Ghazali And The Poetics Of Imagination (Islamic Civilization And Muslim Networks)
by Ebrahim Moosa

Description

Moosa (Duke Univ.) offers a comprehensive study that brilliantly clarifies the multifaceted and conflicted legacy of the great Muslim medieval religious philosopher al-Ghazali. Competing religious, cultural, and political agendas have distorted his real contributions to Islamic culture. Spurned by both fundamentalists and rationalists in the contemporary Muslim world, Ghazali is prized by traditionalists for his mystical piety and ethical insight. Centering his inquiry on the image of the dihliz, the threshold which occupies the border between the subjective and the objective, Moosa explores problems of knowledge through a focus on the self as it manifests in poetics, self-creation, the pursuit of virtue, ethical self-mastery, and ultimately the sociopolitical realm, where ethics meets law and jurisprudence. Ghazali's own crisis of faith led him to reinvigorate his own religious tradition by situating traditional problems in metaphysics, theology, ethics, law, and mysticism in the context of the soul's overcoming its exile from God. Thus, ethics ceases to be only abstract theory and becomes the art of transformation. Especially impressive is Moosa's linking of historical inquiry with the existential interests of contemporary Muslim subjectivity. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by J. Bussanich