Deliverance from Error by al-Ghazali: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, The Deliverer from Error, was written by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in the last years of his life, around 1108, after he had returned to public teaching at Nishapur and shortly before he retired again to his home town to die.

It is addressed to an unnamed questioner who asked him to explain how he had come to his convictions: what he had doubted, what he had examined, and why he had abandoned the most prestigious post in the Islamic world to wander for a decade as an ascetic.

The answer runs to sixty or eighty pages depending on the edition. It describes his early doubt, his examination of the four groups who claimed to possess truth, his crisis and departure from Baghdad, his years of retreat, and his return, with a closing section on why he came back and what he now held.

It is one of the very few spiritual autobiographies in classical Islamic literature, and by some way the most influential.

Who al-Ghazali Was

Born in Tus in 1058, trained under the leading theologian of the age, al-Juwayni, and appointed in 1091 to the chair of law at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, al-Ghazali was by his mid-thirties the most celebrated scholar in the Islamic world, with hundreds of students and the ear of the vizier and the caliph.

In that period he wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, his attack on Avicenna, and polemics against the Ismailis, and was regarded as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy.

In 1095 he left. The Munqidh is his own account of why. After a decade away he taught again briefly, then retired to Tus, where he died in 1111. His late works, including The Alchemy of Happiness and The Niche of Lights, belong to the period this book explains.

The Occasion

The framing matters, because it shapes what kind of book this is.

Al-Ghazali presents the text as a reply to a brother in faith who has asked him to lay open the secrets of the sciences and the perils of the schools, and to explain his own journey. The form is a letter, and the tone is personal in a way his other work never is.

But the personal narrative is arranged to prove a thesis. The order of examination, theology first and Sufism last, is the order of an argument, not necessarily of a life. Scholars have long noted that the Munqidh is as much an apologia, a public defence of a controversial return to teaching, as it is a confession.

A reader should hold both. It is a true account, by the man himself, of a real crisis. It is also a document written by a master rhetorician who knew exactly what he wanted the reader to conclude.

The Crisis of Doubt

The opening movement, and the passage that made the book famous outside Islam.

Al-Ghazali says that from his youth he sought certain knowledge, which he defines as knowledge in which the thing known is so disclosed that no doubt remains, no possibility of error, and no imaginable miracle could shake it. He examined what he had been taught and found it was mere authority, accepted because his teachers held it. He looked for knowledge that met his standard and found only sense perception and necessary truths.

Then he tested those. The senses lie: a shadow that seems still is moving, a star that seems tiny is vast, and reason corrects them. So the senses are not certain. But if reason can correct the senses, could something beyond reason correct reason? Perhaps waking life is a sleep from which death wakes us, and everything reason holds firm dissolves as a dream does.

For nearly two months, he says, he was in this condition: a sceptic in fact, though not in speech or doctrine. He could not argue his way out, because argument requires premises and it was the premises he doubted.

The Floor Beneath Doubt

The resolution, which is not what a philosopher would expect.

Al-Ghazali does not find an argument that defeats the doubt. He reports instead that God cured him: that a light was cast into his breast, and that the necessary truths became trustworthy again, not by proof but by restored confidence. He compares it to the way a person simply knows that they are awake.

He draws a conclusion from this that governs the rest of the book. The deepest certainty is not produced by argument. It is given, and the way to receive it is not more reasoning but a change in the one who reasons. That is the thesis the four schools are then tested against.

Readers who want the doubt answered on its own terms will be disappointed, and are meant to be. The book's point is that the terms were the problem.

The Four Schools

The central section, organised as an inquiry.

Having recovered his footing, al-Ghazali asks who among the seekers of his day actually possesses truth. He identifies four groups. The theologians, who claim to reach it by reasoning from revelation. The philosophers, who claim logic and demonstration. The Batinites or esoterics, who claim to receive it from an infallible teacher. And the Sufis, who claim to experience it directly.

He says he examined each thoroughly, from the inside, reading and mastering their literature before judging. The claim is credible. He had written the definitive attack on the philosophers and the definitive attack on the Ismailis, and he had grown up in a family with Sufi connections.

The examination takes each in turn and finds three wanting.

The Theologians

The school he had been trained in, dismissed first and briefly.

The theologians, the mutakallimun, defend the faith by argument against its opponents. Al-Ghazali grants that they do this well and that their work is necessary. But their premises are taken from revelation and from their opponents, and their aim is to defeat error rather than to reach the truth for its own sake. Their science, he concludes, was not designed to give certainty to someone in his condition, and it did not.

The judgment is delivered by someone who was, at the time of writing, the most eminent theologian alive. That gives it a weight it would not otherwise have.

The Philosophers

The longest examination, and a summary of a much longer book.

Al-Ghazali divides the philosophers into materialists, naturalists and theists, and their sciences into mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics, politics and ethics. He judges each. Mathematics and logic are sound and have nothing to do with religion; the danger is that their rigour lends the philosophers' metaphysics a credit it has not earned, so that a student who sees the geometry proven assumes the theology is too. Physics is mostly sound with reservations. Metaphysics is where the errors lie, and he lists the three that amount to unbelief: the eternity of the world, God's ignorance of particulars, and the denial of bodily resurrection.

The section is the argument of The Incoherence in miniature, and a reader who wants the full case should go there. What the Munqidh adds is the personal frame: this is how the philosophers looked to a man who had mastered them and needed something they could not give.

The Batinites

The esoteric school, and the section most shaped by politics.

The Batinites, the Ismailis of his day, held that truth could not be reached by reason and must be received from the infallible imam. Al-Ghazali grants the premise that a teacher is needed and turns it: the Muslims have an infallible teacher, the Prophet, whose teaching is available. The Ismaili imam, by contrast, is hidden, his doctrine is never produced, and when pressed the Batinites offer only the claim that they have a teacher and never what he taught.

The section is sharp and it is also the work of a man whose patrons were at war with the Ismailis, who had assassinated the vizier Nizam al-Mulk three years before al-Ghazali's crisis. Readers should take it as both a real argument and a political one.

The Sufis

The fourth school, and the book's destination.

Al-Ghazali reports that he read the Sufi literature, al-Muhasibi, al-Junayd, al-Shibli, Abu Yazid al-Bistami, and learned everything that could be learned by reading. And he found that what he had learned was exactly the thing the Sufis said could not be learned by reading. Their path was not a doctrine but a condition, reached by practice: by purifying the heart of everything but God, by remembrance, by the abandonment of rank and wealth and attachment.

He saw that he possessed the theory and lacked the state, and that the state was the whole point. That recognition, he says, is what precipitated the crisis, because he also saw that he could not reach the state while holding the position he held.

Health and the Definition of Health

The image at the centre of the book, and the one every reader keeps.

The difference between knowing the definition of health and being healthy. The difference between knowing what drunkenness is, its causes and its symptoms, and being drunk. The physician who is ill knows more about health than the peasant who is well, and has less of it.

Al-Ghazali's claim is that the theologians, philosophers and esoterics were all, at best, physicians describing health. The Sufis were healthy. And no quantity of description would make him well.

The Breakdown

The passage that separates this book from every other apologia.

Al-Ghazali describes six months in 1095 in which he was torn between the pull of the world, his post, his students, his reputation, his fear of poverty, and the call of the path. He would resolve to leave in the morning and lose the resolve by evening. He knew, he says, that his teaching was for the sake of fame and that he stood on the edge of the fire.

Then his body decided for him. His tongue dried up so that he could not lecture. He could not swallow. The doctors examined him and said the cause was in the heart and beyond their medicine. He became, in his own description, unable to do anything at all.

He does not dress this up. It is a breakdown, described by the person having it, with the shame and the paralysis intact. The honesty is the book's authority, and nothing else in medieval Islamic literature is quite like it.

The Ten Years

The years away, told briefly.

In November 1095 al-Ghazali left Baghdad, giving out that he was going on pilgrimage so that the caliph would let him go. He went to Damascus, where he lived in the mosque and swept its floors, then to Jerusalem, where he shut himself in the Dome of the Rock, then to Hebron, Mecca and Medina, then back to Damascus, then home to Tus, where he built a small retreat and taught a few companions.

He says the retreat lasted about ten years and that in it he received, through practice, what the Sufis had promised: not everything, but enough to know that they were right, and to see that the way they walked was the only one that ended in certainty.

He is reticent about the experiences themselves, as the tradition expects, and says only that what he saw cannot be put into words without the words being wrong.

The Return

The closing movement, and the part that reads most like a defence.

In 1106 the vizier summoned him to teach again at Nishapur, and he went. The Munqidh explains why. The age was corrupt, unbelief was spreading, and he had been told by those he trusted that God had appointed a renewer of religion for each century, and that he was the one for this. He says he consulted his heart and found that it was no longer the heart that had taught in Baghdad: then he had taught for fame, now for God.

The passage is where the book most plainly answers critics who thought his return a betrayal of his departure. Whether the reader believes him is up to the reader. The claim is at least consistent with a man who had learned the difference between the definition and the thing.

Prophecy and Its Proof

A section often skipped and worth reading.

Al-Ghazali closes with an account of how prophecy can be known to be real. He argues from the existence of faculties beyond those the sceptic admits: the child has senses but not reason, and cannot conceive what reason sees; the adult has reason but not prophecy, and is in the same position with respect to it. The proof of prophecy is not argument but taste, the direct experience that the Sufi path opens, which shows the seeker a knowledge beyond reason and so makes prophecy credible by analogy.

The argument is the same as the one that governs the whole book. Certainty is a condition, not a conclusion, and those who lack the condition cannot be argued into what it reveals.

Augustine, Descartes and the Genre

The comparisons everyone makes, and what they are worth.

With Augustine's Confessions the Munqidh shares the form of a conversion told in the first person, the crisis of will that precedes it, and the frank account of the body's collapse. Augustine is far longer and far more inward; al-Ghazali is drier and more argumentative. Both are written by men who had reached the top of the intellectual world and found it empty.

With Descartes the parallel is closer and stranger. The method of universal doubt, the untrustworthiness of the senses, the dream argument, the search for a foundation immune to any deceiver: all are in the Munqidh, written in Arabic in 1108. Whether Descartes read it, in the Latin or the Spanish versions available in his century, has been argued for two hundred years and not settled. What can be said is that al-Ghazali got there first and went somewhere different with it: Descartes founded knowledge on the thinking self, al-Ghazali on a light given from outside.

The Translation

R.J. McCarthy's version, first published as Freedom and Fulfillment in 1980 and reissued by Fons Vitae as Deliverance from Error, is the scholarly standard: complete, annotated, with an introduction on the text's history and an appendix of related passages. It is the one to own.

W. Montgomery Watt's The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali, from 1953, pairs the Munqidh with the Beginning of Guidance in a plainer translation, is still in print, and is the version most readers met first.

The edition linked here contains both texts under the double title. Either translation serves; McCarthy's notes are the reason to prefer his.

The Objections

Three, and they are the ones scholars have raised.

The arrangement is rhetorical. The four schools in ascending order, the tidy crisis, the vindicated return: the life has been shaped to an argument, and the Munqidh is not a neutral record.

The doubt is resolved by fiat. A light in the breast is not an answer to scepticism, and readers who wanted one will feel the book changed the subject.

The polemics are political. The sections on the philosophers and the Batinites serve the Seljuk state's enemies list as well as the truth, and al-Ghazali was the state's man.

Who Should Read It

Read it first among al-Ghazali's books. It is short, it is personal, and it explains why the rest of his work looks the way it does.

Read it if you have doubted your way to the bottom and wondered whether there is a floor, and want to hear from someone who did the same and found one, by a route you may not expect.

Read it beside Augustine and Descartes, as the Islamic chapter in the story of how the West learned to doubt.

Read it if you want to know what Sufism looked like to the most rigorous mind of its century, and why he chose it.

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