The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and His Revival of the Religious Sciences.

• Author: Rouayheb, Khaled El-
• Position: Al-Ghazali's Moderation in Belief: Al-Iqtisad fi al-i'tiqad - Book review

The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and His Revival of the Religious Sciences. By Kenneth Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 238. $65, 41.99 [pounds sterling].

Al-Ghazali's Moderation in Belief: Al-Iqtisad fi al-i'tiqad. Translated by Aladdin M. Yaqub. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvii + 311. $50, 35 [pound sterling].

Until a few decades ago, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) was widely known among scholars of Islamic intellectual history as a foe of Islamic philosophy and upholder of mainstream Ash'ari theology tinged with moderate, law-abiding Sufism. Most specialists writing in English no longer subscribe to this image. Especially since Richard Frank's seminal monographs Creation and the Cosmic System (1992) and Al-Ghazali and the Ash'arite School (1994), the tendency has been to emphasize the extent to which al-Ghazali was influenced by Avicennan philosophy and consequently departed from Ash'ari theological doctrines.

In The First Islamic Reviver, Kenneth Garden builds on and furthers this trend in scholarship, but seeks to go beyond piecemeal negations of older views and to develop a new overall interpretation of al-Ghazali, which focuses on his self-perceived role as a "reviver" of the Islamic religious tradition. Al-Ghazali was well aware of the hadith according to which God would send a renewer or reviver every one hundred years, and there are suggestions in his later writings that he thought of himself as occupying that role at the beginning of the sixth/twelfth century. His magnum opus is appositely entitled Ihya' 'ulum al-din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences). Garden devotes the core part of his monograph to a reinterpretation of this work, reading it in light of al-Ghazali's earlier Mizan al-amal, in which some of the main themes of Ihya' are adumbrated, and of his later Persian work Kimiya'-i sa'adat, a distillation of the main themes of Ihya' to an audience not comfortable with Arabic. Ihya' is often seen simply as a Sufi compendium, but Garden argues that this elides both the originality of its vision and the extent to which it is indebted to philosophy. Ihya' is rather an ambitious attempt to demote Islamic law (fiqh) and rational theology (kalam) from their central position in the Islamic scholarly tradition in favor of al-Ghazali's own "Science of the Hereafter." Though incorporating the basics of the law and creed, this "science" remains firmly focused on what is truly important for humans, namely, achieving "felicity" (sa'ada) through ethical and supererogatory practice based on theoretical knowledge of intelligible forms. Significantly, this view of the human telos seems to be adopted from the Islamic philosophers. Following the recent work of Alexander Treiger, Gardner also argues that the metaphysics of Ihya' is heavily indebted to Avicenna, though al-Ghazali pushes Avicenna's Neo-Platonism further in a monistic direction. Al-Ghazali's Ihya' undeniably draws on earlier Sufi writings, especially Qut al-qulub by Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996), but it derives its overarching objective and its metaphysics from the Islamic philosophers.

Garden then turns to al-Ghazali's attempts in later life to promote Ihya"s basic message. He is keen to rebut the view--suggested by al-Ghazali himself in his al-Munqidh min al-dalal--of a...