SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 111
tises of the Greek. Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called
The Aims of the Philosophers. It was chiefly about Aristotle. In the preface,
he said the Greeks were wrong and he would prove it, but first-in this
book-he would explain what Greek philosophy was all about so that
readers would know what he was refuting when they read his next book.
One has to admire Ghazali's fair-mindedness. He didn't set up a straw
man for himself to knock down. His account of Aristotle was so lucid, so
erudite, that even hard-core Aristotelians read the book and said, ''Aha!
Now at last I understand Aristotle!"
Ghazali's book made its way to Andalusia and from there into Christ-
ian Europe, where it dazzled those few who could read. Western Euro-
peans had pretty much forgotten classical Greek thought since the fall of
Rome. For most, this was their first exposure to Aristotle. Somewhere
along the way, however, Ghazali's preface had dropped out, so Europeans
didn't know Ghazali was against Aristotle. Some, indeed, thought he was
Aristotle, writing under a pen name. In any case, The Aims of the Philoso-
phers so impressed Europeans that Aristotle acquired for them an aura of
imposing authority, and later Christian philosophers devoted much energy
to reconciling church doctrines with Aristotelian thought.
Meanwhile, back in Persia, Ghazali had written his follow-up to The
Aims of the Philosophers, a second seminal volume called The Incoherence of
the Philosophers. Here, Ghazali identified twenty premises on which Greek
and Greco-Islamic philosophy depended, then used syllogistic logic to dis-
mantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my mind, was his
attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among material phe-
nomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think fire
causes cotton to burn, because fire is always there when cotton burns. We
mistake contiguity for causality. Actually, says Ghazali, it's God who causes
cotton to burn, since He is the first and only cause of all things. The fire
just happens to be there.
If I'm making Ghazali sound ridiculous here, it's only because I'm not
as fair-minded as he was with Aristotle. I disagree with him. Not everyone
does. Ghazali's case against causality was resurrected in the West, by the
eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume; and in the 1970s, I
read essentially the same argument made again by the American Zen Bud-
dhist Alan Watts, who likened cause and effect to a cat walking back and