Our halaqa a few years back attempted to read Hujjat al Islam Imam Ghazali’s (ra) work, “Incoherence of the Philosophers”. We failed miserably as the work is a very complicated philosophical book. Without the context of the opponents arguments, and maybe even a general summary of what Imam Ghazali (ra) was trying to say our discussions trailed into the confused look / ’scratch our head’ zone.

I still have the book which I often attempted to try to read on my own, but the same problems affected my individual comprehension of this book. I didn’t feel I understood what Imam Ghazali(ra) was trying to prove and why, yet I was fascinated by the book as I knew that it represented one of the most intellectual works our ulema have produced.

I recently came upon this book by a western author, “An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy” by Oliver Leaman. While I am the first to suggest to steer clear of books about Islam from non-Muslims, this book has been very helpful in providing some context to the philosophical discussions that took place in the past. The author really takes an impartial view towards the arguments made in both directions, and I get a feeling that he respects the conclusions that the traditional/classical Muslim community came to. In the absence of a teacher I found this book as a good way to get some context and understand the actual text of Imam Ghazali’s (ra) Incoherence .

It also has some interesting sections on Sufism and its role in lives of the philosophers. He appreciates the difference between the science of Sufism and the mystical traditions of other religions. I especially liked this passage:

“There can be a ’science’ of this (the mystical) experience in just the same way that there is a natural science and a system of logic, and such a science would have as its task the explication, description and organization of our religious experience.

This sounds very different from the normal way of understanding mysticism, which often takes the form of an antinomian contrast with rational approaches to faith that is, the mystic does not have respect for the laws of religion since he has another and more direct route to the truth, that of experience of God. Also, the techniques of the mystic are often far from clear, and highly subjective. There is no reason to think he has hit the mark, as it were, apart from his self-observation, and this is far from scientific in the sense where science is aligned with objectivity.

There were mystics in the Islamic world who could be characterized this way, but the system of mysticism is just as systematic as any other form of intellectual enquiry, and there was a great deal of suspicion even within Sufism of various esctatic and emotional states into which some of their peers threw themselves
…
On the whole, also, they insisted on a serious attitude to the norms of social and religious behaviour, rather than their replacement by other and more dramatic forms of spiritual expression.”