Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination.

• Author: Rizvi, Sajjad H.

Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination. By EBRAHIM MOOSA. Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks. Chapel Hill: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2005. Pp. xi + 349. $22.50.

Arguably for the best part of a century, but certainly for the past couple of decades, the fertile field of Ghazali studies has been embroiled in a debate over the true nature of the "most prominent Muslim after Muhammad." Abu Hamid al Ghazali (d. 1111, one of the easiest dates in Islamic history to remember), as practically all good students of Islamic civilization know, was the most important Sunni Ash'ari theologian of the medieval period, who, by virtue of also being a Sufi, effected the reconciliation of the Sufi path to the Sunni creed. A defender of "orthodoxy," he condemned Shi'i heretics (Ismailis) in his Fada'ih al-Batiniyya and anathematized philosophers in his Tahafut al-falasifa for holding three key heretical doctrines: the co-eternity of the cosmos with God, the denial of God's knowledge of particulars, and the denial of (the Qur'anic account of) bodily resurrection. However, some specialists (especially Richard Frank) have argued that the systematic influence of Avicennan philosophy upon Ghazali made him a philosopher foremost; the impact of Avicennan cosmology, prophetology, and indeed psychology is quite clear in his Mishkat al-anwar and his magnum opus Ihya' 'ulum ai-din. Jules Janssens has even argued that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Tahdfut should not be read as an anti-Avicennan text. These scholars have argued that there are systematic ambivalences in Ghazali that result from his attempt at reconciling contradictory epistemologies and modes of inquiry (Avicennan philosophy, Sufism, Ash'ari theology) designed for different readerships.

A prominent South African Muslim intellectual, Moosa engages with the ongoing debate about the "true nature" of Ghazali and offers a "dialogical encounter with perhaps the most influential intellectual in the Muslim tradition." Being at the forefront of engaged and committed scholarship on Islam with a keen present-mindedness concerned with the state of Islam, Moosa argues for the contemporary engagement and revitalization of the Islamic tradition through the reconciliatory hermeneutics of liminality advocated by Ghazali in the quest for a new Muslim subjectivity that allows for different responses to paradigms, reconciling traditionalist Islamic scholarship with contemporary contexts and awareness. Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination is to some degree an extension of Ghazali's own rhetoric deployed by a figure who considers himself as playing a Ghazali-like role, communicating and interpreting the Islamic tradition for the contemporary culture of metropolitan...