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Notes -
Al-Ghazali was the first time that I actually felt like I understood some of the appeal of Islam.
One of the reasons for that has nothing to do with the books: I actually never knew about hadith (ie. recordings of what people have seen or heard from their Prophet), and it never occured to me that the often harsh tone taken in the Quran (which is narrated from the words of the angel Gabriel) might not necessarily reflect on Muhammad's actual disposition. One wonders if the reason why Muhammad preached at all was because he was terrified of the visions of the fire that he was shown, and he couldn't stand by and do nothing while others quietly walked towards such horrors. A large portion of Al-Ghazali's texts is just hadith and commentary on that, which gave me a very different view of Islam.
Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly. At least the Islam of his time taught that everything that happens is God's will, ie. that free will is not a thing, and the justification for punishing those who can do nothing otherwise is that God can do what he wills with his own possessions. Even if God chose to be completely unjust to all human beings, that would be his right. But the mercy of God can be seen in the way that he does not do this. We can see here the meaning of the saying of Muhammad "Surely, of the excellence of a person's Islam is that he leaves what does not concern him." When another person wrongs you, the origin of the wrong is actually God, and the purpose of the wrong is to test you, to see what you will do. Everything thereby becomes subsumed in a dialectical relationship with God:
It helps a lot that Al-Ghazali clearly possessed a highly intelligent mind. I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic. But it becomes clear through Al-Ghazali's treatment that the meaning of that scripture really is something that has intellectual substance. I have not read these books with a systematic intent to study them, so I've only learned through a kind of osmosis the habits and ways of thinking that are either implicit or explicit in the Islamic tradition. There is an idea of seeing what is plain, of moderation. And it is full of gems. Some of the quotes from Al-Ghazali himself (not hadith) that I bothered to copy down are:
There are also deeper issues of Al-Ghazali's thought which I do not yet understand, like his connection to the Sufis and his emphasis on the heart, or his thoughts on what occupations are a communal duty, which fascinate me, but I'm not yet qualified to speak on. I, at least, have found it worth my time.
I’ve read al-Ghazali here and there, and the KCA was based on an original formulation al-Ghazali laid out in the medieval era, which later Christian philosophers revived.
On the point about the Hadith - most of the Hadith are very repetitive and you can find the same identical sayings that are practically 95% similar, stated and overstated throughout the multiple volumes in Bukhari and Muslim. You can buy truncated and condensed versions off Amazon that remove the duplications, as I’ve found them easier to read without getting bored by it.
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