Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology (Book Review‪)‬

Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology. By FRANK GRIFFEL. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xiii + 408. $74. Griffel's new book on the great Arabic theologian al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) is a substantial contribution to the field of Arabic intellectual history and to Ghazalian studies in particular. It consists of some 280 densely written pages, excluding the endnotes, and contains a timetable, an index, and a detailed bibliography. The book is inscribed in a recent scholarly trend aiming to show the interface between Arabic philosophy and theology during the classical and post-classical periods. Like Robert Wisnovsky's Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context (Cornell University Press, 2003), it focuses on specific concepts that played a key role in medieval intellectual debates between theologians and philosophers and stresses the impact of Avicenna's ideas on the subsequent development of Islamic theology. The reader gains not only a heightened understanding of the cross-fertilization between these fields, but also an enhanced sensitivity to the complexity of al-Ghazali's thought and the scope of his intellectual achievements.