ABSTRACT
To offer a way of celebrating how far people in the West have come in appreciating Islamic and Christian traditions and their fruitful interaction, this chapter discusses a comprehensive account of each tradition by instead attending to the way a few notable figures have set the pace. Negative theology is part of the dialectical understanding of the hiddenness of the revealed God. The follower of the negative way wants to be in a 'liberating ignorance in which faith rests on the Unknowable and is nourished by silence'. The Qur'an often attributes agency to God as well as to creatures, showing that revelation acknowledges and exploits the inherently analogous character of agency as exhibited in the multiple uses of the term 'agent'. This small clue offers us the best way of presenting Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's intent and strategy to contemporary readers.
