The Deliverance from Error

"Al-Ghazālī is one of the most important medieval Muslim theologians and his authority remains widely recognised today. The Deliverance from Error is a text that he wrote towards the end of his life and it’s an intellectual autobiography. He starts the text by describing the crisis of faith he had in his youth, when he realised he would have been just as fervent a Jew or Christian as he used to be a Muslim had he been brought up in a Jewish or Christian community. He realises his commitment to Islam was not based on deliberation and choice, but on what he calls the authority of parents and teachers: the contingent circumstances of his upbringing. It’s an excellent way of getting philosophic questions going, of getting people to question their own convictions, how did they acquire those convictions? Is it because they actually thought about them or simply because they were educated in this way and have internalised them? Once he has lost trust in Islam, al-Ghazālī asks himself: what can I trust? What can I have faith in? Where can I get knowledge from? He turns to his senses and to his intellect as the two cognitive faculties that provide us with knowledge. It’s quite interestingly parallel to what Descartes does in the First Meditation . He dismisses his senses very quickly because they misrepresent things, the example he gives is that we look to the sky and see the sun the size of a dinar coin but of course astronomy tells us that the sun is many times bigger than the earth. Here the intellect corrects the mistake of the senses. Then the question arises: can we rally trust the intellect? He argues that it’s not impossible to think that there’s a cognitive faculty out there which identifies the mistakes of the intellect in the same way as the intellect identifies the mistakes of the senses. The fact that we don’t have that faculty doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Maybe there are other beings out thereangels or something like thatwho have that faculty in the same way as animals don’t have intellect but human beings do. He basically calls into question his intellect as well and he ends in total scepticism. So, Islam he cannot trust, his senses he cannot trust, his intellect he cannot trust. The only way out for him is divine grace. God shines light into his heart, restores his faith in his cognitive faculties and then he embarks on a project of rebuilding his trust in Islam, and he does that by examining the four main competing interpretations of Islam in his time, proposed by theologians, philosophers, esotericists, and Sufis. He ultimately settles on the Sufi interpretation of Islam. This is very helpful for me because you can use al-Ghazālī as a model for both fundamentally questioning your commitment to your religious tradition but then also for justifying an internal debate within a religious tradition. He shows there are competing interpretations, you have to choose between them, you have to examine them, you have to make up your mind. It helps me to motivate this idea of a culture of debate from within the Islamic tradition. I don’t think that philosophical reflection leads to atheism . It’s true today that if you look at philosophers, the very great majority of them are atheists and are committed to secularism and to naturalism and so forth. If you look at the history of philosophy almost no philosopher was an atheist. There’s always this commitment to God, and you have very elaborate philosophical arguments for religious doctrines. We know of many different kinds, from rationalist to existentialist: Kierkegaard and so forth. So I think you would end up with a plurality of views, sometimes incompatible views, but they would just be more reflective, more intelligent, more sophisticated. But my sense is that people often stick to their core commitments. Some people do have conversion experiences, but it’s relatively rare. I think a more plausible expectation is that people would revise these commitments, and maybe reinterpret their traditions in the light of these revised commitments, and so see it as a gradual progression towards the truth. In my book, there’s really no aspiration whatsoever to nail down an absolute truth, but there’s still a commitment to the idea that it is possible to work towards the truth. Basically, I make a case for fallibilism, that we shouldn’t trust our convictions too much because they may turn out to be wrong. We have to somehow have a strong concept of truth otherwise this whole idea of debating and trying to revise and get things clear and more consistent wouldn’t make sense. My own view is that there is such a thing as the objective truth, but we can never be sure we have grasped it, so the debate remains open."