Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and the poetic abcreation of reason

A reflection on Islam’s most influential teacher besides Mohammed.

Muhammed al-Ghazālī

Al Ghazali stems from before the stagnation of Islamic science, which reached I completion around 1400 under Ottoman rulership. I suspect that he may have been the worst teacher in human history. It was due to his enormous poetic influence on intellectual pathos that it came to be a disgrace to think about important matters via logical arguments. After Al Ghazali was done, only revelation was trusted as a source of truth.

Of course it didn’t take long after that for political rulers to take complete possession of religious authority. One Ottoman ruler allegedly went so far as to forbid all sciences save the one oriented on curing sexually transmitted diseases. I saw this last bit in a BBC documentary, I wonder if it can be verified.

Islam as the beautiful childhood fantasy: a world of mercy, an omnipotent father, the will to grow into someone great with a great many people who love you in the next world. To a child, being grown-up is the next world, and it imagines all sorts of bliss for it.

The Christian ideal allows for the same thing, but it holds a second, and a third option. The nature of the trinity is such that man is able to get lost in their meanings separately, and so ‘work on himself’ - keep switching perspectives on himself, transform. Christianity is a transformative religion, whereas Islam is a fixating one. This corresponds with the nature of the pagan religions existing before Christ in Europe and the Middle East - in the ME, the great phallic gods, the domination-monoliths. The European tribes had more focus on Gods that amically fight amongst themselves.

A relatively friendly strife between Gods - by human terms natural, that means often very vicious, but not absolutely hostile like God and Satan - a strife in the knowledge of having to deal with each other. Revenge within bounds, creative solutions, jokes, humiliations and re-exaltations, a lot of adultery.

On a more violent level, only the God Most High has to castrate his own father. This can either simply mean to take over control, but there is an alternative interpretation, not mine, which I posted somewhere else - Kronos is the self-contained God who wishes to not be contained and thrusts outwards bestowing himself onto time - this bestowing is Zeus, and to be able to exist, the power-sphere of Saturn must be broken.

Zeus was helped by his mother Rhea, which is then the aspect of the self-enclosed ancestry that represents the will to exist in Olympian, Earthly terms.

Islam as Poetry

The whole appeal of the holy Book is its poetry. My friend who is a muslim of great ethical and intellectual quality used to read the Book in the Mosque to the grown ups when he was a small child, and watch many among them cry. The great Sufi poetry is among the most convincing attributions of specific qualities to divine nature and the very law of the man we discussed, the command to avoid realism, represents in a higher sense the command to seek poetic relations.

The life of the Islamic family is poetic. I remember the small patios in the housing blocks in the outskirts of Damascus, the galleries and balconies with children’s chatter echoing around the seat of the mother, or grandmother, entertained by the men, she smiles at a little girl with a large orange balloon, through which this girl is staring, wide eyed, at the stranger. There is definite beauty, but it must not be expressed in images or logic.

The Word is omnipresent in Islam, and the name with the double L is a poetic accellerant of the most powerful order. Don’t try it at home unless you’re prepared to share your house with the God from thereon out.

The culmination of poetry tends to be on the tragic side of things. It is possible that the beauties in the unimaginable households of princes who use the religion to subject and to justify their subjecting are, as value to self-valuing, enough to justify all the suffering and ignorance their rule relies on… in the eyes of a Nietzschean perspective at least. Not in modern terms.

We moderners… We can not even aspire to such unrestrained wealth. We have lost that sense of Kingship, which is poetic, and of a time before science and reason.

Islam is at its most dangerous a means to reduce the world to a collection of forces. It circulates these forces, dependent identities, around this black stone - all of them happy in half-knowing, becoming rather than being, submitted human energy, orgasmic belonging – and the fire of a god in men without discipline of intellect. Men of fortune sit on thrones there and enjoy the fruits, which are sweet. Literally, and quite extremely so.

In the worst case, man is unleashed to his lusts rather than that he avoids them - his justification of life is that he is a sinner, and tragically so. That is why so many martyrs receives their ordeal with such immense will to shine, and why the Hezbollah pressmen were keen to show me all the billboards on which the children were advertised that threw themselves with bombvest on an Israeli prison, and managed, in the end, to drive the Israelis out. Tragedy and heroism, this is the active force of Islamic ethics.

If, in the mouths of the martyrs, the phrase “Allah Akbar” were replaced with “Equal Rights”, the war would be over right quick - but they seek war. This is nothing but the will to the end, the will to the proof that not many, but one exists - that all instances of the many are incoherent and relate only to truth by this great name, this one logos wherein the mayhem and nonsense of the world resounds in a perfect outcry of truth: “NO!”

Islam is a Holy No. And it can be argued that a Holy No is required to substantiate a Holy Yes.

Poetry as the Abcreation of Reason

The relation of Islamic resolve to poetic narrative means that the attacks on the muslim nations, populations and memes will continue to strengthen the resolve, as such attacks prove the poetry’s worth, confirm a crucial degree of truth-value. It’s not considered that the worth might be negative precisely because of the predictable truth value, but the population of faith is a thousand years removed from such insights, or a thousand years in terms of our own history. It is likely that time will progress faster given the present means of communication.

It is possible that insights will dawn, but I predict a best case of no less than a hundred years before an intellectual core can be substantial enough to sway popular opinion. In the meantime it is only given to ‘us’ to create the conditions for such an promethean elite. We as the west will begin to communicate our values in terms that actually threaten the religion.

Divine Reason

Al Ghazali denied causality in the Aristotelean sense, on which Islamic scholars had relied and which they had developed exhaustively, literally unto exhaustion of their meaning.

Then a powerful poet-scholar renounced all four of Aristotle’s causal logics on the basis of their inconclusiveness, and his message stuck out of pure revolutionariness. God is the spirit of revolution, revaluation.

And he was right. The causality conception existing in his time was imperfect, ‘unworthy’ - of reality. Newton disclosed a relation of these causes to each other was far more elegantly than what is made apparent by this particular categorization, and he did so in the quest for divine gold, and he called the object of his law as “the love of God”.

In Aristotle, causality was conceived in terms of efficiency. In Newton, causality was revealed in simplicity. Of course he stood in a tradition of men to whom such truths were revealed - the outcry eureka is older than Newton, older even than Archimedes. But all laws that had been discovered by the pre and post Copernicans came together in Newtons formula of momentum and attraction. And this led to the completion of the model in Einstein’s theory of gravity and light, the conception of which was revelation, in the sense of a perfectly capable mind knowing how to position itself to itself so as to know what is necessary. It is a miracle how E conceived of the principle of the speed of light - and yet also he stood in two traditions - of Archimedes and of Moses. He saw his science as discerning the thoughts of God. (“All the rest is irrelevant”)

Revelation and science are intimately intertwined.

Concluding, it has become much clearer now how a foolishness as that of Al Ghazali could have come to be. He simply wished to return to a more simple nature of things - he was tired of the never ending expansion of categories and tracts of significance. Back to the source! Unfortunately, there was not yet a source to speak of. Ghazali was so arrogant to claim the abcreation of logic without having something to put in its place. A great hubris that did not remain unpunished - billions suffer for his pride.

All very poetic indeed - and this makes me wonder if there is a way out at all without another prophet.

FC,

I think that you have gone too far in criticizing Gazali. He does not deserve that much.
His only mistake was that he totally rejected the questioning and insisted on faith far more than required.

He did not maintain the balance between the spirituality and practicality.

Most guanine religious scholars like Gazali use to become idealistic and expect the same level of sincerity and commitment form the masses what they themselves have. They miss a very simple point that all people cannot be the same thus they should not expect that from the masses what is beyond their capacity.

Secondly, his criticism of the Aristotle and Plato was because of the fear of Islam also following the path of Christinaity. He did not want that happening.

with love,
sanjay

Secondly, i think that you missed a very important point about Gazali.

In his days, every stream of the knowledge was included in the philososphy. Like the study of physics, astronomy and mathematics were also considered as philosophy, not to mention metaphysics.

Gazali was critic of other philosophers only in the terms of metaphysics, not scientific streams like physics, medicine or mathematics. He challenged only the notions about the God, not all.

I may be wrong but your criticism is giving the impression that Gazali opposed all scientific progress, which is not the case.

with love,
sanjay

You don’t say!

That is one of his major mistakes, indeed. And what a very bad, dramatic and fatal mistake that turns out to be, invariably.

Perhaps he did have the sense of nuance that you propose - but I am considering his real heritage, not his intentions.

That raises a lot of questions. First of all, why did he think that Aristotle led to Christianity?

FC,

You cannot blame anyone for his heritage. The heritages depends far more on later followers than initiaters.
You cannot blame Rutherford for the killing of innocent Japanese in H&N. And, neither Jesus for all those Crusades, which were executed in the name of Christianity.
Things and notions should be seen the orignal context.

He had to criticize Aristotle.

It were not the western philosophers that made Aristotle famous, but Muslim ones like Averroes and Avicenna. Aristotle was very once very respected within Muslim intellectual populace. They named his as the first teacher. Later, western Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas read the Arabic translations of his works and translated into European languages.

Later, Aristotle became the symbol of reason and logic, along with Plato. Though, Aristotle did not say much about the God in particular, but as Christian intellectuals started considering him as an authority, Instead of the Chruch, Gazali feared that the same may happned in Islam too.

That is why he criticized Aristotle, but only for his ideas of metaphysics, not as a whole.

with love,
sanjay

Thanks, Sanjay - that corroborates everything I said, actually. Due to an irrational allegiance, or allegiance to irrationality ( I do not know if you have read the Koran ) he dismissed Aristotle. The ground, that religion was supposed to be untouched by reason, is very dangerous and proved fatal, deliberately depriving the minds of the future billions who would have to carry the consequences of his actions of their right to think about God, divinity. Implicity, denying the their right to come to understand themselves.

I can hardly think of a more powerful act in favor of darkness. In fact, I can’t think of any.

This is without competition the greatest evil in the world - the idea that religion (moral thought) and science (a-moral thought) should be disconnected, rather than humbly acknowledging that they are often hard to reconcile for humans. Be honest. Is that supreme arrogance (the idea that a human could decide this in the first place) not the recipe for tyranny and oblivion and the destruction of the human spirit?

The prophet and the philosopher are architects of man, they imprint their will (you will say their wisdom) on millennia. To do so by taking away mans power to think his divinity is to be the bridge-builder to hell. It is literally the chained pair of the Devil card. Chained not by understanding - pure, but by understanding coupled with the belief that knowledge is ungodly.

As I said in the OP, Newton proved the final resolution of this error, and it is a shame that the muslims do not revere him as a true prophet that unmasked Al Ghazali.

To some extent, though not thoroughly.

He dismissed only a part of Aristole, in which he was in directl conflict with basic doctrines of Islam, like whether the soul take rebirth or not. Gazali was not dismissive of Aristotle as a whole. He accepted may of his other premises.

with love,
sanjay

FC,

I do not think that you still get it right.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/al-ghazali/

You are also a vitim of same misperception.

What he is actually trying to say that Atistotelian logic is an ontology, which runs on its own declayerd definitions/premises. It has not demostrated successfuly thus considering those as fundamental thruth is wrong.

And, he was not as narrow minded either as you are thinking.
Look at this-

He further says-

And, he was quite right.

with love,
sanjay

I forgot to mention his most significant contribution to islam and the world too.

Before Gazali, Sufism was considered as some sort of black magic by Islam and was opened to blasphemy too. It was only Gazali, who fought for it and established it as a subset of mainstream Islam.

with love,
sanjay

Sanjay,

again you give more credibility to my judgments of Al Ghazali.

The passages on him that you quote to demonstrate his open mindedness demonstrate precisely the insanity I accuse him of having spread.

How can you be lenient and forgiving to someone who thinks that demonstration can by definition not contradict ‘revelation’? How can you take someone seriously who holds these three purely undemonstrated ‘truths’ as a standard for what demonstration is allowed mean?

No, he was indeed insane, quite as bad as I had intuited.

It was perhaps nice of him to allow sufism. But I do not care about that. I care about his influence on the billions. In this sense he caused an evil of demiurgic proportions.

From where he stands, demonstration does not contradict revelation. Having said that, it is quite difficult for the pure intellectal persons to digest.

He had his reasons.

FC, you need to understand a basic thing about true spiritual scholars like Gazali. They do not say such just things because they find all that in any book. You are completely mistaken if you think so.

I do not know whether you are aware or not, there was a period of a serious intellectual/spiritual stuggle in his life, which lasted many years. During that time, he gave away all his wealth in donation and just roamed here and there in the search of his quest of answers. After some years, he came back and started teaching and writing again.

He must had some personal demonstration during that period of what is considered as relevation by you. But, the problem of such people is that they cannot prove it to others thus find it difficult to put that in such logical way as philosophy demands.

When he insists on doing some basic premises of Islam not to put on test, he must have confirmed those, at least to some extent. You can certainly doubt that but he cannot do anything regarding that.

You can say the same thing about Moses, Christ, Buddha, Mahavira and millions others too. None of them gave any proof either. You have to look at the life and the charecter of the person to see his intentions.

Secondly, most of the philosophy does not rely on proof. Can you tell me which philosopher gave proof of his premises, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Plato ot even N?
Did Descartes show by demostration that he thinks, therefore he is?
Did kant demostrate his metaphysics?
Did N demostrate his wtp to others?

It is all in the mind, not on the ground.

Philosophy is all about premises and ontologies derived by those and most of those are still not confirmed physically.
That is why philosophy has to rely either on science or spirituality for ultimate confirmation. It can confirm a very few of its premises on its own
.

One may believe Kant, Hume, N or Gazali. That does not make any difference on the benchmark of demonstration. Remember, all are mere beliefs, not demonstrated facts.

But, by no means, i am holding all that useless.

with love,
sanjay

You can say that again … and again. :confused:

This explains why you never understood what I told you about Nietzsche and value. You were prejudiced about me, thinking I don’t know about spirituality.
I find you a far more head-stuck person than myself. I think with my brain, sure, but I ground my thoughts in my heart. You do not display much heart in your writings, little passion, little spirit. (all these mean the same thing: courage)

So did Caligula.

He is the opposite of spiritual. He took away mans spirit and replaced it with servitude to his favorite book.

The koran is anything but spiritual. It’s a prison for the spirit.

And?
What meaning does such a quest have if it led to him cluttering up mans destiny with mud and causing future billions to live in deprivation?

He must had some personal demonstration during that period of what is considered as relevation by you. But, the problem of such people is that they cannot prove it to others thus find it difficult to put that in such logical way as philosophy demands.

So he should have stayed away form philosophy and stuck to his revelations. But instead he chose to defile the noble art of philosophy (honesty) with his hallucinations.

Yes. He confirmed it but he could not prove it so everyone just had to obey on blind faith.

You don’t understand this at all, Sanjay.

My objection is to his claims to logic and thought. Not to the fact that he shared his little fantasy with the world. His evil is that he imposed his fantasy on free spirits and stole from them the faculty of mind.

As you may know ‘mind’ relates to ‘mannas’, the higher thought faculty in sanskrit, and also to ‘Man’. Due to Ghaxzali, the muslim man is no longer man, but back to ape.

Al Ghazali is thus literally the reverse of Prometheus. He is the one that took the fire away from man. He brought man back into darkness.

All these thinkers did is demonstrate and justify. That is what philosophy is. They made mistakes, because until Nietzsche they too still relied on the possibility of objective analysis. But their work was to liberate man from such ideas, from the hallucinations of prophets and madmen like Ghazali.

It is all in the mind, not on the ground.

Then you believe that mind is unreal?

If you had a notion of spirit, you would know that “as above, so below”.

I guess you have to believe this to keep misreading Nietzsche, to serve your own beliefs.

You are describing your own mind. The mind of the philosopher is beyond your comprehension, apparently – the idea that a man could be honest to himself,choose to not delude himself with fairytales, seems alien to you.

Signing of with “with love” when all you’ve given is falsity is not smart. It shows that you do not know what love is. Love is not something you can bring about by saying the word. It’s in your actions. The love you could show me would be in correctly representing my views, and to try responding to them (as hard as it is to understand someone like me for either an atheist or a theist), and not to preconceived notions of what a philosopher can be.

Honesty and courage, my friends. That is all it takes. God may give you courage, but will thwart your honesty. And to be courage for a lie isn’t that hard.
Having heart while seeing the world in the eye is a far greater courage.

Consider the relation of courage and intelligence. It is a precarious relation, but a crucial one in the face of all other beings. The task of philosophy is to leave and love all things in their self-nature. This is the Way, as the greater Dogen of Shobogenzo practiced it. It is sitting in lotus and being rooted in oneself. And considering, this is the ecstatic bliss of the spirit, all other beings in their self nature.

James,

I acknowledge your objection and have to accept too that i have nothing to present in the support of Gazali.

But, as i have a read him to some extent, my assumption is that he is not faking. He was an honest person with a serious quest to know the answers.

An average doctor can tell whether the person has been attended medical classes or not from conversation only, without checking the degree.

with love,
sanjay

I sort of regret saying this as it is exceptionally harsh thing to say. Please see it as the full range of my anger at you for insinuating that I do not operate from spirit or love, that my intellect is incapable of grasping spiritual revelation and divinity. That is an incredibly grave insult, and your signing off on that with the automatic ’ with love’ adds to its cynicism.

Still, I am certain that if you had encountered my writing with heart and courage, that you would not have seen the need to lecture me on the very first thing that all meditative people learn when they set out on the path, which is that a sanctifying intelligence is awakened once the teleological mind is silenced.

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