Al-Ghazali is the focus point at which all the trends of the time gathered.
We see the disappearing basis for philosophy and the pressure on kalam; we
see the expansion of Sufism into respectability and its integration into the
scholastic curriculum. For al-Ghazali also rides on a decisive change in the
organizational basis of intellectual production. Schools of law and theology
were ceasing to be lineages of private teachers assembling in the mosques. Now
there were madrasas, formal foundations of properties supported by donors
or by the government. Al-Ghazali’s sponsor Nizam al-Mulk as vizier estab-
lished madrasas in every major city, shifting the basis of education and Islamic
thought from ad hoc groups of teachers at the mosques into foundations under
government support. Nizam al-Mulk was no doubt following a trend already
in motion; his theological politics gave vigorous support to Sunnis against
ShiÀites, and we find that competition between the sects was producing a
proliferation of madrasa foundations on both sides (Nakosteen, 1964: 42–44).
It is fitting that al-Ghazali should have produced the great conservative
synthesis, for he was teaching in the founding generation at the most important
madrasa in the Islamic world. Al-Ghazali’s most enduring legacy for Islamic
thought was not his acute philosophical skepticism, which was largely forgot-
ten (Watt, 1985: 76), but the fact that he made logical methods respectable
among conservative theologians as a neutral tool that could be used for any
correct form of thinking. Of all the heritage of the falasifa, logic was rescued
from destruction by al-Ghazali and his followers and incorporated into the
curriculum of the madrasas. It soon became part of a rather droning scholastic
routine.^18
Routinization of Sufis and Scholastics
After 1100, philosophical creativity became rather thin, at least in the Islamic
east; a brilliant episode was taking place in Spain, but encapsulated in the far
west. In the heartland of Islam, there was no longer the innovative struggle
between multiple lineages densely intermeshing at great intellectual centers.
Simplified networks of the relatively notable figures still existed; even the Sufi
poets, rejectors of systematic thinking, tended to be offshoots of these net-
works. Thinner networks of theologians also continued, linking together the
more significant names (see Figure 8.3).
This was the great era of institutional Sufism. Already in the late 900s, the
Sufis were making alliances of respectability with the conservatives, and we
find Sufi Hanbalites proclaiming Sufism as a branch of the Àulama legalists (134
and 135 in Figure 8.2). In the 1000s, Nishapur theologians (169, 188, and
190) were drawing up registers of Sufis, collecting their biographies, explaining
mystical terms in a scholastic manner. Contemporary with al-Ghazali there
began a long series of foundings of Sufi orders. At least 12 Sufi orders arose
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^423