The Grand Ghazalian Synthesis

"Even at the time [Ghazali] was born, more than four centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam itself was in many ways still in the process of being elaborated as a coherent religious system. Broadly speaking, five general trends had established themselves in this regard, and the proponents of each were competing vigorously for the allegiance of Muslim rulers and/or the Muslim masses. These five trends or tendencies may, for convenience, be labelled traditionist legalism, metaphysical philosophy, rational theology, esoteric (batini) Shi'ism, and Sufi mysticism."

--Elton L. Daniel, The Alchemy of Happiness, pp. xxi-xxii.

Al-Ghazali engaged all of the dominant trends of his milieu and chose, from among them, those aspects that he thought would serve the long term interests of his Sunni co-religionists. Judging by the subsequent 1,000 years of Muslim history, his choices were quite sound for, in Daniel's words, he managed to "sort out, prioritize, and synthesize the various religious tendencies of his time into a comprehensible religious system which has remained at the heart of mainstream Sunni Islam ever since" (ibid., xxxiv).

This is quite an achievement for a single intellectual whose only real authority during his lifetime and through the centuries succeeding it has been the force of his rhetoric: for Sunnism never developed a central authority (like the Vatican) capable of promulgating dogma and enforcing allegiance to it.

Orientalist anxieties in the face of such a commanding (and obviously superior) intellectual presence have resorted to blaming al-Ghazali for "destroying Islamic philosophy" and, thereby, depriving Muslims of a robust intellectual tradition. Bizarre as this claim may sound, one finds it stated and re-stated in a variety of ways throughout Western scholarship on Islam. What Ghazali accomplished in the early 12th century, however, was to deliver much of Sunni Muslim thought from the burden of metaphysical speculation--whether in philosophy or theology. Beginning in the early 20th century, intellectuals in the West (from Heidegger and the Existentialists to Wittgenstein, Rorty, and the American pragmatists) have struggled to unburden themselves, with mixed success, of the Plato to Kant metaphysical legacy. On the whole, however, that legacy appears to be one that Western philosophy seems incapable of escaping.

Far from "destroying" Islamic philosophy, Ghazali presided over its transformation into a mode of reflection that has survived the obsolescence of metaphysics and restored falsafa to its late Hellenistic emphasis on social criticism and character formation.