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The Alchemy of Happiness

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Renan, whose easy-going mind was the exact antithesis to the intense earnestness of Ghazzali, called him "the most original mind among Arabian philosophers." (1) Notwithstanding this, his fame as a philosopher has been greatly overshadowed by Avicenna, his predecessor, and Averroes, his successor and opponent. It is a significant fact that the Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes five columns to each of the others and only a column and a half to Ghazzali. Yet it is doubtful whether it is as a philosopher that he would have wished to be chiefly remembered. Several of his works, it is true, are polemics against the philosophers, especially his Tehafot-al-falasifa, or "Destruction of the Philosophers," and, as Solomon Munk says in his Melanges de philosophic Juive et
Arabe, Ghazzali dealt "a fatal blow" to Arabian philosophy in the East, from which it never recovered, though it revived for a while in Spain and culminated in Averroes. Philosopher and sceptic as he was by nature, Ghazzali's chief work was that of a theologian, moralist, and mystic, though his mysticism was strongly balanced by common sense. He had, as he tells us in his Confessions, experienced "conversion"; God had arrested him "on the edge of the fire," and henceforth what Browning says of the French poet, Rene Gentilhomme, was true of him

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