Impact of Al-Ghazali’s Refutation of the Philosophers
Tyson’s Argument
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, an author, and a science communicator of great renown. In a talk some decades ago, he makes the following argument. The Islamic Golden Age was a great thing. Mathematics, Geometry, Astronomy, Physiology, Physics, and other scientific fields took great leaps forward while Europe was stuck in the dark ages. The world Algebra and Algorithm are of Arabic descent. Half of the star names are Arabic. Tyson attributes this success to the acceptance of all modes of thinking in the intellectual centers of the Muslim world, especially Baghdad. Philosophers philosophized. Students were welcome from all religions and places, even doubters, and unorthodox schools of thought like the Al-Kalam flourished.
Then, the Mongols sacked Baghdad fractured the Muslim world, which remains fractured to this day. Muslims are behind in all matters of engineering and science. If they achieved the Islamic Golden Age before, why not again in the Ottoman Empire or the Mughal Empire or the dozens of similar empires in North Africa and Central Asia. If the foundational blocks are there in the culture, what has stopped them from raising to the prominence once again? There has only been one Muslim Nobel Prize winner (true at the time Tyson said it) compared to the hundreds by Jewish scientists even though there are over a billion Muslims and only 15 million Jews. So, what gives?
Tyson claims that Al-Ghazali in one of his works said that Mathematics is the work of the devil. Specifically Tyson claimed that Al-Ghazali said that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil. If you are a good Muslim, you should avoid Mathematics. This had a ripple effect over the course of generations and slowly science lost its place of prominence.
Tyson is mostly correct, but only accidentally. He got wrong what Al-Ghazali said, but the beginning and end are the same. To be clear, no evidence exists in Al-Ghazali’s numerous works that contain such a simple antagonistic statement against Mathematics. Furthermore, Al-Ghazali as a polymath never would have made such a statement either. To the contrary, his earlier works contain the opposite, where he as a polymath supports science and mathematics. However, Al-Ghazali’s overall impact might have been to split the Muslim world from science. Here is how.
The Death of Causation
Causation is illusive and yet the most important part of the modern world. Even if we cannot prove that one action must follow another, we make ungodly machines and apparatus that assume causation exists, and will continue to exist for hundreds of years. We make bridges, airplanes, and skyscrapers, we take medicines and vitamins, and we make diplomatic treaties involving compromises and future rewards all because we believe causation to hold true for the near future.
All of human ingenuity stems from the desire to cause things. Someone wanted to stave off diabetes and discovered insulin. Someone wanted to help other illnesses and made the germ theory. Someone wanted to – (insert human need here) – and they invented – (enter invention here). There are millions of people out there that see the world they live in, they then conceive of a better world and cause that better world to appear.
Yet Al-Ghazali says that causation does not exist.
The Victory of Religion over Science
Al-Ghazali was not the first person to claim this superiority, but he was a skilled polymath who made this claim. He beat the philosophers at their own game and only then called the game stupid.
Many people before and since Al-Ghazali have written books about how Muslims should live their life. All of them have purely religious backgrounds and arguments. Al-Ghazali was an intellectual, able to box with the best of them. His claim had more weight. At one time, he also had a political backing through Nizam ul Mulk Tusi, which raised his status. His political thought on the relationship between the Sultan and the Caliph also gave him the mainstream recognition and support.
His word held more weight and still there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims fanatic about him believing him to have done no wrong in his life. Therefore, when he threw away science and held religion more securely, others followed.
Onto Speculation
This is where the facts of the matter end and speculation begins. Al-Ghazali had a non-zero impact on the Muslim consciousness and the decline of the Muslim world, but how much. Maybe he had a positive impact, maybe a slight negative, or maybe disastrously negative, who knows? There are hundreds of theories on why different societies rise and fall.
The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans definitely had nothing to do with Al-Ghazali. At a point, they were at the height of their science, and then the ceased to exist. Rome fell. Who was Rome’s Al-Ghazali?
Ibn Khaldun points out the relationship between tribal people and urban dwellers to claim that tribal people with their hard lifestyle have strength to form cities but they then grow weaker over time due to luxury and ease and fall into decline in his theory of Asabiyyah.
Every field has its own theory about the decline of different civilizations. Economists think it is about economy. Political scientists think it has to do with political science and laws. Nutritionists think it has to do with nutrition (for reference, the sub-continent from 700 AD to 1400 AD suffered countless invasions from Central Asia and one theory is that the Indian people’s diet meant they were physically not strong enough to resist the Turkic-Persian-Mongol invaders who were bred and raised on more meat than grains compared to the Indians). To no surprise, the scientist Tyson thinks the reason behind the decline of the Islamic golden age has to do with departure from science.
When two cats fight over a fish, the monkey runs away with it.
That being said, someone has to be right and we have to pick a side. I do believe that Al-Ghazali was a major component for the start of the decline. It is not that Al-Ghazali flicked a switch and it all went haywire. Furthermore, it is not that Al-Ghazali’s anti-causation ideas took off in the Muslim world after the fall of Baghdad. Instead, when Al-Ghazali defeated the philosophers, a greater evil took its place. Al-Ghazali’s Sufism only maintains a small portion of the Muslim population. If the rest are not philosophers, what are they? They are Muqallids.
An overly simplistic background of the early Muslim world divides it into three main actors. First, there are philosophers like Al-Farabi, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Ibn-Khaldun and more. These do use primary sources of Islam but they include other philosophies and in some places deviate from the primary sources. Second are the clergymen, strict interpretationists, who take the primary sources as literal as possible with no room for philosophical intrigue, metaphors and hold that new knowledge (of all kinds) is not necessary. On the side line, the actor were people like Al-Ghazali who fought with the philosophers (rightly so). But when Al-Ghazali defeated the philosophers and “proved” their uselessness in the matter of metaphysics, religious and social affairs, the clergymen used that opportunity to take over the narrative and set up their own kingdom.
When two cats fight over a fish, the monkey runs away with it.
All Knowledge is Complete
But what is wrong with the clergymen?
In Islam, the idea exists that religion is complete, that innovation is obsolete and unnecessary. But this has seeped into the society as the fact that further of the world through science is not necessary.
Islamic law is complex and comprehensive. Quran and Sunnah are silent on many of the details and exceptions that appear in modern life. To solve those details and exceptions, multiple schools of thoughts emerged and branched away. There is the Sunni school and the Shiite school. Inside the Sunni school are the four Madhabs (translated as religions, Islam is a Deen, a full code of life, and Madhab is a religion, concerned with religious affairs only). At some point after Al-Ghazali, the four Madhabs (Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi) in the Sunni school were considered generally complete.
From the time of the Prophet to the next five six centuries, the Muslim world had innovation after innovation about the details of Islamic life. One method of innovation is called Ijtihad which can be over-simplified as “using your own reasoning to interpret and extrapolate from the Quran and Sunnah” about problems like how to perform ablution, how to divorce a spouse, how to divide inheritance, and everything else under the sun of Islamic jurisprudence.
When the four Madhabs were ‘complete’, Ijtihad was heavily reduced and prohibited, and it was replaced with Taqleed, the idea that in any matter of jurisprudence, which is not crystal-clear through the Quran and Sunnah, has to be referred to one of the four Madhabs. You can follow any of the interpretations of the four Madhabs (which slightly disagree with each other), but you cannot create your own interpretation no matter how smart you think you are. In addition, if you do want to create your own interpretation, you must first go through the proper religious education and see how others before you have interpreted the primary sources before making your own interpretation. Even though these madhabs were formed from the primary sources and are themselves secondary and created by humans, taqleed maintains the higher status of the founder of the Madhabs calling them Imams (Imam Malik, Imam Shafi, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and Imam Abu Hanifah). It is borderline insane and criminal to suggest that a person should be allowed to interpret Islam from the primary sources while skipping these Imams.
In terms of keeping Islam alive, this worked. There is a non-zero chance that Islam would have passed off (as other religions did) into obscurity if it had not been regimented and regulated by these madhabs and their clergymen. Shiite school has a smaller percentage of the Muslim population but they do afford some more innovation, still not enough.
However, this process of Taqleed takes out the confidence and motivation to do innovation. It is a strangely unique thing that is missing from most Muslim societies that there is some truth out there that is not written down. Muslims think subconsciously that all questions of importance have been answered and they are written down in one of the hundreds of thousands of books. All Knowledge is complete.
The Frontier of Science
But all knowledge is not complete.
Science works at the frontier. There is a large body of knowledge that we are comfortable with, then there is an unknown size of knowledge that we do not know, which is “the great unknown”. Nestled in the middle is the frontier, where we are pushing into the great unknown little by little, one research paper at a time.
It is an important concept to hold dear that truth is somewhere out there and you and I can research it and write it down. The vast majority of people do not accept one or both of these statements. Either they lack true acceptance of the fact that the great unknown exists, or they lack the confidence to believe they can be the ones to tackle the unknown.
In the west, my understanding is that it leans more towards a confidence issue where people do not consider that they are the same biological specimens as Richard Feynman, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and others (sorry for no female representation). There is a general acceptance that we are moving forward, but it is being done by others.
In the Muslim world, it leans towards a general disregard for the great unknown. It is not in the social vocabulary to say that important stuff is hiding in the great unknown and that we should work to unravel it ourselves. Instead, there is a general belief in completion. There is the completion of Deen through the Quran, which shall never change, there is the completion of Prophethood and no more prophets will appear, and there is the completion of the Madhabs and no more innovation is necessary.
It is not Al-Ghazali’s direct ideas that are antithetical to the marriage of Islam and Science, but his victory over the philosophers laid the ground for Muslim clergy devoid of intrigue of the physical world through science that ensured that the Islamic Golden Age shall never return.
Attempts at recovery
Now, it should be clear that Muslims have not had a great time in the grand scheme of things. Muslims lost force in Europe, Turkey became secular with the fall of the Ottomans, the British overtook the Mughals, Iran and Saudi got western influence, the Middle East is a mess in general, Muslims lost Spain, and Central Asia is Muslim in name only.
With the fruits of the renaissance bearing, Muslims figured out they are lacking, but only a few took actions. I only know a few of these that had some success, but none enough to ignite the Islamic Golden Age.
The last Ottomans tried Pan Islamism to get support for the Ottomans from all corners of the Muslim world since the Ottomans were in some sense the direct successor of the old Muslim caliphates. This raised some minor political intrigue and movements in the colonized world but did not work or save the Ottomans.
The Salafis emerged that bypassed the four madhabs claiming them to be the reason for the decline of the Muslim world and went straight back to the primary source of the Quran and Sunnah with more strict interpretation. Saudi Arabia is now Salafi, but even though it is the center of the Islamic world, other regions maintain their madhabs. There is an argument to be made the Saudis and the UAE are bringing back the Islamic golden age, but not really as their progress is an economic one, not a technical or scientific one.
The Salafis also fail to identify that the cause of the decline of the Muslim world was not the existence of the four Madhabs but their rigidity and their failure towards not developing scientific intrigue in the society.
Other revivalists like Shah Waliullah in the subcontinent tried to revive the madhabs from the inside and back into action injecting innovation back into it and opening the doors of Ijtihad, but with little success.
Other revivalists like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan took a more western approach of leaning towards technical education over religious ones but this was overtaken by the narrative of colonialism. Even though Sir Syed talked about science and its necessity, even if it had gained traction, practically it would have replaced religion with secularism, the Islamic Golden Age would still not come back.
Al-Ghazali defeated philosophy and scientific intrigue by the end of 11th century and close to a thousand years later; Muslims have not been able to put it back in. No, Al-Ghazali did not say that counting numbers is the work of the devil, but he might as well have.