SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 113
Ghazali now wrote two more seminal books, The Alchemy of Happiness
and The Revival of the Religious Sciences. In these, he forged a synthesis be-
tween orthodox theology and Sufism by explaining how the shari'a fit in
with the tariqa, the Sufi method for becoming one with God. He created
a place for mysticism within the framework of orthodox Islam and thus
made Sufism respectable.
Before Ghazali came along, three intellectual movements were compet-
ing for adherents in the Islamic world. After Ghazali, two of those currents
had come to an accommodation and the third had been eliminated.
I don't say the philosophers acknowledged that Ghazali had proved
them wrong and as a result shriveled up and died. Nor do I even say that
public opinion turned against the philosophers because Ghazali had
proved them wrong. Public opinion rarely believes or disbelieves anything
based on proof. Besides, hardly anything in philosophy is ever definitively
proven right or wrong.
I say, rather, that some people wanted to turn away from philosophy
and natural science in this era. Some already regarded reason as dangerous
trickery leading only to chaos, and Ghazali gave such people the ammuni-
tion they needed to look respectable, and even smart while they were de-
nouncing philosophy and reason.
In the years that followed, more and more people turned in this direc-
tion. The assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral
matters allows people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no
two people having exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil,
people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doc-
trines that assert unambiguous rules promote social solidarity because they
enable people to cohere around shared beliefs, and when no one knows
what tomorrow may bring, people prefer to clump together.
Sometime during this period, the status of women in Islamic society
seems to have changed as well. Various clues suggest to me that in the early
days oflslam, women had more independence and a greater role in public
affairs than they had later on, or than many have in the Islamic world
today. The Prophet's first wife Khadija, for example, was a powerful and
successful businesswoman who started out as Mohammed's employer. The
Prophet's youngest wife Ayesha led one major party during the schism that
followed Othman's death. She even commanded armies in the field, and