (mutakallimun), who claim that they are the exponents of thought and intellectual speculation; (2) the Batiniyah, who consider that they, as the party of ‘authoritative instruction’ (ta’lim), alone derive truth from the infallible imam; (3) the Philosophers, who regard themselves as the exponents of logic and demonstration; (4) the Sufis or Mystics, who claim that they alone enter into the ‘presence’ … and possess vision and intuitive understanding”, and “The truth cannot lie outside these four classes”. His rule for judging any of them: “a man cannot grasp what is defective in any of the sciences unless he has so complete a grasp of the science in question that he equals its most learned exponents” (tr. Watt).

The philosophers’ sciences, he found, “are six in number: mathematics, logic, natural science, theology, politics, ethics”. He sorted them by their proofs. Mathematics is demonstrative and no danger to religion, “A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences”; but “The arguments in elementary matters of mathematics are demonstrative whereas those in theology (or metaphysics) are based on conjecture”, and the danger is that a student impressed by the one trusts the other. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) he took them on in metaphysics: “it is our purpose to disillusion those who think too highly of the philosophers, and consider them to be infallible”; “I will approach them in order to attack them, not to defend something of mine own” (tr. Kamali, from an Urdu version). He listed twenty of their positions and judged three of them unbelief. His own search ended with the Sufis, whose way “cannot be apprehended by study, but only by immediate experience (dhawq-literally ‘tasting’)”; “it is above all the mystics who walk on the road of God” (Deliverance).

Ibn Rushd (died 1198) answered from the Law. His Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-maqāl) sets out “to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commanded, either by way of recommendation or as obligatory”. Philosophy is “nothing more than study of existing beings and reflection on them as indications of the Artisan”, and the Qurʾān’s “Reflect, you have vision” (59:2) is “textual authority for the obligation to use intellectual reasoning”, “the most perfect kind of study using the most perfect kind of reasoning”, demonstration. The ancients are to be used “regardless of whether this other one shares our religion or not”, as in a valid sacrifice “no account is taken … of whether the instrument belongs to one who shares our religion”. Since “the natures of men are on different levels with respect to [their paths to] assent”, the Law calls them by three methods, demonstration, dialectic and rhetoric, citing “Summon to the way of your Lord by wisdom and by good preaching, and debate with them in the most effective manner” (16:125): “the rhetorical class … the overwhelming mass”, “the people of dialectical interpretation”, and “the demonstrative class, by nature and training, i.e. in the art of philosophy”. “Truth does not oppose truth”, and philosophy is “the friend and milk-sister of religion” (tr. Hourani).

He also answered al-Ghazālī. Abū Ḥāmid “was mistaken about the Peripatetic philosophers, in ascribing to them the assertion that God … does not know particulars at all” (Decisive Treatise), and The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-tahāfut) aims “to show the different degrees of assent and conviction attained by the assertions in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and to prove that the greater part has not reached the degree of evidence and of truth”. It also states a limit the philosophers set themselves: the ancients held that the religions’ principles are not to be questioned, since “the man who inquires into them and doubts them merits punishment … one can only attain knowledge after the attainment of virtue” (tr. van den Bergh).