Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

ng. Tahafut is better understood as a criticism of the philosophers' claim to certainty independent of revelation, a certainty that is based on the use of rationality and reason. 34 His commitment was to the primacy of revelation. 35 By maintaining this commitment, he did not exclude a role for reason in religion. Al-Ghazali supported this argument by elevating Islamic tradition in relation to reason, giving an apologetic for the final authority of the community of faith. 36 The only higher authority was direct mystical experience (dhoq - lit. ‘tasting’) of True knowledge. 37 The extraordinary rarity of this mystical experience 27 Griffel, Al-GhazdlT’s Philosophical Theology’, p. 4. 28 An example of this is Tertullian’s famous statement, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?...our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon....’ in ‘De Praescriptione Haereticorum’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translation of the Writings of the Fathers, Down to AD 325, ed. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 243-67 (p. 246). 29 Halstead, ‘Islamic Concept’, p. 518, quoting conservative Muslim scholar Syed Ali Ashraf, New Horizons in Muslim Education (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), pp. 27-32. 30 Halstead, ‘Islamic Concept’, p. 518. 31 Griffel, Al-GhazdWs Philosophical Theology, p. 98. 32 Ibid. 33 In post-modern code, we might say ‘faith assumptions’. 34 Griffel, Islam and Rationality (Leiden: Brill, 2016) p. x; and in Al-Ghazall’s Philosophical Theology, p. 98. 35 Frank A. Stone, ‘Muslim Faith and Reason Discussion and Its Implications for Islamic Education’, Muslim World, 60.4 (1970), 314-20 (p. 317). 36 Stone, p. 317. 37 Marmura, ‘Al-Ghazali’, p. 137. Hutcherson, The Relationship between Faith and Reason 63 meant that the default highest authority to which most would have access was the gathered and accumulated Islamic tradition. Griffel adopts Abdelhamid Sabra’s metaphor of naturalization to describe the complex relationship between philosophy and Islamic belief in al-Ghazali’s thinking. 38 While integrating aspects of philosophy (such as logic) within Islamic religious thinking, al-Ghazali limits other aspects like Aristotelian ontology. 39 Effectively, this cemented a place for reason in Islamic faith, while at the same time reorienting it to an ancillary position in relation to revelation. Reason, rationality, and philosophy were to be citizens in the kingdom of knowledge, but submissive ones. Al-Ghazali's concept of knowledge further clarifies his understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. Al-Ghazali presents a fairly complex discussion of knowledge in a variety of works, with the clearest summary of his thinking coming in one of his later works, The Revival of Religious Sciences (Ihya’ ‘ulum al-Din). 40 In it he treats knowledge extensively: its sources, purpose, obligations, nature, and attributes. 41 Fundamentally al-Ghazali consi