Al-Ghazali and His Condemnation of the Philosophers
A few years ago, I watched the reboot season of “Cosmos” on PBS, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. In an episode on the Muslim contribution to astronomy (and mathematics), Tyson made the claim that Muslim civilization was dominant in the natural sciences…until it wasn’t. Strangely, Tyson attributed the loss of scientific thinking in an entire civilization to one man: Al Ghazali. The merits of Tyson’s claim is a separate topic (TL;DR: Tyson is obviously wrong and a college freshman who’s taken Islam 101 could have told him why), and less interesting to me. What is very interesting though, is how would al-Ghazali’s thinking be viewed in the post-modern philosophical discourse? Was he a master or a simpleton?
Public domain image, via Wikimedia Commons
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) is considered to be one of the most iconic and influential thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age, reflected in his epithet of Hujjat al-Islam (“The Proof of Islam”). A brilliant jurist, theologian, and philosopher, he rose to prominence as a professor in the Nizamiyya in Baghdad (a full fledged university, surprisingly similar to today’s universities). As the youngest ever tenured professor at the most elite educational institute of its time, his lecture hall was packed, and instructors who were twice his age acknowledged his brilliance and attending his seminars and lectures. Yet at the age of thirty-eight, in the middle of his career, he experienced a profound spiritual crisis that left him unable to lecture. Abandoning his prestigious post, wealth, and family, he wandered for over a decade through Damascus, Jerusalem, and Mecca, often living in mosques, embracing anonymity, and devoting himself to prayer and ascetic practice. In some accounts, he took on simple, menial roles — such as sweeping or caring for mosques, consciously shedding his status as a famous professor and insisting that he was a simple laborer or custodian. This reflects a Sufi practice of fanaʾ (self-effacement), where one humbles the ego by embracing obscurity. In this period, he found clarity through Sufism, which he came to regard as the true path to spiritual certainty. After about 11 years of this wandering, he returned to teaching in Nishapur and Tus, but with a very different outlook — no longer chasing prestige, but integrating scholarship with Sufi spirituality.
A Sufi in Ecstasy in a Landscape. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
To briefly bring it back to Tyson, it is important to stress that al-Ghazali was not “against reason.” On the contrary, he was one of the most rigorously trained intellectuals of his era, deeply familiar with logic, philosophy, and the works of Muslim thinkers like Avicenna and al-Farabi as well as those of Aristotle and Plato. In his autobiography Deliverance from Error, he accurately states that his authority stems from the fact that he had completely mastered the methods of philosophy before ultimately rejecting their claim to truths. His critique was not that reason was useless, but that reason alone could not provide certainty about the deepest questions of existence, the afterlife, and God. In his view, philosophical reasoning had limits and needed to be balanced by revelation and spiritual practice.
This conviction is articulated most forcefully in his famous work Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), written in 1095. In it, he attacked Muslim philosophers particularly Avicenna and al-Farabi for adopting Greek metaphysics uncritically, arguing that their reliance on Aristotle and Plato led them into heresy. In a nutshell, Al-Ghazali questions the elevation of the Greek texts to the rank of revelation. Al-Ghazali accuses the Muslim philosophers of undermining key Islamic doctrines—such as creation in time, divine omniscience, and bodily resurrection. To be clear, his goal was not to destroy philosophy but to humble it, showing that unaided reason could never reach truths that prophecy and revelation made clear, and that revelation was a primordial source of Truth that could not be excluded from the framework. Ironically, contemporary “reform” (literalist) movements in Islam, argue that Al-Ghazali himself doesn’t go far enough and accuse him, too, of “being a philosopher”.
A fun thought experiment would be how al-Ghazali might respond to later Western thinkers, although one realizes that the conversation may not get very far because the perspectives can be so divergent. Lets do that experiment, from the Stoics to the post-moderns.
The Stoics and Marcus Aurelius. The Stoic tradition emphasized self-discipline, detachment from pleasure, and acceptance of fate. Al-Ghazali would have admired these traits, seeing in them echoes of Sufi ascetic practice. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations might have resonated with al-Ghazali’s own habit of self-examination. Still, he would have found Stoic philosophy incomplete. By resigning themselves to an impersonal fate, the Stoics missed the possibility of a personal God whose providence gave meaning to human struggle and promised justice in the afterlife.
Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that reason has strict boundaries: it can structure human knowledge of the phenomenal world but cannot reach the noumenal reality of God or immortality. On this point, al-Ghazali might have found surprising common ground with Kant! Both men sought to demonstrate that reason alone cannot resolve ultimate questions. Yet al-Ghazali would have criticized Kant for grounding morality in human autonomy rather than divine revelation. For him, true ethics flowed not from rational duty alone but from submission to God’s will.
Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer described human existence as driven by the “will to live,” a blind, irrational force that condemns people to suffering. Al-Ghazali, who had himself abandoned wealth and status after his spiritual crisis, would have sympathized with the idea that worldly striving leads to misery. But he would have insisted that suffering is not meaningless. For al-Ghazali, pain and loss are tools of purification, directing the soul toward God. Schopenhauer’s bleak pessimism lacked the divine hope that al-Ghazali believed gave life ultimate meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” and urged humans to create their own values through the will to power. To al-Ghazali, Nietzsche would have embodied the greatest danger of philosophy: arrogance before God. Perhaps an Al-Ghazali vs Nietsche debate would be the most interesting of all, given how inverse they are. Al-Ghazali’s critique of Muslim philosophers already emphasized that unaided human reason cannot reach eternal truths. Nietzsche’s exaltation of human creativity apart from God would have seemed to al-Ghazali the ultimate delusion—a philosophy that glorifies the self while denying its Creator.
Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre exists near the Nietzsche end of the spectrum from where al-Ghazali exists. Sartre’s existentialism, with its insistence that “existence precedes essence,” would have been anathema to al-Ghazali. For Sartre, humans create their own values in a godless universe; for al-Ghazali, essence and value come from God alone. He would likely have regarded Sartre as a tragic figure, mistaking the experience of freedom for the absence of God, and thus leading others into despair rather than genuine liberation.
Michel Foucault. Foucault famously analyzed the way institutions—from prisons to hospitals—shape individuals through systems of power and surveillance. Al-Ghazali might have agreed with Foucault’s suspicion that worldly authority often corrupts and reduces people to mere objects of control. Yet he would have diverged sharply by arguing that true liberation comes not from dismantling human structures of power but from submitting to divine law.
In the end, al-Ghazali’s legacy lies in his balance: he neither rejected philosophy outright nor surrendered to it. He showed that reason is a gift, but one that must recognize its boundaries. His condemnation of philosophers was not an anti-intellectual gesture, but a reminder that human thought, however brilliant, cannot replace revelation and the transformative power of faith.
