Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination

I started to read this book because I had a decidedly distasteful attitude towards Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and I decided that perhaps I was not giving the man a fair shake. I had recently read that in Al-Ghazalis’ “Council to Kings” he characterized the ‘race of women’ as consisting of females whose behavior could be pigeonholed into the following categories: dog, pig, fox, scorpion, pigeon, donkey, mouse, snake, monkey or sheep. A good woman would be most similar to a sheep. I don’t like to be called a sheep. Anyhow, this “Council to Kings” book is out of print, so I couldn’t get a feel for the context in which Al-Ghazali wrote this stuff, plus one needs to keep in mind that gender justice is very historical time and show more context dependent. Therefore, I decided to read Ebrahim Moosa’s book to get a better idea of who this Al-Ghazali person was and what he had to say about women.

First off, he doesn’t have anything to say about women in this book. Al-Ghazali’s ideas of individuality and what constitutes human consciousness are gender neutral.

Second, there isn’t much verbatim quoting of Al-Ghazali, this is Moosa’s commentary on Al-Ghazali’s ideas, many of which were spread out across volumes of Al-Ghazali’s copious literary output.

Third, Moosa does have a post-modernism bias (based on my observation that only post-modernists use the word ‘bricolage’) however, he is respectful of Muslim tradition. His basic tenant is Muslims need to deconstruct the past so that it can then be reconstructed with a foundation of tradition but with an active dialog in respect to dealing with modern problems.

Moosa’s book is very good in that it paints a very complex portrait of a highly complicated and interesting historical figure. No Al-Ghazali wasn’t perfect, yes he backtracked on some of his ideas or wasn’t consistent, and perhaps even he was a dreaded ‘flip-flopper’, but nevertheless, who exactly is right all of the time? Who doesn’t change their mind? And besides, Al-Ghazali did write some stunningly beautiful things. I particularly liked his analysis of the “light” ayahs in Surat al-Noor. Furthermore, since so many Muslim traditions have picked over and borrowed from Al-Ghazali’s work, I felt like I had a better understanding of so many other Muslim thinkers, particularly Rumi and Muhammad Iqbal. In reading Al-Ghazali, you get a better understanding of the source of many Muslim ‘talking points”.

There is a lot of heavy vocabulary, most of which Moosa defines so you don’t have to go running to a dictionary (ex. Anathema, catachresis, epistemicide, teleiopoiesis, liminality, palingenesis). The style is academic, but not so obtuse that a college sophomore couldn’t handle it. The chapters on self and identity were lovely, but I got a bit lost on the metaphysics chapters.

After reading this book I had much greater respect for Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, and while he wasn’t perfect and got some stuff wrong, overall he was an amazing thinker. show less