Al-Ghazali's Case That Falsafa Corrupts Belief

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali trained thoroughly in falsafa before turning against it, and his Tahafut al-Falasifa, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, remains the single most consequential critique the tradition ever received from inside the civilization that produced it. Al-Ghazali did not reject reasoned argument as such; he had mastered it well enough to reconstruct the falasifa's own positions with real precision before attacking them. His central charge was that on at least three points, the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of particulars rather than only universals, and the denial of bodily resurrection, philosophers following Aristotle by way of Avicenna had reached conclusions that plainly contradicted Islamic doctrine, and that their claim to have reached those conclusions by demonstrative, certain reasoning did not survive close examination. The charge of unbelief he leveled at those three points carried real institutional weight, at a time when a scholar's orthodoxy was not a private matter. Averroes answered decades later in Cordoba with the Tahafut al-Tahafut, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, defending the falasifa point by point and arguing that al-Ghazali had misunderstood the arguments he claimed to refute. Neither side persuaded the other's tradition. Al-Ghazali's critique is often credited, more than any single event, with falsafa's declining institutional standing in the Sunni heartlands after his lifetime, even as the tradition he criticized went on, through Averroes's own commentaries, to shape philosophy in Latin Europe instead.