Encofrados continuos

What had changed since the tenth century? Like many scholars of his day, Ghazali was greatly attracted to philosophy as a method for knowing the realities of things, but he was also aware of its dangers. If past scholars such as‘Amiri had looked to the logic of Aristotle to prove the truth of Islam, now, in the eleventh century, philosophy was on the verge of riding roughshod over Islam.12 _{One figure in particular was responsible for the new situation:}

Avicenna (d. 1037), a brilliant thinker with a highly scientific bent and also, apparently, a strong libido. He enjoyed patronage from the various courts of

his day but also faced threats to his life on account of his ideas.13 _Avicenna

was no atheist. Islam permeates his philosophy. But his thought is quasi-deist. He explains religion, including prophecy, in terms of the rationality of the mind rather than as a divine (that is, meta-rational) communiqué. He also explains the workings of the world according to a system of causality of its own, leaving no room for miracles that would involve the suspension of the natural laws of the universe. A learned reader such as Ghazali might draw the conclusion from the writings of Avicenna that recourse to God was not needed to explain the truths of existence. Avicenna’s thought veers in this direction: The world follows a system that may originate in divine wisdom but is nevertheless explicable on its own terms. Indeed, God can only hope that the world cooperates with his will.

The system of Avicenna, if not reframed, ran the risk of stripping religion of its own authority, forcing it to define itself in terms of philosophy. Ghazali was thoroughly influenced by Avicenna, but he also realized that Avicenna’s ideas needed to be domesticated within Islam if Islam was to operate on its own revealed terms. He initiates this project through skepticism, calling upon the most learned members of the umma—he means the philosophers—to admit their ignorance. Avicenna would have been ill inclined to do so. It is here that Ghazali distinguishes himself from the great philosopher, even when accepting so much of his thought, reviving Islam not by means of logic, even if greatly indebted to it, but by doubt about the power of philosophy. Ghazali is no obscurantist but he does seek to find a way to preserve the integrity of Islam as the means of acquiring certain knowledge.

Avicenna was as much a scientist as a philosopher, and this helps explain his outlook. Science is impossible without the assumption of a system of rules: The world has to have its own logic for scientific inquiry to make sense. But this is to relegate God to the sidelines. God may have created the world as a system of interlocking causes, but to understand the world one had only to understand the system by which it was made, while ignoring its maker. There was no need to petition God for help or expect him to intervene in the world in miraculous ways. The system was set in advance. It was enough simply to know cause and effect. A prophetic message from God was useful for the masses but not for the learned.

In Avicenna’s view, prophecy was not so much a communiqué from God, that is, divine speech, as it was a human expression of universal rationality. This was to turn prophets into expert philosophers with unsurpassed skill in syllogistic reasoning. To be sure, there was a difference: Prophets had a dis- position to receive truth effortlessly while philosophers had to work at it.14

Still, there was no essential dividing line between what prophets commu- nicated by inspiration and what philosophers demonstrated by syllogistic reasoning. In this sense, it was not the performance of miracles that estab- lished the veracity of a prophet. A prophet was a prophet because his soul had a special disposition to universal rationality. It was not by miracles but by standards of rationality that a prophetic message could be verified.

Avicenna thus advanced a philosophical position on prophecy that was not entirely unknown in previous centuries. (Farabi had also thought of prophecy as a kind of human cognition.) By the eleventh century, the philosophers of Islam conceived of prophecy as a natural even if intensified form of human rationality.

Ghazali would be influenced by this notion of prophecy, even as he altered it to preserve the notion of prophecy as a message from God. He would make use of Avicenna’s idea of prophecy as a natural even if rare phenomenon to suggest that believers, at least the spiritual elite among them, could experience what the prophets had experienced. He was not suggesting that people could become prophets, not even the spiritual elite, but only that they had the potential of becoming prophet-like. By following the Prophet’s teachings, adhering closely to ritual prayer, and constantly reciting the names of God, humans could reach a state of awareness allowing for a taste (dhawq) of the knowledge of prophets.

By becoming prophet-like in this sense, the saints of Islam had access to the knowledge that prophets had of the reality of existence, even if they were unable to express it in words or even conceive it as a set of ideas in the mind. It was, after all, a meta-rational phenomenon, not unlike dreaming. Even if beyond words and ideas, this meta-rational phenomenon, that is, the mystical insight of the truly learned among Muslims, constituted a valid approach to knowledge: It was a way to verify the existence of something that the senses and even the mind could not apprehend on their own. The truly learned, not the philosophers but the friends of God (awliya-’ alla-h) or saints, could “see” the reality of existence by the“eye” of the heart. It was a light that God cast into their hearts to illuminate the truths of things beyond what the senses and the mind could determine. With the shift from philosophical to mystical scholasticism, one becomes attuned to seeing things as they exist with God.

One of Ghazali’s goals was to verify the truth of prophecy. To know the reality of a thing, he claimed, you had to“be” it. Thus, for example, a student could never know his teacher in reality until he became a teacher himself. But how is one to acquire knowledge of God by this method? People could not become godlike as a way to experience and thereby know the truth of God. However, by suggesting that people could become prophet-like, Ghazali maintained that they could know things as the prophets knew them. In this way, the knowledge of God as conveyed by revelation could be verified by mystical awareness or, as it were, insight.

It is thus mystical scholasticism that corroborates the truth of prophecy. The truly learned can “see” what the prophets know, allowing them to “demonstrate” the reality of prophecy, even if they are unable to commu- nicate it in words or even conceive it as ideas in the mind. Ghazali is not being coy when at various places in his writings he hints at but refuses to speak of mystical disclosures. It is simply impossible to put such disclosures into words or even construe them as ideas in the mind, but they do serve as grounds for his reframing of the scholastic project. Surer knowledge of the

realities of things is obtained by starting from God as the source of their being, a process that assumes mystical awareness, even if such awareness results not from the direct experience of mystical disclosures but rather as the fruit of learned ignorance.