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1058–1111
The theologian, jurist, and mystic whose demolition of philosophy and turn to Sufism marks the single most consequential intellectual event in Islamic civilisation — the figure Iqbal compares directly to Kant.
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī is arguably the most influential Muslim thinker after the Prophet Muhammad himself. A jurist, theologian, philosopher, and mystic, he performed what Iqbal calls a ‘civilisational rescue operation’: the systematic demolition of Hellenistic philosophy (falsafa) as it had been practised in the Islamic world, followed by the integration of purified Sufi experience into mainstream Sunni theology.
His Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) destroyed the claim that Aristotelian philosophy could demonstrate necessary truths about God, creation, and the soul. His Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) rebuilt Islamic practice from the ground up, grounding it in experiential piety rather than mere legal compliance. His spiritual autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (Deliverance from Error), remains one of the most honest accounts of intellectual crisis ever written.
Iqbal’s relationship to al-Ghazali is dialectical: profound admiration for the demolition, measured critique of the reconstruction. Ghazali destroyed the right target (the pretensions of rationalist philosophy) but, in Iqbal’s view, retreated too far into mysticism — abandoning the world-engagement that Iqbal considers essential to Islamic civilisation’s vitality.