They enjoyed, therefore, comparative freedom for their speculations, notwithstanding the hostility of the theologians. This state of things came to an end in the East in the first half of the twelfth century, and the writings of the philosophers were more than once publicly burned. In one such conflagration, in 1160, the works of Avicenna and the Essays of the Ikhwan al-Safa were consigned to the flames. When once it was in this business, the Moslem inquisition did not make too fine distinctions, but burned scientific treatises on astronomy in the category of astrology. In the West, however, Arab philosophy had in the twelfth century its short-lived glory. Ibn Bajja, of Fez, known to the schoolmen as Avempace (d. 1138), begins this period, Averroes (Ibn Rushd; d. 1198) ends it.

The Aristotelianism of al-Farabi and Avicenna was of a denatured kind, which Aristotle would hardly have recognised and would certainly not have acknowledged. Averroes made an era in European philosophy by his endeavour to interpret honestly the genuine teachings of the Stagirite, and it does not detract from the magnitude of his achievement that he was not always right in his interpretation. He spurned the subterfuges by which Aristotle was harmonised with the religious dogmas of creation, providence, and immortality. Science and philosophy are one thing; religion is another. Each should confine itself to its own sphere, and not intrude on that of the other. Religion is for all, and is given in a form and language intelligible by the common mind; philosophy is the affair of the few who have the mental power and discipline and the previous scientific training it demands. The philosopher should not, by colporting science in the market-place, undermine the faith of the simple believer; the unphilosophical should not, in the name of faith, put dogmatic restraints on philosophical speculation. The worst enemies of faith, in his eyes, were theologians like al-Ghazali, who undertook to establish the truth of religion by their dialectic reasonments and their pseudo-metaphysics, and demanded that men should believe

not only what was revealed but the reasons they gave for it.1

This plan for avoiding conflict between philosophy and religion by leaving them no common ground to contend upon has more than once been revived, sometimes in behalf of the freedom of thought, sometimes of the immunity of faith to reason. In some of the schoolmen it became the doctrine of a double truth, according to which a proposition might at the same time be true in philosophy and false in theology or vice versa.

In a history of Moslem philosophy it would be necessary here to go into Averroes' theory of the unity of the intellect, which was to the Christian schoolmen the characteristic heresy of Averroism, and as such was combated by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. This doctrine, however, by way of which Averroes found something better than the immortality of the individual soul, had no similar echo in Islamic theology; and, indeed, the influence of the last great Moslem philosopher was immeasurably greater in the Christian than in the Moslem world.

1 See below, p. 474.

CHAPTER XX

MOHAMMEDANISM

ORTHODOX THEOLOGY

Al-Ghazali-His Life and Religious Experience "Revival of the Religious Sciences"-The Way of Salvation-The Higher Life— Theology in the West-Ibn Hazm and the Zahirites-Ibn Tumart and the Almohads.

IN bringing down the history of Moslem philosophy to Averroes, its last representative, we have anticipated, and must now turn back to the man who gave to Mohammedan theology and ethics the form which in all essentials it has retained ever since. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) stands to Moslem theology in this respect in somewhat the same position that Thomas Aquinas does to Christian theology. His great work, "The Revival of the Religious Sciences," may fairly be compared to the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas, but his personal contribution to theology was more considerable than that of the Christian theologian.

Al-Ghazali was born at Tus, near Meshed,' in 1058 A. D. Early left an orphan, he devoted himself to theological study, as he himself says, from no higher motive than that there were scholarships for theological students, and that teaching offered a career. After studying jurisprudence (of the school of al-Shafii)2 he went to Nisabur, then one of the great centres of learning in the Moslem world, and continued his studies under one of the most celebrated theologians of his time, commonly known by his honorary title, Imam al-Haramain, an Asharite and at the same time a

1 In Khorasan. For a fuller biography, see D. B. Macdonald, Life of al-Ghazzali, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. XX (1899), pp. 71-132.

2 The Asharites were chiefly of this school.

mystic of the orthodox type, a man of large learning and deep piety. Under him al-Ghazali studied logic, the natural sciences, and philosophy, as well as theology. After the death of his master (1085), he left Nisabur, and in 1091 was appointed by the Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, professor in his newly founded college at Bagdad. As a teacher he had a conspicuous success, and his lecture-rooms were crowded with students; but at the height of his career he suddenly resigned his chair and left Bagdad. The reason he gave was the failure of his health; his ostensible purpose, a pilgrimage to Mecca. In an interesting intellectual and spiritual autobiography, Munkidh min al-Dalal, the cause of his withdrawal is explained. The breakdown of his health was the result of an acute intellectual crisis. Inquiry into the nature and grounds of certainty in matters of religion led him into the depths of scepticism. Certainty could be assured only by the evidence of the senses or by the primary ideas of reason, but further reflection threw even these certainties into doubt. From this extreme he was delivered, he tells us, not by reasoning, in which he found no help, but by God, who cured him of that disease, and brought him back to the conviction that in the ideas of reason there is a basis of certainty. But recognition that certainty is possible was not yet attainment of certainty.

Looking about him upon those who professed to have the certainty of religion, he found four classes: the scholastic theologians (Mutikallimun), who undertook to confirm the truth by reason; the esoteric sect (Batiniyya), who had an infallible guide in their Imam, and held that only by committing themselves implicitly to him can men be secure; the philosophers, who relied on logical demonstration; and the mystics, who thought that truth was revealed to them intuitively in their ecstasies. Such, then, were the ways in which he must seek certain knowledge. To return to a naïve faith in what he had been taught as a child was impossible the very condition of that kind of faith is that a man should not be conscious that it is such.

He set himself, therefore, to examine the methods and results of the theologians and the philosophers. The arguments of the theologians, he discovered, were all very well for those who accepted the Koran and tradition; they could defend orthodoxy against various kinds of heretics, and refute their errors; but against such as denied their premises they were helpless. Some of them indeed ventured farther into the field of philosophy, but, being poorly grounded in the sciences, they only exposed themselves to the ridicule of the philosophers. As for the philosophers1 themselves, their mathematics, logic, and natural science are all very well, but the metaphysics which affirms the eternity of the world, denies God's knowledge of particulars, and rejects the resurrection of the body and bodily punishments hereafter is mere infidelity; their ethics they have appropriated from the Sufis. Of those who, renouncing reason, took refuge in the infallibility of their Imam, he entertained a very poor opinion; their arguments moved in a circle. remained, then, only the way of the mystics.

There

With the general character of this way he was not unacquainted, but he now addressed himself to a more thorough study of their treatises, several of which he mentions by name. The result of this study was a recognition that what he was in search of was not to be got from books. Descriptions of stages and states were not the thing itself. There is as much difference between a definition of renunciation-the condition of a man whose soul is no longer of this world-and the reality of it as between knowing the symptoms and causes of intoxication and being intoxicated.

He had by this time been brought back to firm faith in the three fundamental doctrines of Islam: God, the Prophet, and the Last Day, not, as he is at pains to repeat, by definite

1 His controversy is chiefly with the Arab Aristotelians.

2 The agreement, as far as it extends, is in reality due to their common dependence on the same Greek sources.

The sect which al-Ghazali has in mind are the Ismailis (see below, pp. 499 ff., 504); particularly, the branch which Hasan al-Sabbah developed into the Assassins.