ABSTRACT
Before I go any further; there is one other aspect of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s intellectual life that I need to cover in some detail In this chapter I wish to pay closer attention to the two brothers al-Ghazālī, who were extremely influential in the moral and intellectual life of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt. I have had quite a number of occasions to refer to these two prominent figures in Islamic intellectual history. Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī is the more famous of the two brothers. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (450/1058–505/1111) was a prominent intellectual with an active, critical, and wide-ranging interest in practically all the moral, political, and intellectual issues of his time. Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (d. 520/1126) was much more limited in his intellectual preoccupations and led a happy and productive life as a prominent Sufi. There are indications that the two brothers were quite close to each other Aḥmad may have been influential in Muḥammad’s turn to Sufism. Aḥmad also, we are told, taught at Nizāmīyya at Baghdad, substituting for Muḥammad when he was in the firm grip of a paralyzing loss of faith. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt never met Muḥammad but read him closely and extensively. But he knew Aḥmad personally, met and probably corresponded with him. In this chapter, I will examine in some detail the significance of the brothers al-Ghazālī in ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s intellectual growth and disposition. I will also demonstrate in which particular ways ʿAyn al-Quḍāt turned away from the al-Ghazālīs and cultivated a deeper affinity with Avicenna. Once I discuss the specifics of this move away from the brothers al-Ghazālī and towards Avicenna, I can also begin to introduce the emergence of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s radical subjectivity, his collapsing of the metaphysics of human objectivity into a volatile conception of the individual as a thinking agent, resting this agency on conflicting parameters of cognition. Once I do that, then our real task of unpacking ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s transgressive exposition of how “truth” is “told” can begin in earnest.
