Imam Gazzali: A Great Philosopher of Islam

Abdul Latif Ansary

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2023.v05i01.1400

Imam Gazzali: A Great Philosopher of Islam

Author(s)	Abdul Latif Ansary
Country	India
Abstract	Imam Gazzali is known one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, logicians and mystics of the Islamic Golden Age. He is considered to be the 5th century’s mujaddid, means a renewer of the faith, who, according to the prophetic hadith, appears once every hundred years to restore the faith of the Islam and its community. His works were so highly acclaimed by his contemporaries that al-Ghazali was awarded by the honour of the title “Hujjat al-Islam” means “Proof of Islam” Gazzali believed that the Islamic spiritual tradition had become moribund and that the spiritual sciences taught by the first generation of Muslim had been forgotten. This belief led him to write his mugnum opus entitled ‘Ihyaulumad-din’ (The Revival of the Religious Science). Among his other works, the Tuhfat al- Falasifa (Incoherence of the philosophers) is a landmark in the history of philosophy, as it advances the critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th century in Europe. Others have cited his opposition to certain stands of Islamic philosophy as a detriment to Islamic scientific progress. Besides his work that successfully changed the course of Islamic philosophy the early Islamic Neo-Platonism that developed on the grounds of Hellenistic philosophy, for example, was so successfully criticized by al- Ghazzali that it never recovered—he also brought the orthodox Islam of his time in close contact with Sufism. It became increasingly possible for individuals to combine orthodox theology and Sufism, while adherents of both camps developed a sense of mutual appreciation that made sweeping condemnation of one by the other increasingly problematic.Al-Ghazzali occupies a unique position in the history of Muslim religious and philosophical thought by whatever standard we may judge him. Al-Subki went so far in his estimation of him as to claim that if there had been a prophet after Muhammad, al-Ghazzali would have been the man. Various spiritual phases developed by him. He was in turn a canon-lawyer and a scholastic, a philosopher and a skeptic, a mystic and a theologian, 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 an extraordinary independence of mind, he became a veritable challenge to the philosophies of Aristotle and Plotinus and to their Muslim representatives before him, al-Farabi and ibnSina. The main trends of the religious and philosophical thought of al-Ghazali, however, come 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. The teachings of this remarkable figure of Islam pertaining either to religion or philosophy, either constructive or critical, cannot, however, be fully understood without knowing the story of his life with some measure of detail, for, in his case, life and thought were one: rooted in his own personality. Whatever he thought and wrote came with the living reality of his own experience.
Keywords	Philosophy, Philosopher, Islamic, Theology, Imam Gazzali, Theologians, Mystics, Mujaddid, Islamic Spiritual, Hujjat Al-Islam, Religious Science, Islamic Philosophy, Incoherence, Orthodox Theology, Sufism, Revitalized, Extraordinary.
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 5, Issue 1, January-February 2023
Published On	2023-01-16
Cite This	Imam Gazzali: A Great Philosopher of Islam - Abdul Latif Ansary - IJFMR Volume 5, Issue 1, January-February 2023. DOI 10.36948/ijfmr.2023.v05i01.1400
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2023.v05i01.1400
Short DOI	https://doi.org/grpdqf

View / Download PDF File

E-ISSN 2582-2160

doi

CrossRef DOI is assigned to each research paper published in our journal.

IJFMR DOI prefix is
10.36948/ijfmr

Downloads

Research Paper Format Copyright Permission Form and Undertaking Form Cover Page Vol 6 Isu 6 Cover Page Vol 6 Isu 5 Cover Page Vol 6 Isu 4

All research papers published on this website are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, and all rights belong to their respective authors/researchers.

CC-BY-SA

About IJFMR Fees & Payment Current Issue Publication Archive	Submit Research Paper Track Submission Status Publication Guidelines Publication Ethics Peer Review & Plagiarism	Join as a Reviewer Editors & Reviewers Reviewer Referral Program Get Reviewer Membership Certi.	Website/Journal Policies Usage Policy Content Policies Privacy Policy

Contact Us		+91-9898-5948-55	editor@ijfmr.com

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Imam Gazzali: A Great Philosopher of Islam

Share this