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7 Al-Kind, Akhbr qut Mir in Rhuvon Guest (ed.), The Governors and Judges of Egypt
(Leiden: Brill, 1912), p. 55.
8 Al-Kind, Akhbr qut Mir, p. 66.
9 Il sagit du frre dAsm. Il laurait achet pour 500 dinars (noter la dprciation du codex au
l des annes) (al-Maqrz, al-Mawi, IV, part. 1, p. 31).
10 Al-Maqrz, al-Mawi, IV, part. 1, p. 31.
11 Ce codex dAsm est dj voqu (pour la priode fatimide) par A. Mez, The Renaissance
of Islam (London: Luzac, 1937), p. 338.
12 Ibn ajar, Raf al-ir, p. 215. Al-Maqrz cumule les deux : il ordonna de corriger ce qui
tait crit et de changer le feuillet (ce qui ne semble pas cohrent : pourquoi changer le feuillet
sil a t corrig ?).

Al-Ghazls Philosophical Theology. By Frank Griffel. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2009. Pp. 412. 45.00.
The brute fact of his unparalleled role in the development of Sunn Islam is not the
only reason that al-Ghazl goes on engaging historians of Muslim thought. His deep
impact came from mastering and reconciling an array of disciplines and apparently
antithetical standpoints. The enigmatic subtlety of the resulting teachings the ne
details of the Ghazlian synthesis excites the interpretive ingenuity of scholars in an
on-going effort to elicit a denitive Ghazlian system. The scope suggested by this
books title somewhat contrasts with its tight focus as it runs its course its main
concern turns out to be with al-Ghazls causality, though many other germane issues
are treated; cosmological, epistemological, and even legal. But the focus on causation
is of disproportionate value in reconstructing the bigger edice and retrieving the true
al-Ghazl. For central to his overall project was his mediation between, and partial
integration of, Asharism and Avicennism. His causal theory in turn lay at the core of
this intellectual feat, and was critical for the success or failure of the attempted
accommodation of the two isms. Griffels book brings out, through painstaking
analysis of al-Ghazls relevant discussions, how elegantly he resolved the radically
occasionalist worldview of Asharism with the radically naturalistic worldview of
Avicennism.
The books earlier chapters give a context for the involved theoretical discussions
to come in its second half. Thus, al-Ghazls biography is carefully reassessed in
the opening chapter and questions of the precise chronology of events are revisited;
in the second chapter there is a bid to map the Ghazlian school and trace its main
exponents. A challenge in xing the chronology in the rst chapter is to disentangle
reality from self-presentation, al-Ghazls history from his historiography, the mans
biography from his autobiography. Griffels considered scepticism leads him to
discredit some of the most salient features of the popular version of events. For

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example, the ten years al-Ghazl spent as a renunciant in Damascus

(according, at least, to its local lore), are argued to have been, in reality, no more
than six months (pp. 445). Again, on intricate grounds Griffel judges suspect
the famous episode in feel, almost lmic which sees the earnest young
scholar taking three years to internalise his notes after retrieving them from
brigands who had robbed him on his way back to s from studies in Jurjn. Possibly
the gure of al-Ghazl has replaced an original, less famous, protagonist in the
retelling (pp. 278).
Paradoxically, had al-Ghazl himself been the origin of this last anecdote, which
he is not, it would by no means have enhanced its authority, in Griffels terms.
Picking up on views broached by Abd al-Dim al-Baqar as long ago as 1943 in his
Itirft al-Ghazl aw kayfa arrakha al-Ghazl nafsahu (How al-Ghazl Created
His Own Historiography), he takes al-Ghazls famous confessional work, the
Munqidh, as well as other statements, to be image management, at least in part. It
is implausible, for instance, that he lacked any acquaintance with philosophy prior
to mastering it over a mere three-year period, studying it in free moments during
his routine of teaching 300 students at the Baghdad Nimiyya college, and
almost immediately formulating his momentous refutation, Tahfut al-falsifa
(The Incoherence of the Philosophers). It is instead judged likelier that there
was a long period of gradual research in this eld after al-Ghazl left his studies with
al-Juwayn in 465/1072 and nally took up his position at the Nimiyya some
nineteen years later (p. 35). The true timescale would thus have no proportion with the
one reported.
His claim to have not practised sm prior to his entry into seclusion in response
to the crisis of 488/1095 is likewise questioned (p. 42). An erstwhile student
of al-Ghazl, Ab Bakr b. al-Arab, instead species the date at which the
master accepted the f path and made himself free for what it requires as having
been 486/1093. The date is only marginally earlier but oddly disconcerting as it puts
the shift in the very thick of al-Ghazls high-prole activity at the Baghdad
Nimiyya and spoils the clear dialectical form of the autobiography, its psychological
urgency and dening message of personal revolution through crisis. Griffel proposes
that al-Ghazls tidier dating of his f conversion may be owed to Islamic
hagiographical conventions, as he turned forty in 488/1095, and other notable gures,
not only Abl-asan al-Ashar, but also the Prophet himself underwent momentous
transformations at that age. Griffel even puts quotation marks around the whole
conversion event, explored with such grim realism in the Munqidh, and leans toward
a reading of al-Ghazls crisis in terms of the established literary trope of
Su repentance (tawba) (p. 43). The harsh lessons and life changes are viewed
as dramatisation, presumably pedagogic or even polemical in intent. The trend is
instead to read al-Ghazls oeuvre and views as more consistent and discreetly

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unied: Although the weight of certain motifs in al-Ghazls writing changes after
488/1095, none of his theological or philosophical positions transform from what they
were before (p. 43).
In Griffels view, the true reason that that year was pivotal is that al-Ghazl thereafter
shunned the patronage and teaching institutions of the rulers. This was mainly
spurred, he argues, by pious scrupulosity over the legitimacy of his paymasters funds
(pp. 434) surely a vital point, but perhaps symbolic of a deeper discomfort.
Though his premise of the corpus basic doctrinal unity makes Griffel disinclined to
mark out al-Ghazls different voices to any extent, is it not possible that he had come
to hear his own ofcial voice, that of his persona as Imm al-Irq, etc. under the
Seljuqs, as a travesty of the inner man? He no longer felt able to serve the old public
agenda with sincerity.
At any rate, another of the myths dealt with is that of al-Ghazls subsequent
ten years of seclusion, as, in real terms, there was no seclusion. The issue here
was, again, al-Ghazls retreat from his earlier ofcial teaching prole, not his
retreat from teaching per se. Uzla (seclusion) did not actually signify meditative
quietism, but simply withdrawal from public ofce. In fact al-Ghazl remained
extremely active, not least as a teacher, working from his zwiya-convent in s,
and earlier in similar foundations in Damascus, Jerusalem and Baghdad. The zwiya
and khnqh were in effect simply independent madris (pp. 501). This critical,
even revisionist, take on the Munqidh is only one facet of Griffels biographical
chapter. Partly through its use of lateral sources, not least al-Ghazls own letters, it
overows with intriguing ndings and fresh suggestions. A last ourish is that, far
from being lost, al-Ghazls nal resting place is probably identiable with the
Hrniyya mausoleum in abarn-s, which surely has nothing to do with the caliph
Hrn al-Rashd and is instead stylistically close to the mausoleum in Merv of Sanjar,
the great Seljuq prince contemporary with al-Ghazl (pp. 589). In place, date and
scale, it ts.
A discussion of al-Ghazls followers in the second chapter gives some esh to the
notion of a Ghazlian tradition: Ab Bakr b. al-Arab, Asad al-Mayhan,
Muammad b. Yay al-Janz, Ibn Tmart, Ayn al-Qut al-Hamadhn and
also other gures like Sharaf al-Dn al-Masd and Ibn Ghayln al-Balkh who were,
at least, Ghazlian in spirit. Indeed, marking out al-Ghazls direct debtors from
separate purveyors of the same broad outlook to which he was himself heir, is not
easy. The more philosophical Asharism linked with al-Ghazl already stirs in his
teacher al-Juwayn and came thoroughly to typify the Nimiyya at Nishpr.
Moreover, though the transfer of this ethos to the Baghdad Nimiyya was doubtless
partly due to al-Ghazls close links with the college, it remained an ethos with
its own life. What Shahrastn, Ibn Khaldn and others referred to as the arqat

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al-mutaakhkhirn, the Ashar via moderna, is not coterminous with al-Ghazl, nor
may we call it Ghazlianism.
Some of the Ghazlians discussed here have impressive, independent credentials,
such as Asad al-Mayhan, whose work al-Talqa (The Notes) wedded syllogism to
Islamic jurisprudence and was still in use at the Baghdad Nimiyya long after
his death. Al-Mayhan seems to have been in step with, rather than in the footsteps of,
al-Ghazl an admirer but not necessarily a follower. Though his deep combination
of religious learning with Avicennan philosophical currents surely corresponds with
the Ghazlian zeitgeist, he had formidable links of his own with the Avicennan
tradition, having studied with Lawkar, who had been the student of no less a gure
than Bahmanyr b. Marzbn, Ibn Sns great disciple.
The case of Ibn Tmart (d. 524/1130) seems of special signicance since he initiated
an entire religious and dynastic movement, the Almohads, in the Maghrib and the
Iberian Peninsula, putting al-Ghazls teaching on a truly global footing and carrying
it to the western extreme of the Islamic world. But despite the popular view that
Ibn Tmart met al-Ghazl, or was even a direct student of his at Baghdad, his
supposed mentor had already moved east, back to Khurasn, by the date of his stay
there (499500/11067). Griffel, however, sifts Ibn Tmarts writings for traces of
inuence (p. 80), nding a clear echo of al-Ghazl in his drive to combine
Gods absolute determination of everything with a universe of extensive, elaborate
cause-effect relations: [Gods] determination follows an undisturbed calculus
(isb l yukhtalla) and an unbroken order (p. 80). Even in such a teaching though,
gauging Ibn Tmarts exact debt seems hard, since framing secondary causal
sequences as divine habit is found in al-Juwayn, and was anyway developed by him
from the original lexicon of Asharism with its key notion of Gods custom (dat
Allh).
Perhaps especially rewarding are the chapters nal sections on Ayn al-Qut
al-Hamadhn and the anonymous allegory, The Lion and the Diver. This sixth/
twelfth century story of a jackal, modelled on the tenth chapter of Kalla wa-dimna, is
found by Griffel to be an allegorisation of al-Ghazls life and circumstances. For
instance, the jackal (Ibn w) is known in the fable as the diver (al-ghaww),
which was al-Ghazls favourite metaphor for his own deeply inquiring personality.
The jackal renders faithful advice to the lion king, but nds that his situation has
become untenable and ees to become an ascetic, much as did al-Ghazl. In fact the
reference seems not to be to his famous ight from Baghdad in 488/1095 but, rather,
to his later circumstances with Suln Sanjar, for whom he wrote a Persian mirror for
princes, and before whom he had to defend himself against the open hostility of other
religious scholars.

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Al-Hamadhn, for his part, was a disciple of al-Ghazls ecstatic younger brother
Amad and was executed in 525/1131 by the Seljuqs. He had the thought-provoking,
not to say provocative, teaching that true seekers only reach higher kinds of belief and
transcend a merely metaphorical form of Islam (al-Islm al-majz) through a
judicious element of unbelief an intentionally shocking paradox, typical of sm.
Griffel brilliantly traces the formulation to al-Ghazl himself, rather than to Ibn Sns
al-Risla al-aawiyya, the text cited by al-Hamadhn as its origin, though it is quite
absent from it. Just as in al-Hamadhns reference, al-Ghazl distinguishes four
levels of belief in the thirty-fth book of his magnum opus, the Iy ulm al-dn
(Revival of the Religious Sciences); and again like al-Hamadhn later, al-Ghazl
states that the ultimate degree of faith requires a portion of unbelief. It may be,
however, that al-Ghazl and his follower had quite different views of what this
unbelief exactly meant. In the Iy reference, al-Ghazl is clearly concerned with
Gods unity (tawd) and takes the highest belief (by turns, unbelief) to involve
acknowledging that all existence is divine. But if Griffel is correct, al-Hamadhns
supposedly benecial unbelief concerns something else, namely, that the world is
from a certain point of view (i.e. that of the four prime elements) co-eternal with God
(p. 85), just as Ibn Sn claimed.
Though he is known as a dedicated Ghazlian, by a strange twist al-Hamadhns
savage end is partly owed to al-Ghazls own contribution to the Islamic law on
excommunication (takfr). Griffel explores this contribution in detail in his fourth
chapter and in fact has a large earlier study of the wider topic.1 The emerging picture
is an ironic one, typical of al-Ghazls contribution. Though he seals a juristic trend
which in theory harshens the law, his position is consciously liberal in impact and
what seems restrictive proves derestictive.
Thus, according to Griffel (pp. 104 ff.), excommunication (i.e. takfr, the
condemnation of a position as tantamount to unbelief, kufr, or of a person that held
it as tantamount to an indel, kr) had originally been casual and widespread in
Muslim polemical discourse. Such condemnations were a normal function of sectarian
polemics because they were understood to be humanly unenforceable. They simply
amounted to the opinion that the posthumous fate of the individual concerned would
be pitiable. However, through developments within his own Sh school shortly
before al-Ghazls time, the category of unbelief was assimilated in law to that of
apostasy (irtidd), more specically, the clandestine apostasy of someone outwardly
accepting but privately rejecting the faith (i.e. zandaqa). This was a dangerous shift of
categorisation, since apostasy could indeed be prosecuted before the law, and was not
simply Gods affair. Al-Ghazls severity therefore turns out to be part of an attempt
to disarm this situation and reconrm margins of tolerance in practice. While he
supports the equation of unbelief with apostasy, and the capital nature of the crime of
apostasy, he is masterly in carefully circumscribing what can truly be termed

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unbelief (kufr), as distinct from a series of closely associated categories which are
neither capital offences nor even necessarily within the scope of lawyers sanctions
categories such as misguidance (all), error (khaia), and innovation (bida). These
are dened by al-Ghazl as not prosecutable in the manner of unbelief, and those
guilty of them may not be said to be unbelievers, i.e. to have apostatised. Al-Ghazl
thus simultaneously tightens and disarms Islamic law in this area; his position is
actually both lenitive and rigorist, or even lenitive as rigorist.
Even in the theoretically wholly non-negotiable category of unbelief (kufr) itself,
Griffel brings out the generosity of al-Ghazls stance. For his theory accommodates
a potentially wide range of interpretations of revelation as conceivable within belief,
such that even adopting a more attenuated understanding of the revelation may remain
acceptable, as long as the revelation is not actually being rejected by the person
concerned, as untruth. Kufr means giving the lie to the Prophet, i.e. taking statements
authoritatively transmitted from him as insincere. Or in other terms, it is asserting that
the referent of the Prophets words lacks existence (wujd). But, as al-Ghazl insists
in his Fayal al-tafriqa (Decisive Criterion), wujd is not an unequivocal idea.
There are at least ve kinds of wujd, and only one of them is the regular, concrete,
external kind, al-wujd al-dht (p. 107). The others (sensorial, imaginational,
conceptual and analogous existence) are subject to hermeneutic interpretation.
Al-Ghazl understandably challenges the interpreter to demonstrate that concrete
existence is impossible for any references whose literal sense is being set aside the
so-called qnn al-tawl (law of interpretation). But the fact remains that in his
teaching there is much scope for someone remaining a Muslim while saying that what
the Prophet asserted is not literally true.
Philosophers in Ibn Sns mould are surely the main group in al-Ghazls mind in
these legal mitigations. The second half of the book in one way or another concerns
al-Ghazls skilful mediation between this group and the predominant Ashar
orthodoxy which he famously represented. While in the polemical context of the
Tahfut al-falsifa he fully convicts the group for unbelief on three scores (their denial
of the worlds temporal creation, of Gods knowledge of particulars, and of the
physicality of the afterlife), he can yet be seen to import much of its worldview.
Causality, Griffels main focus, is the key to this importation. Through al-Ghazls
causal theory, the rich cosmology and science of Avicennism can be converted for use
in a framework of Asharism. This should be put with care, however. Though Griffel
presents more than enough to show how al-Ghazl explains their real mutuality and
brings them together in a single, coherent theory, he prefers the idea that al-Ghazls
nal stance is agnostic, not fact-assertive. Both are viable, co-ordinate cosmological
theories, but the matter rests in the realm of speculation and, according to the author,
al-Ghazl is ultimately non-committal. This may strike us as philosophically
disappointing, yet it does t with other traits of al-Ghazls thought such as the

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radical scepticism of the early part of his autobiography, his express intention in the
Tahfut not so much to refute the philosophers as simply to show that some of their
claims are uncertain, and a f sensibility accenting practice over dogma doctrines
are means not ends, instrumental to the moral and spiritual life, which are what nally
count.
That said, an exciting sense that a real Ghazlian system looms in these pages is hard
to avoid. Its shape might be sketched tentatively as follows. Its starting point can be
taken as al-Ghazls nominalism and, more important, his radical critique of
secondary causality. Yet these Ashar stances are but the threshold. He goes on to
reinstate the entire groundwork of deductive thought and secondary causality but does
this in a way which makes God minutely and continuously responsible, in line with
occasionalism. However, the fact that this minute responsibility is enacted by God
from above the entire spatio-temporal realm and is located at the eternal level of Gods
ruling (ukm), means that in practice there is the self-same necessity and xity in
al-Ghazls cosmos as in Ibn Sns. The unfolding of the cosmos, moment by
moment, simply reects analytically what is decided beyond time by the divine will,
and is present synthetically on the Well-guarded Tablet. Though the elaborate agency
of al-Ghazls God is wholly free, it is also wholly above time entailing de facto
immutability from our time-bound vantage point. Al-Ghazl actually adopts Ibn
Sns notion that the content of the world is necessary in the sense of necessary by
another (wjib bil-ghayr). But he sees Gods free will, not His very essence, as what
imposes its necessity. The reality of Gods will is thus safeguarded, whereas it seems
to be sacriced in Ibn Sns variety of determinism, which makes Gods very essence
what imposes necessity on the cosmos by an apparently involuntary, automatic
process.
There is clearly not room here to cover all sides of the above picture as it emerges
from Griffels research. Al-Ghazls nominalism, (discussed, for example, at pp.
1767) is an epistemic parallel of his occasionalist causal theory. In Griffels usage,
nominalism may apply not just to universals but to intellectual judgements generally.
The simple problem here is congruence (taba): what assures us that such judgements
truly relate to objective realities in the world about us? Al-Ghazls answer is that
there is intrinsically little to assure us and no necessary congruence. The generic
patterns, universals, causal sequences, etc. by which our minds interpret the world,
may have no actual t with it. A related, ner problem is that of inductive reasoning
(istiqr), and the challenge of how a universal judgement can be generated from only
particular experimental instances (discussed at pp. 20413), known elsewhere as the
problem of incomplete induction. Al-Ghazl here turns to his own purposes an idea
from Ibn Sn, that in such cases a condensed syllogistic inference is hidden in the
mind, which concludes that the observed causal pattern is not just random (ittifqan).

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Journal of Quranic Studies

Al-Ghazl takes over this concept of a hidden syllogistic power (quwwa qiysiyya
khayya).
For him, there can in truth be but one causal ground for all such judgements. Though
he lacks the top-down epistemological guarantee assumed in Ibn Sns thought
(whereby the process of reason is taken to arise through contact with a higher mind,
the so-called active intellect), al-Ghazl ends up invoking an even more radically
transcendent basis for the process: God Himself. Thus, as was earlier argued by
Michael Marmura and Ulrich Rudolph, al-Ghazls understanding of human
knowledge is every bit as occasionalist as his theory of causality in the outside
world. As Griffel states: He argues that God creates our knowledge of the world
habitually in accord with it (p. 155). Incidentally, this epistemology bears striking
comparison with that of thirteenth-century AD Franciscan proponents of divine
illumination, such as Bonaventure, whose starting point was similarly the
ineradicable uncertainty of the sensory world and the human mind left to itself; and
later, in the seventeenth to eighteenth century, Nicolas Malebranche had an
occasionalist epistemology mirroring his own occasionalist causal theory, in a
manner uncannily echoing al-Ghazls earlier teachings. Though Griffel seems to
devalue somewhat al-Ghazls autobiography as a source of authentic insights into
his intellectual development, it in fact articulates this distinctive epistemology in
highly dramatic and personal terms. For is not al-Ghazls famous crisis of
scepticism, with which that text starts, precisely concerned with a traumatic rst-hand
exploration of the uncertainty of our faculties and our supposed sources of knowledge,
in the absence of Gods direct intervention? This critical early episode can clearly be
read as dramatising and epitomising his wider noetic theory.
Al-Ghazls occasionalist theory of causation in the world at large is mainly
presented by Griffel through his close analysis of the seventeenth discussion of the
Tahfut. In this justly well-known discussion, al-Ghazl attacks the Aristotelian
theory that essential powers, some active and others passive, inhere in the very natures
of things in the world, and explain causal relations. On this view, in al-Ghazls
example, re supposedly has an active power (quwwa filiyya) to combust and cotton
a passive power (quwwa munfaila) to be combusted. But al-Ghazl, in a direct
preguring of Hume, insists that the most we may honestly conclude from processes
like combustion is a phenomenon of observed concomitance. That is, cause X and
effect Y simply occur side by side (alal-taswuq). The fact that Y exists together
with (inda) X, can by no means be taken to prove that Y exists through (bi-) X. The
deeper background of the critique is of course al-Ghazls Asharism, which holds
that the only real agent in existence is God, who directly creates everything, mutually
disposed in a single gestalt, at every moment. In line with this, al-Ghazl argues that
the title of agent or maker (fil) can ultimately only apply to God, and to nothing
else. This is because, according to al-Ghazl, the precondition for true agency is

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having total knowledge of the act made, and only God has this (p. 184). Compare this
with Avicennism, in which even an inanimate entity like re can be termed fil. In
his major treatment of Ashar thought, the Itiqd, al-Ghazl is true to the school in
opposing the belief that anything other than God can be ascribed with the power of
generation and producing effects (tawallud) (p. 203).
Another facet of this picture is modern possible worlds semantics, argued by Griffel
as being foreshadowed in al-Ghazls causal theory. The thesis he pieces together
(pp. 162 ff) is along the following lines. Aristotle, and Ibn Sns philosophical
predecessors, viewed modality (i.e. whether a thing is necessary, possible, or
impossible) in narrowly statistical terms, that is, as following from the actual
occurrence of things in the world. Ibn Sn next moved in a direction conducive to
possible world semantics, but supposedly did not get there, since, though his
consideration shifted from the statistical occurrence of actual things to their status in
the mind, he was held back by his rigid determinism. In his understanding, only what
is could be, and the state of affairs must be as it is; there is no possible alternative to
the given situation. Finally, through Asharism even prior to al-Ghazl (notably, in
al-Juwayn), a truly possible worlds approach to modality emerged in Islam.
According to Griffel, this comes down to the model known as preponderation (tarj),
or specication (takh), which, it is argued, embodied a concept of possibility
which denitely involved synchronic alternatives or compossible worlds. These
alternatives to what is actually the case can be entertained in our minds and are
selected or rejected by Gods will. When X occurs this is through God selecting
(or specifying or preponderating) it over the synchronic alternative -X. The upshot of
this is, again, to stress the openness of creative scenarios from the standpoint of God,
who freely generates the actual state of affairs from amongst all substitutable ones.
But there is some slight concern in this account that it is too tidy in its distinctions,
since Ibn Sns causal theory in fact also fundamentally involves the concepts of
preponderation and specication (see, for example, Ishrt, 4th nama, fal 10; and
5th nama, fal 10). It may therefore, on closer scrutiny, prove less far than presented
from al-Ghazls possible worlds approach. This is in step with al-Griffels view of
Ibn Sns doctrine (pp. 13341), as being, at bottom, a form of deism, obfuscated by
the philosopher to avoid condemnation as patently blasphemous. Notwithstanding the
fact that this is a study of Ibn Sns great critic, a worry stirs that some hostile cliches
about Avicennan thought are in danger of going unscrutinised.
Al-Ghazl was keenly aware of the need to rene his occasionalist cosmology,
to get away from any prospect of indeterminacy or caprice being involved in
Gods causation in practice. He mentions preposterous absurdities or hideous
impossibilities (mult shana), such as a book being left, only to reappear as a
boy, or a lethal re confronting someone who lacks all awareness of it. The world is
evidently not chaotic like that, says al-Ghazl, and this is because God wills to

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recreate it according to predictable norms. This, of course, is the venerable Ashar

idea of Gods self-imposed convention (dat Allh/sunnat Allh), but al-Ghazl
explores the full scope of this (originally, Quranic) seed-idea to develop a degree of
barely suspected harmony with Avicennan cosmology. Griffel even claims that he
insinuates that the conventions (awid) are attributable to creatures, as much as to
God, making his reworking of the idea even closer to the philosophical notion of
natures (abi) inherent in the world and explaining its behaviour (p. 202).
Al-Ghazls reinterpretation of the idea partly depends on Ibn Sns ontology. We
end with a position which is in principle occasionalist, but in practice is a form of
natural determinism, by way of an application of Ibn Sns (originally, al-Frbs)
distinction of intrinsic contingency (al-imkn bil-dht) and extrinsic necessity
(al-wujb bil-ghayr) in one and the same thing from different points of view. In its
intrinsic contingency, the world need not be at all (thus, occasionalism and continuous
re-creation is entailed in consideration of the world). But in its extrinsic necessity, that
is, as necessitated by Gods habit, the world must be as it is (thus, determinism is
entailed in consideration of God). It is vital that in this Ghazlian adaptation of Ibn
Sns key distinction, the source of the worlds necessity is stressed as being Gods
will, as stably expressed in His habit. Here, then, is a strictly predictable, necessitarian
universe which is yet the pure epiphenomenon of divine will. The natural universe of
Ibn Sn, the potential subject of empirical inquiry and scientic reason, is fully
identied with the supernatural universe of Al-Ashar a lambent play of Gods
immediate activity. In place of the primitive occasionalist intuition simply opposing
God to His effects, al-Ghazls occasionalism accents the interjacent reality of Gods
custom, fully identied with the hierarchic and sequential mechanisms of secondary
causation. Though supercially contradictory, in his eyes the two cosmologies truly
hold for the one cosmos, a split perspective on a single reality, perhaps akin to the
wave-particle duality of modern quantum theory.
There are, admittedly, technical conicts in the foundations of the two cosmologies
which al-Ghazl seems never to address directly. While al-Ghazl and Ibn Sn
both acknowledge that some things are outright impossibilities, the expectation is that
al-Ghazl restricts them more than Ibn Sn, to uphold the scope of Gods freedom
and exercise of will. Al-Ghazl indeed connes the category of what is inherently
impossible, even for God, to logic, so that to violate the principle of noncontradiction, say, is under no circumstances conceivable, even for the Creator, as
is to afrm the more specic while denying the more general, as is to afrm the
two while denying the one (i.e. denying a subsets existence, when its whole set is
acknowledged to exist) (pp. 1589). But recent interpreters of al-Ghazl argue that
when this short list of purely logical impossibilities is really examined, he can be seen
to be discreetly ushering in much of the worldview of the philosophers. In particular,
the second and third of the above impossibilities, if applied to the genera (ajns) of

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Aristotelian science, seem to keep Gods viable activity to within natural laws and the
entire apparatus of Aristotelian hylemorphism (p. 159). Al-Ghazl evidently judges
that the transforming of genera (qalb al-ajns) is impossible even for God. The
problem here, however, as highlighted by Griffel, is exactly what al-Ghazl means by
genus. It may well be, he argues, that al-Ghazl is not referring to genera in the
elaborate Aristotelian sense at all, but to Ashar genera. There are only two in the
highly simple ontology of Asharism: atoms and their accidents, or rather bodies made
of atoms and the accidents which can only subsist in these bodies. If this is indeed
what al-Ghazl means, then Gods activity is after all unconned by most standards,
the viable transformations within these two great divisions being quite limitless. God
could, for example, give the accident of motion to an inanimate body, such that a
cadaver moved.
Al-Ghazls silence here on what he means by genus is linked to his yet more
fundamental silence on what he really thinks about atomism, a silence which Griffel
does not penetrate, any more than could Richard Frank in his Al-Ghazl and the
Asharite School. Frank suggested, at most, certain subtle qualications of atomism
by al-Ghazl in his Ashar treatises, and that in the Iy and later works such as the
Mishkt al-anwr (Niche of Lights) he apparently introduced clear differentiations
between the corporeal and spiritual, the sublunary and celestial, etc. proper to
Avicennan, not Ashar, physical theory. But this is an issue which would have to be
tackled head on in any serious brokerage between Ashar and Avicennan
cosmologies, for the whole occasionalist worldview builds on the discontinuous,
atomistic physics of classical Asharism and, conversely, the starting point of
Avicennan physics is atomisms refutation. This digital-analog fault line within the
medieval Muslim mind is not just casually bridged.
It becomes clear from Griffels book that a prime element in al-Ghazls own
solution for bridging his paradigms came to him straight from sm. The concept
in question is trusting in, or delegating to, God (al-tawakkul alllh). It is
intriguing how al-Ghazl at least in his Iy adopts this denitive concept
of Islamic mysticism, a fundamental habitus or station in the individual mystics
self-development, and recongures it as a key with a wider cosmological application.
The concept, however, retains its fundamental reference to the inner development of
the believer and remains an index of his consciousness. To this reader at least, this
strongly suggests that the essential message of al-Ghazls autobiography is to be
taken seriously: he primarily unlocked his intellectual and spiritual impasses through
sm. In the f approach there is no insight without self-purication and no
objectivity isolable from ones subjective development. He speaks, then, of two
primary degrees of tawakkul in relation to cosmology. The preliminary level of
cosmological trust involves an attitude of acceptance towards Gods custom. He
presents this in the thirty-fth book of the Iy through a rather laboured exploration

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of the metaphor of delegating ones legal affairs to an attorney or solicitor (wakl)

(discussed at p. 186). A second, higher degree of cosmological tawakkul (pp. 1934)
involves a deepening of this attitude. It extends condence beyond the patterned
regularity of the world unfolding in time before us, to its transcendental focal point
and source beyond time, namely, the Well-guarded Tablet. The critical achievement of
this deeper tawakkul is that it roots Gods custom above the merely temporal,
circumstantial level, in a supratemporal, absolutely xed, ground. As Griffel says:
The contingent correlations that we experience in Gods universe are the necessary
results of a coherent and comprehensive plan of creation that exists from eternity
(p. 194). In effect, al-Ghazl has instated philosophical nature through a mystical
pathway a form of God-consciousness. This reading of his achievement is given
delightfully graphic conrmation in the parable of the competing artists (pp. 2634).
Though perhaps better known from Nim and Rm, we learn that the allegory is
found earlier than either, in the twenty-rst book of al-Ghazls Iy. The story
speaks of a kings challenge to a group of Byzantine and Chinese artists to paint a
chamber according to their quite separate styles and methods. Whereas the Byzantine
painters work up a positive depiction of creation in lavish colour, the Chinese
approach is to clean and polish their wall so perfectly that it acts as a mirror. The result
of the competition is then two wholly indistinguishable images. In this parable, the
Byzantine and Chinese artists symbolise the philosophers and the f mystics,
respectively.
It is in his Mishkt al-anwr that we witness the true extent to which al-Ghazls
own depiction of the cosmos came to mirror that of the philosophers. Near the end of
Al-Ghazls Philosophical Theology, Griffel attempts his own decryption of the
philosophical allusions of the vitally important Veils section within this work, and
his detective skills do not fail to impress. This section is, essentially, a Ghazlian
doxology, but one in which the exact names of the religious groupings are never made
explicit. One point is, however, clear: the index of elevation within al-Ghazls
hierarchy of beliefs is the philosophical height, i.e. the transcendence, of a given
groups concept of divinity. It seems, then, that all the parties concerned in the higher
echelons of his scheme, the groups veiled by veils of pure light, have theologies and
cosmologies usually classed as philosophical. A rst group is identied by Griffel as
pre-Aristotelian philosophers who conceived of the heavens as a single entity, and
viewed God as its moving force. He suggests that this may also correspond with
kalm cosmologies which reduced the universe to a single physical class, as with
atomism. A higher group is identied by Griffel with Aristotle and the cosmologists
who followed him most closely. These accepted a plurality of cosmic levels, a whole
hierarchy of spheres, and viewed God as the direct mover of the outermost, starless
sphere. A yet higher group is then distinguished by al-Ghazl, who further underlined
Gods transcendence by proposing that the outermost sphere is in fact not moved by

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God himself but by a great angel, itself obedient to God. The reference is solidly
identied by Griffel as being to al-Farbs and Ibn Sns cosmology. The most
puzzling, controversial problem of decryption relates to al-Ghazls highest group.
For he says that an ultimate level of teaching insists that even this last cosmological
doctrine fails to elevate God sufciently above the realm of multiplicity. According to
this group, the one obeyed (al-mut) by the angel who moves the outermost sphere,
is still beneath the true God. In this teaching, the Obeyed One is an exalted
intermediary between the entire cosmic realm of multiplicity and the absolutely
inconceivable godhead.
Twenty years ago, in a seminal article (Ghazl and Religionswissenschaft),
Hermann Landolt argued that the only viable candidate for this mysterious,
anonymous group would be Fimid period Isml thinkers, who declared God to
transcend His Logos-Command, thought of as a kind of demiurge. This is, of course,
very surprising, given al-Ghazls highly public censure of Ismlism. Griffel
himself rejects the identication, though he confesses that there are thought-provoking
parallels. He demonstrates that al-Ghazl had an understanding of Fimid thought
which was seemingly compromised by ignorance of the actual texts. Instead, his own
thesis (p. 282) is that al-Ghazl formulates the perspective in question by a simple
process of extrapolation. The basis for this extrapolation is Ibn Sns proof of God,
known as the Burhn al-iddqn. Ibn Sn declares the superiority of this proof to the
proof from motion used by the Peripatetics. The latter merely demonstrates that the
heavens have an ultimate mover, whereas the Avicennan argument abandons any
concern with physics and motion, and so reaches above this. It is an approach suited to
demonstrate the divine cause itself. Griffels suggestion is then that al-Ghazl simply
draws on this to infer a yet superior concept of God, which relates to Ibn Sns
concept as it in turn related to Aristotles, each approach coordinate with a different
transcendental entity. It must be pointed out, however, that this explanation of
al-Ghazls idea of the topmost cosmological grouping by no means precludes the
Isml stimulus argued by Landolt. Before al-Ghazl, Isml thinkers like Nir-i
Khusraw precisely viewed Ibn Sns type of proof as supposedly only pertaining to
the lesser entity known as the Command, and as succeeding in proving something
only at its level. In this cosmological system, the Command is the First Existent, and
the godhead per se is declared as beyond existence.2 If al-Ghazl was spurred to his
heights of cosmological speculation by considering Ibn Sns proof, so had Isml
thinkers been before him.
As a nal aside, I nd what Griffel quotes on Ibn Sns proof, from the allegedly
Ghazlian MS London, Or. 3126, fascinating on quite separate grounds. It presents
Ibn Sns proof of God in a way which seems to conrm my reading of it.3 According
to my understanding, though it is largely a cosmological argument, it is in part
denitely ontological (according to Kants famous classication of arguments for

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God). For Ibn Sn starts with the reasoning that God must exist in re, on the
very basis of the Necessary Being in intellectu otherwise He would not be
necessary, at all. At the end of the 4th nama of his Ishrt, Ibn Sn hailed this as
the approach of the elite, insofar as it does not proceed to God from His creation,
but it starts only with God, then proceeds to creation from Him. This is strongly
supported by the manuscript, which Griffel renders as follows: [The more recent
philosophers] discovered the necessity of the Creators existence from His
existence itself. Once they had established this, they established (the existence of)
contingent beings through it (pp. 2512).
This review, for all its length, cannot do justice to Griffels study. In presenting and
analysing such a wealth of materials, focused around the key themes of cosmology
and causality, it allows one to glimpse that most elusive of the treasures of the
intellectual heritage of medieval Islam: an overall Ghazlian system, the consistent
structure emerging from within the seemingly inconsistent viewpoints and many texts.
The books net impact seems thus, ironically, to qualify, and even contradict, Griffels
idea of al-Ghazls agnosticism.
TOBY MAYER
DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2011.0023

NOTES
1 Frank Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam: Die Entwicklung zu al-Gazls Urteil gegen
die Philosophie und die Reaktionen der der Philosophen (Leiden, Boston, Kln: Brill, 2000).
2 See F.M. Hunzai (ed. and tr.), Knowledge and Liberation: A Treatise on Philosophical
Theology (London: I.B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 1998) at
pp. 41 ff.
3 See my Ibn Sns Burhn al-iddqn, Journal of Islamic Studies 12 (2001), pp. 1839.

Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mull adr on Existence, Intellect, and

Intuition. By Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 315 + xxii.
45.00.
Mull adr, the name by which adr al-Dn al-Shrz is commonly designated, was
born in Shiraz in c. 979/1572 and died in Basra in 1050/1640. He was a brilliant
thinker who elaborated a very innovative system of thought that had an enduring
inuence on many generations of later thinkers in Iran and Central Asia. In spite of his
great signicance he was, until the midst of the twentieth century, almost completely
neglected in the West. Fortunately, the last few decades have seen an increasing
number of publications on his life and works in Western languages. Still, many crucial