ABSTRACT
Focusing on Ghazanfar and Islahi’s treatment of the religious nature of the texts, the occasional mention of al-Ghazali’s Islamic faith (in the main part of the paper) makes their secular interpretative position particularly clear. Ghazanfar and Islahi keep faith separate from and subordinate to the scientific economics that al-Ghazali is propounding. The authors’ interpretative position is typified by their statement: “Like other scholars of his age Ghazali mixed philosophical, religious, ethical, sociological, and economic considerations into his writings. From time to time a poem, anecdote, aphorism, or quotation from the Scriptures enlightens his texts” (383). For
Ghazanfar and Islahi’s al-Ghazali, the scriptures are no more than decorative. This view of al-Ghazali is not plausible given a careful reading of the texts, including the Ihya Ulam al-Din (usually translated as Revival of the Religious Sciences) and the Kitab Tahafut al Falasifah (translated as Incoherence of the Philosophers), which are the sources of many of Ghazanfar and Islahi’s quotations. The overall argument of these works is that to build a structure of thought that goes beyond the Qur’an and hadith is to be lost in undirected human will and speculation (see, for instance, Hourani 1991). It is misleading to characterize al-Ghazali as a modern thinker when the main project of post-Enlightenment Western philosophy has been to build and to justify systems of thought that are independent of religious thought. The inaccuracy of Ghazanfar and Islahi’s characterization of al-Ghazali should be evident just from the titles of the two major works mentioned above, and even more so when the proper sense of Din as religious practice is considered. If alGhazali actually held the modern secular view that religion is an optional and inconsequential extra, which the authors seem to assume he held, he would probably have gone to the gallows along with his near contemporary al-Hallaj, and we would not have any texts to discuss today.
