On Celebrating the 900th Anniversary of al-Ghazal

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M. A al-Akiti
University of Oxford

orty-ve score years ago the world witnessed the passing of a great man of religion who not only made his mark as the fth-century mujaddid of his own faith, but also left his legacy to the two older Abrahamic religions. He is equally, it seems to me, Islams ha-Nesher ha-Gadol and Doctor Angelicus: the Hujjat al-Islam, Abu Hamid Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Ghazal the Sha jurist, Ashar Sunn theologian and Su master who died in that not very-easy-to-forget year of 1111 (505 AH). In celebrating the 900th anniversary of this special Muslim scholar, the Editor of The Muslim World, Yahya M. Michot, has invited me to edit a special issue, which has come to embrace two actual issues of the journal, dedicated to al-Ghazal , for which I feel honoured and grateful. Perhaps it is doubly providential not least owing to the auspicious-looking number 11, which so often crops up here that commemorating his ninth centenary actually coincides with the rst centenary of The Muslim World itself: star 1111 falls in conjunction with star 1911, in this year, and with this very issue. It might even be providential, too, that this commemoration physically appears in December and extends into the rst issue of 2012: the Muslim month in which al-Ghazal died (Jumada al-Akhira) extended into the next Christian year, 1112! Much has been said of al-Ghazal s virtues, and it would be superous to list them here. But one good example is well worth recalling. Al-Ghazal s career is dened most of all by the way he attempted to balance the pursuit of the middle way with respect to everything he encountered. We can see this best in how he articulated his religion by delicately balancing the various disciplines and traditions secular as well as religious, foreign as well as indigenous and by intricately weaving together the different dimensions of Islam the outer as well as the inner, the legalistic as well as the spiritual in his magnum opus, the Ihya ulum al-d n. One could even regard this work as the Summa Islamica. The great historian al-Safad (d. 764/1363) wrote of it: Were all the books of Islam to be lost except the Ihya, that would replace them.1 Indeed,
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Al-Safad , Kitab al-waf bil-wafayat, ed. Hellmut Ritter, et al., 30 vols. in progress (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1931), 6:275.16: law dhahabat kutubu l-islami wa-baqiya l-Ihyau la-aghna amma dhahaba.

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al-Ghazal s balancing of the forces transcends the bounded concerns of his own religion and engages the perennial concerns of all and sundry, atheists and theists alike. Let me again invoke al-Safad , who, in his hall of fame a roll call of preeminent Muslim scholars who made their marks in their respective elds listed al-Ghazal as a scholar who has not been surpassed in reconciling the rational and the scriptural sciences.2 The contributions offered here in homage to al-Ghazal have come from what so far appears to be the lucky number of 11 authors, including myself. They variously include treatments of aspects of his bibliography, his biography, his corpus, his teachings and ideas, and, not to be omitted, his heritage and likeness organized under the following ve headings: (1) Biography; (2) Corpus Algazelicum; (3) Theories and Concepts; (4) Comparisons and Post-Ghazalian Reception; and (5) Reference Tools. We begin with remarks concerning my own offering, which ends the commemoration. There I aim to provide the reference point for standardizing the pagination of the Ghazalian corpus: Index to Divisions of al-Ghazal s Often-Cited Published Works. Referencing the writings of any great scholar, and more so a prolic one, can be a daunting process for individual researchers, especially when the state of the published corpus is beset with a lack of systematization, which indeed, generates documentational chaos in the secondary literature. Such is the unformatted state of al-Ghazal s printed works, yet hitherto there has been no collective sense of urgency for moving towards a unied system of citation. This cumulatively produces inconvenience and impedes to a degree the progress of Ghazalian scholarship. It is hoped that this listing will be the rst part of a cumulative (and collective) effort to sort out most of the present chaos and facilitate the work of researchers in the eld. In the rst section, Kenneth Garden puts into context al-Ghazal s writings about himself, comparing the well-known Munqidh with the lesser-known Persian letters: Coming Down from the Mountaintop: al-Ghazal s Autobiographical Writings in Context. What this comparison shows us is we nd al-Ghazal actively promoting his revivalist agenda, not only in the Munqidh but, more interestingly, in his private letters. Moreover, when circumstances called for it, al-Ghazal presented his life very differently from how it appears in the Munqidh, in order to t the context of his project of revival. These autobiographical writings, moreover, reveal a picture of al-Ghazal as a public intellectual who enjoyed privileged access to the men of state of his time. In fact, they reveal that an intimate shaykh-mur d relationship existed with one of them: al-Ghazal was tutor to the son of his famous patron, the Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk (ass. 485/1092), namely, Fakhr al-Mulk (ass. 500/1106), who himself assumed the viziership of the Seljuk government. In the second section, which looks at the corpus of al-Ghazal s works, two scholars have focused on the Ihya, another on the M zan, another on the Maqsad and the last on a little-known Hebrew text attributed to al-Ghazal . Timothy Gianottis Beyond Both
2 Al-Safad , al-Ghayth al-musjam f sharh Lamiyyat al-ajam, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Arabiyya, 1975), 1:193.24: l-jami bayna l-maquli wa l-manquli.

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Law and Theology: An Introduction to al-Ghazal s Science of the Way of the Afterlife in Reviving Religious Knowledge (Ihya Ulum al-D n) analyzes what appears to be the major motive behind the writing of this master work by al-Ghazal , for which he there coined the term ilm tar q al-akhira, explained by Gianotti as the teleological science devoted to the systematic preparation of the individual soul for her ultimate encounter with the Divine (p. 597). The author provides an overview of that Ghazalian method as it is used in the Ihya; it includes both a theoretical and a practical component, which are found to be interdependent, indeed symbiotic and complementary. Gianottis analysis presents the reader with a good exposition of al-Ghazal s agenda for religious reform and/or revival (tajd d ) and shows how and why he challenged the then prevailing conception of religious knowledge in Islam. In particular, it reveals al-Ghazal going against the paradigms and objections of the jurists ( fuqaha) and theologians (mutakal limun) of his time. The next instalment on the Ihya, Al-Ghazal between Philosophy (Falsafa) and Susm (Tasawwuf ): His Complex Attitude in the Marvels of the Heart (Ajaib al-Qalb) of the Ihya Ulum al-D n, by Jules Janssens, systematically catalogues the mostly Avicennian philosophical sources and also the various Su sources used by al-Ghazal in kitab XXI of the Ihya. The subject-matter of Aristotles De Anima was to become what I would unhesitatingly characterize as al-Ghazal s jewel in the crown, just as it had been for Avicenna (d. 428/1037).3 As I have argued, this important book of the Ihya not only prefaces the subsequent books on Ihyaan Ethics there, but, revealingly, it forms the theoretical basis for the philosophical ethics embedded in those books. To this end, Janssens has here helpfully provided us with a map that explicitly charts al-Ghazal s indirect appropriation of the falsafa tradition a source that was then alien to his own scholastic culture and afliation. Furthermore, Janssens has presented us with al-Ghazal s Islamic sources for the Su tradition in this book. Consequently, this survey demonstrates to unsuspecting readers al-Ghazal s process of naturalization4 for these foreign sources, and shows how these, in turn, were intricately combined with the

On the attractions of Avicennas synthesis of the De Anima tradition for al-Ghazal s overall project, see M. A al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa: Al-Ghazal s Madnun, Tahafut, and Maqasid, with Particular Attention to Their Falsaf Treatments of Gods Knowledge of Temporal Events, in Y. Tzvi Langermann (ed.), Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, no. 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), p. 57 n. 15. 4 The terms appropriation and naturalization were originally used by A.I. Sabra in a different context [A. I. Sabra, The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement, History of Science 25 (1987): 22543], but I have found them entirely suitable to describe al-Ghazal s borrowing strategy for materials from falsafa. See al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, p. 62 n. 25; rst used in this connection by M. A al-Akiti, The Three Properties of Prophethood in Certain Works of Avicenna and al-Gazal , in Jon McGinnis (ed.), Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, no. 56 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
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supervening indigenous sources. A complicated relationship between the two distinct, but not necessarily conicting, sources is revealed. Yasien Mohameds The Ethics of Education: al-Isfahan s al-Dhar a as a Source of Inspiration for al-Ghazal s M zan al-Amal looks at another work and yet another source for the thought of this versatile scholar. Although Janssens has previously surveyed the same source of the M zan,5 here Mohamed presents a detailed analysis of the content and style of the Mizan compared with the Dhar a of al-Ragh b al-Isfahan (ca. 425/1033), focusing on the sections dealing with the etiquette and adab of the student seeking knowledge. In line with what we now know of al-Ghazal s editorial practice involving another authors texts, the M zan unsurprisingly improvised on the materials he used from the Dhar a, doing so seamlessly in his own terms in order to advance his own programme. The result is that the nished Ghazalian text reads more clearly for the student and has become systematized. The next offering to enrich our knowledge of al-Ghazal s corpus is the theoretical treatment provided by Taneli Kukkonen, himself a talented philosopher, on Al-Ghazal on Accidental Identity and the Attributes. This is, in fact, a supplement to one of his previous works that analyzed al-Ghazal s Maqsad al-asna.6 Here, Taneli argues with his customary crisp articulation and philosophical acuity that al-Ghazal offered a solution to the problem of how contradictory qualities can be predicated of God by making use of the Aristotelian notion of accidental identity or unity. He explores how al-Ghazal relates this notion to the whole question of the divine attributes and how they, in turn, relate to the divine essence. In fact, the purpose of Tanelis contribution has been to show that there is nothing accidental about the Maqsad, which is a tightly argued work where conceptual concerns and practical precepts coincide in a way that is scarcely found in either the philosophical or the theological literature (p. 678). This stems, Taneli says, from al-Ghazal s most deeply seated philosophical convictions (ibid.), and is in line with how al-Ghazal situated the Maqsad in his nal and most detailed theological curriculum as it is laid out in the Arba n.7 The Maqsad, which far transcends his most advanced work on the kalam tradition, the Iqtisad, is located between, on the one hand, various books of the Ihya (itself a work professing practical precepts, albeit admixed with conceptual concerns), and the Madnun corpus (writings with exclusively conceptual concerns and pure theory, resulting, of course, from his positive engagements with the

Jules Janssens, al-Ghazal s M zan al-Amal: An Ethical Summa based on Ibn S na and al-Ragh b al-Isfahan , in Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven (eds.), Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages: Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation, in Honour of Hans Daiber, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, no. 75 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 6 Taneli Kukkonen, Al-Ghazal on the Signication of Names, Vivarium 48 (2010): 5574. 7 Al-Ghazal , Kitab al-arba n f usul al-d n, ed. Muhy al-D n Sabr al-Kurd (Cairo: Matbaat Kurdistan al-Ilmiyya, 1328/1910), 2728 (qism I, epil.).

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falsafa tradition) on the other. It is effectively the last work before the borderline with the Madnun.8 The nal study devoted to particular texts is by Tzvi Langermann, The Hebrew Ajwiba Ascribed to al-Ghazal : Corpus, Conspectus, and Context. In his offering, Langermann revisits a Hebrew text attributed to al-Ghazal that was edited by Heinrich Malter in 1896, who accepted it uncritically as a translation of a genuine work by al-Ghazal associated with the Maqasid al-falasifa.9 This detailed survey is a welcome addition to our knowledge of texts relating to al-Ghazal , making this Hebrew work accessible in English for the rst time. In the absence of other evidence, Langermann (wisely) did not want to deal with the question of authenticity here, but opted instead to prove that this text in its own right is a coherent whole, which conveys a clear thesis all the way through and takes an unambiguous stance on some key issues of concern to al-Ghazal . Langermanns results now make it certain that the Hebrew Ajwiba is indeed a translation of one of the recensions of al-Ghazal s original Arabic Ajwiba, which I have 10 called the Masail Madnun. This particular recension is what I designate as version alpha or the Samawat component, and elsewhere I have presented evidence that this Problemata literature forms an integral part of the Madnun corpus of al-Ghazal , 11 something that I have recently investigated. The Masail Madnun, as I have pointed out, acts as a set of supplements to the Madnun manuals, such as the Major Madnun,12 and to give an important example, the Samawat serves, essentially, as a companion to the Major Madnun.13 This explains why the Samawat is closely related to the Major Madnun textually.

For some remarks on situating the Madnun corpus within the context of present-day Ghazalian scholarship, see my Index to Divisions of al-Ghazal s Often-Cited Published Works in this commemoration, vol. 102, p. 72 n. 5. 9 Al-Ghazal , Die Abhandlung des Ab Hmid al-Gazzl: Antworten auf Fragen, die an ihn gerichtet wurden, ed. Heinrich Malter, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Verlag von J. Kauffmann, 1896). 10 Referred to in al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, p. 54. 11 M. A al-Akiti, The Madnun of al-Ghazal : A Critical Edition of the Unpublished Major Madnun with Discussion of His Restricted, Philosophical Corpus, D.Phil. diss., 3 vols. (University of Oxford, 2008), 1:220263 (chap. 5, sec. 4). This section deals with the Masail Madnun in its entirety, and includes descriptions of the contents of the Arabic recension corresponding to the Hebrew Ajwiba. It also includes a conspectus of all of the known components of the Masail Madnun, from which one can see the whole Problemata work in perspective. The state of the various recensions of the Masail Madnun is complicated, some have been published and some are still only in manuscripts, but I have undertaken in my thesis a comprehensive survey of this interesting set of texts as a rst step in making sense of the Masail as an important supplement to the Madnun manuals. This allows moving on to the second stage, namely producing a consolidated edition of the Masail, which Wilferd Madelung and I are planning to do. 12 The Madnun manuals include, for example, the text edited in my thesis, the Major Madnun, and the previously published Maarij al-quds. 13 Al-Akiti, The Madnun of al-Ghazal , 1:224.
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The Major Madnun in turn is textually close to the Danishnamah-version of the Maqasid al-falasifa (as shown in my contribution to Langermanns recent volume),14 and this fact will help explain why Malter thought the Maqasid to be the main source for the Hebrew Samawat. Considering that the text of the Major Madnun is almost indistinguishable from the Maqasid (Danishnamah), it might well be more accurate to argue, in light of my results, that the actual source of the Hebrew Samawat is the Major Madnun, rather than the Maqasid the more so as Langermann reports that the medieval Hebrew scholars knew about al-Ghazal s esoteric corpus, and that they considered the Ajwiba to be the tract in which al-Ghazal revealed his true position to 15 those worthy of hearing it (p. 283). Lacking this new evidence from the complete set of the Madnun corpus, Langer mann understandably had to resort to relying on internal evidence alone, and, in the end, crafting a careful argument that the Hebrew text is indeed coherent. In light of the Madnun corpus, however, he now needs to consider the Hebrew Ajwiba as an authentic work of al-Ghazal s. Besides these advances, Langermann has suggested an identica tion and intellectual prole for the imaginary protagonist in this Masail as a Sunn traditionalist, something which is very appealing. Langermanns work is an important piece of textual scholarship, not least for the meaningful contribution it makes to enriching our knowledge about the Madnun corpus but, more importantly, to the wider eld of Ghazalian studies. In the third section, two authors deal with various philosophical concepts and common ideas found in the writings of al-Ghazal . Alexander Treigers Al-Ghazal s Mirror Christology and Its Possible East-Syriac Sources is an illuminating piece of scholarship, for the narrower eld of Ghazalian studies but also for our knowledge of the Muslim understanding (and misunderstanding) of the trinity and, indeed, of mirror Christology itself. Treiger argues persuasively that al-Ghazal s Christological theory is unique in using the mirror metaphor to describe the cognitive process involved and, moreover, that its origin lies in Nestorian Christianity, particularly in the wal ology of John of Dalyatha in the second/eighth-century. Treiger describes al-Ghazal s Christology along these lines: divinity was reected in Christs heart as light is reected in a polished mirror. Those who saw this reection erroneously thought that Christ was united with divinity (ittihad ) or that divinity indwelled in him (hulul ), and therefore called him God and that this error thus became part of Christian teaching. Al-Ghazal insists, by contrast, that no union or indwelling took place, but rather that this was a case of reection of divinity in the mirror of Christs heart. (p.
These results appear in al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa. On the other version of the Maqasid, the Shifa-version, see my Index to Divisions of al-Ghazal s Often-Cited Published Works in this commemoration, vol. 102, p. 162 n. 20; cf. idem, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, p. 53 n. 6. 15 In this particular context, it is pertinent to recall al-Ghazal s own formulation of the title for the Madnun corpus: that which is to be withheld from those not t for it (al-Madnun bi-h ala ghayr ahlih); cf. ibid., p. 52 n. 3.
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On Celebrating the 900th Anniversary of al-Ghazali

699). The way al-Ghazal invokes the errors of the Christians makes an instantly recognizable trope on a key concern of his, namely the drunken Sus like al-Bistam (d. 262/875) and al-Hallaj (ex. 309/922). As Treiger shows, the belief that the union between divinity and humanity in either Christ or al-Bistam or al-Hallaj is nothing more than a vision of God (ruyat Allah), granted to them in the mirrors of their hearts. Through a handy appropriation, al-Ghazal redenes the Incarnation as Jesus beatic vision on earth, thereby denying his divinity and provides a Christology that is acceptable to a Muslim audience. Our commemoration of al-Ghazal continues in the next issue of the journal with the other article of the third section. Here, the subject is one of the topics closest to al-Ghazal s heart, namely the notion of tra: Al-Ghazal s Use of Original Human Disposition (Fitra) and Its Background in the Teachings of al-Farab and Avicenna, by Frank Griffel. It is tting indeed for Griffel in his offering to take up this important Ghazalian topic, which extends also into the wider eld of Islamic studies but has received surprisingly little attention. The pioneering efforts present us with more than what one would normally expect for a rst proper treatment of a widely used yet mystifying term, by going beyond basic linguistic analysis to investigate in detail the philosophical sources for al-Ghazal s interpretation of tra. Griffels analysis reveals the extent to which tra came to acquire diverse technical meanings. They range from the Farabian sense of talent to the Avicennian idea of how tra relates to commonly accepted judgements (mashhurat) and, indeed, social norms and conventions, and how these connexions, in turn, could act as an impediment to the innate judgments by the tra. Griffel presents convincing passages showing how al-Ghazal was deeply affected by the latter theory and how this in fact ts into his wider anti-taql d agenda. Needless to say, al-Ghazal himself was not a slavish follower of those Peripatetics, but differentiates himself, just enough, from their views in his several technical uses of tra. Perhaps the most interesting of these is al-Ghazal s own conception of tra, which, arguably, nds an analogue with the current controversial notion of a God gene.16 Teasing aside, this article makes a positive contribution to our understanding of how tra plays an important role in al-Ghazal s theology and epistemology. In the fourth section, we are treated to a reception history and a comparative study. Anna Akasoy looks at the epic career of the Ghazalian legacy as it moves from the Mashreq to the Maghreb and then goes further, into the world of the Latin Algazel through the lens of the translator, Ramon Llull (d. 1315). Her contribution, Al-Ghazal , Ramon Llull and Religionswissenschaft, ends with a modern reection on the approach to the study of religions. Akasoys article is rich in material that cuts across various themes and times. It includes a discussion on the enigmatic burning of the Ihya in the Muslim

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Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

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West,17 an analysis of Ramon Llulls Book of the Gentile as compared with al-Ghazal s 18 Mishkat al-anwar, and a consideration of the relevance of al-Ghazal s notion of tra in modern debates about an Islamic theology of religions. Both al-Ghazal and Llull offer an appreciative view of other religions. Their positive attitudes can serve as positive examples today, since both of them address the subject of religious diversity within a rational and universal framework by putting traditional truths on a more certain epistemological basis. This, as Akasoy rightly contends, would make them palatable even to critics of religion. Yet they also offer to committed stakeholders the prospect of maintaining their traditions with condence. Indeed, Akasoy manages to show that both thinkers can play an important role in modern debates about the nature of religion. In The Quest for the Divine: al-Ghazal and Saint Bruno of Cologne, Minlib Dallh compares al-Ghazal with his distant contemporary, Bruno of Cologne (d. 1101), the founder of the Carthusian order. Dallh brings to our attention a little-known accident of history where these two men of God had remarkably similar journey in life; not least, their spiritual careers underwent the same sort of crisis. Even more notable is the political success surrounding their lives and the tribulations that followed. Both men, at the height of their professional careers and fame, felt a deep disenchantment with worldly success, relinquished their high positions and, ultimately, found in the mystical dimensions of their respective faith traditions the answer to their spiritual crisis. The breakdowns they suffered turned out to be spiritual breakthroughs (p. 61). These convergences speak for themselves. Both men were: theologians; mystics; reformers of their respective traditions; professors; men who maintained their loyalty to their institutional and religious afliations; men who attracted famous pupils and patrons alike, who made life-changing vows, who returned to their public establishments, who retired twice from public life, and who founded their own zawiya or monastery. The greatest difference, it turns out, as Dallh contends, is that unlike Bruno, al-Ghazal had the sophistication and philosophical language to express his intellectual and spiritual crisis (p. 67). The reach of these men beyond their graves is still a miracle of sorts. Perhaps the only detail missed by Dallh is the lucky number 11 in their death dates.

Discounting any political incorrectness in the Ihya that may have been its actual causa cremandi, the new perspective afforded by the identication and authentication of the Madnun corpus allows the following proposition to be made about this debate: the controversial falsafa material appropriated in the Madnun that ended up being naturalized in the Ihya provides al-Ghazal s foes with the legal pretext for their complaints. See al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, p. 901. 18 The Mishkat, incidentally, is one of the works I have found to belong to the Madnun corpus; ibid., p. 534 n. 7.
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