Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology

Frank Griffel’s continuing fascination with the career of one of the most significant medieval Muslim thinkers remains – and in this latest offering, he once again enters into the ‘Ghazali debate’, attempting to make sense of his significance and contribution to the intellectual history of Islamic civilisation. Griffel’s study is a nuanced and contextualised study focusing upon Ghazali’s ideas on cosmogony and divine creative agency embedded within a highly useful and evidenced, analytic biography and consideration of the relationship of reason to the other Islamic humanities. Along the way, Griffel makes a number of telling observations. First, Ghazali’s career ought to be treated holistically; the attempt to divide his teachings into the esoteric and exoteric can be quite futile beyond the banal point that Ghazali wrote different works for different readerships. Griffel continues a recent tendency to consider the Revival (Ihya’ [ulum al-din) as a philosophically relevant text along his works in falsafah and kalam. Second, while there are some reliably established editions of the text, the Ghazalian corpus demonstrates a major problem in the study of Muslim intellectual history – the absence of critically established texts that can be the foundation for research. Third, a useful way to deal with academic debate and disagreement might well be the search for a Hegelian synthesis, especially as experts often disagree about the interpretation of precisely the same passages, which themselves are rather fragile. Fourth, the career of Ghazali actually demonstrates, against the nineteenth century consensus on the course of philosophy in Islam, that rational inquiry was both significant and naturalised in Islamic civilisation.