Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (20 page)

Ghazali came to their rescue. The way to beat the philosophers, he decided, was to join them enough to use their tricks against them. He plunged into a study of the ancients, mastered logic, and inhaled the tre
atises of the Greek. Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called
The Aims of the Philosophers
. It was chiefly about Aristotle. In the preface, he said the Greeks were wrong and he would prove it, but first—in
this
book—he would explain what Greek philosophy was all about so that readers would know what he was refuting when they read his next book.

One has to admire Ghazali’s fair-mindedness. He didn’t set up a straw man for himself to knock down. His account of Aristotle was so lucid, so erudite, that even hard-core Aristotelians read the book and said, “Aha! Now at last I understand Aristotle!”

Ghazali’s book made its way to Andalusia and from there into Christian Europe, where it dazzled those few who could read. Western Europeans had pretty much forgotten classical Greek thought since the fall of Rome. For most, this was their first exposure to Aristotle. Somewhere along the way, however, Ghazali’s preface had dropped out, so Europeans didn’t know Ghazali was
against
Aristotle. Some, indeed, thought he
was
Aristotle, writing under a pen name. In any case,
The Aims of the Philosophers
so impressed Europeans that Aristotle acquired for them an aura of imposing authori
ty, and later Christian philosophers devoted much energy to reconciling church doctrines with Aristotelian thought.

Meanwhile, back in Persia, Ghazali had written his follow-up to
The Aims of the Philosophers
, a second seminal volume called
The Incoherence of the Philosophers
. Here, Ghazali identified twenty premises on which Greek and Greco-Islamic philosophy depended, then used syllogistic logic to dismantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my mind, was his attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among material phenomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think fire causes cotton to burn, because fire is always there when cotton burns. We mistake contiguity for
causality. Actually, says Ghazali, it’s God who causes cotton to burn, since He is the first and only cause of all things. The fire just happens to be there.

If I’m making Ghazali sound ridiculous here, it’s only because I’m not as fair-minded as he was with Aristotle. I disagree with him. Not everyone does. Ghazali’s case against causality was resurrected in the West, by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume; and in the 1970s, I read essentially the same argument made again by the American Zen Buddhist Alan Watts, who likened cause and effect to a cat
walking back and forth past a narrow slit in a fence. If we’re looking through the slit from the other side, Watts said, we keep seeing first the head of the cat and then the tail, which doesn’t mean the head causes the tail. (Actually, I think it does, in a sense, but I won’t get into that here.)

Take it however you will, the argument against causality undermines the whole scientific enterprise. If nothing actually causes anything else, why bother to observe the natural world in search of meaningful patterns? If God is the only cause, the only way to make sense of the world is to know God’s will, which means that the only thing worth studying is the revelation, which means that the only people worth listening to are the ulama.

Ghazali allowed that mathematics, logic, and even the natural sciences could lead to true conclusions, but wherever they conflicted with the revelations, they were wrong. But if science is right only when it reaches the same conclusions as revelation, we don’t need science. All the truth we need we can get from the revelations.

Some of the philosophers struck back. Ibn Rushd (known to Europeans as Averroes) wrote a riposte to Ghazali called
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
, but it did little good: when the smoke cleared, Ghazali had won the day. From his time forward, Greek-based Muslim philosophy lost steam and Muslim interest in natural science foundered.

Ghazali won tremendous accolades for his work. He was appointed head of the prestigious Nizamiya University in Baghdad, the Yale of the medieval Islamic world. The orthodox establishment acknowledged him as the leading religious authority of the age. Ghazali had a problem, however: he was an authentically religious man, and somehow, amid all the status and applause, he knew he didn’t have the real treasure. He believed in the revelations, he revered the Prophet and the Book, he was devoted to the shari’a, but he wasn’t feeling the palpable presence of God—the very same dissatisf
action that had given rise to Sufism. Ghazali had a sudden spiritual crisis, resigned all his posts, gave away all his possessions, abandoned all his friends, and went into seclusion.

When he came out of it many months later, he declared that the scholars had it right, but the Sufis had it righter: The Law was the Law and you had to follow it, but you couldn’t reach Allah through book learning and good behavior alone. You needed to open your heart, and only the Sufis knew how to get the heart opened up.

Ghazali now wrote two more seminal books,
The Alchemy of Happiness
and
The Revival of the Religious Sciences
. In these, he forged a synthesis between orthodox theology and Sufism by explaining how the shari’a fit in with the tariqa, the Sufi method for becoming one with God. He created a place for mysticism within the framework of orthodox Islam and thus made Sufism respectable.

Before Ghazali came along, three intellectual movements were competing for adherents in the Islamic world. After Ghazali, two of those currents had come to an accommodation and the third had been eliminated.

I don’t say the philosophers acknowledged that Ghazali had proved them wrong and as a result shriveled up and died. Nor do I even say that public opinion turned against the philosophers because Ghazali had proved them wrong. Public opinion rarely believes or disbelieves anything based on proof. Besides, hardly anything in philosophy is ever definitively proven right or wrong.

I say, rather, that some people
wanted
to turn away from philosophy and natural science in this era. Some
already
regarded reason as dangerous trickery leading only to chaos, and Ghazali gave such people the ammunition they needed to look respectable, and even smart while they were denouncing philosophy and reason.

In the years that followed, more and more people turned in this direction. The assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral matters allows people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no two people having exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doctrines that assert unambiguous rules promote social solidarity because they enable people to cohere around shared beliefs, and when no one knows what tomorrow may bring, people prefer to clump together.

Sometime during this period, the status of women in Islamic society seems to have changed as well. Various clues suggest to me that in the early days of Islam, women had more independence and a greater role in public affairs than they had later on, or than many have in the Islamic world today. The Prophet’s first wife Khadija, for example, was a powerful and successful businesswoman who started out as Mohammed’s employer. The Prophet’s youngest wife Ayesha led one major party during the schism that followed Othman’s death. She even commanded armies in the field, a
nd no one seemed surprised that a woman would take on this role. Women were present at the iconic early battles as nurses and support staff and even sometimes as fighters. In the battle of Yarmuk, the chronicles tell of the widow Umm Hakim fighting Byzantine soldiers with a tentpole for a sword.
²
Also, details about some of the battles come from women bards, who observed the fighting and composed poems about it, essentially acting as war correspondents.

Women must also have been present at crucial community meetings in those early days, since the fact of their public arguments with Khalifa Omar are recorded—and yet Omar appointed a woman to administer the market in Medina.
³
Besides all this, women figure prominently among the scholars of early Islam. In the first century after the Hijra, women such as Hafsa, Umm al-Darda, Amra bin Abdul Rahman, and others rose to eminence as auth
orities on hadith. Some were famous calligraphers. They and others taught classes, took in students of both sexes, and gave public lectures.

Clearly, these women were not shut out of public life, public recognition, and public consequence. The practice of relegating women to an unseen private realm derived, it seems, from Byzantine and Sassanid practices. Among the upper classes of those societies, women were sequestered as a mark of high status. Aristocratic Arab families adopted the same customs as a way of appropriating their predecessors’ status. The average Muslim woman probably saw her access to public life markedly reduced in the fourth century AH (that is, after about 1000 CE) or at least that’s what the tone of scholars
’ remarks on gender roles imply. The radical separation of gender roles into nonoverlapping spheres accompanied by the sequestration of women probably froze into place during the era of social breakdown that marked the latter days of the Abbasid khalifate. The same forces that squeezed protoscience out of Islamic intellectual life, the same forces that devalued reason as an instrument of ethical and social inquiry, acted to constrict the position of women.

Ghazali devotes one-fourth of his oeuvre,
The Revival of the Religious Sciences
, to a discourse on marriage, family life, and the proper etiquette for the sexes. Here, he says that a woman “should remain in the inner sanctum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter and exit excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard h
er husband in his absence and in his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs. . . . She should not leave his home without his permission: if she goes out with his permission, she should conceal herself in worn-out clothes . . . being careful that no stranger hear her voice or recognize her personally. . . . She should . . . be ready at all times for (her husband) to enjoy her whenever he wishes.”
⁴
Ghazali also discusses men’s obligations to their wives, but add up all his remarks and you can see that he’s envisioning a social world divided strictly into public and privat
e realms, with women restricted to the private one and the public realm reserved exclusively for men.

Anxiety about change and a longing for stability tend to deepen traditional and familiar patterns of society. In the Muslim world, these included patriarchal patterns inherent not just in Arabic tribal life but also in pre-Islamic Byzantine and Sassanid societies. Ghazali’s ideas proved persuasive in his time and in the centuries following his death because this was a period of rising disorder, a time of anxiety that cast a pall over civilized life, a time of instability that came finally to a horrifying crescendo.

 

 

W
HAT GAVE RISE to all the anxiety? The answer lies in the political story unfolding alongside the intellectual movements I have described. From the Prophet’s day through the first two centuries or so of Abbasid rule, people in the Muslim world had good reason to think they were living at the very center of world civilization. European culture barely existed. India had fragmented into many small kingdoms. Buddhism had receded into China, and although it’s true that there in “Cathay” the Tang and Sung dynasties presided over a glorious renaissance almost exactly coextensive with the Musl
im one flowering in the middle world, China was too far away to have much resonance in places like Mesopotamia or Egypt.

If the Muslim realm was the heart of the world, then the underlying driving force of world history was the quest to perfect and universalize the Muslim community. All the major issues of the time—the struggle between Shi’ism and orthodoxy, philosophy and theology, Persians and Arabs—could be understood within this framework. For a long while, optimistic observers could look at world events and believe that things were generally moving forward. The implications of the holy miracle that blossomed in Mecca and Medina were still flowering. Islam had perme
ated deeply and rippled far. Even the Hindus of the Indian heartland were weakening. Even sub-Saharan Africa had Muslim converts now. Only Cathay and darkest Europe remained fully outside the realm. It seemed only a matter of time before Islam fulfilled its destiny and bathed even those regions with light.

But the dream of the universal community of piety and justice remained elusively out of reach and then began to slip away. At the very height of its power and glory, the khalifate began to crack. Indeed, looking back, historians could plausibly say the cracking began before the heights were achieved. It began when the Abbasids took power.