al ghazali deliverance from error summary

What Aquinas became for medieval Christendom, so Ghazzali was to the Islam of the early Middle Ages, except that Ghazzali's ideas were also influential in Europe, where he was known as 'Algazel'. In time, Ghazzali's attempt to revive his religion was fully recognized, and he was given the peculiar title Hujjat-el-Islam, or 'The Proof of Islam'. Leaving behind his family and colleagues, he resigned his post and began over a decade as a wandering Sufi mystic in Syria, only to return to teaching many years later. The intensity of the work left Ghazzali with a nervous breakdown and a speech problem that made him unable to continue giving lectures. This study evolved into his monumental The Revival of the Religious Sciences, which progressively debunked every school of philosophical learning except for Sufism, which in his eyes provided the route to direct experience of God that Islam had lost sight of. Yet this epiphany was clearly not enough to sustain him, and he began an exhaustive program of private reading and study to discover the school of philosophy, religion or mysticism that would best correspond to the truth he had been witness to. A blaze of light seemed to pierce through to his heart, and in an instant the 'well-ordered arguments' that had that had been his basis in reality thus far became insignificant next to his direct experience of divine truth. In the midst of his dark night of the soul, Ghazzali had an experience that would change him forever. He wondered: might it not be the case then that the reasoning we use to structure and explain our day to day reality might also seem like an illusion seen from some higher state of wakefulness? Ghazzali remembered that Sufi mystics, for instance, claimed their higher states of consciousness made reasoning worthless. Similarly, during a dream we could see and feel fantastic things, but on waking we realize they have no basis in reality. Although, for instance, a star in the sky appears tiny, mathematics proves that the object is in fact much larger than the earth. But at the very peak of his career he began to have doubts that his powers of reasoning had really led him to truth.Īs he tells it in his autobiography, The Deliverance From Error, Ghazzali had a kind of spiritual crisis in which he was no longer sure of what he knew, and his thinking ran along the following lines: He observed that the evidence of one's senses could often be wrong, overtaken by some higher order of truth. As a professor of Islamic jurisprudence in Baghdad 's Nizamiyyah College, Al-Ghazzali was considered one of the leading minds of his day. All his life he had aimed to know 'the deep reality of things', and his mental powers had led him to eminence.

Al ghazali deliverance from error summary