Ibn Tūmart's teachers: the relationship with al-Ghazālī

Abstract

A joint political project between al-Ghazālī and his Andalusian pupil, Abū Bakr Ibn al-‛Arabī concerning the government of Spain can be uncovered from the documentary evidence and some reasoning about the chronology. The idea was apparently to gain a foothold for al-Ghazālī with the Almoravid ruler Yūsuf Ibn Tāshufín. Our conclusions about the existence of a political project are supported by documents which have been available for some time: the fatwā al-Ghazālī wrote in support of Yūsuf, the letter he wrote to Yūsuf praising Abū Bakr Ibn al-‛Arabī and the letter he obtained from the caliph, all of which can be compared with al-Turtushī‛s letter to Yūsuf on the same subjects. The connecting idea is that this is part of a political project which would rely on a power base in the peninsula, most notably the Sufi militants and the previous ruling elite of the Taifa kings (Ibn ‛Arabī's father had served Al-Mu‛tamid, Prince of Seville). Al-Ghazālī's writings provide an ideological cement for this political alliance in that they praise sufism and criticize taqlīd, which was the standard approach to law used by the jurists who staffed the Almoravid hierachy. Because al-Ghazālī's discourse is far above the intellectual level of the ordinary jurist, either because they provided no immediate profit or because of the practical difficulty for simple people to get books and teachers on these subjects. Hence al-Ghazālī's discourse remains the property of an intellectual elite which is at the same time a social and economic elite, fluent in literary Classical Arabic and distilling the intellectual gains of many generations of educated Andalusians. To confront this group, the Almoravid jurists represented the urban middle class and could arouse the urban mob in their favor. Motivated by fear that the combination of Ibn al-‛Arabī and al-Ghazālī could replace him in power, the most prominent among them, Ibn Hamdīn of Cordoba, was able to orchestrate the official burning of Al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyā’ throughout the realm. Thus we find that the conflict between these two groups was well defined even before Almohad rebellion in North Africa provided the intellectual elite a military champion. The intellectual elite in turn provided the North African Almohads with administrators and an ideology. Al-Ghazālī was identified as an enemy of the Almoravid regime even before Ibn Tūmart, the founder of the Almohad movement, returned from the East to launch his rebellion against the Almoravids from the Atlas mountains. We propose some changes in the previous picture of Al-Ghazālī's whereabouts at different times. Scholars have already accepted a basic modification of the idea that he left Baghdad definitively after he stopped giving his lectures to huge audiences at the Nizāmiyya school because they noticed that Abū Bakr Ibn al-‛Arabī says he was tutored by Al-Ghazālī for two years in Baghdad after that period. Now we would like to draw attention to the fact that Ibn Khallikān says that Al-Ghazālī stayed in Alexandria, Egypt waiting for an answer from Yūsuf Ibn Tāshufīn. In the context of a shifting picture of the chronology of Al-Ghazālī’s travels, the notion that Ibn Tūmart might have seen the famous scholar seems possible and even probable.