Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination.
Sara, Solomon I.
GHAZALI AND THE POETICS OF IMAGINATION. By Ebrahim Moosa. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005. Pp. xv + 249. $59.95. $22.50.
Born in 459 H/AD 1058 in the Persian city of Tus, 'al-Ghazali
or Ghazali became an important intellectual figure in 11th- and
12th-century Islam. After extensive travel and writing, he died in 505
H/AD 1111 in the place of his birth. Moosa's study allows us to
approach Ghazali's life chronologically, following him to the
centers of learning of his time, or to read that life as a conversion
story pivoting on the year 488 H/AD 1095--the turning point from
Ghazali's life as a traditional scholar to a life as a passionate
religious and mystical figure. (A historical summary is presented on
page xiii.) Or we may follow Ghazali's scholarly career guided by
M.'s commentary on some of Ghazali's many treatises--more an
intellectual tour than a biographical narrative.
Ghazali honed his intellectual credentials among--and mostly
against--his peers, writing seminal books that challenged their
prevailing ethos. His Maqasid 'al-Falasifah ("Aims of
Philosophers") and Tahafut 'al-Falasifah ("Incoherence of
the Philosophers") took aim at leading intellectuals like
'al-Farabi (d. AD 950) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. AD 1037). He also
sharply criticized his society for encouraging the gap between elite and
ordinary believers. These and similar challenges elicited a rebuttal from another intellectual leader, Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198) in the
latter's defense of philosophy, Tahafut 'al-Tahafut ("The
Incoherence of Incoherence"). Ghazali exercised enormous influence
but also created controversy, even though M.'s treatment of those
controversies is rather irenic.
M. also treats controversies that arose between Islam and
missionary Christianity--precursors to our later clashes of
civilizations. He gives more space than necessary to those who highlight
civilizational contrasts (e.g., to Madnonald [14]), only to reject these
negative arguments and promote a positive view of his subject on matters
of faith and practice.
M. does not subject any of Ghazali's treatises to minute
analysis. Rather he extracts Ghazali's ideas and posits, somewhat
a-temporally, their echo in the modern literary criticism of Derrida,
Ricoeur, Said, and others. In doing so, he hopes to bring Ghazali into
dialog with contemporary issues of Islamic belief and practice and the
demands of life in the world apart from belief. (In this regard,
modernity's challenges to Islam are not far different from the
challenges confronting Christianity.) One can get the (post)modern
concerns of the book from the chapter titles: 1. Agonistics of the Self;
2. Narrativity of the Self; 3. Poetics of Memory and Writing; 4.
Liminality and Exile; 5. Grammar of Self; 6. Metaphysics of Belief; 7.
Dilemmas of Anathema and Heresy; 8. Hermeneutics of the Self and
Subjectivity; 9. Technologies of the Self and Self-Knowledge; and
Conclusion: Knowledge of the Strangers. It is difficult to imagine a
more sympathetic defense of Ghazali as he faced both his own time and
now ours.
Ghazali dipped into many other disciplines, in addition to his
training as a jurist, to give a richer expression of the demands of
belief and practice. M. often calls him a bricoleur to capture his
multidimensional personality as a meeting place of many currents of
thought. All in all, M.'s nuanced understanding of Ghazali's
world allows us to enter the dihliz ("a passage way") into the
intellectual/spiritual edifice that Ghazali built.
Due to the richness of the subject, one might wish for more
quotations from Ghazali's many treatises, such as his
'Ihyaa' ("Reviving") and Munquidh
("Rescuer"), and more textual support for the concepts
discussed. The book ends with a glossary of Arabic terms, but it
includes only about half the terms used. The index could be much more
extensive. Despite these limitations, the book is interesting,
informative, and a great read.
SOLOMON I. SARA, S.J.
Georgetown University, Washington
