Al-Ghazālī, Philosophy, and the Decline of Science in the Islamic World:A Historiographical and Textual Reassessment

Abstract

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (c. 1056–1111) occupies a central and controversial position in histories of Islamic philosophy and science. From nineteenth-century European scholarship to modern popular accounts, he has often been portrayed as an opponent of philosophy, rational inquiry, and the natural sciences whose influence helped precipitate a civilizational decline in scientific activity. This paper reassesses that narrative through a combined historiographical and textual analysis. For analytical clarity, it distinguishes a banishment thesis—the claim that al-Ghazālī rejected philosophy and the natural sciences—from a decline thesis—the claim that his influence caused or decisively accelerated the decline of philosophical and scientific inquiry in Muslim societies. Close attention to The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Deliverance from Error, and The Book of Knowledge indicates that al-Ghazālī’s criticism was principally directed at specific metaphysical doctrines and at the philosophers’ claims to demonstrative certainty, rather than at mathematics, logic, medicine, astronomy, or the study of nature as such. His critique of causal necessity also cannot be reduced without qualification to a rejection of natural order. Furthermore, the continuation of philosophical, logical, mathematical, and astronomical activity after the eleventh century complicates monocausal accounts of decline. The paper concludes that al-Ghazālī profoundly reshaped the relationship between falsafa and kalām, but the available textual and historical evidence does not support portraying him as the individual who terminated rational or scientific inquiry in Islamic civilization.

Keywords: al-Ghazālī, Islamic philosophy, Islamic science, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, causality, Orientalism, decline thesis, falsafa, kalām