Al-Ghazzālī’s Final Word on Kalām

Abstract

Al-Ghazzālī’s last work on speculative theology—Iljām al-ʿawām ʿan ʿilm al-kalām (“Saving Muslims from Specu- lative Theology”)—reflects a significant departure from the Ashʿarī school of thought and arrival at the ‘way of the salaf ’ (madhhab al-salaf). This so-called salafī path es- poused in Iljām is indicative of the theological approach of Traditionalists, especially Ḥanbalīs, which vehemently rejected Kalām and allegorical interpretations of divine attributes. In Iljām, his opponents are not so much the Muʿtazilīs as they are the Ḥashwī anthropomorphists. Al- though he still recognized Kalām as a scholastic discipline that basically met the goal of protecting the Sunnī creed and defending it against heresies, he was convinced that its method ultimately failed to delineate a decisive her- meneutic path to intimately knowing God and His attri- butes. This paper briefly examines al-Ghazzālī’s Iljām, its key theological constructs, its relative importance within the Sunnī corpus on Kalām, and the scholarly debate over the meaning of the ‘Way of the Salaf.’