The Islamic world · c. 1058–1111
Al-Ghazālī
Ashʿarite theologian who left his Baghdad chair for Sufism
The philosophers fail to prove their own claims, such as the eternity of the world; fire does not burn cotton by necessity, God creates the burning. Certainty finally came to him not from argument but from Sufi experience.
Life and thought
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī was born around 1058 in Tus, in north-eastern Iran, and rose to the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world, at the Niẓāmiyya college in Baghdad, in 1091. In 1095, in a crisis of faith and health that left him unable to speak, he gave up his chair, distributed his wealth and spent years as a wandering Sufi in Damascus, Jerusalem and Mecca. He returned to teach briefly and died in Tus in 1111.
In The Incoherence of the Philosophers he argued, on the philosophers’ own logical terms, that they had not proved what they claimed: that the world is eternal, that God knows only universals, that causes produce effects by necessity. When fire touches cotton, we only observe the burning following the contact; God creates the burning, and could withhold it. His autobiography, Deliverance from Error, tells how certainty finally came to him not from argument but from Sufi practice. He made mysticism respectable within Sunni orthodoxy; Ibn Rushd wrote a whole book against him.