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Islamic Translation Series (ITS) | Published Volumes
The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa), by al-Ghazali, a parallel English-Arabic text translated, introduced, and annotated by Michael E. Marmura
Description/Order Information
6x9 hardcover, 611 pp.
ISBN 0-8425-2351-0
$29.95
click here to order this book
About This Volume
The Incoherence of the Philosophers ranks among the most important works of one of the most fascinating thinkers in the history of Islam.
Born in the eastern Iranian city of Tus in 450 A.H. (1058 C.E.), Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali also died there, relatively young, in 505 A.H. (1111 C.E.). Between those two dates, however, he established himself as a pivotal figure throughout the Islamic world. By his early thirties he was a pre-eminent legal scholar and teacher in Baghdad. But then, overcome by skepticism and finding no other satisfactory way to combat his doubts, he abandoned his academic position to devote himself to reattaining religious certainty through the practice of Sufi mysticism. By his own account, he succeeded. After somewhat more than a decade of travel and ascetic contemplation, and at the instance of the sultan at that time, he emerged again into public life and teaching during his final years.
The Incoherence of the Philosophers—itself pitched at a very sophisticated philosophical level—contends that, although Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) boasted of absolutely unassailable arguments on crucial matters of theology and metaphysics, they could not, in fact, deliver on their claims. Additionally, maintained al-Ghazali, some of their assertions represented mere disguised heresy and unbelief. The great twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher and Aristotle commentator Ibn Rushd (Averroes) attempted to refute al-Ghazali's critique in his own book The Incoherence of the Incoherence, but it remains widely read and influential today.
Biography of Translator
Michael E. Marmura was born in Jerusalem on November 11, 1929. He received his B.A. in 1953 from the University of Wisconsin and went on to obtain both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, where he taught from 1959 until 1995 and where he twice chaired the Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies.
Dr. Marmura has published medieval Arabic philosophical texts and translations, as well as numerous articles on Islamic philosophy, many of them devoted to the thought of Avicenna and al-Ghazali. His publications include an edition of Ibn Sina's Fi ithbat al-nubuwwat (Proof of prophecy); Refutation by Alexander of Aphrodisias of Galen's Treatise on the Theory of Motion, with N. Rescher; and Islamic Theology and Philosophy: Studies in Honor of George F. Hourani, of which he was the editor. He has also published a history of Islamic philosophy incorporated in Der Islam II: Politische Entwicklungen und theologische Konzepte, coauthored with W. Montgomery Watt.
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