Ebrahim MoosaReseñas
Autor de Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination
Reseñas
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First off, he doesn’t have anything to say about women in this book. Al-Ghazali’s ideas of individuality and what constitutes human consciousness are gender neutral.
Second, there isn’t much verbatim quoting of Al-Ghazali, this is Moosa’s commentary on Al-Ghazali’s ideas, many of which were spread out across volumes of Al-Ghazali’s copious literary output.
Third, Moosa does have a post-modernism bias (based on my observation that only post-modernists use the word ‘bricolage’) however, he is respectful of Muslim tradition. His basic tenant is Muslims need to deconstruct the past so that it can then be reconstructed with a foundation of tradition but with an active dialog in respect to dealing with modern problems.
Moosa’s book is very good in that it paints a very complex portrait of a highly complicated and interesting historical figure. No Al-Ghazali wasn’t perfect, yes he backtracked on some of his ideas or wasn’t consistent, and perhaps even he was a dreaded ‘flip-flopper’, but nevertheless, who exactly is right all of the time? Who doesn’t change their mind? And besides, Al-Ghazali did write some stunningly beautiful things. I particularly liked his analysis of the “light” ayahs in Surat al-Noor. Furthermore, since so many Muslim traditions have picked over and borrowed from Al-Ghazali’s work, I felt like I had a better understanding of so many other Muslim thinkers, particularly Rumi and Muhammad Iqbal. In reading Al-Ghazali, you get a better understanding of the source of many Muslim ‘talking points”.
There is a lot of heavy vocabulary, most of which Moosa defines so you don’t have to go running to a dictionary (ex. Anathema, catachresis, epistemicide, teleiopoiesis, liminality, palingenesis). The style is academic, but not so obtuse that a college sophomore couldn’t handle it. The chapters on self and identity were lovely, but I got a bit lost on the metaphysics chapters.
After reading this book I had much greater respect for Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, and while he wasn’t perfect and got some stuff wrong, overall he was an amazing thinker.½