Quick Take: Why is Christianity Waning & Islam Growing?

Al-Ghazali didn't set Islam on a path to decline, but foresaw the danger for organized religion ahead

About a decade ago, it became fashionable to pile on a Muslim thinker, the Iranian scholar Abu Hamid al Ghazali (1058-1111), and blame him for the intellectual, social, political and cultural decay suffered by Islamic countries over the last thousand years¹. This was always unfair, and the unfairness is particularly glaring when one considers Ghazali’s warnings in light of what’s now going on in many Christian churches.

In essence, Ghazali was the most effective and successful promoter of a conservative strand of Islam that found much favor in following years, for multiple reasons, mostly unrelated to Ghazali himself. We could say, in modern political terms, that Ghazali became the most famous Republican commentator at a time of Republican ascendancy: he was, let’s say for the sake of simplification, the Rush Limbaugh of 11th century Islam: just like nobody would blame the ascendancy of neocon Republicanism on Limbaugh exclusively, nobody should blame the ascendancy of conservative Islam on Al-Ghazali exclusively.

And yet, just like it would be wrong to analyze neocons without looking at figures like Limbaugh, it’s worth considering Ghazali’s figure and his contribution to that particular development in Islam. This is especially the case because Ghazali’s thought does much to clarify one of the most important questions in the 21st century: why is Christianity falling off a cliff especially in its Western strongholds, while pretty much every other religion is either stagnant or on the rise?

Many historians have noticed that scientific enquiry in Islamic countries, never as strong a point as many believe, slowed down markedly from around the passing of Ghazali, to the point of almost ceasing (with significant exceptions) for a millennium. Was this a coincidence? Not really: Ghazali worked hard, and efficiently, to make this happen. But, like Limbaugh, he was more of a messenger than a driver of future events.

In the Islamic world, unlike Christendom, the rejection of philosophical discussion and its reduction into mere theology was made easier by the fact that the Arabic world always made a sharp distinction between foreign-induced philosophy and wisdom, and the search thereof: the first, “falsafa,” was described with a word borrowed from Greek while the second, “hikma” (as in Baghdad’s “Bayt al-Hikma,” or House of Wisdom) was native and much preferred by Sufis and other Islamic mystics.

For much of the early Islamic era, both words were used inter-changeably. Slowly, however, the idea was “falsafa” was a contamination of pure Islamic ideals expressed in the Quran and the hadiths (sayings of Muhammad, fastidiously compiled for centuries) became dominant, and this idea soon poisoned all attempts at scientific enquiry: because this activity was (correctly) associated with foreign, polytheistic, “falsafa,” given that science really took many more centuries to become something entirely separate from philosophy, both in West and East.

Ghazali, with his fear and loathing of the key scientific concept of skepticism, was a strong critic of “falsafa” and did much to repress its discussion in centuries to follow. Being an enormously respected scholar and teacher, his book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" (Tahafut al-Falasifa) – sharply aimed against practitioners of “falsafa” and not those of “hikma” – became a key tract against science and philosophical enquire alike, based on the belief that all causal events comprise the immediate and present will of Allah: from that tenet, Ghazali rejected Aristotle and Plato, and their Islamic admirers (including Ibn Sina/Avicenna, and Al-Farabi), whom he labelled as corrupters of the Islamic faith.

Like the first Greek philosophers, such thinkers – as Ghazali very well understood – had come as close as they could to declare that scripture is nothing more than philosophical truth vulgarized to appeal to the ignorant, literal-minded majority: which was apostasy, a charge that Ghazali didn’t take lightly and defined as "a legal pronouncement that involves confiscation of property, capital punishment, and the sentence to eternal punishment in hellfire."²

The question here is, of course, why Islamic scholars and rulers paid attention to the weak arguments against free enquiry put forward by Ghazali, a man with an obvious dislike for previous, respected philosophers and men of letters. The answer is unrelated to the theological arguments then going on in the Baghdad university where Ghazali taught, and very closely related to the fact that Baghdad was effectively part of the Seljuk Empire, which kept Abbasid caliphs in charge of the city and the surrounding region – as a sign of goodwill and respect for Islamic tradition.

Ghazali didn’t come from nowhere. As head of the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the most prestigious school in the Islamic world at the time, he was generally aligned with the Asharite School, named after the Sunni theologian Al-Ashari (874-936), a mystic from Basra. Al-Ashari claimed godly visions led him to reject (at the age of 40) his earlier association with rationalistic interpretations of Islam known as Mutazilism and embrace conservative positions associated with the Mutalizites’ sworn enemies, the Hanbalites.

His Asharite disciples focused their scholarship on the question of whether acts have no intrinsic moral qualities prior to divine command and prohibition – thus stealing and killing are evil acts simply because Allah prohibits them, whereas helping the needy is good simply because Allah commands it. This question never was particularly prominent in Christian theology, partly because Plato’s influence mostly settled it in favor of the existence of intrinsic moral values, but was a very important one in Islamic theology³.

Asharites, on the whole, tended to fall on the opposite side to Plato’s, arguing in line with Hanbal’s teachings that Allah is not bound by human prejudices on what is “good” or “bad” and, if he’s truly omnipotent, can’t accept moral limitations to his power, particularly moral limitations derived from the reasoning of mere humans.

From a theological perspective, this approach dispenses neatly with the problem of evil. Examples of horrible human suffering by disease and natural disasters are simply decreed by Allah. Against the predominant Christian response, this means that it’s not emphatically not the case that such suffering must somehow be conducive to some greater human good that we, mere humans, cannot perceive here and now⁴.

Ghazali’s writings fundamentally derive from this line of argumentation, while grappling with the follow-up Asaharite debate on whether Allah, free from all responsibility to act one way or another with regard to humans, is by necessity truthful in his communications with us.

In the Tahafut, Ghazali followed on from his earlier work “Maqasid al-Falasifa” ("The Aims of the Philosophers"), in which he summarized and explained fundamental philosophical concepts discussed by Islamic schools influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly that of Ibn Sina, called “Avicenna” in the West.

It was Avicenna's legacy that was the primary target of the Tahafut. Ghazali argues that philosophers fall short of finding ultimate causes because, while it is Allah’s “habit” to allow certain effects to typically follow particular causes, this is not necessary. He uses the example of cotton catching fire when in contact with a flame – this happens often, but Allah could stop it or trigger it at any point, so Allah is its ultimate case, not physics, which thus become contingent and not necessary. Other examples include eclipses. Remember: for Ghazali and the Asharites, Allah has no need to be truthful in any interactions, and that includes natural phenomena.

Ghazali was still explicit in his approval of mathematics, the exact sciences and things like medicine, a stance that is, in fact, less radical than Ashari’s rejection of everything but divine revelation as “insinuation of the devils.” However, his adamant rejection of causality, his view that Allah is the cause of all that happens, amounts to a rephrasing of Ashari’s stance in an even more damaging way: that idea itself really is quite enough, if taken seriously, to eliminate all need for any science.

This logic came to be applied to all fields of knowledge touched by Islam and wasn’t so much driven by convincing arguments as by the fact that Ghazali’s philosophy provided useful intellectual cover for less sophisticated, often non-Arabic and non-Iranian dynasts who appreciated Islam’s doctrinal simplicity and directness as useful to control unruly subjects. These were people like Ibn Tumart (1080-1130), the Berber leader who later drove the Almohad puritan movement, who was a disciple of Ghazali either directly or indirectly, through his studies in Baghdad.

The usual counter to any discussion of Ghazali’s influence on future Islamic thought is that the Tahafut didn’t put an end to scientific enquiry in Islamic lands. The honest answer is that, for centuries, an ever dimmer candle of scientific curiosity was kept by various isolated figures, until this was but a tiny flicker by comparison with the sort of scientific development seen in the contemporary Christian world.

For example, well after Ghazali’s death and deep into the 12^th century, the polymath Al-Salah (d. 1154) – likely born in Samosata in modern Turkey, like the Classic Greek novelist Lucian – found it necessary to discuss in great detail the differences in the numerical values of the coordinates of the fixed stars that could be detected when comparing with one another the available translations of Ptolemy’s Almagest. This was certainly science and no mere theology.

Still, Samosata’s Al-Salah almost coincided in time with his younger namesake the Kurdish Al-Salah (1181-1245), a theologian who became much more influential as a compiler and scholar of hadiths. A reactionary who pined for what he believed had been more pious times than his, Al-Salah wrote that philosophy is “the basis of foolishness and degeneration… motivated by perversion and blasphemy” and a rejection of Islamic law.

Such words would have been praised by Ghazali and even more so by Ghazali’s contemporary Peter Damian, as bishop of Ostia second only in the Catholic hierarchy behind the Christian pope: Damian himself wrote that philosophy was the Devil’s work and should be avoided by monks.

Damian was a now-forgotten figure who was extremely popular and powerful during his time, and his repudiation of homosexual acts between clerics helped popularize the Christian rejection of sodomy as a capital sin; however, his Al-Salah-style fulminations against philosophy were mostly ignored by fellow Christians and indeed later retooled as promoting the use of philosophy in support of theology.

Why? Why didn’t Damian become the Christian Ghazali, leading all Christians through a dim path towards the all-powerful divinity who doesn’t care about quantum physics and won’t deign to play dice with subatomic particles?

It’s not enough to say that Damian perhaps wasn’t an effective or as skilled a propagandist of religious conservativism as Ghazali. Because there were many others who followed him.

Manegold of Lautenbach (1030-1103) held that the Aristotelian dialogue Timaeus, oft-quoted by the likes of France’s Peter Abelard, the famous philosopher who got Heloise pregnant and was castrated as a result, is irreconcilable with Christian doctrine. In “Against the Four Labyrinths of France,” a work written after 1174, the French canonist Walter attacked the ‘scholastic nonsense’ of four theologians – Abelard plus his contemporaries Gilbert de la Porree, Peter Lombard and Peter of Poitiers: the “labyrinths” – who, he thought, were possessed by the spirit of Aristotle.

People like Damian, Manegold and Walter didn’t play games. One of Abelard’s books – his account of the Trinity, “Theologia Summi Boni” – was condemned as heretical and burned in 1121 and, two decades later, Abelard himself was excommunicated at the urging of rival theologians.

That Christians would develop all the modern sciences and technologies wasn’t at all a given, circa 1100. Vegas would have taken bets: after all, it was way, way easier for Christians to stamp down any dissent within their ranks: all Muslim thinkers held civilian jobs, mostly as judges, ministers or advisors: there was no Muslim pope to bring them to heel, no abbot to admonish them, because there was no organized Muslim clergy. But all the medieval Christian “philosophers” (theologians, scientists, theoreticians or various sorts) were clerics; they were all employed in abbeys and churches and could be dismissed by the Pope, an increasingly powerful figure since the 11th century, the head of the “Papacy” and not the mere Bishop of Rome.

Everybody in Christendom who was literate knew the ancient wisdom of the Greeks came from sodomite pagans. And there wasn’t even that much ancient wisdom to suppress: Latin-language (Christian) copyists had protected much of the Graeco-Roman intellectual legacy over the century, but surviving Greek texts were few and far between. In fact, the Greek Eastern Roman Empire did a fantastic job of protecting them, but these texts remained unavailable for Western scholars for centuries, except for a few, and those were often re-translations to Latin from often poor Arabic-language translations from the Greek that only later were made redundant by the dissemination of Greek-language originals.

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Quick Take: No, Muslim Scribes & Translators Didn't Save the Graeco-Roman Legacy

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It would have been easy to put an end to all the Greek philosophizing. And yet the Christian hierarchy decided not to crack down on dissent. It wasn’t any specific pope or abbots who made the decision: it was all of them. It was a slow, deliberate, collective acceptance that Christianity could only move forward if thinkers were allowed to challenge religious tenets, if they were allowed to consider ideas outside of the accepted boundaries of proper speculation.

Thus, it was churches and, in particular, monasteries that drove the discovery, storage and dissemination of learning, instead of slowing it or freezing it. The Benedictine abbey of Mont St. Michel in Brittany had one of the most prominent roles in the popularization of the new Aristotelian translations to Latin that influenced Western thought so much from the 12^th century; Adelard of Bath translated the astronomical tables of Al-Khwarizimi and the introduction to astrology written by the Iranian Al-Mashar (787-886), helping to trigger much discussion about the uselessness of astrology; Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, in 1141-1143 commissioned the first full Latin translation of the Quran: the sort of step that would have been unthinkable coming from a top official from any other religious establishment, regarding the most venerated doctrinal text of a rival religion.

People like the Italian Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), identified as some as the founder of Scholasticism, sought ontological arguments for the existence of God independently of the Church hierarchy; Conrad of Hirsau (1070-1150), wrote that the arts liberate the mind from worldly ties and lead it to love the things that are eternal – a stance that was pretty much opposite to that increasingly popular among Muslim clerics of the same generation.

Also in the 12^th century, Bernard of Chartres illustrated the link between being and grammar, and how nouns, verbs and adjectives demonstrate the nature of being, with the image of a white virgin – the noun ‘whiteness’ (albedo) expresses the form of the color without a participating subject (pure virginity); the verb ‘is white’ (albet) expresses this form being active within a subject (the woman is, for the moment at least, a virgin); the adjective ‘white’ (album) expresses the same form joined to the subject.

The most ingenious, smart and powerful enemies of philosophical enquiry couldn’t do anything to stop this movement. Not even the great Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a rare combination of smarts, wit, unbridled energy and learning with extremely reactionary instincts, who directed the charges against Peter Abelard and later confronted Gilbert de la Porree over his commentaries on Boethius’ theological works — aiming straight for Boethius’ idea that the existing matter shares divine attributes because it was created by God.

Bernard managed to get Gilbert accused of heresy in the presence of Bernard’s former pupil Pope Eugenius III. Back against the wall, Gilbert made an ingenious, formal distinction God and divinity, while maintaining that the two concepts coincide in God because, by nature, He is divine; trumping his master, the pope ruled that Gilbert’s ability to hold and not to hold the view that God is divinity was enough to escape censure.

Even after a previous pope ordered Peter Abelard’s books burned, nobody paid any attention. Abelard died of old age in Cluny, Christendom’s most luxurious abbey and one adorned with a fine wine collection and all the manuscripts he could read.

The injunctions against Abelard’s work were lifted soon thereafter, and his “Theologia” was copied and re-copied, as scholarship on the part of the admirers of Graeco-Roman teaching, and not the objections to it, emerged dominant: over the 12^th century, collections of “flowers” (florilegia) or anthologies of prose and poetry became fashionable among the learned. This is also evident in the fact that the “Four Book of Sentences” written by the “Master of Sentences” Peter Lombard – Abelard’s fellow Classics-lover, as well as Bishop of Paris – remained the standard teaching textbook of Latin Christian theology, and the first establishing Purgatory as a physical place, until the 16^th century.

Judaism kept a small, tight, prosperous ship, and Islam a well-ordered and decaying one. Christians took a middle road: they traded doctrinal coherence for material and physical progress, while remaining open — like Islam — to all-comers. In the process, Christianity bred its own enemies, and taught them all their best arguments in the books Christian clerks had carefully protected and expanded upon. And then Christianity was slain.

1. France’s Ernest Renan, perhaps the 19^th century most influential orientalist, was the main creator of the idea of Ghazali as destroyer of philosophy and science in the Islamic world. As he wrote in “L’Islamisme et la science, ”as young teenagers Muslim boys turn “suddenly fanatic, full of an inane pride of possessing that which he thinks to be absolute truth … This mad pride is the radical vice of the Muslim. … convinced that God gives fortune and power to those who obey him, irrespective of education or personal merit, the Muslim has the most profound contempt for education, science, and everything that makes up the European mind.” Renan was relying on earlier work on Al-Ghazali by Germans Salomon Munk (1803~67) and Franz August Schmölders (1809-80).

2. “Falsafa” philosophy, Ghazali argued in a rather methodical way, does not constitute a science in its own right, but a conglomerate of four genuinely different disciplines. These are mathematics; logic, that is, the investigation of proofs and definitions, which is actually part of theology, according to Ghazali and thus an intrusion; metaphysics that is, the investigation of Allah’s essence and attributes, which he also considers to be part of theology, and thus another intrusion; and physics, aiming at investigating the material bodies and as such comparable to medicine but not indispensable for humans as medicine is. Cit. "Al-Ghazālī on Philosophy and Jurisprudence" by Ulrich Rudolph, in "Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World," ed. by Peter Adamson (De Gruyter, 2019), p. 70.

3. See "A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant," by Ben-Ami Scharfstein (State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 323.

4. Cit. "Must God Tell Us the Truth? A Problem in Ashʿari Theology," by Khaled El-Rouayheb, in “Islamic cultures, Islamic contexts: essays in honor of Professor Patricia Crone,” ed. by Behnam Sadeghi et al (Brill, 2015), p. 411.