Al-Ghazālī's critical arguments against Ibn Sīnā and Al-Fārābī  In the incoherence of the philosophers: Is God bound by  human logic?

Fadhlur Rahman; Umar Latif

doi:10.47766/tharwah.v4i1.2053

Authors

Fadhlur Rahman Institut Agama Islam Negeri Lhokseumawe https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0118-3166
Umar Latif Universitas Islam Negeri Ar-Raniry

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47766/tharwah.v4i1.2053

Keywords:

Al-Ghazālī, Ibn Sīnā, Al-Fārābī , the incoherence of the philosophers, God, Allah

Abstract

This paper examines the philosophical and theological arguments advanced by Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (c. 1058–1111 CE) in his seminal work Tahāfut al-Falāsifa/ “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” (English Version) c. 1095, one of the most substantial texts in the history of Islamic intellectual thought. The study focuses on al-Ghazālī's systematic critique of the Hellenistic-Islamic philosophical synthesis represented by Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950) and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037), whose Neoplatonic-Aristotelian framework had come to dominate elite Muslim intellectual circles at that time. The paper, thus, analyzes seven principal arguments—concerning the eternity of the world, divine knowledge of particulars, bodily resurrection, emanation, necessary causation, divine agency, and the philosophers' claims to demonstrative certainty to reconstruct the logic and theological motivations behind al-Ghazālī's polemic. This paper argues that al-Ghazālī's project is best understood not as an anti-rational rejection of philosophy, but as a principled défense of divine freedom (free will), and personal agency against a Greek-derived necessitarian metaphysics that, in his view, reduced God to a passive metaphysical principle. The study further explores how significance of al-Ghazālī's critique continue to challenge modern thinkers, not only how to define divine action and human knowledge, especially the perennial dialogue between faith and reasoning.

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