Abu Hamid Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Tusi al-Shafi'i al-Ghazali was born in 1058 C.E.
in Khorasan, Iran. His father died while he was still very young but he had the
opportunity of getting education in the prevalent curriculum at Nishapur and Baghdad. Soon
he acquired a high standard of scholarship in religion and philosophy and was honoured by
his appointment as a Professor at the Nizamiyah University of Baghdad, which was
recognised as one of the most reputed institutions of learning in the golden era of Muslim
history. After a few years, however, he gave up his academic pursuits and worldly interests and
became a wandering ascetic. This was a process (period) of mystical transformation. Later,
he resumed his teaching duties, but again left these. An era of solitary life, devoted to
contemplation and writing then ensued, which led to the authorship of a number of
everlasting books. He died in 1128 C.E. at Baghdad. Ghazali's major contribution lies in religion, philosophy and sufism. A number of
Muslim philosophers had been following and developing several viewpoints of Greek
philosophy, including the Neoplatonic philosophy, and this was leading to conflict with
several Islamic teachings. On the other hand, the movement of sufism was assuming such
excessive proportions as to avoid observance of obligatory prayers and duties of Islam.
Based on his unquestionable scholarship and personal mystical experience, Ghazali sought
to rectify these trends, both in philosophy and sufism. In philosophy, Ghazali upheld the approach of mathematics and exact sciences as
essentially correct. However, he adopted the techniques of Aristotelian logic and the
Neoplatonic procedures and employed these very tools to lay bare the flaws and lacunae of
the then prevalent Neoplatonic philosophy and to diminish the negative influences of
Aristotelianism and excessive rationalism. In contrast to some of the Muslim philosophers,
e.g., Farabi, he portrayed the inability of reason to comprehend
the absolute and the infinite. Reason could not transcend the finite and was
limited to the observation of the relative. Also, several Muslim philosophers had held
that the universe was finite in space but infinite in time. Ghazali argued that an
infinite time was related to an infinite space. With his clarity of thought and force of
argument, he was able to create a balance between religion and reason, and identified
their respective spheres as being the infinite and the finite, respectively. In religion, particularly mysticism, he cleansed the approach of sufism of its excesses
and reestablished the authority of the orthodox religion. Yet, he stressed the importance
of genuine sufism, which he maintained was the path to attain the absolute truth. He was a prolific writer. His immortal books include Tuhafut al-Falasifa (The
Incoherence of the Philosophers), Ihya al-'Ulum al-Islamia (The Rivival of the
Religious Sciences), "The Beginning of Guidance and his Autobiography",
"Deliverance from Error". Some of his works were translated into European
languages in the Middle Ages. He also wrote a summary of astronomy. Ghazali's influence was deep and everlasting. He is one of the greatest theologians of
Islam. His theological doctrines penetrated Europe, influenced Jewish and Christian
Scholasticism and several of his arguments seem to have been adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas
in order to similarly reestablish the authority of orthodox Christian religion in the
West. So forceful was his argument in the favour of religion that he was accused of
damaging the cause of philosophy and, in the Muslim Spain, Ibn Rushd
(Averros) wrote a rejoinder to his Tuhafut.
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