HISTORY AND SCHOOL OF

PSYCHOLOGY

AL GHAZALI
IBN KHALDUN

Submitted by: Sajal Ayub

Submitted to: Rabia Batool

Enrollment: 01-171182-038

Submitted on: April-18-2019

 AL GHAZALI (1058-1111 A.D.)

INTRODUCTION
Al Ghazali full name is Abu Hamid Al Ghazali. He is one of the great and most influential
Islamic philosophers, theologians, jurists and mystics of Sunni Islam. He was of Persian origin.
Islamic traditions consider him as ‘’Mujaddid’’, one who appears every century to restore the
faith of Islamic community, according to Islamic hadith. He was awarded by honorific title
‘’Proof of Islam’’ by his companions due to his immense work. He believed that Islamic spiritual
science has been forgotten which has been known by previous generations as a result he wrote
his master piece with the name of the ‘’Revival of the religious sciences’’. Another remarkable
work include ‘’Incoherence of the philosophers’’. He also wrote a number of treaties on logic
and culminated in the inconsistency in which in he protect Islam against such philosophers as
Avicenna who sought to express certain hypothetical views contrary to accepted Islamic
teaching. He also served as the professor of theology at the university of Baghdad.

CONTRIBUTIONS
1. Alchemy Of Happiness

In the Alchemy of Happiness, al-Ghazali begins by writing that “He who knows himself is truly
happy.” According to him ‘’Self knowledge’’ is knowing we have heart and spirit that are
absolutely perfect but it has been spread with the dust of bodily needs, pleasure and desires. The
key to clean the heart and spirit is through by the elimination of selflessness.

As he writes,

“The aim of moral discipline is to purify the heart from the rust of passion and resentment
till, like a clear mirror, it reflects the light of God.”

This happiness cannot be achieved by all people but special people and those are only prophets.
Prophets are Allah’s messenger who awakes the Muslim community towards their ultimate
goals. He says that we are as happy as we follow the prophets.
Al-Ghazali writes that every person is born with a “knowing pain in the soul” resulting from a
disconnection from the Ultimate Reality. The pain occurs when we walk towards the wrong path,
towards physical pleasure and desires. Those who try to relief those pains by physical desires are
unhappy. The only way to relief from the pain is through self knowledge..

In the process of asserting, Al-Ghazali makes many other interesting observations about the
nature of happiness. He points out that there are different potentials within the soul, and that a
corresponding happiness is connected with each potential. Each part of the soul captivate in that
for which it has been created. But the highest function of the soul is the perception of truth;
hence it is the greatest happiness one can acquire.

2. Ethics Of Communication
He says that a person should talk in a very kind way. Their talks should be humble and they try
not to hurt anybody. He encourages everyone to peace, value the life and humanity, kindness,
gentleness, virtue, honesty, and sincerity. Freedom of speech is a right of every person and they
need to communicate so they should know the ethics of communication. Ethics of
communication develops the person overall personality.

3. Revival Of The Religious Sciences

Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences is disciplining the Soul, which focuses on the
internal struggles that every Muslim will face over the course of his lifetime. It included the
positive aspects and good personal characteristics of a person. Beside it he also mentioned the
bodily needs that are natural in all human beings.

CONCLUSION
Western scholars have been so attracted by his account of his spiritual development that they had
paid him far more attention than they have other equally important Muslim thinkers.
 IBN KHULDUN (1331-1406)
INTRODUCTION
Ibn khuldun full name is Wali al-Din Abd Al-Raḥman Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Abi
Bakr Muḥammad Ibn Al-Ḥasan Ibn Khaldun. He was a leading Arab historiographer and
historian, who developed one of the earliest nonreligious philosophies of history, contained in his
masterpiece, the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”). He also wrote a definitive history of
Muslim North Africa he invented modern history. Ibn Khaldun, laid down the foundations of
different fields of knowledge, in particular the science of civilizations. Ibn khuldun also known
as ‘’The man who invented modern history’’.

CONTRIBUTIONS

1. The Muqaddimah: Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History

In 1375, desire solitude from the exhausting business of politics, Ibn Khaldūn took the most
significant step of his life: he sought refuge with the tribe of Awlad Arif, who place him and his
family in the safety of a castle, Qalʿat Ibn Salamah, near what is now the town of Frenda,
Algeria. There he spent four years, “free from all preoccupations,” and wrote his massive
masterpiece, the Muqaddimah, an introduction to history. His original intention, which he
subsequently achieved, was to write a universal history of the Arabs and Berbers, but before
doing so he judged it necessary to discuss historical method, with the aim of providing
the criteria necessary for distinguishing historical truth from error. This led him to formulate
what the 20th-century English historian Arnold Toynbee has described as:

“A philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever
yet been created by any mind in any time or place,”

A statement that goes even beyond the earlier eulogy by Robert Flint:

As a theorist on history he had no equal in any age or country until Vico appeared, more
than three hundred years later. Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were not his peers . . . .
2. Social thought
The work is studded with brilliant observations on historiography, economics, politics, and
education. It is held together by his central concept of ‘’Aṣabiyyah’’ or “social cohesion.” It is
this bond, which arises spontaneously in tribes and other small connection groups, but which can
be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology, that provides the motive force that carries
ruling groups to power. Its unavoidable weakening, due to a complex combination of
psychological, sociological, economic, and political factors, which Ibn Khaldun analyzes
exemplary skill, heralds the decline of a dynasty or empire and prepares the way for a new one,
based on a group bound by a stronger cohesive force.

3. In economics

Ibn khuldun laid down the foundations of different fields of knowledge, in particular the science
of civilization. His significant contributions to economics, however, should place him in the
history of economic thought as a major forerunner, if not the "father," of economics, a title which
has been given to Adam Smith, whose great works were published some three hundred and
seventy years after Ibn Khaldun's death. Not only did Ibn Khaldun plant the germinating seeds of
classical economics, whether in production, supply, or cost, but he also pioneered in
consumption, demand, and utility, the cornerstones of modern economic theory.

REFRENCES

https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/al-ghazali/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/al-Ghazali

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ibn_Khaldun

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ibn-Khaldun