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ABSTRACTTheMannof al-Ghaz~l:
A Critical Edition of the UnpublishedMajor Mannwith Discussion
of His Restricted, Philosophical Corpus
M. Afifi al-Akiti, Worcester College, OxfordD.Phil. thesis
submitted in Michaelmas 2007
How medieval Islamic authors produced a religiously acceptable
synthesis of the Greekphilosophical/scientific traditions and the
established Muslim religious disciplines is veryimportant for the
whole subsequent history of Islam. The work of al-Ghaz~l
(d.505/1111), a leading religious scholar and philosopher of the
twelfth century (and of allperiods of Islamic thought), provides an
outstanding example. The thesis investigates hisesoteric
philosophical writings, the Mann, previously unstudied as a corpus,
and
identifies and interrelates the authentic writings that this
difficult and complicated oeuvrecomprises. In that process, the
problems of theMaq~id(s) and the Qaw~`id al-`aq~|idare resolved.
Problems of authorship, textual transmission, structure, and
contents of the
Mannhad formed a strong barrier against scholarly use of those
works, but theMannhas now been placed within the authenticated body
of al-Ghaz~ls work. The firstcritical edition of the most advanced
and technically philosophical manual among the
Mannworks, theMajor Mann, is presented here along with a survey
of most of theunpublished manuscripts of the corpus.
The worst gap in Ghaz~lian scholarship has been filled.
TheManncorpus cannow be used in contextualizing and assessing
al-Ghaz~ls philosophical endeavours andhis career overall, and it
will enable much more accurate analysis of the role of therational
tradition in Muslim thought. TheMannshows how al-Ghaz~l, who
belongedto the Ash`ar school of theology (kal~m) and is famous in
the Islamic world for beingtherefuter of the Greek-derived
philosophical and scientific tradition in Islam (falsafa),
madeeffective use of Aristotelian ideas fromespecially and
extraordinarilythe Metaphysicsand the De Anima, as modified by the
Peripatetic thinker, Avicenna (d. 428/1037). In the
Mann, al-Ghaz~l demonstrates how greatly his theologizing came
to rely on thephilosophical and scientific tradition even while it
continued to be expressed intraditional, religious terms.
HisMannproject reveals the ways of intellectual synthesisin
medieval Islamic culture and society and illuminates the history of
philosophy andscience, religion and secular culture therenot least
by showing that philosophy/science
and religion were mutually relevant and interactive in a rich
variety of ways. Easygeneralisations are not profitable here; and
individual, densely contextualised studies are
what are valuable.
