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