The chapter examines the methodological conundrums of producing knowledge about past traditions through present-day realities, a dilemma we navigate using the “progressive-regressive” method, a term first articulated by Marc Bloch. But beyond the study of the past, the study of the non-Western world poses particular challenges, which we explicate using Joan Cocks’ concept of neo-cosmopolitanism. The Islamic world, while culturally and historically distinct, has always operated within global circuits of economic and political exchange and has shared social imaginaries with the universal civilization of a given time. Where necessary we transcend the limits of three epistemic postures: Enlightenment liberalism, Orientalism, and postmodernism. We examine the status of “science” in the Abbasid world in relation to Ghazālī’s distinction between profane natural knowledge and sacred signs (āyat). Political fragmentation and economic change overlapped with Islam’s encounter with foreign scientific traditions. Ghazālī intervened to differentiate ẓāhir (the apparent) and baṭin (the hidden) as reconcilable components of knowledge, rendering these encounters theoretically coherent.

The chapter reviews interpretations of Ghazālī’s thought prevalent in debates on political Islam, predicated on Islam’s encounter with the West and modernity, inquiring into Ghazālī’s relevance to contemporary Western conceptions of Islam. Participants consistently invoked Ghazālī in terms of his significance to rationalism. Ghazālī is either depicted as an enemy of Enlightenment or a precursor to postmodern critiques of modernity. We analyze three contemporary Ghazālī representations, including Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), Abdul Latif Salazar’s documentary Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness (2004), and a 2010 academic conference on “The Rise of Intellectual Reform in Islam,” hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center featuring Baber Johansen, Ebrahim Moosa, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Talal Asad. We posit that Ghazālī was a reformer responding to a theologico-political crisis. Ghazālī’s The Alchemy of Happiness, written shortly before 1105 CE, and his dīn/dunyā distinction, separated universal truth from religious identity to secure the autonomy and validity of worldly knowledge crucial to the functioning of the Abbasid Empire.

This chapter examines scholarship in Islamic studies affirming Islam’s status as the symbolic “other” of Western modernity. The 1978 double upheaval of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran transfigured popular and academic representations of Islam in the West. But the transformation that Orientalism precipitated, as scholars like Richard C. Martin have argued, has gone politically and intellectually astray. Contemporary scholars’ romanticization of Islamist rejections of modernity confuses regressive ideas concerning culture, tradition, and family values with radicalism. The chapter traces this new orthodoxy to earlier thinkers like Henri Corbin, which Steven M. Wasserstrom described as “religion after religion.” We examine the work of Omid Safi, Talal Asad, Bruce Lawrence, Hossein Nasr, and Marshall Hodgson. We also discuss a second intellectual current emanating from the Left, whose popularity was made possible by the twentieth-century political eclipse of Marxism, which critiques modernity as a fusion of secularism and liberal democracy, exemplified in Ashis Nandy’s 1983 Intimate Enemy.

The chapter discusses Abdolhossein Zarirnkoub’s Persian-language biography of Ghazālī, Farār az Madrasa (Escape from Madrasa), which argues that Ghazālī’s intellectual formation was significantly shaped by the Persian mystical tradition of his time as well as by a broader Islamic tradition of learnedness. An appreciation of the historical and cultural confluence of the Abbasid and Seljuq Empires is crucial to explaining Ghazālī’s reformist vision. Within Ghazālī’s lifetime, the ideals and promises of the Seljuq state gave way to sudden, chaotic collapse, revealing in the process the malfunctioning of a self-professed regime of salvation. Ghazālī was a child of the Niẓām al-Mulk revolution in administration and politics, with its hopes for unifying the Seljuq and Abbasid states under the banner of justice and governance. Yet Ghazālī witnessed the sudden and tragic collapse of the Seljuq state, after Niẓām al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshāh were assassinated in an explosive chain of events. Ghazālī was witness to a failed state-building project, who nevertheless clung to the ideals of that lost revolution while plotting to reinstate its normative mission by other means.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

After having already probed here and there into the earlier political history of the region, our archaeological endeavour proper sets in at the pivotal moment that inhabitants of the Pashtun Borderland developed manifest imperial aspirations themselves.

At that time, the region had been dominated more by views on community and society, alongside mechanisms to put these into practice, which were somewhat at odds with the various forms of imperialism to which they had been subjected. Yet, without the latter, a distinct Pashtun ethnic identity would perhaps not have emerged to such an extent that it could serve as a major element in the ideological justification of their own imperial ambitions. After all, while larger empires around the Pashtun Borderland had emerged and disappeared, the Borderland itself, alongside a distinct ethnic identity which was considered worth defending against external forces, remained rather fluid in shape until the early eighteenth century.

This chapter discusses Ghazali’s Writings in Persian and reception in Iran. Typical Ghazālī studies center his Arabic output. Yet one major work, The Alchemy of Happiness, was written originally in Persian. Ghazālī participated in a Khurasani cultural tradition. Zarrinkoub argues that Ghazālī’s mystical understanding of Islam, against prevailing literalism, influenced Islamicate civilization and culture. Zarrinkoub highlights the contribution of Persian-speaking philosophers, theologians, and scholars to the mystical and theological development of Sunni Islam. Although Iran is conventionally framed as the epicenter of Shi‘ism, Iran only became a majority Shi‘a country with the Safavid Empire in 1501. Through Persian resources we see a cosmopolitan Islam thriving where the Abbasid Empire intersected with multiple cultural revolutions, and where mysticism and established power clashed and reconciled in Ghazālī’s Sufi encounter. Ghazālī’s flight from the madrasa was a flight from orthodoxy in Islamic education, in his renunciation of the educational system. Ghazālī’s Sufism was partly a critique of the dogmatic understanding of Islam common among the ‘ulama.’

This chapter offers a reading of Ebrahim Moosa’s Al-Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, which, through the concept of dihlīz, identifies “the Ghazālian secret” to overcoming false binaries, whether between Ghazālī and his peers or between Islam and the West, as the embrace of a liminal existence. Moosa renders the debate between Ghazālī and the Muslim philosophers (p. falāsifa) of his time as analogous to the contemporary struggle between post-imperialism and globalization. Although his reinterpretation of dihlīz opens new perspectives, we contend that his argument imposes postmodern precepts onto an Abbasid thinker. The historical Ghazālī conceived of the Abbasid Empire in terms of an unfolding divine will and so sought to empower it. Ultimately, we suggest that Moosa marshals Ghazālī to accord mysticism, which replaces objectivity as the “master” paradigm, higher epistemic value than modern reason. This does not correspond to the life and thought of the historical Ghazālī, whose priorities concerned guaranteeing the success of a state project to which he was existentially committed.