ABSTRACT
Al-Ghazali was a philosopher of great originality and critical acumen. He was deeply religious, a mystic as well as a penetratingly analytical thinker; a sceptic as well as a man of faith. His great desire was for a certainty that was unshakeable, a knowledge in which ‘the object is known in a manner which is not open to doubt at all’. 1 He propounded a radical scepticism concerning the theory of knowledge embodied in the philosophical thought of his Arab predecessors and advanced a theory of his own that saw knowledge as direct and intuitive rather than as the product of demonstrative reasoning. In mid-life he abandoned his career as a professor of theology in order to adopt the way of life of Sufism. 2 Subsequently he made it his aim to establish a form of Sufism that could be a bastion to orthodox Islamic doctrine but would at the same time correct the excessively legalistic tendencies of that orthodoxy by cultivating an inward spirituality in believers. His sceptism has been likened to that of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and of the logical positivists of twentieth- century European philosophy.
