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WorkAl-Ghazali

Deliverance from Error

His own account of doubting even reason, losing his voice at the lectern, and finding in the Sufis what argument could not give.

by Al-Ghazali45 passages held

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Original title
المنقذ من الضلال
Original language
Arabic

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Overview

Someone, al-Ghazālī says at the outset, had asked him two things: how he had found his way through the quarrels of the sects to certainty, and why he had left a crowded lecture hall in Baghdad and then, long afterwards, accepted a similar post at Nishapur. This book is his answer, written at the Niẓāmiyya college of Nishapur after he returned to teaching there in 1106: an account of his own mind, and a defence of what he had done. It begins with a doubt that spared nothing. The senses deceive, as when the eye sees a shadow standing still that an hour later has plainly moved. Reason might deceive as well, as a dream seems certain until one wakes, and nothing proves that waking life is not a dream in relation to some further state. Argument did not cure this; certainty returned, he writes, as a light that God cast into his breast. He then examined four groups that claimed the truth: the theologians, the philosophers, the Ismāʿīlīs who relied on an infallible teacher, and the Sufis. Only the Sufis had what he lacked, a knowledge that comes by taste and practice and cannot be had from books. In 1095, after some six months of indecision, his tongue failed him at the lectern; he left Baghdad and spent the next ten years in retirement. Claud Field's 1909 English version, The Confessions of Al Ghazzali, called it one of the very few genuine Eastern autobiographies and set it beside the spiritual autobiographies of Newman and Bunyan. Later readers have compared its doubt with that of Descartes.

Key concepts

What is “blind belief”, and why can’t it be got back?

It is belief taken over from parents and teachers without being examined, the way children of Christians grow up Christian and children of Muslims grow up Muslim. Al-Ghazālī says such belief works only while the believer is unaware of it. Once a person sees that they hold a view merely because they were raised in it, the innocence is gone for good, and the only way forward is to look for the truth themselves.

What does al-Ghazālī mean by certain knowledge?

Knowledge so secure that no doubt can touch it and no error is even possible. Al-Ghazālī sets this bar at the start and then tests what he knows against it. Anything that falls short, however familiar, cannot count as certainty, because what is not proof against doubt is not certain. Sense impressions fail the test first, and then, for a time, even the first truths of reason seem to fail it.

What do the Sufis mean by knowing through “taste”?

Taste, in the Sufis’ sense, is knowing something by having it happen to you rather than by learning its description. A doctor who falls ill can still explain health perfectly while lacking it, and a healthy person who cannot explain it has it. The Sufis’ knowledge is of the second kind. It comes through practice and changed living, which is why reading their books gave al-Ghazālī the theory but not the thing.

Which kinds of philosophers does the book distinguish?

He sorts them into three groups. Materialists deny a creator and think the world has always existed by itself. Naturalists study the wonders of nature and admit a wise maker, but deny that the soul survives death. Theists, the line of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, refuted the other two, yet kept errors of their own, and it is these, transmitted by Avicenna and al-Fārābī, that he judges most seriously.

Why does he split philosophy into separate sciences?

He divides philosophy into six sciences and judges each separately: mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics, politics and ethics. Most are religiously neutral, and mathematics and logic rest on proofs nobody can refute. The serious errors lie almost all in metaphysics, where the philosophers could not meet their own standard of proof. The division lets him accept a science while rejecting particular doctrines, instead of condemning philosophy whole.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

When Reason Might Be Dreaming

If the senses can be corrected by reason, what corrects reason? The book's first crisis is a doubt that no argument could cure, because every cure would itself be an argument.

Al-Ghazālī first trusts the senses and watches them fail: a shadow looks still and is moving, a star looks the size of a coin and is larger than the earth. Reason corrects the senses, so he trusts reason, until a dream reminds him that everything seems certain while it lasts. Nothing proves that waking is not a dream to some further state. The doubt lasted about two months, and no proof ended it; certainty returned as a light God cast into his heart, which he calls the threshold of all knowledge.

  • skepticism
  • certainty
  • epistemology
  • reason
  • dreams
  • truth-seeking
  • inspiration
  • knowledge

Enter a dialogue

Sorting True Coin from False

Can a true idea be rejected because of the people who hold it? He sorts the theologians and philosophers as an assayer sorts coins, and refuses both blanket trust and blanket refusal.

Having lost the faith that children absorb from their parents, he studies each school that claims the truth on its own terms. The theologians defend belief well, but only from premises their opponents already accept, which helps nobody who accepts nothing without proof. The philosophers prove their mathematics beyond dispute and then claim the same certainty for metaphysics, where they only conjecture. His verdict cuts both ways: a believer who rejects true mathematics because unbelievers teach it harms religion, and a truth does not become impure because of who holds it, any more than honey turns foul for being poured into a surgeon's cupping glass.

  • philosophy
  • theology
  • mathematics
  • astronomy
  • heresy
  • tradition
  • authority
  • truth

Enter a dialogue

Knowing Drunkenness, Being Drunk

What if the knowledge one most needs cannot be read about, only lived? This account turns from proof to a change of life that his own body forced on him.

From the Sufis' books he learns everything that can be learned by study and finds that what matters cannot. Defining drunkenness is not being drunk; knowing health is not being well. The Sufi knowledge comes by taste and practice, and practice meant leaving the honour he enjoyed in Baghdad. He saw that his teaching sought reputation more than God, hesitated for six months, and then his tongue would not move at the lectern. He left, gave up his fortune, and spent ten years in retirement and devotion.

  • sufism
  • religious experience
  • renunciation
  • devotion
  • contemplation
  • sin
  • soul
  • intellectual humility

Enter a dialogue

A Sense Above Reason

Why should reason be the last stage of human knowing? He argues that prophecy stands to reason as reason stands to the senses, and that sleep already hints at it.

A person acquires the senses one after another, touch, then sight and hearing, and around the age of seven discernment, then reason, and each grasps what the earlier ones could not. Prophecy, he argues, is a further stage, a faculty that sees what reason cannot, as reason sees what sight cannot. Someone blind from birth would deny colour, and reason-bound people deny inspiration the same way. Sleep gives everyone a glimpse of it, since in dreams people perceive things of the unseen world that their senses never reported.

  • prophecy
  • religious belief
  • proof
  • afterlife
  • education
  • ethics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
45
distinct concepts
110
by passages held, corpus-wide
#666

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “inspiration”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 35 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyinspiration3
epistemologyreason3
certaintyepistemology2
certaintyreason2
epistemologyknowledge2
inspirationreason2
knowledgereason2
philosophysufism2
philosophytruth2
certaintyinspiration1
certaintyknowledge1
epistemologysufism1
epistemologytruth1
inspirationphilosophy1
sufismtruth1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Deliverance from Error (المنقذ من الضلال) you are here EN
  2. The Alchemy of Happiness (Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat)

    His major work in Persian, written around 1105 for readers without Arabic, and a shorter companion to the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

     EN
  3. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (تهافت الفلاسفة)

    The book by which he is known in philosophy, finished in Baghdad in January 1095, months before he gave up his chair there and left the city.

     AR
  4. The Just Balance (القسطاس المستقيم)

    One of several answers to the Ismāʿīlīs, this one cast as a dialogue on the road; his autobiography points readers to it instead of repeating its case.

     AR
  5. The Marvels of the Heart (كتاب شرح عجائب القلب)

    The twenty-first of the forty books of the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and the ground for the books on vices and virtues that follow it.

     AR
  6. The Niche of Lights (مشكاة الأنوار)

    Among his late works, and the one in which his thought comes closest to the mystics: three chapters on a single verse of the Qurʾān and a single saying of the Prophet.

     AR
  7. The Standard of Knowledge (معيار العلم في فن المنطق)

    Written after The Incoherence of the Philosophers to explain the philosophers' technical vocabulary to its readers, and to give jurists and theologians a test for their own arguments.

     AR
  8. مقاصد الفلاسفة

    A report before a refutation: Avicenna's system set out without a word of objection, then framed by a short preface and ending that point ahead to The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

     AR
  9. ميزان العمل

    The second half of a pair: having set a standard for knowing in The Standard of Knowledge, he set one here for acting, still in Baghdad, around 1095.

     AR
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