The core
In 1095, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali — arguably the most influential Muslim intellectual in history — published the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a systematic demolition of the claims of the falāsifa, the Muslim philosophers working in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic tradition. The book is one of the pivotal texts in Islamic intellectual history, and its consequences — intended and unintended — are still unfolding.
Al-Ghazali’s target was not philosophy in general but a specific philosophical programme: the claim, advanced most systematically by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), that human reason operating through Aristotelian logic could arrive at certain knowledge of God’s nature, the structure of the cosmos, and the fate of the soul — and that this rational knowledge was superior to the knowledge delivered by revelation. Al-Ghazali identified twenty propositions held by the falāsifa and argued that they were either logically incoherent, internally contradictory, or incompatible with the clear teachings of Islam.
The three charges of unbelief
Of the twenty propositions, al-Ghazali declared three to constitute outright kufr(unbelief): the philosophers’ claim that the world is eternal(contradicting the Qur’anic doctrine of creation); their denial of bodily resurrection (the falāsifa held that only the rational soul survives death, not the body); and their claim that God knows only universals, not particulars (which would mean God does not know individual human beings or their specific acts — undermining the entire framework of divine judgement).
The remaining seventeen propositions he classified as bid’ah (innovation) — erroneous but not rising to the level of unbelief. This distinction mattered enormously: al-Ghazali was not declaring all philosophy harām. He was drawing a line between philosophical conclusions that are merely wrong and philosophical conclusions that are incompatible with being Muslim.
The critique of causation
The Tahāfut’s most philosophically celebrated argument — Discussion 17, on causation — transcends the immediate polemical context. Al-Ghazali argues that there is no logically necessary connection between what we call a “cause” and what we call an “effect.” When fire touches cotton and burning follows, we observe a sequence, not a connection. Nothing in the concept of fire entails burning; nothing in the concept of cotton entails combustibility. The burning is produced by God’s act, and God habitually creates burning when fire meets cotton — but this habit is not a necessity. God could create the contact without the burning, or the burning without the contact. Miracles are simply instances where God departs from the customary pattern.
This argument anticipates, by six centuries, David Hume’s famous analysis of causation: that we never observe a necessary connection between events, only a constant conjunction. Al-Ghazali and Hume reach this conclusion from opposite directions — al-Ghazali from theistic commitments, Hume from empiricist scepticism — but the logical structure of their arguments is remarkably similar. Both deny that causation is something we can observe in nature; both locate the appearance of causal necessity in habit rather than in reality.
A simple question.
Does fire burn cotton?
In the Islamic tradition and beyond
The Tahāfut provoked one of the great counter-texts in the history of philosophy: Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes) Tahāfut al-Tahāfut(The Incoherence of the Incoherence, c. 1180). Ibn Rushd argued, point by point, that al-Ghazali had misunderstood the philosophers he was critiquing, that his arguments often refuted straw men rather than actual philosophical positions, and that denying natural causation makes the study of nature — and therefore the very science the Qur’an encourages — impossible in principle. If fire does not genuinely burn, there is no reason to study the properties of fire; and if there is no reason to study nature, the Qur’anic injunctions to reflect on creation are rendered meaningless.
The historical irony is bitter. Ibn Rushd’s response had relatively little impact in the Islamic world, where al-Ghazali’s prestige was enormous and growing. But in medieval Europe, translated into Latin, Ibn Rushd became “the Commentator” — the philosopher whose Aristotelian commentaries shaped the thought of Thomas Aquinas and the entire tradition of Latin scholasticism. The Muslim world received al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy; the Christian West received Ibn Rushd’s defence of it. The divergent intellectual trajectories of the two civilisations in the centuries that followed are not fully explained by this fact, but they are not unrelated to it.
It is essential, however, not to caricature al-Ghazali. He was not anti-intellectual, and he was emphatically not anti-rational. His later works — particularly the Mustaṣfā on legal theory — make extensive use of Aristotelian logic, which he regarded as a neutral tool separable from the metaphysical conclusions the falāsifahad drawn with it. What al-Ghazali opposed was not reason itself but the claim that unaided reason, operating through philosophical method alone, could deliver certain knowledge of the most important questions: God’s nature, the soul’s fate, the world’s origin. On these questions, he argued, revelation and mystical experience are necessary supplements to reason — not replacements for it.
One moment, two trajectories
Tap a branch to see where each path led.
Why this matters
Iqbal’s engagement with al-Ghazali in the Reconstructionis characteristically nuanced. He admires al-Ghazali’s intellectual courage — the willingness to follow an argument to its conclusion regardless of institutional pressure — and he shares al-Ghazali’s conviction that mystical experience is a genuine source of knowledge. But he regards al-Ghazali’s critique of causation as a catastrophic error whose consequences far exceeded anything al-Ghazali intended.
The argument is precise. By denying that nature possesses genuine causal powers, al-Ghazali’s position — as absorbed into mainstream Ash’arite theology — removed the intellectual motivation for natural science. If every event is a direct act of God, then investigating the mechanisms of nature is investigating something that does not exist. The early Muslim scientists — al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Khwarizmi — had operated on the opposite assumption: that nature is an ordered system of real causes and effects, placed there by God, and worthy of study precisely because it reflects divine wisdom. When the theological mainstream shifted to occasionalism, this assumption lost its metaphysical grounding. Science did not stop immediately, but the intellectual culture that had sustained it was gradually hollowed out.
Iqbal does not blame al-Ghazali alone for this. He recognises that intellectual decline has multiple causes — political, economic, institutional — and that al-Ghazali himself was a far more complex thinker than the simplified version of his legacy suggests. But he insists that ideas have consequences, and that the specific idea al-Ghazali bequeathed to Islamic theology — the denial of natural causation — had consequences that are still shaping the Muslim world’s relationship with modern science.
For Tadreej, al-Ghazali’s critique is a case study in something the project takes seriously: the way a brilliant intervention, correct in its diagnosis of a genuine problem, can produce a cure worse than the disease. The falāsifa had overreached; al-Ghazali was right to say so. But the intellectual culture that formed in the wake of his critique — one that distrusted systematic rational inquiry and retreated to occasionalist metaphysics — was not what al-Ghazali intended, and it is not what Islam requires. Learning to distinguish between what a thinker said, what a tradition made of what they said, and what we now need — this is the kind of critical capacity the Seven Capacities framework is designed to build.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture I (Sections 2–4, 6–8) · Lecture II (Sections 1–3)
Further reading
- Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Marmura translation)
- Ibn Rushd, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Van Den Bergh translation)
- Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī's Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press)