It is useful to start with Gazall’s legal condemnation of the philosophers. On three counts, the Arabic Aristotelians are to be regarded as unbelievers: because (1) the philosophers subscribe to the pre-eternity of the world, (2) deny that God knows particulars, and (3) reject bodily resurrection, the falasifa fall foul of the creedal confession of the Muslims. (On an additional 17 charges, the philosophers are to be deemed heretics). These positions are offensive not so much because they contradict the apparent meaning of Scripture - Gazall is prepared to reinterpret revelation where reason demands - but because of the necessitarian line of reasoning that has brought the philosophers to them. In Gazall’s mind, the philosophers presume to dictate the terms on which God’s encounter with creation must take place, a procedure that unduly restricts God’s absolute power (qudra). Because the conclusion is unacceptable, the philosophers’ reasoning must be faulty.
Because Gazall accepts the demonstrative scientific ideal endorsed by the Muslim philosophers from al-FarabI onward, he needs to find fault either with the philosophers’ formal inferences or with their premises. Typically he concentrates on the latter, claiming that what the philosophers regard as the necessary and self-evident starting Points for knowledge are in fact anything but that. For instance, the common conviction that certain things are causes for others is ultimately indemonstrable, since all we ever perceive are things happening concurrently (Incoherence, 166.1-168.10). The philosophers’ rejection of a first moment of time at which God created the world from nothing is likewise untenable. They may claim that this is a necessary truth of reason, but the simple fact that not all people share the same intuition shows that it cannot be a primary, axiomatic truth, nor can the philosophers demonstrate their thesis inferentially (Incoherence, 17.6-15). The same approach is employed time and again both in the Incoherence and in other polemical works: (Gazall cleverly exploits the distinction between conceiv-ability and imaginability, maintaining that many things that do not fall within the parameters of our everyday experience may nevertheless be possible to a transcendent agent (see Kukkonen 2006).
(Gazall’s methodological skepticism in the Deliverer is to be viewed in this light. To accept straightforwardly (Gazall’s description of a self-induced skeptical crisis is to ignore the profoundly literary character of the work. Stephen Menn has situated (Gazall’s autobiography in a line of philosophical self-assertion that stretches from Galen to Descartes (Menn 2003). The narrative is similarly filtered through (Gazall’s later association with the ‘‘sober’’ Sufism of al-Junayd (Ormsby 1991). The Deliverer’s passages on doubt and certainty ultimately aim at pointing the way toward an epistemology whereby God acts as the guarantor of all veridical perceptions, whether sensory, intellectual, or supraintellectual. Even so, there are important self-imposed limits to (Gazall’s radicalism, starting with his willingness to defer to reason as a yardstick for determining which beliefs are warranted. This differentiates his position from the thoroughgoing fideism of the Isma'ills, whose irrationalism (Gazall opposed (see Kukkonen 2010).
World History
