110 DESTINY DISRUPTED
about the philosophers. He therefore had Hallaj clapped in prison for
eleven years, but Hallaj was so lost to the world by this time, he didn't care.
Even in his cell he kept spouting his God-intoxicated utterances, some-
times associating himself with Jesus Christ, and often mentioning martyr-
dom. One thing was for sure: he recanted nothing. Finally, the orthodox
establishment decided they had run out of options. They would have to
pressure the state to apply the time-tested, never-fail method of discredit-
ing a message: kill the messenger.
The authorities did not just execute Hallaj. They hung him, cut off his
limbs, decapitated him, and finally burned his corpse. Oddly enough, it
didn't work. Hallaj was gone, but Sufism continued to proliferate. Charis-
matic individuals kept emerging, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all
across the civilized world. Some were "sober" Sufis like Junayd and some
were the God-intoxicated variety, like Rabia Basri and Hallaj.
In sum, by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on
three great cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians,
philosopher-scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and
law in full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and
to develop a technique for achieving personal union with God. Yes, the
three groups overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing
directions, and their intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes
bloody political and financial stakes. At this juncture, one of the intellec-
tual giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the
province ofKhorasan. His name was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.
By his early twenties, Ghazali had already earned acclaim as one of the
foremost ulama of his age. No matter how many hadith you knew, he knew
more. In his day, some ulama had elaborated a theology to compete with
that of the Mu'tazilites. The Asharite school, as it was called, insisted that
faith could never be based on reason, only on revelation. Reason's function
was only to support revelation. Asharite theologians were constantly squar-
ing off against prominent Mu'tazilites in public debates, but the Mu'tazilites
knew fancy Greek tricks for winning arguments, such as logic and rhetoric,
so they were constantly making the Asharites look confused.
Ghazali came to their rescue. The way to beat the philosophers, he de-
cided, was to join them enough to use their tricks against them. He
plunged into a study of the ancients, mastered logic, and inhaled the trea-