Al-Ghazālı̄ famously claims in the Incoherence of the Philosophers that al-Fārābī and Avicenna are unbelievers because they hold philosophical positions that conflict with Islam. What is less well-known, however, is that Averroës claims in the Decisive Treatise that al-Fārābī and Avicenna are not unbelievers; rather, al-Ghazālı̄ is the true unbeliever for writing the Incoherence of the Philosophers. In this paper, my aim is to present a sustained reconstruction of Averroës’ legal and philosophical argument for why al-Ghazālı̄ is an unbeliever. The (...) crux of Averroës’ argument is that al-Ghazālı̄ has expressed false allegorical interpretations of scripture to unqualified persons, which has led them into unbelief. By being causally responsible for other people’s unbelief, al-Ghazālı̄ is an unbeliever as well. (shrink)

This article evaluates Max Weber’s overall analysis of Islam. Despite his efforts to be objective, Weber’s analysis was entrenched within a similar Orientalist discursive framework present among other Western scholars who studied non-Western traditions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After a review of the existing literature on Weber’s understanding of Islam and its relation to capitalism, this article critically explores other aspects of Weber’s conclusions about Islam that are equally problematic. Weber glosses over many centuries of variegated (...) Islamic cultural history to provide a universalist account of the Islamic civilisation that reduces it to a general meta-discourse. He regularly ignores many of the more localised, regional Islamic cultural traditions altogether. As a result, Weber fails to meaningfully account for the many nuances and idiosyncrasies constitutive of the broader Islamic tradition. This article argues that Weber’s account of Islam shows a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding on his part. (shrink)

Based on historical comparisons among master-pupil chains and other aspects of social networks among philosophers, some prmciples are suggested regarding long-term intellectual change. The higher the eminence ofphilosophers, the more tightly they are connected to mtergenerational chains of other eminent philosophers, and to horizontal circles of the intellectual community. Intellectual creativity proceeds through the contemporaneous development of rival positions, dividing up the available attention space in the intellectual community. Strong thought-communities, those that have strong external support for their institutional base, (...) subdivide to maximize internal distinctiveness; weakly supported thought-communities disappear or amalgamate by syncretism. External conditions thus affect the content of ideas indirectly by affecting the space available in the mternal field of the intellectual community. The content of philosophies, the degree of abstraction and self-conscious reflection upon intellectual operations, depends on how many generations intellectual networks maintain continuity under conditions of creative rivalry. New positions are produced by competitive appropriation of prior ideas and by negation of preexisting positions along the lines of greatest organizational rivalry. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the deep theological faultline generated by divergent understandings of the divine attributes among two early antagonistic Muslim groups – the traditionalists (main...