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Extraordinary for its facile arguments for defending faith over reason while using fact free assertions. Al-Ghazali knows as a first principle that anything that disagrees with his Islamic faith is by definition wrong.

Each of Kant’s antinomies are given a definitive answer by Al-Ghazali.

I realize the previous sentence might not be readily understandable by everyone who reads it. So, I am forced to needlessly elaborate. In Kant’s First Critique, he has four statements (theses) and their contrary (anti-theses) which can be shown to be as true as the original assertion. Simply, they were 1) is time infinite or finite, 2) are things simple or complex, 3) is the world deterministic or determined and 4) is existence necessary or contingent.

Al-Ghazali in his world of pretending to know things that he can’t possibly know without explanations gives the answer he wants to each antinomy and shows philosophy always wrong when it differs with his version of revealed truth.

There is a lot of sloppy philosophy that he sprinkles about, and this author clearly acts like he understands the answers to the great questions. Modern religious folk would tend to love this book because his answers fall within the three major revealed religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism).

Angels are real to him. They are intellects without material, form without matter, a whatness without thatness (I just brought Scotus in with that terminology and he postdates Al-Ghazali), substance without accidents (Aristotle is assumed understood in this book).

�Ѳ������DzԾ������� Guide for the Perplex and Aquinas�� Summa Theologia each assume angels make sense but for them reason precedes faith and there is method to their systems. They, for example, reach the same conclusions as Al-Ghazali, but they at least have reason supporting them. Al-Ghazali does not. I enjoyed their books while only finding this book amusing and a diversion.

Avicenna is the real villain in this book. Al-Ghazali’s God must have given us free-will (in order to be able to damn us for eternity), and our souls continue after death, and intuition is not sufficient while a piece of cotton burns because God makes it so, and the particular gives a general leading to the universal, thus God controls and knows everything because he is all-knowing. I’m going to jump ahead two hundred years and tell you William of Occam shows that the universal is superfluous, and, for example, we can understand what a horse is, and a group of horses are, but horseness is superfluous.

Al-Ghazali needs the universal. He also rejects the possibility of an infinite regress and claims it can’t exist, within a finite set he’s right, but when dealing with an infinite such as God, or time and space, or causality, or existence an infinite regress possibly can exist. Taking all the rational numbers (a countable infinite) out of the line segment from zero to one, the line still has a measure of 1. Finite rules are different when applied to the infinite. Kant’s antimonies destroy the facile logic of Al-Ghazali, and everyone of Al-Ghazali’s assertions are sublimated within Kant’s antinomies.

Al-Ghazali wrongly makes existence a predicate. He has to in order to give credence to his ontological certainty of a simple non-composite God who freely created a universe out of nothing because He wanted to. Avicenna says that the world was always here, first as the thought of God and then created ex-nihilo. Al-Ghazali disagrees and makes existence a predicate and gives the world a starting point, but doesn’t for God since for him God always existed.

I can’t really emphasize enough how juvenile Al-Ghazali’s arguments really are (I put them at the sophistication level of William Lane Craig, and that means they are nothing but sophistry and begging the question apologia) and how they would only convince the already convinced and already believers in revealed religions.

Unfortunately for the Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (see Starr’s book with that title for further amplification) this book clearly puts the kibosh on original thinking and will make it anathema for progress.

A whole swath of modern religious American Christians would absolutely love this book because there is very little that Al-Ghazali speaks about that they would disagree with, and only what he doesn’t speak about such as the trinity, the divinity of Jesus and his miracles would they find offensive by omission.

Al-Ghazali takes miracle as a certainty in the world and thinks that the cotton burns only because God makes it so, or the prophet Abraham did not burn in the furnace because God made it so.

It was as if we were in the Bishop Berkeley or Leibnitz’s world, or a world without causation similar to David Hume’s take of the world. Remember, Kant’s First Critique can be called a synthesis of Berkeley and Leibniz meshed with Hume (see the Bernstein Tapes on the First Critique for a support of that statement).

This book is actually very easy to follow since it lacks sophistication. The low rating is not because it's complex which it is not but because it is a simplistic book and mostly would appeal to those who are already certain in their beliefs in things they pretend to know already. Certainty does not allow for progress, and Al-Ghazali provides no avenue for growth. Maimonides, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Berkeley write books with similar conclusions, but they educate the reader and give them something more than bromides.