In Our Time - Al-Ghazali

Episode Date: March 19, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Al-Ghazali, a major philosopher and theologian of the late 11th century. Born in Persia, he was one of the most prominent intellectuals of his age, working in such centres of learning as Baghdad, Damascus and Jerusalem. He is now seen as a key figure in the development of Islamic thought, not just refining the theology of Islam but also building on the existing philosophical tradition inherited from the ancient Greeks.With:Peter Adamson Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in MunichCarole Hillenbrand Professor of Islamic History at Edinburgh and St Andrews UniversitiesRobert Gleave Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of ExeterProducer: Victoria Brignell.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the 11th century AD, the Middle East, particularly the cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Jerusalem, was a flourishing centre of learning and cultural activity. At the heart of its thriving intellectual community was Al-Ghazali, one of the most eminent Muslim theologians and philosophers of his day. In his book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he attacked Arab scholars who had become immersed in Greek philosophy, arguing that their ideas were incompatible with Islamic doctrine. He was renowned mystical thinker who had a strong interest in the tradition of Sufism,

the idea that Muslims can find divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. He also made a significant contribution to Islamic legal practice, asserting that the aim of Sharia law is not to promote specific rules, but to ensure the greater good. Al-Ghazali had a profound influence on later Muslim theological, and is widely regarded as playing a major role in the development of Islamic law and thought. With me to discuss the life and work of Al-Ghazali are Peter Adamson, Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich, Carol Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic History at Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities,

and Robert Gleve, Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter. Peter Adamson, Al-Gazali was born in Persia in the mid-11th century. Can you tell us about the part of the world that he grew up in? Right. Well, this is a central part of the Islamic world, which was very large at the time and stretched from Spain, the Iberian Peninsula in the east, or sorry, in the west, all the way to Central Asia in the east. And this is the result of the Islamic conquest, which had happened really in the first generations after the rise of Islam in the 7th century. And that was mostly accomplished under the Umayad Caliphate. The Umayyads are then succeeded by the Abbasid, caliphate. and it was at that time that the Greek philosophical works that you just mentioned were translated into Arabic. And the caliphate at the time of Al-Qazali is still a going concern in the sense that there is a caliph in Baghdad. However, already back in the 10th century, there's a development where the caliph loses effective control and has to cede control to effectively a militarily, a militarily more powerful group that's holding the real life.

reigns of power. And at first we have a group called the Buyids, who are actually Shiite Muslims, basically running the show with the caliph as a figurehead. And then we have, this is now something called, something called the Sunni Revival, the Seljuks, a Turkic group who come in and take over power under the caliph. So what we're seeing here is a kind of political reflection of something that what will also happen in no small part, thanks to Al Ghazali, at the intellectual level, a kind of revival and blossoming of Sunni Islam, theoretically, in the hands of someone like Ghazali and politically under the Seljuks. We are talking about a vast empire, and we're talking about incursions and additions and extensions.

Are we talking about political mobility almost all the time on quite a big sky, aren't we? Yeah, and in fact, the background to Ghazali's lifetime is really one, to some extent, of fragmentation. of the Islamic Empire. So one might think, okay, well, we've got this Islamic expansion and conquest, which is just going to create a unified empire all the way from Spain to Central Asia. But at this time, there's been a degree of fragmentation. For one thing, the Omajad Caliphate survives as a kind of rump of power all the way out in the Iberian Peninsula.

For another thing, the Shiite force known as the Fatimids, have taken power in Egypt. And then you've got the Seljuks now ruling the Islamic heartlands. And that includes the area where Ghazali grew up and will mature. What do we know about his family in his early life? Well, he's supposed to have come from humble origins. There is a story that his father is a wool carter or worked with wool, which is probably a spurious etymology based on his name,

Ghazali. So that may not be true, but it does seem to be true. that his family is of humble origins, but he was bright and intelligent and promising, and so he was educated well from an early age. What did educated well mean? Well, the Qazali would have been educated in the kind of standard Islamic sciences from early on,

so he would have learned the Quran. He would have started learning jurisprudence at an early age, and eventually he would sort of graduate to theology. This is something that he accomplished by going off to study with one of the most important theologians of this era, whose name is Giovanni. And Giovanni seems to have had a decisive influence on his intellectual formation and is probably the first person we can point to as a really significant teacher

who shapes Ghazali's worldview. And having mentioned mobility in the way that the empire with God, Digestphariz, was developing, he also hit on a stable society. in the cultural sense, didn't he? Yeah, that's right. At least under, I mean, there is a lot of conflict going on. And we should maybe mention that this is also an era of conflict between Islamic powers and Christian powers. There's been struggles between the Muslims and the Eastern Roman Empire, which we call the Byzantines, right back since the rise of Islam.

But this is also going to be the age where the First Crusade is launched. So it's not like everything is. peaceful and harmonious across the board. But the social situation in the cities of the Islamic heart lens is very impressive and more advanced than contemporaneous Europe. They're much bigger cities. This is a time of great scientific achievement and advancement. And so there's plenty of philosophical and other intellectual activity going on that Hazali can tap into, which is exactly what he does. Carol Hillenbrand, he was brought up as a Sunni rather than a Shiite.

Now, could you explain what that meant then? The Sunni Muslim world was very large and united. It was, on the other hand, threatened by the Fatimid Islamaili caliphate in Cairo. And to be as Sunni was the majority group within the whole of the House of Islam. And Al-Ghazali was very committed to the maintaining of sun. Sunni Islam. So we find him, for example, writing a brilliantly stinging attack on the extreme Ismailis of Cairo, a work that he was commissioned to do by the caliph himself, Al-Mustathir. So all his polemical skills were employed to try to demolish what he regarded as extraordinarily

heretical claims that the only person who knew what true Islam was was in fact the charismatic Ismaili Imam to whom total obedience was required. Now for Ghazali, being a Sunni scholar means being part of an elite of religious scholars who all back each other up. And so he writes lots of books in the tradition of Sunni thought, books on Sunni law, Sunni theology and so on.

And it has to be said that his stinging rebuke to the Ismaili Caliphate, it's a wonderful title, this book, Fadai Hal Batinilla, the horrors or the infamies of the people who have esoteric knowledge, was Faddail al-Mustathiriyya and the merits of those who follow Al-Mustathia. That's the caliph's name. And for him, in this particular work which he wrote in 1095, or perhaps 1094 before he left Baghdad, this work is a clear confirmation of the importance of the caliphate,

the Sunni caliph, who is the foundation of the unity and stability, of the Muslim world. Can you tell us, Peter introduced us to it, but can you tell us a little more about his education? Peter mentioned subjects, but how deep was it, how broad is it, can you just give us a bit more of a flavour of it? Al-Ghazali was obviously in a difficult position.

He was born in 1058, and he and his brother Ahmad, who became a very famous Persian super poet, they were orphaned very early. And it's a bit of a blur about who looked after him after that. But certainly he was exposed to Sufism from an early age, something that doesn't always come out in his subsequent career until after his breakdown.

I'm much more interested in the subjects and how far did they go, just some idea of how deeply they read and what the range was, and what the quality of it was, that sort of thing. Well, he, Al-Ghazali, was a Shafi, That means that he belonged to one of the four major Sunni legal schools. And so he wrote from that viewpoint. And he was very keen in his famous work,

the revivification of the Islamic sciences, Ejia Ulumadine, to write a clear exposition of what every Muslim should do at every moment of the day, a proper framework for a Muslim's life. So that is his, I think that his law background is the most important thing that's influencing all the time. But you studied philosophy as well

and studied the work I'll be saying there are a previous great sage in that part of the law. Certainly. And I think basically his attitude to philosophy was one of fascination, but I don't think he was very good at dealing with its intricacies. He was very good at knocking his, down afterwards with logical arguments which he'd taken from the philosophical tradition. Robert Cleve, how developed was the ideology of Islam at that time?

Well, it had been a few centuries since the first theologians had emerged within the intellectual elite of Islam. And a number of theological trends had developed, all of which had influenced Al-Qazali's thinking at different points in time during his training. And really the development of philosophical knowledge, theological knowledge, and legal understanding was quite advanced by the time Al Ghazali came to his more developed phase in terms of intellectual development. So it was, there was a strong theological framework into which Al Ghazali could fit and which he could innovate within when he started writing independent works.

We're talking about a university system, an embryonic, and a de facto university system, aren't we? Yes, certainly. There was groups of pupils who worked with a particular scholar, such as when Al-Hazali went to work with Joani, and the relationship between the pupil and the teacher was an extremely strong bond. And you joined a group in order to study with a scholar

and became his pupil, and were known as his pupil, and you worked from that as the basis of your thought. So there was a university system in the sense that there was much advanced learning going on, often in mosques or in Islamic seminaries, madrasas, and these were the sites, if you like, of Al-Hazali's training and eventually his own prowess as a teacher. So we're talking about intense intellectual engagement, hard work, and across a range of subjects.

It turned into a profession by then. It was a full-time job being a scholar. It wasn't something you did on the side. Most of the scholars were now employed within the seminaries. They had received enormous endowments, which were enabling the seminaries to function as professional institutions. What was the awareness of Greek philosophy in the Arab world at this period? It was quite high.

It wasn't a central part of many of the Madras, the seminary curricula, partly because their main curriculum was, as Carol has said, based around illegal training. Many of the people that went through the training within the seminaries were to become functionaries within the state bureaucracy, and a legal training was seen as the primary starting point

for that profession later on. But within the seminaries at more advanced stages, you would study philosophy alongside theological works. And Al-Hazali certainly began to study philosophical works independently because of his own intellectual curiosity, and he wrote a number of works, some of them quite good introductions to the thoughts of the philosophers, which were considered quite independent and objective from that perspective.

So we have a philosophical knowledge, which is quite well developed within, the Islamic world at the time. Not always accepted, certainly controversial, but it was certainly a known discipline. If we could take that on, Peter Adamson, what were the problems that the Arab Muslim philosophers were wrestling with? We're past the age of, we're in the age of translation, aren't we? Where the great translations are being made. Well, actually, we're past that. So the translations had pretty much been finished up in the 10th century. And the translations of Aristotle in particular. Yeah. And in fact, really,

prior to the coming of Ghazali, we have what is the biggest shift in the whole history of philosophy in the Islamic world because in the wake of the translation movement, the first generations of philosophers working in Arabic were mostly busying themselves with responding to Aristotle, who had just become massively available.

They had almost all the Aristotle that we have, in fact, in Arabic translation. But then Avicenna comes along, and with Avicenna's new very powerful philosophical synthesis, you see a change in the way philosophy is done in Arabic, with the exception of what happens out in Andalusia in Spain. Can you describe that? Is it possible to summarize and describe that synthesis?

Yeah. Well, he basically takes up all the topics that are covered in Aristotle's philosophy and rethinks them with his own distinctive methods, epistemological methods, new logical discoveries. and also new breakthroughs in metaphysics. And it may be good to focus on that because that's the thing that Hazali is most of all going to respond to. So going back to something Rob was saying earlier, there's been development in Sunni theology,

in particular within a school called the Ashadites. And the Ashadites were reacting against their rivals by emphasizing the untrammeled freedom of God to do whatever he wants. So, for example, they argued against opponents that if God wanted to send a sinner to paradise and a good person to hell, he could do that. He doesn't, but he could. And Avicenna's metaphysical picture of God, his philosophical theology, if you will, is diametrically opposed to that. So Avicenna has a proof of God's existence where he shows that there must be something that necessarily exists. And then he derives all of God's other attributes. from this core concept that God is necessary. So what that means for Avicenna is that everything about God is necessary. And the reaction to Avicenna in Ashadai theology,

which is really going to be the dominant story in Islamic philosophy in the East for many centuries to come, actually, not just Ghazali. The core, or there's one core issue that they're worried about, is how much of Avicenna can they keep? while still being Ashadite theologians who think that God acts freely and by will, as opposed to necessarily, as Avicenna had said. Can we take that on, Carl? Can you take it on? Harold Hindabran.

What's the role that Al-Ghazade is taking for himself? We're in Baghdad, and it was very important to him at that time. Baghdad was important as a big center. Can you just tell us his relationship with this Avicenna, who was a massively powerful, a massively powerful mind not too long before Al-Ghazali. I think he was a deep admirer of Abysana, but at the same time, I really don't think that in Baghdad,

his total focus was on philosophy. When he was in Baghdad, he had the plum job. It was the head of the Nizamia Madrasa, that is to say, a madrasse, founded by the great Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Malmulk, who was his mentor. He had the plum job. It was as if he were Archbishop of Canterbury and Regis Professor of Divinity at Oxford all in one, and he was only 33 when he got the job. And I think he had a very busy life.

As Rob has mentioned, he taught himself philosophy, not always a good idea to teach yourself something as difficult as philosophy, as he says in his spiritual optobiography. And nevertheless, he had large classes and he was fully occupied with teaching and with consummate ease, he moved from the Caliphal court speaking Arabic to the camp court of the Seljuk Sultan,

where Persian was the language, his own native language, Gazales. But nevertheless, he was fully, let's not look at him, I feel, in a theological and philosophical limbo. This is a man while he was in Baghdad, and he wasn't there for long. He was there from 1091 to 1095,

four years, four turbulent years for him. And there he was involved heavily in the politics of the time, writing this piece for the Caliph, of course, and so on. And I believe that the kind of environment that he was in was rather more like Wolf Hall than Whitehall. Robert, Robert Gleve, one of his one, I love his titles, actually, because I'm the title of his books, and this one, the incoherence of the philosophers,

is seen as a very important work. Can you tell us what he's saying in that book? Well, his incoherence of the philosophers is his really stinging attack on the philosophical tradition and the way in which he felt it had infected Islam. He's attacking Avicenna in this. His primary target is Avicenna, but he's not necessarily naming individual philosophers.

He's talking about the general views of the philosophers, the camp of philosophers, the intellectual trend of the philosophers. And in the incoherence, he outlines a number of things which they are just plain doctrinally wrong about. And he goes through them one by one, listing 20 of them. and most of those are errors which are intellectual errors. But then he picks on three that are so significant that they are,

that they condemn the philosophers as heretics. And that states his position, if you like, that to an extent the philosophical tradition should not have a place within the intellectual sciences of Islam. And the three doctrines, which he considers as entirely contravening the orthodoxy of Islam. First of all, the notion that the world is eternal. That is that the philosophical view that matter cannot be destroyed

and therefore the world must have existed eternally. This, he says, directly contradicts the Islamic doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing, which we find in the Quran, but also is generally developed, in Islamic theology that God created the world from nothing. So this is the first thing. The second thing, which he considers to be heretical from the philosophical beliefs,

is the notion that God doesn't know particulars. That is that the philosophers, as Peter was saying, have this notion of God as knowing the generalities of things, but not knowing the particulars. And that is contradictory to the doctrine of Islam, which indicates that God knows. everything about everything. And then finally, the notion of the bodily resurrection,

which philosophers had questioned as a physical possibility, the notion of a bodily resurrection, which is a fundamental element of Muslim belief that there will be a bodily resurrection at some future time to be decided by God. So these three doctrines were viewed by Al Ghazali as demonstrating that the philosophers were outside the pale of Islam. So there's a bit of setting up a big argument, wasn't he, Peter at Pardamson? Could we say that the problem of causality was an important core of that?

Yeah, that's really the core issue, in fact, because what Avicenna's philosophical theology commits us to, or at least commits him to, is the idea that God's relationship to the world is necessary. And that's really why, for example, the universe would wind up being eternal, because if he creates the universe necessarily, then whenever you've got God, you've got a world. So the world is eternal. and it comes up again towards the end of the incoherence when Ghazali takes up the topic of miracles

this is probably the most famous part of the incoherence actually because it reminds people of David Hume and like David Hume Ghazali raises or gives examples of standard cases of causation his case is cotton touching fire and then burning and he asks the question whether the cotton necessarily must burn In other words, is this causal connection between fire touching cotton and the cotton burning a necessary relation?

Or could it happen that the fire fails to burn the cotton? And he wants to say that it could fail to burn the cotton because that leaves room for miracles to occur. And he accuses the philosophers of saying that the relationship is necessary. The reason why it reminds people of David Hume is that he then says, well, we expect the fire to burn the cotton. and we have this very strong impression that it must burn the cotton, but that's just because we have a habit. Every time we've seen fire touch cotton or something similar,

we've seen it burn the cotton and turn it to ash. But that's just an expectation that's been created by our experience. It doesn't necessarily mean that the cotton will burn. Now, this is also an example of a very deep problem, I think the problem, about Hazali, at least as a philosopher, which is to what extent does he in fact accept philosophical ways of looking at things? Because some people read Kazali here as saying that God just does everything, which would be the standard Ashadite picture.

This is sometimes called occasionalism. So the Ashadite idea would be that when fire touches cotton, God makes the cotton burn. The fire doesn't make the cotton burn. So in a way, everything's a miracle. another way of reading Ghazali is to take him as saying that the fire does really burn the cotton, like the philosophers say. It's just that God could always step in if he wanted to and stop the cotton from burning. So he wouldn't be denying physical causation. He would just be denying that physical causation is necessary.

And that illustrates a more general feature of his philosophy, which is that it's often hard to say whether he's throwing out all of Avicester. Sennan philosophy or just the parts of Avicenna and philosophy that really annoy him, like the three theses that Rob mentioned. Karen, if you want to take that on, that's fine. Otherwise, I'd like to know what you're like to tell us about why he left Baghdad. I'd much prefer to tell you about that. Good.

Because I feel very strongly that you can divide his academic career into two distinct parts. The first part leading up to his departure from Baghdad in 1095, where the philosophical aspects of his writing are very important. And thereafter, he is much more interested in spirituality and in Sufism in particular. So what happened in Baghdad was, and we have the evidence of his own spiritual autobiography in this respect. This book is called Al-Munkid menadal, the deliverer from error, error in the sense of straying from the wrong, onto the wrong path. Anyway, this is a very powerful and eloquent book, very short, very popular with the Europeans afterwards

because it's accessible. It's not like Augustine's confessions in one sense that that's a very long book. But anyway, the evidence from his spiritual autobiography about his sudden and dramatic departure from 10 in 1095 is as follows, that he tells us in graphic description how he was giving a lecture in the Nizamia Madrasa, and he found that he couldn't speak.

In fact, he says, God put a lock on my tongue. And thereafter, he, well, he couldn't eat or drink, and he became very ill and people worried about his health. And he would try to break away from all the attachments, the political power he had, the prestige and so on. And then he would put one foot forward and one foot back, as he puts it,

and hesitate again. In the end, he made a sudden and secret departure from Baghdad saying, well, basically, that he was plagued by religious doubt. What he needed was certainty and religion. and that he thought what he would find in the Sufi path. Now, after he left Baghdad, he went straight and did a pilgrimage, and then he spent several years, Vandayyara, as the Germans would say, wandering around, meditating, dressed as a Sufi,

and he went to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and also he spent two years, he says, in the Omaid Mosque in Damascus, in the minaret, meditating. And thereafter, and we can assume it was around five years after that, say 1100, he was back home again in eastern Persia. And there he stayed, and that is another story. Thank you very much. Peter Adamson,

what did other thinkers, how did they respond to the, incoherence of the philosophers? Well, it was read in the eastern parts of the empire. So, for example, there's a story about an Ottoman caliph staging a competition between two scholars to say, who can judge better in the

dispute between Hazzali and Avesana. But by far the most famous response comes from Averroes, the famous commentator on Aristotle, who lives in Spain, in Islamic Spain, and dies in 1198. And he wrote the winningly titled Incoherence of the

incoherence, in which he goes through Huzali's incoherence, quotes it entirely, and then refutes everything Hizali is saying. So it's basically a counter-refutation. However, the tactic that Averroes uses is a little bit surprising, perhaps, because he's the last person who wants to defend Avicenna's philosophy, because Averroes is really the last Muslim philosopher who still thinks that philosophy should consist in the study of Aristotle. So this is by then kind of old hat, but he's way out in Spain, and he still thinks this is a good idea. So his reaction to Hazali is, well, first of all, your arguments aren't very good, but second of all, when you say you're attacking the philosophers, you're not attacking the right target because philosophy means Aristotle.

Philosophy doesn't mean Avicenna. And in fact, he often agrees with Hazali that Avicenna's ideas are bankrupt or unconvincing in various ways. He's willing to admit that, but then he always will come in and say, but the true position on this is the one we find in Aristotle, and if you want to understand that better, go look at my commentaries. Robert, Robert Gleve, another major work was the revival of religious sciences. What point is he making there? Well, this was written after his departure from Baghdad and during the second period of his life, as Carol mentioned. And this was a very important exposition by Al-Hazali of what it meant to live a religious life now.

His dissatisfaction with the fellow scholars of the day is obvious in this work. He believes that they are not getting to the heart of what a religious life is in their various writings, that it's all becoming a little bit formulaic and mechanical. And in the revival of the Islamic sciences, his aim is to, is to, express why it is that Muslims behave and do what they do in their everyday religious life. So the book

itself is divided into four parts. And I suppose the first two are about how Muslims should behave. And the second two are about what a Muslim should be like, what qualities a Muslim should have. So the first book is about religious rituals, about how to perform religious rituals. And there are many Muslim scholars who have written about how to perform religious rituals. What's different about this description of religious rituals is it's not just talking about what you do, the physical actions of prayer, but also the reasons why you do it, the sort of spiritual qualities that prayer will encourage in you. The second book is about customs, customs that you should, that exist in human society, and how to behave well, some of it's about table manners,

Some of it's about how to live a happily married life. These sorts of customs are important for Al-Vazali to do that thing properly encourages a particular sort of person. And then the final two books, which are talk about what virtues and vices a Muslim should have. So they describe what it is that you need in order to become a good person and attain salvation. And so the book as a whole is an attempt to revive the... religious sciences, as the title suggests, in order to make them more relevant to the inner spiritual life of the individual Muslim. And this is an area which he felt had been lost in the

scholasticism of the intellectual scene at his time. Carol, Henan Brown, you've mentioned Sufi and Sufism a few times and that he lived the life of a Sufi and dressed like a sylid. Can you just develop that first place? And this is after he left Baghdad. Yes, he says. that he wandered around, as I've already mentioned. And then he went home to his hometown of Tuss in eastern Iran, where he stayed in retirement in inverted commerce.

And then at that time he had pupils that he taught, and he led a life of a Sufi. So what did it mean to him being a Sufi? What did he do being a Sufi? he hadn't done before. He stopped trying to be a big cheese. He was humble. He writes in his autobiography

that I believe that the Sufis alone know the path to God. All the knowledge of the intellectuals, all the accumulated scholarship of scholars is as nothing compared to what the Sufis know about God.

And he talks about the heart. Now, not a heart in the sense of the organ in the left side of the body, as he writes it, but the heart, that quintessential part of a human being, which is the only way that you can really find God, not in an intellectual way, but through mystical experience. Peter, Peter. Just to amplify that in the autobiography, he presents his whole intellectual journey as a quest for certainty.

And one of the arguments that he gives for a Sufi, mystical approach to knowledge, is that just as the reason can stand in judgment over the senses, for example, by correcting visual illusions, so we might wonder whether there's some higher faculty or kind of knowledge that would come in and either confirm or disconfirm the findings of reason. and so his worry here is that reason somehow isn't self-verifying. It stands in need of an external confirmation. And he thinks that the good thing about mystical union with God,

which is what he achieves eventually as a Sufi, is that it doesn't stand in any further need of confirmation. So it's like the buck-stopping, epistemic moment when God infuses your heart with his light, then you know and you know that you're certain. Can we talk, Robert, for a moment, about the role that he played in the development of Islamic law?

Yes, well, in a sense, developing on from this, his view was that the Islamic legal sciences also needed some sort of revival and injection of new thinking. And he was credited with

the development of the first notion that the whole of the Sharia, the law that God has provided for humanity, is made up of individual rules. But behind these individual rules are a series of aims

or objectives of the law, what are called in Arabic macasid. And he was the first to really develop this notion that individual laws are not extremely important in and of themselves. They serve higher objectives, which are the aims which God has

in providing humankind with the Sharia. And this is a very important epistemological step in the development of Islamic law because it enables individual laws which are seen on a particular occasions as being harmful or not in tune with the aims to be overruled and replaced with others. And this became a very important element in the reform and of Islamic law over the century's substance. It's one of the major influences, if you like, of what Al Ghazali has. in the legal sciences, was to develop this notion that the laws are not just individual rules, which we don't know why they are provided.

We actually have a notion of macasid, of aims behind the Sharia, which the Sharia should subscribe to. Can we take that on, Peter Adelson, talk about his legacy, what impact he's had? We're talking about the 11th century. How many centuries, through how many centuries did that legacy ripple and, is it still around? Was it formative? Yeah, I think in some ways the jury is still out on that. So we certainly see that what is often said about Hazzali, namely that he kind of put a nail on the coffin of philosophy in the Islamic world and that therefore Averroes is the last philosopher couldn't be further from the truth.

So in fact, what we see in the Islamic East for many centuries to come running right up into the period of the rise of the Safavid and Mughal empires and the Ottomans as well is emergence of a way of doing theology, especially in the Ashadite school that Hazali belonged to, which is suffused with Avicenna's philosophy.

So the big question is really, what role did Ghazali play in that development? So I think there's two possibilities. One is that Qazali tried to kill philosophy and failed. But I don't

think that's very plausible. I think rather what happened is that by being so selective in his criticism of Avicenna, I mean, if you think about the incoherence, he says he picks certain theses that he identifies even in some cases as heretical and as wrong, but in a way that leaves the rest of the Avicenna edifice standing. And he also will say explicitly, for example, that only an idiot would reject the utility of logic. And logic becomes a big vehicle of philosophy in the later theological seminaries. So I think that Jewini, his teacher, who already began to integrate Avicenna with theology

and then Ghazali, but also other like-minded thinkers who wanted to use Avicenna, but selectively, they really do set the agenda for centuries of Islamic philosophical theology to come. Carol Hillenbrand, finally, what would you say his legacy is for Muslims even up to today? He is often regarded as the most important Muslim intellectual of the Middle Ages. He is called a colossus, a wonderful scholar,

and he's known and admired not only in the Arab world, but also, of course, in his homeland Iran. And across Asia to Malaysia, India and Pakistan have a great admiration. for him and he's also admired in Indonesia. And I think it's very rare to find that someone other than a ruler has mosques named after him and he has, there's an Al-Ghazali mosque in Aleppo

and in Jordan and in Kuwait and in the state of Michigan, believe it or not. And he's commemorated in South Africa with an Al-Gazali college and in the Axar Mosque there's a note saying here is where the great scholar Al-Ghazali meditated.

Finally, finally, did his view, did his work on law and on the Sharia, did that become a founding part of the legal atmosphere in which the Muslims live? Yes, his ideas

on the, on the, on the, on the principles of law underlying, which lie behind the rules, became one of the crucial mechanisms whereby legal thinking might develop. People have a view that legal thinking in Islam did not develop very fast. But one of the reasons, after al-Dhazali, but one of the reasons why Muslim thinkers were able to apply the law to new circumstances, which were not explicitly mentioned in previous law books, was because of this notion of the law,

of the objectives of the law underlying the Sharia. So revivalist thinkers today, you know, reformist thinkers today, rely mainly upon their groundwork which Al Ghazali did in terms of the renewal of Islamic law in accordance with its principles. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you to Carol Helen Brand, Peter Adamson, Rob Gleve, and next week we'll be talking about the scientific achievements of Marie Curie and her family.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, thank you very much for that. I enjoyed that, did you? I'm a bit unhappy about Sufers and not getting enough at a show in it. Because, you know, he set up a situation where the Sufi Brotherhoods could be legal and continue to thrive right across the world.

So, I mean, I would have said that if I would have... remembered it in time. One of the things about Sufism which we didn't mention that we probably should have done is that he enabled Islamic law and Sufism had been in sort of conflict with each other before Al-Hazali. What Al-Hazali did is brought

them together. He brought them together. You can be a fully observant Muslim but you can also have this mystical side and understanding to your religious life. And that was a very important achievement of Al-Hazali. It's what many people who are

who have this personal religious piety, but also are observant of the rules and regulations of the Sharia, they look back to Al-Hazali who brought together these two things, that you can follow the rules, but you can also understand why you're following the rules in terms of your own spiritual development. And I wanted to talk about the writings that he did in Persian, because they're very little known,

and they deserve more of a hearing. I've just translated half of the Alchemy of Happiness which is his major Persian work and he also did letters like mirrors for princes of Machiavelli which he wrote in Persian so sorry about that Melvin No it's good

It's just so much stuff isn't that I think a lot went into that three-quarters of But I can understand Al-a-Zalie's not the easy person You did say quite a lot about synthism, actually, Carol. Yes, I feel... You mentioned it along the way, and then you had a... Yeah, I know.

I just feel that the view prevailing is a rather Eurocentric one that he was interested in philosophy, and that needs to be tempered. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukh slash Radio 4.