Imam Ghazzali’s Quest For Truth: A Preliminary Survey
Introduction
Abu Hamid ibn Muhammad al-Ghazzali is one of towering figures in Muslim thought. His diverse knowledge in many scope of intellectual fields made him a special figure in Islamic thought. His originality in his struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood put him in par with; but with his own originality and uniqueness upon - certain Western philosophers such as Rene Descartes’s method of doubt, David Hume’s skepticism and Emmanuel Kant’s criticism of pure reason. Thus, it may be reiterated that the thought of al-Ghazzali was not only of his time but of all times. His courageous and energetic quest to find truth and falsehood and of uncertainties of sectarian conflicts during his time are not only attract past and contemporary Muslim scholars to study his thoughts, but also non-Muslim scholars to extensively study his thought in every field of knowledge.
According to MacDonald, he is the equal of Augustine in the philosophical and theological disciplines; by on his side the Aristotelian philosophers of Islam seem beggarly compilers and scholastics. However, Imam al-Ghazzali did not discard philosophy in toto, but he analyzed the practices of the Muslim philosophers of his time and elucidated the wrongdoings of their thoughts according to his religious understandings through the guidance of the Qur’an and the hadith or the tradition. Thus, Imam al-Ghazzali is not upholding the orthodox belief through dogmatic method, but through critical analysis and justification. This can be coined as a ‘dynamic orthodoxy.’ It also worth noted that the intellectual development of Imam al-Ghazzali was dynamic in progress in which, through his work, one can trace the complexity and diverse thought of Imam al-Ghazzali which may explained other elements of intellectual thought that may influenced the world view of al-Ghazzali such as Platonism and Neo-Platonism and even Aristotelian philosophy and logic to counter back to what he perceived as heterodox elements during his age. This notion has been suggested by scholars such as Hava Lazarus Yafeh. However, this is not within this brief essay which gives an emphasis on his life, thought and works.
His Background and Quest for True Knowledge
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali, known in the Western world as Algazel, surnamed Hujjat al-Islam. i.e., “the argument of Islam. He was born in 1058 A.D. at Tus in Khurasan. His father was a pious Sufi dervish who lived a simple and modest life by working as a wool spinner. He very often visited and sat in the company of the fuqaha’, and when he listened to their sermons, he wept and prayed to God to grant him a son that would be a faqih. Just before his death, he entrusted both of his sons, Muhammad al-Ghazzali and Ahmad al-Ghazzali to a pious Sufi dervish.
After being sometime with him, Imam al-Ghazzali went to Jurhan to study with Abu Nasr al-Isma’ili. Then he went to Nayshabur to study at the feet of Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni in the Nizamiyya Academy. He became a favourite student of Imam al-Haramayn due to his exceptional intellectual acumen. He soon began to serve under his master as an assistant teacher until the latter’s death in 1085 A.D. His studies were wide ranging and extensive in nature. Among them were theology, fiqh, usul al-fiqh, science, philosophy, logic, and mysticism. Due to his excellence reputation and vigor in the course of knowledge, Nizam al-Mulk al-Tusi, the governor of Baghdad appointed him as the president of the Nizamiyya Academy of Baghdad, which was the most prestigious higher education in Baghdad during that time when he was still 20 years old. His teaching life was so successful. In one time, there were three hundred students would attend his lecture. Al-Ghazzali has achieved the highest height in his career and his earnings were more than enough to let him to live an affluent life. However, during the course of this interval, Imam al-Ghazzali fell into a deep crisis of spiritual unrest, at the extent of his health, so much that he lost all his appetite and could not teach or even utter a word during his lecture or in expressing his mental torment. This spiritual crisis is no surprise to be understood as since his child, Imam al-Ghazzali was very inquisitive and passionate young man who search after truth and wanted to know the reality of nature as it is. In his autobiography Munqidh min al-Dhalal or Deliverance from Error, he elucidated his natural nature as an ardent seeker of truth since his childhood:
“From the period of adolescence, that is to say previous to reaching my twentieth year to the present time when I have passed my fiftieth, I have ventured into this vast ocean; I have fearlessly sounded its depths, and like a resolute diver, I have penetrated its darkness and dared its dangers and abysses. I have interrogated the beliefs of each sect and scrutinized the mysteries of each doctrine, in order to disentangle truth from error and orthodoxy from heresy. I have never met one who maintained the hidden meaning of the Qur’an without investigating the nature of his belief, nor a partisan of its exterior sense without inquiring into the results of his doctrine. There is no philosopher whose system I have not fathomed, nor theologian the intricacies of whose doctrine I have not followed out.””
Imam al-Ghazzali found out that to achieve certainty and to grasp the reality of all things, he has to free himself from taqlid or blind imitation which is the simple acceptance of religious truths on authority. Imam al-Ghazzali later wrote:
“The thirst for knowledge was innate in me from an early age; it was like a second nature implanted by God, without any will of my part. No sooner had I emerged from boyhood that I had already broken the fetters of tradition and freed myself from hereditary beliefs. Having noticed how easily the children of Christians become Christians, and the children of Muslims embrace Islam, and remembering also the tradition saying ascribed to the Prophet, “Every child is born in fitra, then his parents make him Jew, Christians, or Zoroastrian,” I was moved by a keen desire to learn what was this innate disposition in the child, the nature of accidental belief imposed on him by the authority of his parents and his masters, and finally the unreasoned convictions which he derives from their instructions.”
He later on examined the source of knowledge, namely the epistemological process of knowing. His first attempt was on sense-perception. His interrogation led him to question the validity of knowledge through sense-perception:
“I then set myself earnestly to examine the notions we drive from the evidence of the senses and from the evidence of the senses and from sight in order to see if they could be called in question. The result of a careful examination was that my confidence in them was shaken. Our sight for instance, perhaps the best practiced of all our senses, observes a shadow, and finding it apparently stationary pronounces it devoid of movement. Observation and experience, however, show subsequently that a shadow moves not suddenly, it is true, but gradually and imperceptibly so that it is never really motionless… I then set myself earnestly to examine the notions we derive from the evidence of the senses and from that of the sight in order to see if they could be called in question. The result of a careful examination was that my confidence in them was shaken. Then I said unto myself, ‘Since I cannot trust to the evidence of my senses, I must rely only on intellectual conceptions based on fundamental principles.”
In due course however, his conviction on the legitimacy of intellectual capacity to arrive to truth also started to fall down. The knowledge acquired from reasoning and intellectual discernment and process might be real in relation to the thinker’s present state. However, it might not be true outside the realm of this so-called reality or the present state that is the state of sleep. Thus al-Ghazzali questioned himself – How can we differentiate between the experience of the present state and the experience we perceived when we are asleep?
“Do you not see,” I reflected, “that while asleep you assume your dreams to be indisputably real? Once awake, you recognize them for what they are – baseless chimeras. Who can assure you, then, of the reliability of notions which, when awake, you derive from the senses and from reason? In relation to your present state they may be real; but it is possible also that you may enter upon another state of being which will bear the same relation to your present state as this does to your condition when asleep. In the new sphere you will recognize that the conclusion of reason is only chimeras.”
This is undoubtedly a real state of skepticism when one even questioned the validity of reason and rational deliberation. To this state, no knowledge can be comprehended in its true sense. This may led to total collapse on the ability to derive knowledge from the nature of present realm to find the reality behind it, even to the extent to question the existence of our own self. Thus al-Ghazzali believed that the only mean for human being to perceive reality is only when one is in the state of death. Al-Ghazzali quoted the saying of the Prophet: “Men are asleep; when they die, they wake.” He then quote the word of the Qur’an: “Today We have removed the veil from thine eyes and thy sight is keen.” (Qur’an; al-Qaf, 50:22).
According to al-Ghazzali, when his thought and rational faculties were at the brink of collapse, it is the light from God, which he believed, entered his heart by the grace of God. It brought him to the conviction that this life is real and reasoning should not be dismissed as mere hallucination. If one look to the thought of Descartes, one can see that there is a parallel initial conviction of these two figures on the experience of doubt that led to a confirmation of the legitimacy of reason as tool to perceive reality. However, Descartes stopped at reason, finding certitude in the notion, “Cogito argo sum, and made this conviction as the archetype of his philosophy. Al-Ghazali on the other hand went farther. He founded certainty on the will to believe, the will to accept Divine Grace from the source of all knowledge, i.e., in the proposition “Volo ergo sum. However, this Divine Grace should not lead to irrational or abandonment of the legitimacy of religious ethical values and article of faiths.
According to al-Ghazzali, this experience of doubt leads him to break away from the shackle of Taqlid. Even though Taqlid may offer him peace of mind, Taqlid will not lead him to the conviction of truth. Taqlid may offer a person a peace of mind to abandon the quest for truth and accepted religious conviction from the people surrounding him; parents, spouse, sectarian affiliation, and teachers. It will never offer satisfaction for those who want to grasp the true religious experience through his effort and deliberation. This is really a tall order for anyone to strive for even though it is to the expense of his own peace of mind and comfortable lifestyle.
His Thought
During his time, there was a massive disunity among the Muslims under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate. The rule of Baghdad faced disintegration as the provincial governors gained power. At the time of Imam al-Ghazzali, authority has been questioned on who has the religious authority. In his time confusion was reigning. The political situation during that time can be described as fragile. The real political power at that time was at the hand of the Seljuqs which Nizam al-Mulk was the best example and the Caliph at Baghdad was just a titular ruler. In this confusion and dissension, Nizam al-Mulk was finding what sort of Islam should the state be patronized. Imam al-Ghazzali time and again stressed that the main veil that hinder one to experience the existence of God is religious fanaticism. Religion then thus according to him is not a tool to splinter the society into various sects and parties. Nizam al-Mulk could see that Imam al-Ghazzali is a figure that could bring stability to the state and could bring down the political and social dissension over his rule.
Before the birth of Imam al-Ghazzali until his time, the different sects of Islam often came to a heated dispute among themselves. The disciples of one Imam would be ardent enemies of the followers of another. No sect would tolerate the beliefs of other sects. Al-Ghazzali himself was persecuted at the hands of the theologians, and even his books were burnt in Spain because they preached freedom of thought. Religion became dry and didactic and just for the sake of performing formal practices and rituals. The rationale, ethical significance and wisdom behind these religious practices were ignored and belittled. Some of the theologians taught Islam in order to extract money and gain popularity.
Al-Ghazzali found all the religious sects of his time to be extremely biased, uncompromising and exclusive in nature. Members of one sect hurled other sects as heretics on the ground if slight differences of opinion. Every sect claimed that it alone was in possession of the truth. Al-Ghazzali analyzed each sect in his various works. In the Munqidh, he examined the position of the Batinis or the Ta’limites of the Shi’ite Isma’ilis, the theologians, the Sufis and the different sects of the philosophers. To pacify the different sects he showed in Ihya’ that each of the four great Imam of the fiqh madhhab was a model of pious conduct.
Imam al-Ghazzali in his work Munqidh scrutinized the different sects during his time. There are the theologians, the philosophers, the Ta’limites or the Batiniyyah of the Isma‘ilite Shi‘ite, and the Sufis.
Imam al-Ghazzali categorized the philosophers during his time into three main categories. They are the Theists or Illahiyyun, the Naturalists or the Tabi‘iyun, and the Materialists or the Atheists or the Dahriyun. In his book entitled Tahafut al-Falasifah (Incoherence of the Philosophers), he gave his critics on the thought of the Muslim philosophers particularly al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In this work, as MacDonald outs it he smote the philosophers hip and thigh, he turned the philosophers’ own weapon against them as was done by al-Ash‘ari earlier and proved that which their premises and methods no certainty could be reached. He argues that many of the philosophers doctrines were oisitively false and baseless such as: the eternity and everlastingness of the world; emanation from God intelligences and souls of the celestial spheres and these spheres’ possessing the knowledge of the particulars; delimitation of God’s knowledge merely to universals; denial of miracles based on a view of causation; the denial of bodily resurrection in the life hereafter, etc.
According to Imam al-Ghazzali, he achieved his contentment in his pursuit of knowledge in Sufism:
“I learnt from a sure source that the Sufis are the true pioneers on the path of God: that there is nothing more beautiful than their life, or more praiseworthy than their rule of conduct, or purer than their morality.”
He continued his assays on some of the controversial concept in the world of Sufism:
“The degree of proximity to Deity which they (the Sufis) attain is regarded by some as intermixture of being, (hulul), by others as identification (ittihad), by others as intimate union (wasl). But all these expressions are wrong, as we have explained in our work entitled The Chief Aim. Those who have reached that stage should confine themselves to repeating the verse: What I experience I shall not try to say: Call me happy, but ask me no more.”
In Mishkat al- Anwar (Niche of the Light), al-Ghazzali regarded Mansur al-Hallaj as a great Sufi, but according to him al-Hallaj should not uncover the secret of ecstasy experience to the masses.
