Al-Ghazali's Path to Sufism: His Deliverance from Error (Al-Munqidh Min Al-Dalal) and Five Key Texts

This incorporates the Arabic text, a translation and scholarly introduction to what is probably Al-Ghazali's single most significant text, a precursor, and in some ways an antidote, to Descartes's Meditations. Al-Ghazali shows that neither our own sense-experience nor deductive reason is enough to ground even our ordinary beliefs. Nor can we simply rely on what we were ourselves taught in infancy. We know what it is like to wake up from dreaming: perhaps one day we shall wake even from what we now think the waking world. His answer to scepticism is to point out that we do, properly, rely on testimony and even on supra-rational insight even to live seemingly successful lives in this world, but he also retains the truth in the sceptical challenge: that we may wake up. We shouldn't dismiss prophetic testimony on the efficacy of proper ritual even when we don't ourselves understand why it should work: after all, we don't have a complete 'scientific' understanding of why anything should work, even the most ordinary medical cures. Global scepticism is a form of depression, from which we may be saved without any merit on our part, but we also need to unravel the sceptical arguments of philosophers, or their other dangerous errors. The most important moral that he draws is that even people who are thoroughly mistaken on most things may still have true things to say: we should assess what they say, independently of their character or sect, and answer their arguments on their own terms. It's an important philosophical document, and one from which even non-philosophers can learn.