TEHRAN -- A seminar marking the 950th anniversary of the birth of the Islamic scholar Muhammad Ghazali (1058-1111) was held here on Saturday and Sunday, sponsored by the Institute of Wisdom and Philosophy of Iran.

Several Iranian scholars including director of the Institute of Wisdom and Philosophy of Iran Gholamreza Avani, Qasem Kakaii, Ziya Movahhed, and Shahin Avani attended the two-day seminar and gave short lectures.
Gholamreza Avani made the opening speech and said, “Muhammad Ghazali was an Iranian mystic who is regarded as the greatest scholar of the Islamic world among the Sunnis. Western thinkers also studied his words even before reviewing Avicenna’s theories.”
He called Ghazali one of the greatest intellectuals in the world of Islam whose thoughts need to be reviewed, saying, “Ghazali is a Persian scholar and Iranians have more authority to review his thoughts.”
He also put stress on the positive points of Ghazali’s thoughts, and said that his negative thinking are also of major importance, adding, “We are living during the time when the Islamic world has a special status. The world of today is a world of review and criticism and for some, there is no scholar like Ghazali.”
Qasem Kakaii from the University of Shiraz also delivered a lecture on the first day of the seminar on the influence of Ghazali on European scholars during the Middle Ages until modern times.
He pointed to the translation of works by Islamic scholars into Latin during the Middle Ages and discussed the process how Ghazali’s books found their way to Europe during that era.
Scholar Ziya Movahhed next talked about the relationship between cause and effect and said that Ghazali believes mysticism and philosophy finally meet in one place.
“Ghazali presents two ways; either to deny the necessity of cause and effect or to accept it by believing in miracles, and it is interesting to know that Ghazali uses both approaches. Ghazali thought it is wise to look for causality, although in the 20th century discovering the necessity is not only by means of intellect but can also be done experimentally.”
Movahhed also said that in the end, Ghazali declares that one can deny causality and find his own way through mysticism and that in his thinking, mysticism and philosophy will ultimately meet each other in a single place.
Member of the Institute of Wisdom and Philosophy of Iran Shahin Avani discussed ethics in the opinion of Ghazali and said that in Ghazali’s opinion, ethics is undeniably a science dependent upon religious law.
She said that according to Ghazali, man should not defer to his wisdom in the realm of ethics but rather must follow his prophets and Imams. “What is more important in his views is the man himself and not the society, and it is the man who should refine himself in order to achieve perfection.
She also noted that Ghazali believes that God sent the prophets to help man find his inner nature and embellish it with high moral values.
Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was born and died in Tus, in the Khorasan region. He was an Islamic theologian, jurist, philosopher, cosmologist, psychologist and mystic of Persian origin and remains one of the most celebrated scholars in the history of Sunni Islamic thought.
He is considered a pioneer of the methods of doubt and skepticism. In one of his major works, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” he changed the course of early Islamic philosophy, shifting it away from an Islamic metaphysics influenced by ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and towards an Islamic philosophy based on cause-and-effect as determined by God or intermediate angels, a theory now known as occasionalism.