A Short History of Islamic Thought by Morrissey Fitzroy;

Author:Morrissey, Fitzroy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

REASON, REVELATION, AND INSPIRATION

If Sufi mysticism was becoming mainstream, then so, too, was philosophical theology. As with Sufism, a key figure in this development was al-Ghazali. As we’ve seen, his logical critique of the philosophers played an important role in the development and diffusion of the more philosophical Ash‘arism of his teacher al-Juwayni. After al-Ghazali, the next great philosophical theologian was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1150–1210).1 Born in Rayy, al-Razi had studied Ash‘ari theology in Nishapur – reportedly learning one of al-Juwayni’s theological treatises by heart – and philosophy at Maragha in north-western Iran.2 Like many scholars of the time, he was constantly on the move, travelling from city to city in search of patronage and protection from the various ruling dynasties of the Muslim world. Wherever he went, three hundred students reportedly came in tow. Eventually he settled in Herat in modern Afghanistan, where he was given his own madrasa and honoured as the ‘master of Islam’ (shaykh al-islam).3

Much like al-Ghazali, al-Razi had an ambivalent relationship with falsafa. A critical commentator on the works of Ibn Sina as well as a prolific author of original works of Ash‘ari theology, Shafi‘i legal theory, and Qur’anic exegesis, al-Razi identified several fallacies in the theories of the philosophers.4 In his commentary on Ibn Sina’s Pointers and Reminders, for instance, he criticized the great philosopher’s proofs for the existence and unity of God, his doctrine of emanation, and his view (also criticized by al-Ghazali in the Incoherence) that Allah only knew things ‘in a universal way’.5

Yet, again like al-Ghazali, al-Razi also saw much that was useful and good in philosophy. Conceding that Ibn Sina’s book contained, as he put it, ‘important points and remarkable insights’, he studied and absorbed the philosophers’ logical methods, adopted their tripartite view of the soul, and came to think that the highest form of human happiness lay in attaining intellectual perfection.6 Nor was al-Razi afraid to deviate from earlier Ash‘ari views, dismissing the classical Ash‘ari doctrine of kasb – the deterministic notion that humans ‘acquired’ their acts from Allah – as ‘a name indicating nothing’, and criticizing al-Ghazali’s arguments against the philosophers and Isma‘ilis where he found them wanting.7 He even spoke highly of the freethinking poet al-Ma‘arri and engaged with the ideas of the heretical philosopher Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (their shared name indicates that both hailed from the Iranian city of Rayy), hinting at a more radical rationalism hidden beneath the surface of his writings.8

Just as important as his engagement with philosophical ideas, al-Razi also wrote his works in the way that philosophers did, adopting what the historian Ibn Khallikan called a ‘systematical arrangement of topics’ in his theological treatises.9 A typical al-Razi treatise proceeded step by step through the key topics of philosophical theology, beginning with a section on epistemology and logic, then moving onto questions relating to the nature of existence, then to matters connected to God and the divine realm, and finally to issues arising from revelation, such as the nature of prophecy and the afterlife.

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