Al-Ghazali's Epistemological Critique of Reason in Islamic Political Thought — Epoche C2
The disagreement, and who was answering whom In 1095 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī finished a book arguing that the leading philosophers of the Islamic world had failed to demonstrate twenty of their central doctrines, and that three of the twenty amounted to unbelief. Eighty-five years later, in al-Andalus, Ibn Rushd wrote a book-length reply that went through al-Ghazālī's twenty discussions in order. The exchange is the standard exhibit for a supposed rupture in classical Islamic thought between a rationalist philosophical tradition and a theological one that rejected reason in favour of revealed law, and in political theory it is usually redescribed as a contest between rule guided by philosophical wisdom and rule constrained by the Sharīʿa. The redescription is wrong in both directions, and this essay's purpose is to show where. Al-Ghazālī's critique was not of reason and not of logic — he taught logic and made it a prerequisite for legal reasoning — but of the claim that one particular science met the standard of proof it advertised. And his own political jurisprudence, once one goes and reads it, is not an assertion of law's supremacy over circumstance but an unusually frank accommodation of circumstance, grounded in necessity and public interest. The thesis this essay retains from its earlier version is that al-Ghazālī's position is a serious epistemological argument rather than a theological power grab. The corrections are to almost everything else. One point of chronology first, because it disciplines the rest. Al-Ghazālī lived from 1058 to 1111 and worked in Khurasan, Baghdad and Nishapur. Ibn Rushd was born in 1126, fifteen years after al-Ghazālī died, and worked in al-Andalus and Marrakesh. They were not contemporaries and not opponents in any conversational sense. Ibn Rushd was replying, at a distance of three generations and the width of the Mediterranean, to a book that had already done its work. What the Decisive Treatise actually argues Ibn Rushd's Faṣl al-maqāl of about 1179 is usually described as a defence of philosophy, which understates its cleverness. It is cast in the form of a legal responsum: given the categories of Islamic law, is the study of philosophy forbidden, permitted, recommended or obligatory? The answer is that it is obligatory for those capable of it. The argument runs in three steps. The Qurʾān commands reflection upon created things — Ibn Rushd leans on the injunction at 59:2 to draw a lesson, taking the verb in its technical sense of inferring the unknown from the known. Inference is done well or badly, and the most reliable kind is the demonstrative syllogism, in which the conclusion follows necessarily from premises that are themselves certain. Therefore the Law commands demonstrative reasoning, and studying the instruments of demonstration is a religious duty rather than a suspect foreign import. From this comes his much-repeated description of wisdom as the Law's companion and its foster-sister: they were nursed together and cannot be at war. The second half is where the political content lies, and it is not the harmonising piety the phrase suggests. Ibn Rushd holds that truth does not contradict truth, so where a demonstration yields a conclusion at odds with the apparent sense of a scriptural text, the apparent sense admits of interpretation. But he then distinguishes three classes of people by the kind of argument that produces assent in them: those who can follow demonstration, those who can follow dialectical argument from probable premises, and the great majority who are moved by rhetoric. Each class must be addressed only in its own kind of argument. Interpretation is therefore lawful for the first class and must not be published to the third; and the theologians, who belong to the second, commit their characteristic error by broadcasting interpretations they cannot demonstrate. The consequence for authority is direct: the philosopher, not the jurist and certainly not the theologian, becomes the competent interpreter of scripture's difficult passages, and public religious discourse is to be regulated in the interest of a stability that the philosopher understands and the public does not. Ibn Rushd worked the corresponding political scheme out in his commentary on Plato's Republic , written in the 1190s, which he took as his vehicle for practical philosophy — al-ḥikma al-ʿamaliyya in the standard Arabic rendering of the Aristotelian division — because Aristotle's own Politics was not available to him in Arabic. The philosopher-ruler of the earlier version of this essay is therefore a real feature of Ibn Rushd's thought, and this is the text in which it lives. A term must be taken back at this point. The earlier version credited Ibn Rushd with reasoning from the purposes of the law, using the phrase maqāṣid al-sharīʿa . That is not his category, and the misattribution matters because it belongs to the other side of the argument. The doctrine of the law's purposes was given its classical shape by al-Ghazālī himself in his late work on legal theory, and was developed into a full system by al-Shāṭibī, who died in 1388. Handing it to Ibn Rushd inverts the relation between the two men on exactly the question this essay is about. What al-Ghazali attacked, and what he conspicuously did not The Tahāfut al-falāsifa is organised as twenty discussions, sixteen on metaphysics and four on the natural sciences. In its introduction al-Ghazālī states his method, and the statement is the key to the whole book: he writes as an objector demanding proof, not as an advocate of a rival doctrine, and he will argue from whatever premises his opponents grant, including some he does not himself hold. He is not proposing a theology in the book. He is testing whether a body of claims meets a standard. The standard is the philosophers' own. Demonstration in the Aristotelian sense requires premises that are certain, primary, and explanatory of the conclusion; anything less yie