Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

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 authority, 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 ...