Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali)

Summary

Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad. The library text is Claud Field's English version, published in London in 1909 as The Confessions of Al Ghazzali in the Wisdom of the East series; it is an abridged rendering and passes briefly over some sections of the Arabic, notably the long examination of the Ta'limites (the Isma'ili party who relied on an infallible teacher). Ghazali begins with a thirst for knowledge that made him question the beliefs he had inherited, since the children of Christians, Jews and Muslims all simply follow their parents. Seeking certainty that no miracle could shake, he tests the senses (a shadow seems still, a star seems small) and then reason itself, which might be overruled by a higher judge as dreams are overruled by waking. For about two months he is, in his words, a sceptic in fact though not in profession, until God heals him not by argument but by a light cast into the heart. He then examines three groups of seekers. Scholastic theology defends orthodoxy well but argues from its opponents' premises and cannot cure his doubt. Philosophy he studies alone for about two years while lecturing to three hundred students. Mathematics, logic and physics he finds largely neutral, though they can lead students to trust philosophers too far; in metaphysics he faults Aristotle as transmitted by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina on twenty points, three of them amounting to unbelief: the denial of bodily resurrection, the claim that God knows only universals, and the eternity of the world. He insists, however, that truth must not be rejected because of who speaks it, comparing the wise reader to a coin-assayer and noting that honey is not made impure by a cupping glass. Finally he turns to the Sufis and learns that their way is a matter of experience, not definition. Seeing that his own teaching was driven by love of fame, he wavers for six months until his tongue fails, he cannot eat, and the physicians say the trouble lies in his heart. He leaves Baghdad, lives in retreat at Damascus and Jerusalem, makes the pilgrimage, and after about ten years concludes that the Sufis walk the true path. The closing sections explain prophecy as a faculty above reason, as reason is above sense, and suggest remedies for the decline of faith in his own age.

Top Lessons

• Honest doubt can be the beginning of firmer faith

  Ghazali does not hide that he once doubted the senses and even reason itself. He treats this doubt as a sickness to be healed rather than a pose to be admired, and he finds his cure in God's gift of light, not in a cleverer argument. His story invites readers to ask what certainty is and where it finally comes from.

• Judge a teaching by its truth, not by its teacher

  Though he rejects much of the philosophers' metaphysics, Ghazali insists that a true statement does not become false because an opponent says it. His images of the coin-assayer and the honey in the cupping glass teach a discipline of fair reading that is rare in any age of controversy.

• Knowing about goodness is not the same as being good

  Ghazali learns that the Sufis' teaching is easier to study than to practice, as a doctor can define drunkenness without being drunk. When he applies this to himself, he finds that his celebrated teaching was moved by desire for fame. The cost of acting on that discovery is his position, his income and his health.

• Reason has a place, and a limit

  Ghazali praises logic and mathematics, uses arguments throughout, and still holds that prophecy is a faculty above reason, as reason is above the senses. A child of seven could not imagine the work of the intellect; so, he argues, reason should not deny what lies beyond it.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Ghazali describes his intellectual and spiritual life in medical language throughout. His two months of scepticism are a 'mental malady' that God heals; scholastic theology cannot cure 'the malady from which I suffered', and he notes that remedies vary with the disease. The central medical passage is the crisis of 1095: after six months of indecision his tongue is bound so that he cannot lecture, he falls into despair, loses appetite and cannot swallow, and his physicians judge that the trouble lies in the heart and in grievous sadness. Later readers have interpreted this episode as a psychosomatic illness, a depressive crisis, or a conversion-type loss of speech; these are retrospective readings, and Ghazali himself presents it as God's act in turning him from the world. The book also draws on the medicine of its day: drunkenness explained by vapours rising from the stomach, the cupping glass, patients who ignore the doctor's ban on fruit and cold water, and the argument that medicine and astronomy contain knowledge not reached by experience alone. His treatment of dreams as a glimpse of a higher mode of knowing, and of Sufi ecstasy as an altered state with its own certainty, has made the book a reference in the history of religious psychology.

• The Subterfuges of the Sophists

  The dream argument and two months of doubt described as a malady healed by God.

• Sufism (the crisis at Baghdad)

  Loss of speech, appetite and the ability to swallow; the physicians' verdict that the cause lies in the heart and in sadness.

• Divisions of the Philosophic Sciences (Physics; Moral Philosophy)

  Medicine as the study of the body's organs and their changes; the honey in the surgeon's cupping glass.

• Sufism (opening) and The Reality of Inspiration

  Drunkenness and the doctor's knowledge of it; ecstasy and dreams as states beyond ordinary perception.