The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis by Reilly Robert R

Author:Reilly, Robert R. [Reilly, Robert R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2014-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

Almost one hundred years after al-Ghazali’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Averroes (1126–1198) tried to launch a counterattack against al-Ghazali’s disparagement of philosophy with The Incoherence of the Incoherence (1180), which is an almost line-by-line refutation of al-Ghazali’s book. After all the damage that had been done by the Ash’arites and al-Ghazali, Averroes attempted to restore parity between reason and revelation of the kind that had been espoused by al-Kindi. He also insisted, somewhat like the Mu’tazilites, that the study of philosophy is commanded as an obligation in divine law. In The Book of the Decisive Treatise, Averroes stated that since “their [the ancients’] aim and intention in their books is the very intention to which the Law urges us . . . whoever forbids reflection upon them by anyone suited to reflection upon them . . . surely bars people from the door through which the Law calls them to cognizance of God.”7 Averroes also correctly diagnosed the ethical subjectivism inherent in Ash’arism as similar to that of the Greek sophists (the difference being a divine ruler arbitrarily setting the rules in Ash’arism, and a human ruler in sophism). “All these are views like those of Protagoras!” he exclaimed.8

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