ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 1, Book 3 Chapter 30: Al-Ghazali Part 1 - Metaphysics A. Introduction Al-Ghazālī occupies a position unique in the history of Muslim religious and philosophical thought by whatever standard we may judge him: breadth of learning, originality, or influence. He has been acclaimed as the Proof of Islam (hujjat al-Islam), the Ornament of Faith (zain al-din) and the Renewer of Religion (mujaddid).[^1] Al-Subki (d.

771/1370) went so far in his estimation of him as to claim that if there had been a prophet after Mohammad, al-Ghazālī would have been the man.[^2] To be sure he gathered in his own person all the significant intellectual and religious movements of his time and lived over again in the inwardness of his soul the various spiritual phases developed by Islam. He was, in turn, a canon-lawyer and a scholastic, a philosopher and sceptic, a mystic and a theologian, a traditionist and a moralist.

His position as a theologian of Islam is undoubtedly the most eminent. Through a living synthesis of his creative and energetic personality, he revitalized Muslim theology and reoriented its values and attitudes. His combination of spiritualization and fundamentalism in Islam had such a marked stamp of his powerful personality that it has continued to be accepted by the community since his time.

His outlook on philosophy is characterized by a remarkable originality which, however, is more critical than constructive. In his works on philosophy one is struck by a keen philosophical acumen and penetration with which he gives a clear and readable exposition of the views of the philosophers, the subtlety and analyticity with which he criticizes them, and the candour and open-mindedness with which he accepts them whenever he finds them to be true.

Nothing frightened him nor fascinated him, and through the philosophies of Aristotle and Plotinus and to their Muslim representatives before him, al-Farabi and ibn Sina. The main trends of the religious and philosophical thought of al-Ghazālī, however, came close to the temper of the modern mind. The champions of the modern movement of religious empiricism, on the one hand, and that of logical positivism, on the other, paradoxical though it may seem, would equally find comfort in his works.