Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

256 • The Making of Islamic Science—5—Abu al-Waleed Muhammad Ibn Rushd, Tahafutal-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence),Translated from the Arabic with Introduction andNotes by Simon van den Bergh, 2 vols. London:Messrs. Luzac & Co., 1954, pp. 311–16.Abu al-Waleed Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known to the Latin West asAverroes, was called the commentator because of his excellent commentarieson Aristotle. He was born to a distinguished family of juristsand was himself a jurist and physician. He produced works onmedicine, jurisprudence, and philosophy. His most important work,Incoherence of the Incoherence, from which the following excerpt istaken, was written as an extensive response to the famous work ofAbu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058– 1111), Incoherence of the Philosophers.In much of the secondary literature on Islam and science written inthe West, al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philoso phers is often held asthe main culprit for the decline of science in Islamic civilization. Itis, therefore, interesting to read Ibn Rushd’s response to this work,which first quotes al-Ghazali’s arguments and then responds to it.In a way, this can be seen as a debate between two of the greatestminds in Islamic tradition, al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. It is interestingto note that al-Ghazali’s work tackles twenty issues, out of whichonly the last four are about the natural sciences. The main chargeagainst al-Ghazali is that he destroyed science in Islamic civilizationby destroying causal relations. As can be seen from the followingexcerpt, al-Ghazali is in fact advocating an occasionalist view. He doesso to preserve the Islamic view of miracles. The debate is, therefore,not really on science per se, but on the limits of ra tional inquiry intometa-scientific matters. In terms of causality, al-Ghazali holds thatevery time fire burns cotton, the fire itself does not produce theburning effects; they are caused directly by God. It is in God’s powerto stop fire from producing these habitual effects, if and when He sowishes. This accounts for the presence of miracles.Ibn Rushd responds by pointing out that a denial of directcausation would destroy the fixed natures. If fire no longer has the