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Reading group: al-Ghazālī’s Deliverance from Error, the chapters on doubt

Bilal Rashid Fellow
· 7 replies
SkepticismIslamicKalamSufismAl-GhazaliIbn TufaylRené Descartes#al-munqidh#certainty#doubt#reading-group
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Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, usually translated Deliverance from Error, is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to read for a lifetime. I would like to read the first part, the account of his doubt, slowly over three weeks with anyone who wants to join, whatever their faith or lack of it.

Translations. Richard McCarthy's translation, with notes, has been reprinted under the title Deliverance from Error. W. Montgomery Watt's older translation appears in The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazālī. Both are fine; McCarthy is fuller. If you read Arabic, so much the better, and please correct the rest of us.

Plan.

  • Week 1. The opening: his thirst, from youth, to know the reality of things, and his worry that children of Christians grow up Christian and children of Muslims grow up Muslim. What he means by certain knowledge, including his example of the man who turns a stick into a snake.
  • Week 2. The collapse: the senses (the shadow that seems still, the star that looks no bigger than a coin), reason, the possibility that waking life is to something else what dreams are to waking. The illness of about two months, and how it ended.
  • Week 3. A brief look at the four groups of seekers he then examined (the theologians, the philosophers, the party of authoritative instruction, and the Sufis) and why he ended with the last.

Visiting the sick, I have sat with people whose certainties have collapsed in a hospital corridor, and I will be reading partly for that. Bring whatever you are reading for.

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7 replies

  1. Fajar Nugroho

    Fellow

    Week 1. I am eighteen and this is the first time an old book described my exact situation. The line about children growing up in their parents' religion hit me hard. Everyone in my family assumes I believe what they believe because I was raised in it, and al-Ghazālī says that is precisely the problem: inherited belief is not yet knowledge.

    The stick and snake example is clever. If someone told me three is more than ten and proved it by turning a stick into a snake, I would be amazed at the trick but I would still know ten is more. So certainty has to be the kind that no miracle could shake. That is a very high bar. Is anything left after that?

  2. Nur Aisyah Rahman

    Fellow

    Week 2. What struck me is the order. He does not start by doubting everything at once. He tests the senses and finds reason correcting them: the shadow is moving, the star is huge. Then he asks the question that does the real damage: what corrects reason? Maybe there is a judge beyond reason that would show reason's verdicts to be as weak as the senses' were. Its not having appeared so far does not prove it does not exist.

    And then the line I keep rereading: he says that during those weeks he was a sceptic in his actual state, though not in what he said or professed. That is the difference from a textbook thought experiment. He was not arguing a position. He was ill with it.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    Fellow

    A small addition on reception. Ibn Ṭufayl, writing in the Islamic West about two generations later, opens Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān by discussing al-Ghazālī's books and complaining that they say different things to different audiences. He clearly took him seriously as the person who had shown that reason alone is not where the story ends. And then Ibn Ṭufayl writes a whole novel about a man who reaches the truth with no teacher at all, which is a kind of answer.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    A caution I always give in class. The Munqidh was written late in his life, long after the crisis it describes, and it is carefully composed: it has opponents to refute and a path to recommend. Many scholars read the autobiography as shaped, perhaps heavily, by those aims. That does not make it false. But we should not read it as a diary, and comparisons with Descartes need to remember that Descartes's doubt is announced as a method from the start, whereas al-Ghazālī's is presented as something that happened to him.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Week 2, the ending. He says the illness was cured not by an argument but by a light that God cast into his breast, and that this light is the key to most knowledge. Note what he does not say. He does not say the light refuted the sceptic. He says it restored his acceptance of the necessary first principles, with confidence and certainty.

    In the hospital I have never seen anyone argued out of despair. I have seen people restored, and it usually comes from somewhere they did not plan. That is not a proof of anything. But it makes me trust that he is describing something real.

    1. Fajar Nugroho

      Fellow

      Bilal, but then what is the difference between "a light from God" and "I just felt better one day"? I am not trying to be rude. If the doubt was real and the cure was not an argument, how do I know the cure was knowledge and not just relief?

      Helpful · 1
      1. Bilal Rashid

        Fellow

        Fajar, that is the right question, and al-Ghazālī would not dodge it. His answer is not that the light proves itself. It is that without some such restoration, nobody could reason at all, the sceptic included. He also immediately goes looking at four groups who claim to know, which is not what a man does if he thinks feeling better settles everything. Keep reading. In week 3 he tests even the Sufis by what their path produces.

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