HowAllah KilledScienceession s " and rejection of the details of religious and sectarian
[teaching], believin g th em to be man- ma de la ws an d
em be ll is he d tr ic ks ,' He ac cu se d the Muslim. philosophers al-
Farabi and Avicenna of challenging 'the[very]principles of religion.'
At the end ofThe Incoherence of the Philosophers,al-Ghazali asks
a rhetoric al ques tion abou t the phil osophers ; "Do you the n say
conc lusivelythat they are infidels andthat the killing of those who
uphold their beliefsis oblig ator y?"He answ ers! "Pro nounc ing them
infi delsisnecessar yin thr ee que sti ons ": the ir tea chi ngs tha t the
wor ld exi ste d ete rna lly, that Allah does not know particular things,
but only universals, andthere is no resurrectio n ofthebody. Thus, by
the dictates of Islamic law, killing them was "obligatory." This is
hardly the way to encourage ahealthyphilo sophi cal tradi tion, There
were Muslim philo sopher s after al-Ghazal i, but they never achie ved
the statu re of Avicen na. Averr oes, (also called Abul-Waleed
Muhammad Ibn Rushd] answered al-Ghazali in a book called
Incoherence of the Incoherence,insisting that philosophersneed not
kowtow totheologians, but the damage was done. The Golden Age of
Islamic Philosophy, such as it were, was over.
Al-Ghazali's attack on the philosophers was a sophisticated
manifestation of a tenden cy that has always hindere d intelle ctual
develo pmentin the Islamicworld:
There is a prevail ing assumpt ion that the Qur’an is the
perfect book, andno oth er boo k is nee ded , Wit h the Qur 'an
the per fe ct boo k and Islam ic socie ty the perfec t civili zatio n,
too many Muslim s didn't thinkthey needed knowledge that came
from any other source—certainly not from infidels,Allah kills science
But the maincoup de graceto Islam ic scie ntifi c and phil osoph ical
inqu irymay have come from the Qur'an itself. The holy book of Islam