Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Griffel, Frank, 1965-
Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (review)
Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Volume 74, Number 3, September 2006, pp. 795-798

Oxford University Press

Frank Griffel - Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (review) - Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74:3 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74.3 (2006) 795-798 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Frank Griffel Yale University Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination. By Ebrahim Moosa. The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 349 pages. $22.50. There is a short sentence in the autobiography of the influential Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) that closes a paragraph about the goal of Sufi practice. This goal, al-Ghazālī says, is the annihilation (fanā ') of the individual in God. The Sufi has to make a firm decision for the pursuit of this goal "and everything that comes before it is the dihlīz for the one who seeks Him." Arab philologists explain that dihlīz is a word of Persian origin, which refers to the space between the gate and the house. For Ebrahim Moosa, the dihlīz is the quintessential metaphor for what al-Ghazālī's intellectual œuvre is about (47). Al-Ghazālī was a thinker who was "often locked between positions, caught in the paradoxes and contradictions of life in a veritable threshold position, a position at the crossroads" (92). The complexities in his works offer multiple possibilities of understanding and require certain strategies of reading, strategies that Moosa aims to explore. He wants to make al-Ghazālī's voice heard in the discussions of the contemporary Muslim...