during al-Ghazali’s youth. Al-Qushayri (188 in Figure 8.2), a Nishapur theo-
logian from al-Ghazali’s own AshÀarite lineage, had been violently attacked
by mobs stirred up by the Hanbalis in 1072. Ibn ÀAqil (201) was also vio-
lently attacked and forced to recant his use of kalam, rational methods. The
Hanbalis were now so dominant that their own ranks had an internal split;
Ibn ÀAqil was a Hanbali moderate, and we see in Figure 8.2 that he came from
a branch of the Baghdad Hanbalis (177, 186, 202) that had been combining
hadith with kalam. The last of this lineage (202) had to move to Damascus, a
safer environment away from this persecution. Al-Ghazali too would go from
Nishapur to teach at Baghdad, then flee the city as politics heated up again in
the 1090s.
Not surprisingly, in this atmosphere philosophy declined. Ibn ÀAqil la-
mented that in his time there were no more serious thinkers (Watt, 1985: 102).
Al-Ghazali’s one important contemporary was ÀUmar Khayyam; a famous
poet, he was even more eminent as a mathematician, developing techniques
for extracting cube and square roots of algebraic equations. He and his pupil
al-Khazini (210 in Figure 8.2) were the last two great scientific stars of the
Islamic East for a century (DSB, 1981: 7:323–325, 335–351). ÀUmar Khayyam
overlaps with al-Ghazali’s networks: Khayyam was about 10 years older and
had studied at Nishapur before him. Khayyam and al-Ghazali had the same
patron, the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who appointed Khayyam head of the
court astronomical observatory at Isfahan, and al-Ghazali to teach at the great
madrasa which Nizam al-Mulk founded at Baghdad. Khayyam himself wrote
philosophical treatises late in his life; his poems, contemporary with the writ-
ings of al-Ghazali, make disillusioned reference to his own contacts with the
“two-and-seventy jarring sects” and to his student days at Nishapur:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.Khayyam’s advice is the same as al-Ghazali’s:
Waste not your hour, nor in vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute.
Al-Ghazali’s philosophy is an anti-philosophy. He was the great agent of
the traditionalist reaction, but he was great precisely because he was a defector
from the core network, turning the weapons of philosophy against itself. Like
Ibn Sina, whom he attacked, al-Ghazali had a commanding overview of the
cultural capital of the Islamic intellectuals. He scrupulously set forth their views
before refuting them; and he carried out the refutation not by fulmination but
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^421