Ghazali and the Perils of Interpretation‪.‬

ABU HAMID AL-GHAZALI (d. 505/1111) is one of the celebrated thinkers of Arabo-Islamic culture. The and high quality of his prolific intellectual career most celebrated thinkers of Arabo-Islamic culture. The scope and high quality of his prolific intellectual career reflect not just his genius and ambition, but, in many ways, mark the culmination of one cultural epoch an the beginning of another. The continuing interest in an discussion of him, which began in his lifetime, assure him a central position in Islamic culture as one of its constitutive elements and authoritative voices. Reflecting highly developed stage in medieval Islamic thought, hi works abound in confrontations between the manifold epistemologies and systems of thought that were adopted and employed by the various political, sectarian, and ideological groups populating the cultural landscape. Richard Frank's Al-Ghazali and the Ash arite School provide perhaps the most authoritative study to date of the place of Ghazali's thought in Islamic theology, and thus merit a full examination on account of the centrality both this study and of its subject matter. Given the range of his ideas, al-Ghazali has both in spired and puzzled many of his readers, past and present: some have seen him as a champion of Islam, while other have vilified him as its enemy. Others still, like Muhammad mad ibn al-Murtada (d. 1680) in his famous al-Mahajja al-Bayda, (1) chose to mute their partial criticisms Ghazali, and to appropriate him by arguing that, at some point toward the end of his life, he repudiated the objectionable aspectsof his thought. Muslim philosophers are equally represented among al-Ghazali's numerous critics; they grudgingly attempted (and perhaps eventually failed) to contain the damage caused by his attacks, not just from without but also from within their system of thought. On a more traditional level, some argued that, despite his critique of philosophy, al-Ghazali was never able to rid himself of residues of this same philosophy that were ingrained in his thought. (2) In fact, the ambiguity in al-Ghazali's position vis-a-vis philosophy is itself a symptom of the difficult relationship between the so-called "Islamic" and "foreign" sciences in medieval Islamic cultures, one marked at once by ideological rejection as well as epistemological attraction.