Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology.

• Author: Janos, Damien
• Position: Book review

Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology. By FRANK GRIFFEL. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xiii + 408. $74.

Griffel's new book on the great Arabic theologian al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) is a substantial contribution to the field of Arabic intellectual history and to Ghazalian studies in particular. It consists of some 280 densely written pages, excluding the endnotes, and contains a timetable, an index, and a detailed bibliography. The book is inscribed in a recent scholarly trend aiming to show the interface between Arabic philosophy and theology during the classical and post-classical periods. Like Robert Wisnovsky's Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context (Cornell University Press, 2003), it focuses on specific concepts that played a key role in medieval intellectual debates between theologians and philosophers and stresses the impact of Avicenna's ideas on the subsequent development of Islamic theology. The reader gains not only a heightened understanding of the cross-fertilization between these fields, but also an enhanced sensitivity to the complexity of al-Ghazali's thought and the scope of his intellectual achievements.

Chapter one provides a detailed and updated account of al-Ghazali's career and works. Griffel sieves through the mass of information to present only the most reliable facts and puts forth new hypotheses concerning some of the main events of al-Ghazali's life, such as his dale of birth, the reason behind his departure from Baghdad and his peregrinations to Syria, Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Arabian Peninsula, his relation to Sufism, and his repeated involvement in politics. Chapter two introduces the reader to some of al-Ghazali's main disciples, thus clarifying the depth of his legacy. This chapter is valuable not only in its own right, but also because an examination of al-Ghazali's followers can help to reconstruct his original doctrines. The remainder of the book examines al-Ghazali's relation to falsafa and his theories on causality, connecting them when possible to the biographical elements discussed in chapters one and two. Chapter three introduces the main theme of the book, that is, al-Ghazali's attitude toward falsafa, while chapter four focuses on his exegetical method, his approach to reason and revelation, and his views on the acquisition of certain knowledge. Chapter five consists of a short survey of causality and occasionalism in falsafa and kalam respectively, thus selling the stage for al-Ghazali's own elaborations on the subject. Chapters six through nine form an analytical study of the theme of causality and its place in al-Ghazali's cosmology, paying particular attention to the chronological development of his corpus. Accordingly, the study of al-Ghazali's causality begins with Tahafut al-falasifa ("The Incoherence of the Philosophers"), proceeds to Ihya' 'ulum al-din ("Revival of the Religious Sciences"), and ends with al-Maqsad al-asna ("The Highest Goal"), Mishkat al-anwar ("The Niche of Lights"), and the treatise Iljam al-'awamm ("Restraining the Ordinary People"). The main theme of the book...