Doubt and the Inner Life: al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh

If you are a Muslim who doubts, you may feel that you are the first person to have felt this way, or that doubt is something the tradition has no room for. Neither is true. One of the most influential scholars in Islamic history, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 505 AH / 1111 CE), wrote an account of his own doubts, and it has been read for nine centuries. This guide introduces that account, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, “The Deliverer from Error”, and what it may offer a person who doubts today. It quotes al-Ghazali from the Arabic text and gives page links so that you can read him yourself.

Who al-Ghazali was

By his thirties al-Ghazali was the most celebrated scholar in Baghdad, a professor at the Nizamiyya college, a jurist, a theologian and a writer on philosophy. He wrote al-Munqidh late in life, when, as he says, he was past fifty, in reply to a friend who had asked him to describe how he had searched for truth among the competing schools of his day.¹ It is short, personal, and unusually honest.

A thirst that was not chosen

Al-Ghazali says that from before the age of twenty he had plunged into every question, examining the beliefs of every group, and that the thirst to grasp the reality of things was “my habit and my way from the beginning of my affairs”, an instinct God had placed in his nature “not by my choice or my contrivance”.²

He describes the moment the bonds of inherited belief loosened. He noticed that the children of Christians grew up Christian, the children of Jews grew up Jewish, and the children of Muslims grew up Muslim. He recalled the hadith that every child is born upon the fitra, the original nature, and that it is the parents who make the child a Jew, a Christian or a Magian. And he wanted to know what that original nature was, beneath what parents and teachers had added.²

Many people who doubt today begin with exactly this observation. This site’s doubt born into it and the rebuttal why this religion and not another take it up. What is striking is that al-Ghazali did not treat the question as an attack on faith. He treated it as the beginning of a search.

What he wanted: certainty

He decided that what he was looking for was certain knowledge, and he defined it strictly: knowledge in which the thing known is disclosed so completely that no doubt remains with it, and no possibility of error. His example is famous. If he knows that ten is more than three, and someone says “no, three is more, and as proof I will turn this stick into a snake”, and does so, he would wonder at the man’s power but would not doubt that ten is more than three.³

Measured against that standard, he found he had very little. He began to doubt even his senses: the eye sees a shadow standing still, but an hour later it has moved; it sees a star the size of a coin, yet geometry shows it larger than the earth. Then he asked whether reason itself might be judged by some higher faculty, as reason judges the senses, and he pointed to dreams, in which we believe things completely until we wake.⁴

Two months

He could not argue his way out. Every argument, he saw, would rest on the very first principles he was doubting. “The illness became difficult,” he writes, “and lasted nearly two months, during which I was a sceptic in fact, though not in speech or statement”. Then God cured him of that illness, and the necessary truths of reason returned, accepted and trusted, “not by arranging a proof or ordering an argument, but by a light that God cast into the breast, and that light is the key to most knowledge”.⁵

He adds a sentence worth reading slowly: “whoever thinks that unveiling depends on carefully composed proofs has narrowed the vast mercy of God”.⁵ He does not mean that arguments are useless; he spent the rest of the book on them. He means that a person does not hold on to reason by reason alone, and that the recovery of trust is a gift as much as an achievement.

The search through the schools

Recovered from radical scepticism, al-Ghazali examined the four groups of seekers of his time: the theologians, the Batinis who claimed an infallible teacher, the philosophers, and the Sufis. He studied each in depth, and wrote that he found theology adequate to its purpose, defending creed, but not to his purpose, which was certainty.⁶ His judgements on the others are detailed and sometimes severe; they are part of the history of Islamic thought, and readers still argue about them.

He also noted something about inherited belief that is useful for a doubter to hear. Once a person knows that he is merely imitating, he says, the glass of his imitation is broken, and it cannot be mended by patching; it must be melted down and made anew.⁷ There is no going back to the faith you had before you asked. If faith remains, it will be a different faith, one you have examined.

The second crisis

The book’s most moving passage is about a second crisis, this time a crisis of life. Al-Ghazali came to see that his teaching and his fame were bound up with a love of position, and he could not bring himself to leave them. For nearly six months, beginning in Rajab 488 AH, he says, he wavered between the pull of the world and the call of the Hereafter. Then “the matter passed from choice to compulsion”: God locked his tongue so that he could not teach. He tried to teach even one day, for the sake of his students, and could not utter a single word.⁸

The paralysis of his tongue brought grief to his heart; he could not digest food, and his strength failed, until the physicians gave up hope, saying that this was something that had come down upon the heart and could not be treated by medicine.⁹ When he felt his helplessness completely, he turned to God “as one who is compelled, who has no way out”, and God, he writes, made it easy for his heart to turn away from position, wealth, family and companions. He left Baghdad. He spent nearly two years in Syria in seclusion, and continued in this way, travelling and returning, for about ten years.¹⁰

What al-Ghazali gives a doubter now

You are not the first. A scholar whose works are still taught in every Muslim country doubted the reliability of his own senses and reason, and later suffered a collapse that the physicians of his time could not treat. He wrote about both without shame. The tradition kept his account and honoured it.

Doubt can be a stage that passes. Al-Ghazali’s doubt was the beginning of a search, and he presents it as such. That is not a promise about where your search will lead; it is a description of where his did.

The heart matters. His second crisis was not about arguments at all. It was about what he loved and feared, and it showed itself in his body. Many people who doubt find, as he did, that the intellectual question and the inner one are tangled together. Our guide how to assess a doubt suggests ways of telling them apart, and the companion site’s article did your heart leave before your head? looks at the same question.

Time is allowed. His first crisis took two months, his second six, and his recovery ten years. No one rushed him, and no one should rush you.

Inherited faith is not the only kind. The broken glass cannot be patched. If you come through your questions with faith, it will be faith you have tested. If you do not, you will at least know why.

Reading al-Munqidh critically

It would not be fair to present al-Ghazali as beyond criticism. His account was written years after the events and shaped by what he had come to believe. His judgements on the philosophers were contested in his own time and after, most famously by Ibn Rushd. And some of the reports he quotes as hadith are of uncertain strength; a book of personal testimony is not a hadith collection, and our guide hadith grading explained explains why that matters. None of this lessens the honesty of his account. It is a reason to read him as a fellow searcher rather than as an oracle.

If your doubt has become distress

Al-Ghazali’s second crisis is a reminder that inner struggle can affect the body and the mind. If you are not sleeping, not eating, unable to work or study, or having thoughts of harming yourself, please treat that as a matter of health and talk to a doctor or counsellor, and if you are in danger, contact your local emergency number now. Our guide where to find support suggests where to begin. There is no merit in suffering alone, and nothing in the tradition requires it. The doubt doubting through Ramadan is written for one particular form of this experience, and the companion site’s article your doubts are not a disease speaks to the shame many doubters feel.

Sources

1. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: the request, and his age past fifty. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/4
2. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: the thirst for truth 'not by my choice'; the children of Christians, Jews and Muslims; the fitra hadith. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/5
3. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: the definition of certain knowledge; ten and three. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/6
4. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: doubting the senses and reason; the dream. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/7
5. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: nearly two months; 'a light that God cast into the breast'. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/10
6. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: theology adequate to its purpose but not to his. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/13
7. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: the broken glass of imitation. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/12
8. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: nearly six months from Rajab 488; his tongue locked. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/60
9. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: the physicians give up; leaving Baghdad. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/61
10. al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal: nearly two years in Syria; about ten years. https://shamela.ws/book/9246/63