Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral

Beauty

Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty rethinks the relationship

between the good and the beautiful by considering the work of eleventh-
century Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111).
A giant of Islamic intellectual history, al-Ghazālī is celebrated for
his achievements in a wide range of disciplines. One of his greatest
intellectual contributions lies in the sphere of ethics, where he presided
over an ambitious attempt to integrate philosophical and scriptural
ideas into a seamless ethical vision. The connection between ethics and
aesthetics turns out to be a signature feature of this account. Virtue is
one of the forms of beauty, and human beings are naturally disposed
to respond to it with love. The universal human response to beauty in
turn provides the central paradigm for thinking about the love mer-
ited by God. While al-Ghazālī’s account of divine love has received
ample attention, his special way of drawing the good into relation with
the beautiful has, oddly, escaped remark. In this book Sophia Vasalou
addresses this gap by offering a philosophical and contextual study
of this aspect of al-Ghazālī’s ethics and of the conception of moral
beauty that emerges from it.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students in Islamic eth-
ics, Islamic intellectual history, and the history of ethics.

Sophia Vasalou is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the

University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on philosophical and
theological ethics in the Islamic world. Her published works include
Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics
(2008), Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a
Practice of the Sublime (2013), and Wonder: A Grammar (2015).
Islam in the World

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Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty

Sophia Vasalou

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Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of
Moral Beauty

Sophia Vasalou
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556

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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

1 Introduction 1

2 The place of aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī’s ethics 5

3 The good and/as the beautiful in context 8

4 Moral beauty and the paradigm of disinterested love 13

5 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 30

6 Resolving the conflict: An interpretive toolbox 41

7 Concluding comment 52

Notes57
Bibliography74
Index80
Acknowledgements

I’m very grateful to the two reviewers for their careful reading and
constructive suggestions, and to my colleague Katherine Brown for
steering this work to publication. I’m also grateful to the audience at a
talk I gave on the subject at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies for
their questions and comments. The 2019 pandemic put paid to other
opportunities to share this work live, but there are brighter days ahead.
1 Introduction

… would Eros be anything except love of beauty?

Plato, Symposium

At a celebrated juncture of the Symposium, Plato describes the

ascending course an individual must trace through the different
objects of love. From love of beautiful bodies, the lover will progress
to love of beautiful souls, to love of beautiful laws, practices, and
sciences, and finally to love of the transcendent form of Beauty itself,
on which all mundane beauty depends (210a–212a).1 Holding this
piece of philosophical idealisation together are a number of impor-
tant assumptions. The idea that souls can be beautiful or ugly is one.
The idea that the beautiful and the good are inseparably connected
is another; what makes a soul beautiful, to take a key example, is its
virtues. Finally, there is the idea that the truest beauty is transcend-
ent, and all particular beauty points to and depends on it. Some of
these ideas pick out features that were central to the physiognomy
of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy in particular. Yet some of
them enjoy broader reach, representing features frequently taken to
be integral to ancient philosophical and indeed non-philosophical
thinking more generally. The connection between the beautiful and
the good, most notably, is embedded in the basic facts of linguistic
usage. “[I]n Hellenic culture,” as one scholar has crystallised an oft-
made observation, “the beautiful and the good are brought together
in a single notion.” That notion is the Greek term to kalon, which can
refer equally to the kinds of things we would naturally call “beauti-
ful” (such as human faces or bodies) and to the kinds of things we
would naturally call “good” (such as human actions and traits).2
To contemporary philosophical sensibility, many of the features just
listed have come to seem eccentric. The idea, in particular, that ethi-
cal considerations could intersect or even—in some manner still to be
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-1
2  Introduction
defined—coincide with aesthetic ones is liable to appear intellectu-
ally indefensible if not morally pernicious. Despite certain structural
similarities, such as the ostensible independence of both moral and
aesthetic value from antecedent personal interests or purposes, these
kinds of value would seem to be separated by a gulf. Aryeh Kosman
articulates part of the ground of this concern when he remarks that

we would find it decadent or something like belleletristic to be

directed to keep a promise because it would be lovely or in good
taste to do so, or enjoined not to commit mass murder because
doing so would be tacky. For us, “she acted beautifully” and “she
acted rightly” do not mean the same thing.

Put differently, moral reasons carry a type of normative demand that

aesthetic considerations do not.3
Yet more recently, there has been a surge of philosophical efforts
to bridge this perceived gulf. Taking their focus from the virtues and
the vices, the most significant of these projects have set out to restore
credibility to talk of beauty with reference to human character or the
human soul. “Moral beauty,” in the view of Panos Paris, is neither
loose talk nor a category error, but perfectly in order when applied to
the excellence of a person’s character traits taken as complex forms
that promote a particular end (the human good). Defending this view
involves expanding the cramped conception of aesthetic objects that
has come to dominate philosophical aesthetics, with art and nature,
and by extension sensory objects, monopolising the discussion.4
Many of these philosophical projects are framed as attempts to hon-
our our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about ethics, and about
human character in particular. “We may call someone who exhibits
many moral virtues a beautiful person,” Berys Gaut points out, just as
“we may say of a kind and generous action that it was a beautiful action.”
Colin McGinn lists a number of terms of approval and disapproval that
he suggests have substantial aesthetic connotations, including “sweet”
and “pure,” “foul,” “disgusting,” “or “grotesque.”5 We can see these lin-
guistic intuitions at work in prominent literary texts, as in Jane Eyre’s
admiring ascription of a “beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash,
nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance” to one
of the characters of the eponymous novel.6 These intuitions unite us to
the proximate past, as this literary example attests. The same applies to
Gaut’s expression, which echoes nothing more than Hume’s remark, in
the Treatise, that “[t]here is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble
and generous action.”7 The latter remark reflects a broader willingness
 Introduction 3
among Hume and his contemporaries to reach for aesthetic language
in speaking about qualities of character. Recent projects have thus also
taken their bearings from philosophical history, both proximate (as rep-
resented by Hume and his peers) and remote (as represented by their
ancient precursors), viewing their project as in part one of restoration.
In this work, my aim is to broaden the philosophical record to include
an important episode that has not yet received adequate consideration.
This is the episode contributed by the prominent eleventh-century
Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). Many of the ideas
picked out on the previous page as central tropes of ancient philosoph-
ical thinking—particularly in the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools—
turn out to have significant counterparts within the Islamic world.
Partly, this is the result of intellectual influence, as ancient texts that
formed key vectors of these ideas were translated into Arabic and found
their way into the hands of Arabic-speaking intellectuals. That mate-
rial process, it must be said, was not the most straightforward, and
in certain regards, the textual links appear surprisingly thin. Plato’s
Symposium, for example, seems never to have been translated into
Arabic, though some of its ideas made it into Arabic-Islamic culture
through indirect routes, reflecting a generally patchy record of trans-
mission for Plato’s corpus as a whole. Plotinus’ Enneads, in which these
kinds of ideas achieved a critical articulation, was only available in
part and in paraphrase under the title The Theology of Aristotle.8 Yet a
reasonable leaven of these philosophical ideas made it into the mix of
intellectual elements at work in the Islamic world, and it entered into
a variety of intellectual schemes that elaborated the relations between
ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. This includes, above all, Sufism,
where the idea of God’s transcendent beauty—which worldly entities
either naturally manifest or normatively seek to emulate—formed a
cynosure of spiritual preoccupation.9
A thinker of boundless ambition, breadth, and curiosity, al-Ghazālī
drew equally from the granary of philosophical and Sufi ideas in craft-
ing his own intellectual vision. Both influences can be seen at work
in his late-life multi-volume masterpiece, The Revival of the Religious
Sciences, where this vision receives its most powerful and influential
expression. Al-Ghazālī’s purpose in this book is to guide the reader
through the process of ethical and spiritual formation required to reach
ultimate happiness, this being happiness in God. It is in this context that
al-Ghazālī makes an approach to a theme that has formed the defining
focus of Sufi spirituality, the love of God. This approach turns out to be
an account of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics rolled into one. Love
of God is love of beauty; and virtue is one of the forms of beauty.
4  Introduction
Although al-Ghazālī’s account of divine love in the Revival has justly
received considerable attention, its special way of drawing the good into
relation with the beautiful has oddly escaped remark.10 One reason for
wishing to focus attention on it, as already suggested, is to enrich the his-
torical record we survey and seek to mine as we attempt to rethink the
relationship between the good and the beautiful, ethics and aesthetics. If
we believe this effort is worthwhile, a broadened sense of intellectual com-
munity will seem worth cultivating. But a closer meditation on this aspect
of al-Ghazālī’s thinking is also important if we are interested in gaining a
clearer insight into al-Ghazālī’s ethics on its own terms. Al-Ghazālī’s eth-
ics simply cannot be understood without taking into account the aesthetic
framework in which he locates the ethical life, and more specifically the
life of virtue. As I will show, the insight that results from this engagement
is not entirely free from difficulty. Al-Ghazālī’s account of the relation
between the good and the beautiful turns out to problematise the unity
of his thought, and to raise on fresh grounds an enigma familiar to his
major interpreters concerning the consistency between the viewpoints of
his different works. If we are to appreciate the complexity of al-Ghazālī’s
thought, and of Islamic ethical discourse more broadly, this is a challenge
well worth confronting.
After a brief foray into al-Ghazālī’s attitude to aesthetic enjoyment more
generally (Section 2), I set out some of the linguistic, religious, and philo-
sophical background that provides a context for al-Ghazālī’s specific way
of linking aesthetics with the domain of ethics (Section 3). I then begin to
unpack the relation between the good and the beautiful as al-Ghazālī pre-
sents it in his key virtue-centred works, especially the Revival, focusing on
the account of moral beauty he develops in the context of his discussion
of the love of God (Section 4). Moral virtue is the prime exemplar of an
intelligible type of beauty, and the disinterested love that human beings
universally experience towards beauty provides the central paradigm for
thinking about the love they may direct to God. Having explored this
model philosophically, I then turn to consider the quandary it poses for
our understanding of al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre as a whole, given its apparent
antagonism to the (anti-rationalist, anti-objectivist) view of ethical value
expressed in his theological and legal works (Section 5). I try to meet this
challenge by outlining a number of approaches that would allow us to
remove the apparent contradiction, including appeals to chronology,
levels of discourse, and “supercharged” hermeneutics (Section 6). A con-
cluding comment (Section 7) tries to broaden the vista against which we
engage with this particular episode and place the historical record in the
service of the beautiful and the good.
2 The place of aesthetic
experience in al-Ghazālī’s ethics

A good way to get into our topic is through a broader question about the
place of aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī’s thought. “Aesthetics”—
from the Greek aisthesis, “sense” or “sense-perception”—is itself a
modern concept with no exact counterpart in the medieval Islamic
intellectual tradition. Aesthetics was not conceived of and pursued as
a separate subject of inquiry. Yet beauty ( jamāl or ḥusn) was a theme
that preoccupied Muslim intelligentsia across numerous vehicles
of cultural expression, including literature (adab), philosophy, and
Sufism. In philosophy, beauty surfaced as a theme within discussions
organised under rather different headings, such as metaphysical explo-
rations of the nature of God or explorations of literary art inspired by
Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics.1 When we seek to study questions of
“aesthetics” in a particular work or thinker, we will thus often need
to track our subject through a variety of environments and to identify
it using one or both of the following means: the use of core aesthetic
vocabulary (such as jamāl and ḥusn) and the reference to experiences
that we are happy to recognise as instances of the aesthetic in light of
both their objects and their described phenomenology.2
Approaching al-Ghazālī in this manner, one of the first references
to aesthetic experience we find in the Revival of the Religious Sciences
will evoke an immediate sense of scepticism about the status of such
experiences within his concerns. “Anyone who takes delight in the
present world,” he writes in the book On the Condemnation of the
Mundane World, “be it by hearing some birdsong, by gazing upon
some verdure (khu ḍra), or by taking a drink of cool water, will have his
reward in the hereafter diminished several times in proportion.”3 Both
the objects and the broad phenomenology of these experiences allow
us to confidently recognise them (at least the first two) as instances
of aesthetic experience on our terms.4 And al-Ghazālī’s attitude to
such experience seems unmistakably clear: it is one of thoroughgoing
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-2
6  Aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī’s ethics
condemnation. This ties in with the overall theme of the book, and
the jaundiced attitude it adopts towards worldly goods and pleasures.
There is a necessary disjunction, both psychological and evaluative,
between attachment to goods that belong to the present world and
attachment to goods that belong to the next. Attachment to the former
comes at the cost of the latter; and on the level of our fundamental
motivation and conception of the good, only one attachment can reign
supreme.5 To this ascetic view, there would appear to be no exceptions:
all pleasures that form part of the worldly domain and are made pos-
sible by our embodied condition are tarred by the same brush, no mat-
ter whether they come to us through hearing and sight (honoured by
Aristotle in the Metaphysics as the noblest and most intellectual of the
senses) or through taste and feel. This includes the pleasures afforded
by the most ordinary enjoyment of nature and natural beauty.
Yet in fact the attitude conveyed in this book does not tell the whole
story. It may be evident that the above view, which tells us what should
be our ultimate object of desire, leaves open a different way of valuing
the goods and pleasures to be had in the present world. We may not
value them intrinsically, but we may value them as goods that stand in
a subordinate relation to the intrinsic goods of the supernatural realm.
It is not, after all, that we should wholly reject the physical pleasures
of eating and drinking. It is that when we partake of them, we should
regard them under their description as means that enable us to realise
our true end and that give us the power to devote ourselves to what
really matters—to the salutary forms of intellectual and ethical activ-
ity (al-ʿilm waʾl-ʿamal). Seen in this light, eating and drinking become
objects not merely of grudging toleration but of praise and reward
(mashkūr wa-maʾjūr). For “the body is the vessel of the soul, which it
uses to complete its journey toward God.”6 The present world is not an
impediment to the next; it is the means of reaching it.
This way of regarding worldly objects finds its complement in a
rather different mode of valuation. Entities belonging to the mundane
realm may stand in a causal relationship to goods belonging to the
metaphysical realm, which makes us value them in their instrumen-
tal capacity. Yet they may also stand in a signifying relationship to
that realm, which makes us value them in their epistemic capacity and
for their cognitive content. And it is a type of response to the natural
world and its constituents we may recognise as aesthetic in character,
being a response to its beauty and grandeur, that registers that rela-
tionship most strongly.
The best place to observe this attitude at work, in the Revival, is the
book captioned On Contemplation. The contemplation in question has
 Aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī’s ethics 7
a number of different objects, but one of the most important consists
in God’s acts and effects as manifest in the created realm. Like all the
other topics treated in the last quarter of the Revival, this contem-
plative exercise is not a recommended extra of the ethical life, but an
activity we are dutybound to undertake if we are to achieve spiritual
completeness. And this duty essentially takes shape as a duty of won-
der, which reads every aspect of the created realm—from the compo-
nents of our own bodies and the different plants and animals roaming
land and sea to the larger economy of the heavens and the earth—as
a wondrous signifier of God’s attributes, above all his majesty, wis-
dom, knowledge, and power. It is possible that not all wonder has an
aesthetic quality; but this kind of wonder certainly does. The mode
of contemplation that reads the natural world as expressive of God’s
nature is one responsive to its grandeur and beauty. “You have for-
gotten,” as al-Ghazālī observes in one place, “to have regard for the
beauty of the empire of the heavens and the earth.”7
So an aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is not only not
reprehensible but mandated. But its legitimacy rests on our ability to
experience the natural world as pointing to its transcendent cause. To
return to the birdsong that antagonised al-Ghazālī in an earlier book
of the Revival: it’s not taking pleasure in birdsong that is problematic
simpliciter; it’s taking pleasure in birdsong just insofar as it’s birdsong,
and not insofar as it is a glorious expression of God’s nature.
Whether we adopt one or the other of these two modes of valua-
tion—instrumental or epistemic—may be a matter of perspective. The
same object can provide the basis for both, as when we view the article
of food we are consuming as a means to some valorised activity yet
also as a token of the astounding natural economy God has created
and as a signifier of God’s beneficence and creative powers.8
Taken together, this shows that al-Ghazālī has a more nuanced atti-
tude to aesthetic enjoyment. The positive attitude he displays towards
the enjoyment of nature has its counterpart in the view he takes of
certain forms of art. The most notable example is music, the subject
of extensive controversy in the Islamic tradition. Al-Ghazālī is deeply
impressed by the power of music, and by what our profound response
to it says about our own nature and about the higher spiritual reali-
ties. Our response to music reveals the presence of a “divine spark” in
us, and “beautiful, harmonious, well-proportioned sound produces an
image of the wonders of that [higher spiritual] world.”9 As with nature,
the value of music thus derives from the access it gives us, cognitive
and emotional, to the transcendent realm, its beauty a reflection and
conduit of transcendent beauty.
3 The good and/as the
beautiful in context

Al-Ghazālī’s more nuanced attitude to nature and certain forms of

art thus provides an important corrective to the picture suggested by
a partial reading of the Revival. Yet for the purposes of this investiga-
tion, even more interesting is the attitude towards aesthetic experience
he displays in connection to ethics.
It is worth pausing over this contrast for moment in order to build
some context. Professional philosophers studying aesthetics these days
tend to focus on two broad types of objects as primary candidates for
aesthetic response: nature and art. This focus is reflected among some
of the founding figures of philosophical aesthetics, including Kant.
Yet even in Kant’s work, we find evidence of an interest in a different
type of aesthetic object. This shows up less directly in his account of
the beautiful than in his approach to the sublime, where in different
locations and from different directions, he acknowledges that things
that have moral content, to put it broadly, can evoke in the observer an
experience of the sublime. The moral law can evoke that experience;
so can awareness of our own moral vocation as human beings. The
same applies to individuals who display certain kinds of exalted moral
qualities. Thus, for example, “affectlessness (apatheia, phlegma in sig-
nificactu bono) in a mind that emphatically pursues its own inalterable
principles is sublime.”1 The kind of self-command in pursuit of the
noble that Kant describes evokes the Stoic sage more narrowly, and
a type of heroic outlook more broadly. A similar idea is expressed by
Schopenhauer when he identifies his own version of “sublime charac-
ter” as a distinctive object of aesthetic experience.2
The admiration we experience towards outstanding moral exemplars,
this suggests, has an aesthetic modality—a modality that would on one
level appear to be linked to the qualities of distance and elevation that
define its object. Yet the association of the aesthetic and the ethical, as
already mentioned, has a longer philosophical lineage. The world of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-3
 The good and/as the beautiful in contexts 9
classical antiquity was the source not only of the prototypes that pro-
vide Kant and Schopenhauer with their models of the moral hero, but
also of a broader way of conceptualising ethics that drew it into close
connection with aesthetic ideas, as instanced, at the most fundamental
level, by the Janus-faced nature of the Greek term kalon.
Just how that connection should be articulated—how exactly to under-
stand the idea that “the beautiful and the good are brought together in
a single notion,” as phrased earlier—is still a matter for discussion. In a
recent essay, for example, Terence Irwin has tried to redress a popular
way of contrasting the type of connection between ethics and aesthet-
ics we find among more recent philosophers—Kant and Schopenhauer,
but also Hume, Smith, and Hutcheson—and the one at work among
their Greek predecessors. Modern philosophers, even when they link
the good and the beautiful in certain ways—whether by calling certain
forms of character “sublime” (like Kant or Schopenhauer) or certain
actions “fair and beautiful” (Hume), or by inquiring more generally into
the relations between the good and the beautiful—are clear about the
fact that they are inquiring “into two things rather than one.”3 Greek
philosophers are thought to be different given the semantic profile of
the term kalon. Yet Irwin’s argument, framed relative to Aristotle, is
that Aristotle makes a clear distinction between kalon in the sense of
“morally right” and the sense of “beautiful,” recognising these as two
distinct properties. It is a mistake to suppose that he “ascribes one and
the same property to all kalon things, or that he gives the same account
of what makes them kalon. Some things are kalon insofar as they are
beautiful, others insofar as they are well ordered, and others insofar as
they are praiseworthy attempts to promote a common good.” Hence
there is “no good reason to claim that all kalon things are kalon insofar
as they are beautiful. Aesthetic attractiveness belongs only to a proper
subset of kalon things.”4 From a practical viewpoint, Irwin argues,
these facts dictate that we should avoid translating kalon using dif-
ferent English terms and instead opt for a single term that accommo-
dates both senses, such as “fine” or “admirable.”
There are good reasons to dwell on this point, as we will see, though
we will have to get to them in stages. We can start by observing that
we find the same semantic profile in the core Arabic terms employed
by al-Ghazālī and his contemporaries as we do in ancient Greek. Two
of the key terms for “beauty,” as mentioned earlier, are jamāl and
ḥusn. Depending on their context, both of them can be translated with
a range of terms that includes “good,” “fine,” or “beautiful.”5 Their
commonest contrary, qubḥ, translates as both “bad” or “wrong” and
“ugly.” Both terms can be used to qualify and evaluate actions as
10  The good and/as the beautiful in context
well as traits of character. And both terms (sometimes with a slight
morphological permutation) can be used to characterise the external
appearance of objects or people. In a well-known hadith describing
the Prophet’s night journey (isrāʾ), both positive terms appear in appo-
sition to qualify a beautiful woman (imraʾa ḥasnāʾ jamlāʾ). The close
semantic relationship between these two terms is reflected in the works
of several lexicographers and philologists. The eleventh-century lan-
guage scholar al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, for example, defines jamāl as an
intensification of ḥusn, and he is followed by many of his successors.6
Significantly, the two terms are not equally dominant in different
regions of Islamic ethical literature. In works of dialectical theology
(kalām), it was the pair ḥasan-qabī ḥ that lent its name to the notorious
debates concerning the epistemic source and ontological status of eth-
ical norms (are they known by religious scripture or human reason?
Are they objective features or products of divine assignment?). In these
debates, the focus was squarely on actions as objects of evaluative con-
cern, and despite some residual awkwardness, in this context the pair
of terms is often translated as “good-bad” or “right-wrong.”7 In theo-
logical texts of this sort, the term jamīl barely makes an appearance as
a term of ethical evaluation.
Things look different in texts that betray the influence of Hellenistic
civilisation and its philosophies. There, jamīl emerges as the dominant
term of evaluation. This can be seen clearly, for example, in the Arabic
translation of Galen’s short but seminal text Peri Ethon (lost in the origi-
nal Greek), which applies it to the virtues and the actions that derive from
them.8 It is jamīl, likewise, that usually translates kalon in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics, including in the context of the crucial distinction
between the fine, the advantageous, and the pleasant (1104b31).9 The
resulting Arabic triad (jamīl, nāfiʿ, ladhīdh) would travel widely among
works of philosophical and theological ethics receptive to the influence
of the Hellenistic tradition. The prominence of the term jamīl would be
reflected in these works, and for a number of writers, such as al-Fārābī
(d. 950 or 951), it would form the chief evaluative currency.10
Thus, in ethical works where the conception of ethics centres on
the virtues and bears an identifiable debt to the ancient philosophi-
cal tradition, the term jamīl occupies centre stage. The contribution
of ancient philosophical texts, to be sure, went significantly beyond
the mere shaping of terminological preference. A central component
of their bequest lay in the substantive ideas they contributed to the
intellectual conversation. Some of these ideas seem inseparable from
issues of terminology: the limpid distinction between the fine and the
advantageous is a good example (the moral world of a person who can
 The good and/as the beautiful in contexts 11
enunciate that distinction is very different from the moral world of one
who cannot). For our purposes, the most potent idea contributed by
a number of these texts was the explicit application of the concept of
beauty to the human soul, and the claim that beauty includes moral
virtue as one of its most important forms.
This is an idea that appears openly in Galen’s Peri Ethon. Having
spoken of the fineness of actions and of people’s love of the fine
(maḥabbat al-jamīl), it goes on to compare the beauty ( jamāl) of the
soul to the beauty of the body, positing the same factor as the cause of
both, namely, the realisation of a certain type of balance.11 The bal-
ance in question in the former case is that between the different powers
of the soul—appetitive, irascible, and rational—through which virtue
is achieved. In discussing the beauty of the soul, we may note, the text
uses the terms jamāl and ḥusn interchangeably.
Yet it is the work known as the Theology of Aristotle, representing a
truncated and heavily edited translation of Plotinus’ Enneads, that devel-
ops this theme in ways that would reverberate across different levels of
Islamic intellectual culture. Distinguishing between the sensible and the
intelligible world, the work locates the highest form of beauty (ḥusn, jamāl,
bahāʾ) in the latter. True beauty should be sought in the interior (bāṭin)
rather than the exterior (ẓāhir, khārij). One example of inner beauty is
given to us by geometrical forms (ṣuwar taʿlīmiyya). But for our purposes,
the most interesting case is the beauty constituted by the forms of human
character. It is the “forms of the soul, such as magnanimity (ḥilm), dignity
(waqār), and the like” that are truly beautiful (ḥasana). “When we find a
person to be magnanimous and dignified, we wonder at his beauty (ḥusn)
from this regard,” even if his physical exterior is repellent (qabīḥ). Upright
men (al-marʾ al-ṣāliḥ) and wise men endowed with intellect and knowl-
edge captivate us and make us long to feast our gaze on them. This long-
ing, the text suggests, is criterial of an aesthetic response: for an object to
be beautiful is for it to arouse the desire to contemplate. And this is an
invitation that both moral virtue and intellectual virtue extend.12
One feature that sets the adapted Theology apart from the original
Enneads, as Peter Adamson has observed, is the strong ethical emphasis
it introduces into various parts of the discussion.13 This is reflected in
its treatment of inner beauty as just outlined. Interestingly, this ethical
emphasis would not be taken up to an equal degree by the wide range
of Muslim intellectuals who proved permeable to the influence of these
philosophical ideas, including al-Fārābī and Avicenna (d. 1037). Both of
these philosophers tie the nature of beauty to the realisation of proper
perfection. In al-Fārābī’s words in The Perfect State, “[b]eauty [jamāl]
and brilliance and splendour mean in the case of every existent that it
12  The good and/as the beautiful in context
is in its most excellent state of existence and that it has attained its ulti-
mate perfection.”14 This is why God, as the most perfect being, is also
the most beautiful. The truest form of beauty, we may notice, is again
located in the domain of the transcendent. Yet neither al-Fārābī nor
Avicenna appears interested in translating this general idea into a state-
ment concerning human ethical perfection. In his “Epistle on Love,”
notably, Avicenna has little to say about either the beauty of the natural
world or the beauty of human character.15
The above survey is not intended to imply that Hellenistic texts were
the most important agent in making the application of the concept of
beauty to the domain of moral character thinkable for intellectuals in
the Islamic world. The connection between ethics and aesthetics seems
to have been already enshrined in the semantic scope of the key Arabic
terms even before the wide dissemination of Greek philosophy in Islamic
culture. The Qurʾan itself provides some interesting testimony in this
regard, as it contains a number of passages where the term “beautiful”
(jamīl) is applied to actions and qualities of character (or to actions as
expressive of qualities). It is used to describe patience (Q 12:18, 12:83,
70:5) as also forgiveness (Q 15:85) and the act of releasing women after
an early divorce (Q 33:49). Translators approaching these passages have
opted for a variety of expressions most of which preserve the aesthetic
element, including “handsome,” “gracious,” “fair,” “beautiful,” “fitting,”
“comely,” and “sweet.”16 Talk of “beautiful patience” implies that there
are different types of patience, some of which are beautiful while others
are not. What makes patience beautiful, we learn from Qurʾanic com-
mentators, is for a person to endure hardship uncomplainingly, without
resentment and without the need to advertise their suffering to others—in
a word, displaying the type of self-command we associate with a noble,
magnanimous (Kant might have said: a sublime) spirit.17
Whatever the precise developmental route—and it is not my inten-
tion to exhaustively plot that here—the association of beauty with
the domain of moral character found its way into many of the major
lexicographical documents put together by scholars of the Arabic
language. The eighteenth-century scholar Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791),
for example, defines jamāl as ḥusn that concerns either physical form
(khalq) or moral character (khuluq) in his celebrated dictionary.18 The
idea also finds expression, albeit in more rudimentary form, in the
dictionary of Qurʾanic usage compiled by a scholar who flourished in
the same century as al-Ghazālī, and who we know formed one of his
main inspirations in matters of ethics, al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī. Beauty
is of two kinds, self-regarding and other-regarding, the former being a
beauty “proper to a person’s soul (nafs), body, or action.”19
4 Moral beauty and the paradigm
of disinterested love

Some of the preceding discussion has been gritty, revolving as it did

around the negotiation of Arabic terms and their meanings. Yet this
cannot be avoided if we wish to gain clarity on how the ethical and the
aesthetic were brought into relation within important sectors of Islamic
culture, and if we wish to build some context for al-Ghazālī’s specific
account of this relation. Well-versed in the main religious and linguis-
tic sciences of his time but also deeply acquainted with the work of the
major philosophers, including al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Miskawayh,
al-Ghazālī stood at the confluence of many of the intellectual streams
outlined above. His extensive corpus—al-Ghazālī was a prolific writer
of intellectual blockbusters in a range of fields, including law, theology
(kalām), and polemics, philosophical and otherwise—is watered by
these streams in different kinds of ways. In the Revival of the Religious
Sciences, and to a lesser extent the Scale of Action, philosophical eth-
ics and psychology partner up with Sufi thought to create the main
framework of al-Ghazālī’s virtue-ethical outlook.1
These are not, I should underline at the outset, the only works within
al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre that we may classify under the heading of “ethics.”
Ethics is also a theme of his theological and legal works, including
his treatise on legal theory The Quintessence of the Principles of Law
and his theological handbook Moderation in Belief. In those works,
al-Ghazālī’s principal interest is in the kind of questions of meta-ethics
mentioned earlier. (Are ethical norms known by religious scripture or
human reason? Are they objective features or products of divine assign-
ment?) His correlative focus, in adjudicating these questions, is on
actions as objects of evaluative assessment (good or bad, obligatory or
prohibited). By contrast, in the Revival of the Religious Sciences and the
Scale of Action, his primary concern is with traits of character.2
It is in the latter set of works, in which al-Ghazālī unfolds his pro-
gramme of spiritual and ethical perfection, that we encounter an
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-4
14  Moral beauty
ongoing concern with the theme of beauty, and a pervasive enmesh-
ment of the ethical and the aesthetic. It can be observed, on a first
level, in al-Ghazālī’s main forays into the definition of character. In
the Revival, he broaches foundational questions of this sort in the book
titled Discipline of the Soul—one of the most philosophical books of the
Revival, and the one where al-Ghazālī warms to the theme of character
in earnest. A character trait, as he defines it, is “a stable structure (or
disposition: hayʾa) of the soul which causes actions to issue with facil-
ity and ease.”3 This structure represents the “inner form” (ṣūra bāṭina)
of the soul. The form of a virtuous character results when the differ-
ent powers of the soul are placed in balance. The inner form a person
possesses is susceptible to a kind of evaluation directly analogous to
the one their outer form invites. “Human beings,” al-Ghazālī explains,
“are composed of a body that can be perceived by sight (baṣar) and a
spirit and soul that can be perceived by insight (baṣīra). Each of these
has a structure and form, whether ugly/bad (qabīḥ) or beautiful/lovely
(jamīl).” A person who is beautiful on the outside is described as having
a “fine build” (ḥasan al-khalq). A person who is beautiful on the inside
is described as having a “fine character” (ḥasan al-khuluq).4
In framing these points, al-Ghazālī cycles freely between the terms
ḥasan and jamīl. To make the following discussion more navigable
without the need to constantly flag the Arabic terms in use, I will tem-
porarily reserve “fine” for ḥasan and “beautiful” for jamīl. We will
need to return to this arrangement for further comment once a few
more chess pieces have been put in place.
With virtue—the object of moral concern—placed in an aes-
thetic framework, it may come as no surprise to find that moral
motivation—the desire and pursuit of virtue—is also located in a
similar framework. One’s aim, al-Ghazālī writes, should be “to adorn
one’s interior and beautify it through virtue” (taḥliyyat bā ṭinihi wa-
tajmīluhu biʾl-faḍīla).5 Our aspiration to become virtuous, on an impor-
tant level, must be an aspiration to become beautiful. As phrased, this
point may appear troubling from two separate directions. The norma-
tive terms in which it is couched, on the one hand, may evoke perplex-
ity. Surely the desire for beauty is so natural it neither needs no, nor
could possibly benefit from, external encouragement, and could hardly
constitute an achievement? One way of removing this perplexity might
be by taking the point as a way of answering the fundamental question
of why be moral (virtuous). “Because it will make you beautiful” (and
this is something we all want).6 Yet that leads us to the second diffi-
culty, as it might be queried whether a desire to be beautiful represents
an appropriate sort of moral motivation. Put most simply, it is too
 Moral beauty 15
egoistic and self-referential to fit the part. More deeply, the desire to be
beautiful seems to be a desire to appear a certain way, rather than to be
a certain kind of person. This is a way of saying that to acknowledge
the aesthetic modality of our perception of others’ character does not
automatically entail that we consider the same modality acceptable
when representing the actual or desired state of our own.7
There are, of course, contexts in which it is perfectly intelligible for
us to treat aesthetic responses as objects of normative encouragement.
Our aesthetic reactions, after all, often stand in need of education; the
experienced art critic, for example, will find things beautiful that the
novice will not. Yet in fact al-Ghazālī does not ultimately suppose that
our response to moral beauty is one of those cases (though there will
be nuances to consider).8 This becomes clear when we turn to another
level of his account, where both aspects we have discussed (the nature
of virtue and moral motivation) find their deeper foundation. Both
of the concerns just outlined also find their answer on this level of
al-Ghazālī’s account.
Like many of his philosophical (and mutatis mutandis, Sufi) predeces-
sors, al-Ghazālī places God at the heart of his reflections on beauty. It
is God who possesses the truest beauty and sublimity; the beauty of all
other beings is both inferior to and derivative from it. God’s beauty, as
among al-Ghazālī’s philosophical predecessors, is grounded in his per-
fection, with all other perfection again standing in a derivative relation
to it.9 The implications of this idea for the ethical life of human beings
emerge on at least two levels: how we understand the nature of virtue
and how we understand its pursuit. On the one hand, God’s character
provides nothing less than the criterion for what constitutes virtue (or
true virtue).10 And on the other, and as a corollary, the life of virtue fun-
damentally is, and should be understood as, a quest to become like God.
This idea has a long philosophical lineage, especially among Platonists
and Neoplatonists. In the Islamic world, it was given scriptural back-
ing in the form of a well-known hadith that urges believers to “assume
the character traits of God” (takhallaqū bi-akhlāq Allāh). The idea is
explored in the greatest concentration in a short work that al-Ghazālī
devotes to an investigation of the names of God, The Most Exalted Aim
in Expounding God’s Beautiful Names. As he makes clear in this work,
it is the aesthetic response produced by God’s attributes—the sense of
awe, wonder, and reverence aroused by their grandeur and splendour—
that provides the impetus for the ethical striving to acquire them for
ourselves. The person who has gained insight into one of the attributes
of God is thereby filled with “longing for that attribute, ardour for that
grandeur and beauty, and a desire to be adorned by that feature.”11
16  Moral beauty
The beauty of virtue, thus, ultimately attaches to its divine exem-
plar. And it is the perception of this beauty that excites our moral
aspiration and motivates us to imitate it. To return to the two concerns
outlined earlier, this means that, while moral pursuit indeed takes its
basis from a desire for beauty, this desire has a different profile from
the one that underpins the suspicion of it as a form of moral motiva-
tion. This desire is not egocentric and possessive, but allocentric and
participatory. It is supported by an understanding that the beauty we
strive for properly belongs to another, and even in a derivative sense
can only be partially instantiated; and the value of instantiating it is
not that we have it, but that we are more connected to another who
does, and our relation to whom matters to us. As with the birdsong
that exercised al-Ghazālī in the Revival, our response to the beauty
of virtue is validated not on its own account but through its connec-
tion to God. At the same time, what we aspire to in desiring God’s
beauty are a set of features that represent true perfections. The indis-
soluble link al-Ghazālī forges between beauty and perfection means
that appearance and being—appearing a certain way versus being a
certain kind of person—can’t quite be cleaved apart.12
In the Exalted Aim, al-Ghazālī presents admiration and desire for
such beauty as responses that come naturally to us. Yet this should
not disguise the cognitive achievements such responses involve.
Most obviously, we can fail to become aware of God’s characteris-
tics, though the implication is that we will naturally experience them
as beautiful when we do.13 On a different level, this model suggests we
can be mistaken about the nature of virtue, and hence we may admire
perfections that are not really perfections (because not included in
God’s character), just as we can be mistaken about the reasons why
we should pursue virtue (because it is an imitation of God’s beauti-
ful character). Against this metaphysical understanding, we are thus
likely to need to revise our ordinary ideas about virtue, and conse-
quently our aesthetic responses.
These considerations seem all the more important given that it is
our natural reaction to human moral beauty that provides us with a
starting point for thinking about the reaction merited by God’s. This
is in fact one of the most significant structural features of that dis-
cussion of beauty that has justly dominated all accounts of the theme
in al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre, namely the discussion that takes place in the
book of the Revival entitled On Love. Unlike the Exalted Aim, where
the focus is on divine beauty, this book places the moral beauty of
human beings at the centre of its concerns, or of what we may call its
distinctive “ladder” of love. It is there that al-Ghazālī develops most
 Moral beauty 17
fully his understanding of the nature and importance of beauty, and
of the relation between the beautiful and the good.
That such a discussion takes place in a book dedicated to the topic
of love is no coincidence. Like the Plato/Socrates/Diotima of the
Symposium and their many intellectual heirs, al-Ghazālī believes that
love is, at least in part, love of beauty, and that it is as beautiful that
God partly commands our passionate love. Yet love, in al-Ghazālī’s
view, is more complex, and requires sorting. A large part of the book
is accordingly spent building a careful taxonomy of the different forms
of love. This taxonomy is prefaced by a more programmatic medita-
tion on the concept of love.
Love, as al-Ghazālī defines it, is inseparably connected to a con-
ception of nature and natural function. The things perceived by living
beings divide into those that agree with their nature (ṭabʿ) and those
that do not. “Everything whose perception produces pleasure and
delight is beloved to the perceiver … what it means for [an object] to
be loved is that one’s nature inclines to it ( fiʾl- ṭabʿ mayl ilayhi).” Thus,
“love signifies the natural inclination toward an object that produces
pleasure.” Yet as living beings we possess a number of different senses
and perceptual powers. Each of these has its own separate nature and
to each corresponds a different inclination and form of pleasure, and
hence love. Our visual sense, thus, takes pleasure in sight and more
specifically in the apprehension of beautiful forms, our sense of hear-
ing in melodies with rhythmic balance, our olfactory sense in pleasant
smells. When our nature is sound (ʿinda al- ṭabʿ al-salīm), there is thus a
definite range of objects in which each of our senses finds satisfaction.14
These physical senses, al-Ghazālī goes on to argue, do not exhaust
our nature. What makes us human is a sixth sense we possess, which is
what people refer to as “reason” or (in a more Sufi idiom) the “heart,”15
and which contrasts to outer sight as inner insight (baṣīra bāṭina). This,
too, has its proper range of objects, and the corresponding pleasure it
derives upon their attainment. That pleasure far exceeds the one derived
through the other senses—at least when our nature is in a sound state.
As with the other senses, al-Ghazālī’s frames this point using strongly
aesthetic terms. “The beauty of those elements perceived through rea-
son surpasses the beauty of the forms available to sight.”16 It is through
this sense, al-Ghazālī will say here and elsewhere in the Revival, that
we perceive God, who forms its most proper object, and the one whose
attainment affords us the greatest possible satisfaction.
The ensuing discussion in On Love can on one level be taken as a way
of answering the following question: What do we love when we love God?
This is what I read as the underlying purpose of al-Ghazālī’s attempt to
18  Moral beauty
sort through the different varieties of love. Love, in al-Ghazālī’s view,
is individuated by its causes and objects. The most important forms of
love are then named as follows:17

1 Love of self (nafs, dhāt)

2 Love of beneficence (iḥsān)
3 Love of an object for its own sake (li-dhātihi)
4 Love caused by a hidden affinity (munāsaba khafiyya)

Some of these categories speak for themselves. Love of self will seem
self-evident. This type of love, al-Ghazālī explains, manifests itself in
our concern to perpetuate our existence, but also to perfect our exist-
ence. Many of the other objects to which we are habitually attached—
our physical integrity and well-being, our material possessions, but
also our children, kinsmen, and friends—are loved precisely under
their description as conducive to preserving or perfecting our exist-
ence.18 Love of beneficence may also seem self-explanatory: we all
love people who act beneficently towards us. This is the description,
al-Ghazālī explains, under which we love teachers and doctors, for
example. Yet we also love people who act beneficently towards others.
In one version of his taxonomy, al-Ghazālī distinguishes these as two
different causes of love, which I will label beneficence 1 (directed to
self) and beneficence 2 (directed to others) for ease of reference. About
type 4, I will have little to say. To type 3, I will return in a moment, as
it is the one that concerns us most.
Even on this synoptic view, al-Ghazālī’s taxonomy may strike us
as creaky. Why, for example, make beneficence 1 a separate category,
instead of filing it under “love of self”?19 Yet putting such issues to the
side, let us instead attend to the general character of this taxonomy.
The taxonomy is meant to be empirical: it intends to represent the
facts of human experience. The different forms of love describe the
different reasons (and with an eye to 4, the causes) on account of which
we actually love. The taxonomy can then be read as accomplishing
two things. First, it provides the basis for claiming that God is the
most appropriate object of love across its entire spectrum of familiar
forms and reasons. If we love our own existence, its perpetuation and
its perfection, God is the being that truly merits our love, as it is he
who secures these goods. If we love benefactors (whether to self or
others), God is the true benefactor, who causally determines, no less,
the beneficence of human agents.20
Yet the taxonomy has a second drift. Because from an evaluative
perspective, these forms are not all equal; some of them are better
 Moral beauty 19
than others. I take it to be evident that for al-Ghazālī, the best sort of
love is intrinsic love.21 A second aim of the taxonomy is thus to stake
the claim that this superior form of love—and hence superior way of
loving God—represents a real human possibility.
So what is the nature of that love, and under what description do
we empirically meet it? It is the kind of love, al-Ghazālī explains,
that we experience when we love something for its own sake or being
(li-dhātihi), “and not for any gain (ḥaẓẓ) we stand to make beyond
it; rather, its being is itself the gain (dhātuhu ʿaynu ḥaẓẓihi).”22 It will
be appealing, based on this remark, to describe this form of love as
“disinterested.” Yet as this statement already shows, that would be
misleading if taken to imply that we gain nothing whatsoever from
the experience. In modern philosophy, the distinction between “inter-
ested” and “disinterested” sometimes comes up in the context of char-
acterising the distinctively moral point of view, where it is tied to a
contrast between egoistic and non-egoistic motivation. In this capac-
ity, it is sometimes leveraged to question whether ancient philosophers
had a concept of morality, though in the reverse direction, the ancient
philosophers’ lack of this distinction (most fundamentally in concep-
tualising the virtuous life as the happy one) has also been leveraged to
criticise the modern conception of morality.23 The distinction between
interested and disinterested viewpoints is also commonly mobilised in
another context, in characterising the nature of aesthetic experience.
The issue is ultimately definitional: it depends on how we define
“interest.” For his part, al-Ghazālī clearly intends to mark a distinc-
tion between the kind of concern that shapes the egoistic standpoint
of category 1 and the kind that shapes the standpoint of the present
category, with the latter represented as the superior of the two. Yet it is
also clear that he believes we have an important stake in the experience
he now turns to describe. The experience of intrinsic love affords us a
powerful satisfaction in which our nature finds profound fulfilment.
Each standpoint can in fact be seen as representing different aspects of
our nature, each of which has its corresponding concept of “interest”
and sphere of satisfaction. And it is precisely aesthetic experience that
al-Ghazālī calls upon to supply his paradigm case of intrinsic love as
we humanly know it.
The human love of beauty (al-jamāl waʾl- ḥusn) is the clearest exam-
ple of “disinterested” (in this qualified sense) or intrinsic love. We love
beautiful forms for their own sake, and not because of some instru-
mental purpose they might conceivably serve. Al-Ghazālī’s first frame
of reference in approaching this point is the way we typically respond
to the beauty of the natural world. It is a mistake to think, he writes,
20  Moral beauty
that “the only reason we love beautiful forms (ṣuwar jamīla) is on
account of some [carnal] appetite we want to satisfy.” We know from
experience that

people love vegetation and flowing water not because they want to
drink the water or eat the vegetation or satisfy some need (ḥaẓẓ),
but only on account of the visual perception itself (ruʾya) … it
is the necessary expression of a sound nature (al- ṭibā ʿ al-salīma
qā ḍiya bi-) to take pleasure in the contemplation of lights, flowers,
or well-formed birds with fine-coloured plumage … indeed, one’s
cares and sorrows are dispelled as one contemplates them, for no
other stake beyond mere contemplation.24

The intrinsic love of beautiful forms is here identified with the pleasure
taken in the act of visual contemplation and contrasted with an instru-
mental type of desire towards these objects that might derive from
our appetitive nature. This aesthetic response is claimed as a familiar
empirical fact about human beings. Love of beauty is something we
are naturally disposed to (al-jamāl maḥbūb biʾl- ṭabʿ).25
From a philosophical perspective, al-Ghazālī’s account will seem
especially interesting in evoking open comparison with modern analyses
of aesthetic experience. Although, as I have suggested, his understand-
ing of its “disinterested” character has to be approached carefully, the
contrast that underpins his account places it in clear conversation with
a prominent philosophical view of this character that is often associated
with Kant. The hallmark of aesthetic judgements, on this view, is that
they do not implicate (presuppose or stimulate) desire for their object.
As Roger Scruton puts it, aesthetic experience involves enjoyment of an
object for its own sake, which means having a “desire to go on hearing,
looking at, or in some other way having experience of X, where there
is no reason for this desire in terms of any other desire or appetite that
the experience of X may fulfil.”26 Al-Ghazālī’s emphasis on the ther-
apeutic or palliative effect of aesthetic experience, and the experience
of nature in particular, forges equally suggestive connections. Among
philosophers, a similar view has been paradigmatically expressed by
Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, the contemplation of nature ena-
bles us to transcend the will-full perspective of individual subjectivity
and provides us with a temporary reprieve from suffering. “This is why
the man tormented by passions, want, or care, is so suddenly revived,
cheered, and comforted by a single, free glance into nature.”27
Yet it is al-Ghazālī’s next move, and the next frame of reference he
introduces to conceptualise the human love of beauty, that forms the
 Moral beauty 21
flagship of his account. And here, his view and that of most modern
philosophers of aesthetics part ways. Contemporary aestheticians,
as mentioned earlier, typically focus on nature and art as the para-
digm objects of aesthetic attention. This focus goes hand in hand with
an emphasis on availability to sensory perception as a criterion for
aesthetic properties. In the view of one prominent exponent, Nick
Zangwill, sensory properties such as colours and sounds are necessary
for aesthetic properties (though they might not be sufficient), so that
“without sensory properties, there would be no aesthetic properties.”
Hence, any application of aesthetic terms to objects not perceived by
the five senses must be metaphorical.28
More recently, this type of view has come in for sharp critique from
other philosophical quarters.29 It is precisely this narrow view that
al-Ghazālī himself brings up in the next stage of his discussion and offers
to interrogate and refine. This is a view he takes to typify how the ordi-
nary man on the street thinks about beauty. Ordinary people tend to
assume that only concrete physical things, typically things we can see
which have shape and colour and size, more typically still human beings,
can be beautiful. This understanding is too narrow on two counts: in
sidelining the forms of beauty registered by other physical senses and
in overlooking the forms of beauty that are not registered by a physical
sense at all. And here, it is the case of moral beauty—of a beauty attach-
ing to human character—that constitutes al-Ghazālī’s central exemplar.
To correct and enlarge the popular conception of the beautiful,
al-Ghazālī begins by appealing to the data of ordinary language using
a progressively wider palette of examples. We speak not only of a
fine-looking person but also of a “fine horse,” a “fine writing hand”
(khaṭṭ ḥasan), and a “fine sound” or voice (ṣawt ḥasan). More impor-
tantly, we also speak of “fine character” (khuluq ḥasan), of a “fine
course of conduct” (sīra ḥasana),30 and of “beautiful character traits”
(akhlāq jamīla), such as temperance, courage, piety, and generosity.31
These beautiful qualities, which constitute the inner form of a per-
son, are not perceived through the senses, but through inner insight
(al-ba ṣīra al-bā ṭina).
Thus, even though ordinary people, when prompted to pronounce
on the topic of beauty, would be likely to give a restrictive account
of its objects, a more inclusive conception is implicit in their own
patterns of linguistic usage. In the Exalted Aim, al-Ghazālī suggests
these two applications—to sensory and to non-sensory objects—
represent different stages of the development of language, identifying
the former as historically prior. “The term ‘beautiful’ was originally
( fiʾl-a ṣl) appointed to signify the outward form perceivable through
22  Moral beauty
sight … and was later transferred to the inward form perceivable
through insight.”32 Yet even if historically posterior, the latter is now
enshrined in ordinary linguistic usage.
In order for this more inclusive conception of the beautiful to
become reflectively available, the average person needs to consult
not only their linguistic habits but also their patterns of emotional
response—specifically how they respond to the kinds of virtuous
qualities outlined above. “The person characterised by them natu-
rally arouses love (ma ḥbūb biʾl- ṭabʿ) in all those who become cog-
nisant of his features.” Witness the love we experience towards
religious exemplars, such as the prophet Muḥammad, his compan-
ions, and the founders of the schools of law. Our love cannot attach
to the physical form of these figures—that agglomerate of “bones,
flesh, and skin”—as this has long turned to dust. It attaches rather
to the inner form constituted by these praiseworthy characteristics.
It is these characteristics that ground a person’s identity, making it
the case that “Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq was Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq,”33 and the
form they constitute endures through time.34
The moral and intellectual virtues such figures possess thus spell out
a non-physical form of beauty that we register when we respond with
love. This emotional response—to complete al-Ghazālī’s thought and
draw certain ideas together—tracks a relation of natural fitness that
looks in two directions. On the one hand, these virtues constitute the
proper perfection of their possessors’ nature as human beings. Like
many of his philosophical predecessors, al-Ghazālī refers the concept
of beauty to the concept of perfection. An entity is beautiful when
“it realises the perfection appropriate to and possible for it.” In the
fuller expression of the Exalted Aim, “when the inner form is perfect,
harmoniously constituted, and unites all perfections appropriate to
it, as it ought and in the manner it ought, it is beautiful in relation to
the insight that perceives it”—suited to the observer in a way that pro-
duces in him a sense of joy and delight.35 Beauty, as this remark flags,
is always relative to a perceiver. And taken as an object of perception,
the perfection of others’ nature also represents the natural fulfilment
of the observers’ special cognitive power as human beings.
One important point this also brings out is that the emotional
response at issue is no brute passion, as a long-standing tradition with
both modern and pre-modern supporters would have it, representing
emotions as blind pushes and pulls fundamentally opposed to reason.
Emotions, here, respond to reasons; our love of these exemplars is
based on a judgement about their moral features and is justified on
that basis. In another book of the Revival, al-Ghazālī brings up the
 Moral beauty 23
relation between cognitions or beliefs (maʿārif ), states (aḥwāl), and
actions (aʿmāl), and explains that actions result from states, and states
from cognitions. “States,” in al-Ghazālī’s adaptation of this Sufi term,
typically refers to emotions.36 This cognitivist view of emotions is
reflected in his present discussion.
Returning to al-Ghazālī’s previous statement about long-dead figures,
his point can be taken as an attempt to address a puzzle that inevitably
comes up once we accept that we can experience emotional reactions
towards beings that lack physical realisation in the natural world. When
we love a person who lacks physical embodiment for their moral char-
acter, what exactly is it we love? This is a puzzle that comes up equally
whether we’re considering deceased historical characters or imaginary
characters, such as those we meet in fictional works, notwithstanding
the differences between the two cases. With regard to the latter, many
philosophers of art would recognise this as the special problem some-
times labelled the “paradox of fiction.”37 One option would be to say that
what we love is simply the mental representation we have of that char-
acter, regardless of whether there is an actually existing entity that this
is a representation of. Al-Ghazālī, as I read his account, does not want
to take that option (in this respect, he appears uninterested in the emo-
tional responses we might have to purely fictional characters). Instead,
he seems to want to insist that the object of our love has actual existence
external to our mind, and that its existence is temporally enduring.
This begs two obvious questions. In what sense do the non-physical
(moral) features in question endure? And just how do we have epistemic
access to the non-physical (moral) form they spell out? Of these ques-
tions, it is the latter that receives the clearest answer in al-Ghazālī’s
discussion, one that locates his account firmly within the literary prac-
tices of his religious community while also forging links to a wider
context. For a religious believer, access to the religious exemplars of
the historical past is provided by narratives, oral and written. We may
think of the hadith reports detailing the Prophet’s conduct and of
the variety of genres recording the biographies of eminent individu-
als in the Islamic world, such as biographical dictionaries and works
belonging to the genre of laudatory (manāqib) literature. The Prophet
in particular was the focus of a specific literary genre, the shamāʾil (lit-
erally “characteristics”), which built on hadith reports to offer a con-
centrated account of the Prophet’s perfections that both reflected and
was designed to evoke attitudes of admiration and love.38 For a coun-
terpart outside the Islamic world, we only need to think of Plutarch’s
Lives. It is such narratives (siyar), al-Ghazālī indicates, that provide
epistemic access to the moral character of historical individuals.
24  Moral beauty
In certain parts of his discussion, al-Ghazālī encourages us to think
that this way of answering the question about epistemic access to
moral features translates into the following answer to the metaphysi-
cal question about their mode of realisation and temporal endurance:
the beauteous form of these individuals exists in these narratives
(al-jamāl mawjūd fiʾl-siyar).39 Yet closer investigation suggests that, for
al-Ghazālī, this explanation is incomplete. Taken alone, this explana-
tion would allow for the possibility that the object of our love should
be a mere mental construct with no mind-independent correlate.
Al-Ghazālī distances himself from this possibility by making a couple
of related links. On one level, he stakes the claim that there is a causal
relation between the virtuous character of these individuals and the
narratives that represent this character. Such “praiseworthy fea-
tures … are the sources of beautiful accounts [of their lives]” (al- ṣifāt
al-maḥmūda…hiya ma ṣādir al-siyar al-jamīla). Yet this relation is not
merely historical. The implication is that, unlike the physical form
which perishes, these features still endure, and that the statements
found in different narratives are true because the object to which they
refer still exists. It is this existing object to which our own emotional
response attaches when we hear or see it described and we react with
love. “The thing loved is the source of the accounts, that is to say, the
praiseworthy character traits and noble virtues.”40
The above is an attempt to reconstruct al-Ghazālī’s understanding
on the basis of evidence that is not always explicit and unambiguous.
Al-Ghazālī’s interest in this context is not in teasing out these metaphys-
ical and epistemological implications. As reconstructed, his view would
seem to presuppose some version of the immaterial survival of the soul,
in which these kinds of features would inhere. It leaves open a number
of puzzles, including how we might understand the endurance of moral
features that, on al-Ghazālī’s view, only make sense relative to the need to
govern the physical body.41 Also less than fully developed is al-Ghazālī’s
understanding of the exact modality through which verbal and literary
representations can evoke an emotional response to moral virtue. This
seems all the more remarkable given the deep conviction reflected in his
discussion concerning the power of narratives to induce such response.

When we wish to arouse love toward any given person, be they

absent or present, living or dead, in a young boy with his natural
inclinations intact, our only option is to go to great lengths in
describing their courage, generosity, learning, and other praise-
worthy characteristics.42 Once he has acquired a belief to that
effect, he can’t resist: he can’t help but love them.43
 Moral beauty 25
This, to reiterate, is how we conceive a sense of love towards the reli-
gious and other historical personalities named earlier (and how we
acquire reasons for our affective response to them). Describe the
pre-Islamic Arab icon Ḥātim al-Ṭāʾī as generous, the early Muslim
military commander Khālid ibn al-Walīd as brave, and “our hearts
are necessarily drawn to them in love” (aḥabbathum al-qulūb ḥubban
ḍarūriyyan). Indeed, al-Ghazālī next widens his scope,

if it is reported that a certain king living in some distant part

is conducting himself with justice and beneficence (al-ʿadl waʾl-
iḥsān) and spreading good everywhere around him, people are
overcome with a sense of love for him. This is the case even though
the people who feel such love have no reason to hope they might
be [personally] touched by his beneficence, given the … great dis-
tance that separates them. Thus, human beings are not capable of
only loving those who benefit them; rather benefactors are loved
for themselves (maḥbūb fī nafsihi), even if their beneficence never
reaches the person who loves them. For all beauty and fineness
( jamāl wa- ḥusn) is an object of love; forms divide into outer and
inner, and “beauty” and “fineness” apply to both.44

Al-Ghazālī’s account of the efficacy of narratives in evoking emotional

response invites a number of questions. Do all kinds of descriptions
of character evoke love, or only a subset with specific features? Does
the description of beautiful character need to satisfy certain aesthetic
criteria—to be beautiful itself? This hands over to questions about
literary aesthetics that were by no means marginal to Islamic culture,
not least given the cultural primacy of the Qurʾan and the multilevel
intellectual preoccupation with its credentials as a literary document
of unparalleled beauty. Such questions had also been enlivened by
Greek philosophical reflection on related topics, where, as Taneli
Kukkonen notes, engagement with Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics
ensured “that a sizeable body of work formed around the question
of what constitutes pleasing, effective, and persuasive speech.”45 Here,
al-Ghazālī does not seem interested in such literary questions.
Bracketing such questions therefore, it is worth making a couple of
observations about this long quotation. One observation may seem
dry and formalistic, but it has a bearing on a later stage of our dis-
cussion so it is worth recording. In this passage, al-Ghazālī clearly
fuses what had appeared as separate items in his earlier taxonomy:
love of beneficence (specifically, disinterested beneficence 2) and love
of (moral) beauty. A second observation has wider reach. It may be
26  Moral beauty
noted that virtually all of the exemplars of beautiful character that
al-Ghazālī picks to illustrate his thesis share one fundamental feature:
distance from the observer, whether in time (the prophet Muḥammad,
his companions, etc.) or space (the king). This, as the above passage
itself suggests, is a deliberate design, as it serves al-Ghazālī’s purpose
of arguing that the response to moral beauty does not stem from any
bearing the relevant qualities might have on our self-interest narrowly
conceived. Whether this is fully convincing is a question I will be
returning to, but for the moment I will note that one result of this
framing is a remarkable neglect of our emotional reactions to and lov-
ing relationships with living people, notably friends.46 This in turn has
another interesting result, which is important for the philosophical
development of al-Ghazālī’s core idea.
Put simply, the effect of the focus on absentee exemplars of virtue
is to enforce a particularly strong separation between the inner and
the outer, or the intelligible and the sensory, and to ensure that moral
beauty is conceptualised in the greatest possible abstraction from
any physical manifestations the latter might have. That, however,
overlooks the significance of such manifestations in the way char-
acter enters our everyday experience. While the character of spa-
tiotemporally distant exemplars—such as Socrates, the Buddha, or
Jesus Christ, to name some celebrated instances outside the Islamic
tradition—typically becomes available to us through verbal narra-
tives and representations, living human beings reveal their character
to us in a more complex set of ways. This will often involve extended
observation of an individual’s patterns of acting and choosing, and
of their expressed thoughts and feelings. It will be several occasions
of seeing a person redden with anger at a perceived slight, or see-
ing a person’s eyes grow moist while someone unburdens their griefs
to them, that eventually lead us to describe the one as “irascible”
or “proud” and the other as “tender-hearted” or “compassionate.”
While a single expressed thought, expressed feeling, or observed
action will rarely suffice as a basis for attributing a certain type
of character to a person, it will form part of this basis; and once a
judgement of character has been formed, a single action, thought, or
feeling will often be perceived as its immediate manifestation. This
is partly illustrated by the incident from Jane Eyre referenced earlier,
where the heroine, against a background of extended interactions
with her good friend Helen Burns that have given her an understand-
ing of her overall character, finds herself gazing on her wonderingly
one evening and remarking on the “beauty … of meaning, of move-
ment, of radiance” she perceives in her face. This type of expressive
 Moral beauty 27
behaviour, crucially, provides character with its physical anchor and
embodiment. The simple insight that, in living human beings, char-
acter can in an important sense be seen is captured in Wittgenstein’s
lapidary formulation that “the human body is the best picture of the
human soul.”47 The related insight that our character can achieve a
lasting expression in our body—that the picture of the soul may be
permanently painted—finds its most spectacular fictional representa-
tion in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.48
The manifestation of character in the human body seems to me a
point that has a potentially important role to play in supporting the
philosophical plausibility of the concept of moral beauty. While it has
not been a central focus in all recent defences of the idea, it has been
a theme in at least some. Ian Kidd, for example, builds his account of
moral beauty on the fact that the inner virtues of exemplary individu-
als achieve expression in “outer bodily comportment available for per-
ceptual experience,” which allows us to “see tranquillity in their face,
hear calm in their voice and sense equanimity in their demeanour” and
to experience these expressions as beautiful. Talk of “inner” virtues
and “inner” beauty, thus, “should not be taken to imply any radical
separation of the inner and outer aspects of a person.”49
Now what is interesting is that al-Ghazālī himself elsewhere gives
ample recognition to this point and to the relations of mutual reciproc-
ity that hold between body and soul more generally. In one place of the
Scale where he is discussing the concept of outer or bodily beauty,
he makes the surprising statement that such “beauty usually reveals
the virtuousness of the soul.”50 The claim that virtue and physical
beauty are inseparably linked had important precedents in the classi-
cal world. It was the centrality of this idea that Nietzsche had in mind
in the Twilight of the Idols when he stated that “ugliness … is among
the Greeks almost a refutation.”51 The idea also found its way into the
Islamic tradition through a variety of channels, including Greek wis-
dom literature. In one development of this idea, it is a question of the
concomitance of two independent qualities—the physically beautiful
person is also typically virtuous—explicable through a common cause:
a balanced humoural mixture.52 But al-Ghazālī’s continuation in fact
shows that what he has in mind is the rather more basic insight picked
out above. Thus, “the eyes and the face are a mirror that reflects one’s
interior, which is why anger and evilness make themselves manifest in
them.” “When the light of the soul becomes radiant, it communicates
itself to the body”—precisely as Helen Burns’ had done in Charlotte
Brontë’s account.53 The body expresses the soul. The beauty of the soul
thus typically has a sensory correlate; in a very real sense, this beauty
28  Moral beauty
can be seen. On al-Ghazālī’s terms, it would seem more accurate to
say that what we find beautiful, confronted with living human beings,
is the soul as available to a combination of sight and insight.
There are thus interesting insights about the relationship between
inner and outer beauty to be mined from other parts of al-Ghazālī’s
oeuvre—insights that, fleshed out further, might help provide a differ-
ent kind of philosophical credence to the concept of moral beauty. But
these insights are not integrated into his most concentrated discussion
of the theme, in the book On Love, which works with a more rigid
distinction between outer and inner. This evidently reflects the pur-
poses of this discussion. Its ultimate concern is not the beauty of flesh-
and-blood human beings—in whom body and soul stand in intimate
relations—but the beauty of God, and its focus is not the relationship
between humans but the human relationship to God. The discussion
we have followed provides the basis for the claim that critically inter-
ests al-Ghazālī: In God, the virtues that we love in human beings are
united and realised in their truest and most perfect form. God is thus
the most deserving object of a love responsive to beauty.
One way of understanding al-Ghazālī’s discussion, as I suggested
earlier, is as an attempt to establish that this superior form of love is
possible for human beings. This accounts for the empirical empha-
sis of his discussion, which presents itself as a series of claims about
how human beings actually respond to certain kinds of objects and
considerations. How convincing are these claims? In particular, is it
the case that ordinary people respond to moral excellence in the ways
al-Ghazālī describes?
Both philosophers and psychologists have had much to say about
the ways in which people respond to the perceived moral excellence of
others. Ranging from the Platonic views we already touched upon, to
Aristotle’s remarks about “emulation” (zelos) as the emotion felt para-
digmatically by the young that fuels their aspiration to acquire goods
they recognise in others, to Jonathan Haidt and fellow-psychologists’
focus on “elevation” as a response to moral excellence or Kristján
Kristjánsson’s “moral awe,” there has been no shortage of commen-
tary on the nature of these responses. More recently, Panos Paris has
mined a number of empirical studies to argue for the more specific
claim (closer to al-Ghazālī’s) that moral virtues are experienced by
people as “beautiful” and moral vices as “ugly.”54
None of these studies incorporate the empirical claim that these
types of emotional response are universal and exceptionless. Is this an
assumption that al-Ghazālī makes, and that he requires for his argu-
ment? Do all people respond to moral beauty in the way he describes,
 Moral beauty 29
and is it problematic if they don’t? The answer to this question in fact
points to an important qualification in the way we understand the char-
acter of his claim. In several of the statements quoted earlier, al-Ghazālī
described this emotional response as a “natural” one. Taking pleas-
ure in natural beauty is “the necessary expression of a sound nature”
(al-ṭibā ʿ al-salīma qāḍiya bi-); a “young boy with his natural inclinations
intact” will respond with love to descriptions of beautiful character.
Yet these expressions clearly signal the possibility that such a response
may fail. To say that it is a natural response is not to say that it is actu-
ally universal. Our true nature can in fact be prevented from achieving
expression; it can be corrupted. As among ancient philosophers, and
among other figures in the Islamic milieu theorising the key concept of
the human constitution ( fiṭra), al-Ghazālī’s concept of human nature is
normative.55 Healthy human beings will respond this way. This does not
make empirical facts irrelevant: if such a response were the exception
rather than the rule, it would create a challenge for a normative view.
The fact that al-Ghazālī does not confront that challenge in the Revival
can be taken as a sign that he safely assumed most of his readers would
recognise his account of themselves as true.56
This point links to another question. Because one way we might
understand what it means for our response to moral excellence to fail
is that we might fail to respond to what is truly excellent, and instead
admire qualities that are not genuine perfections or admire individuals
who are not truly worthy of admiration. Admiring the wrong qualities
or the wrong people in fact seems like a more realistic danger than (the
almost inhuman) possibility that we might admire nobody or nothing at
all. As mentioned earlier, al-Ghazālī holds at least one theoretical view
that would open up the possibility that our pre-reflective judgements of
(and emotional responses to) character might be mistaken and require
revision. God is the measure of virtue; hence a character trait is only a
virtue if it is a virtue in God. In other contexts, he also articulates an
instrumental view of moral virtue in particular, which implies that a
character trait is a moral virtue if it is instrumental to the realisation of
our intellectual potentialities.57 To the extent that these high-level views
affect the qualities we identify as true virtues, and to the extent that
ordinary people can be ignorant of these views, it would seem that our
natural judgements of character are not infallible and would need some
kind of education. In this context, all that can be said is that al-Ghazālī
does not flag this need. We may speculate that this reflects a judgement
that his argument simply did not require it.
5 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?

My aim in the preceding discussion has not been to provide an exhaus-

tive analysis of al-Ghazālī’s account, and there are several aspects—
including ones integral to his culminating theological claim—that
I will have to leave untouched. Al-Ghazālī’s transition from our
response to the moral beauty of human beings to the moral beauty of
God does not, to briefly name one issue, seem to me entirely seamless,
and to preserve as much of the phenomena as it would need to effort-
lessly succeed.1
These are questions for another day. In the above, I have tried to
work through the main contours of al-Ghazālī’s account of the rela-
tion between the good and the beautiful and to probe some of its
philosophical interest, in the hope of making it available to those
united by a belief that the notion of moral beauty merits recovery
and re-articulation. Al-Ghazālī’s bid to expand the narrow concept
of beauty as applying solely to sensory objects, and his suggestion that
we view moral character as an intelligible form susceptible of aesthetic
response, will resonate strongly with some of the most recent philo-
sophical initiatives in that direction.2
From a historical perspective, it is of course al-Ghazālī’s links to
earlier expressions of similar ideas that will stand out. The distinc-
tion between sensory and intelligible beauty, as already mentioned,
was a staple of Neoplatonic thinking, as was the understanding of
natural and artistic beauty as a manifestation of divine beauty. This
distinction found direct expression in the adapted Arabic translation
of Plotinus’ Enneads (the Theology of Aristotle). There, too, we meet
the idea of moral character as a key exemplar of intelligible beauty.
The emphasis on moral beauty also registers in Galen’s Peri Ethon,
joined, significantly, to an open affirmation of the love that human
beings naturally experience towards it, which may lead them to prefer
the fine even where it conflicts with their immediate advantage.3 The
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-5
 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 31
close conjunction of the good and the beautiful attested in these and
other philosophical texts also finds expression in the more popular
genre of Greek wisdom literature, which left a wide intellectual trace
in Islamic culture.4 From such sources, these ideas found their way
into prominent philosophical works written in Arabic, including those
by al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.
The precise balance of influences at work in al-Ghazālī’s articula-
tion of his ideas has been debated. Certain commentators have argued
that the idea of God’s beauty in particular was fundamentally alien
to Semitic culture and could only be regarded as a graft from the
Hellenistic philosophical tradition.5 Yet the connection between the
good and the beautiful, as we have seen, was inscribed in the very
data of the Arabic language, into which such intellectual grafts were
received. This is a point highlighted by Franz Rosenthal when com-
menting on the “responsive chord” that the equation of beauty with the
ethical and spiritual good in Greek wisdom literature struck in Semitic
monotheism.6 This same connection, as we also saw earlier, is reflected
in a number of important linguistic documents that represent both
standards of linguistic usage (notably the Qurʾan) and also systematic
attempts to describe the principles of that usage, such as the various
types of dictionaries compiled by Arab lexicographers. The latter
type of source, to be sure, is not itself immune to questions about the
influence of Hellenistic philosophical ideas. In his lexicon of Qurʾanic
usage, for example, al-Rāghib—an important source for al-Ghazālī—
ascribes beauty to the soul and also distinguishes between a form of
the “fine” (ḥasan) that is accessible by sight (ba ṣar) and a form that is
accessible by insight (ba ṣīra).7 Yet al-Rāghib is known to have been
receptive to philosophical influence and is commonly described as the
first major intellectual who tried to wed philosophical ideas about eth-
ics into a scriptural framework.8
There are thus various complexities involved in trying to disentan-
gle the genealogy of the ideas we have been considering in al-Ghazālī’s
work. Here, my aim is not to have the final word on such issues, a task
I leave to more competent scholars. Having worked through the main
outline of al-Ghazālī’s account of moral beauty in the Revival—with a
few satellite texts roped in as needed—I want to raise a question about
its place within al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre as a whole. This question, as we
shall see, will invite us to give closer attention to certain aspects of this
account and its way of relating the beautiful and the good.
Al-Ghazālī, as mentioned earlier, was the author of a large number
of works belonging to different kinds of genres. The more specific sub-
set of his output that we would be happy to slide under the heading
32  A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
of “ethics” is itself cut from different types of cloth. While we might
hesitate to describe al-Ghazālī’s works of theology and legal theory—
notably Moderation in Belief and the Quintessence of the Principles of
Law—as works of ethics taken as a whole,9 they treat topics that rep-
resent recognisable ethical concerns. This includes above all the clus-
ter of questions commonly treated under the rubric of “(what makes/
makes us judge) right and wrong” (al- ḥusn waʾl-qubḥ/al-taḥsīn waʾl-
taqbī ḥ) or “the qualifications of actions” (aḥkām al-af ʿāl), where char-
acteristic meta-ethical questions were raised about the ontology and
epistemology of value.
There, al-Ghazālī had defended an Ashʿarite view of these issues, which
made scripture foundational on two interrelated levels: ethical norms
depend ontologically on scripture, and human beings depend epistemi-
cally on scripture to access these norms. “Good (ḥasan),” on this view, is
“whatever the religious Law declared to be good by assigning praise to its
agent.”10 While al-Ghazālī recognised that “good” and “bad” were not
terms of art introduced by scripture and that they have led and continue
to lead an ordinary life in the way people think and talk outside scripture,
he took this naturalistic usage to be irrelevant from a normative point
of view. In its ordinary usage, “good” is whatever agrees with a person’s
purposes; and what’s good in my view will be bad in yours if our purposes
conflict. Variable, relative, and subjective, this sense of “good” and “bad”
has no normative importance. It certainly does not pick out objective
moral qualities of actions, as Muʿtazilite theologians had argued, and it
just as certainly does not reflect the moral pronouncements of pure rea-
son, as again the Muʿtazilites had claimed. Behind this usage of “good”
are subjective and wayward human wants.
There was an important nuance in this view. Al-Ghazālī recognised
that it is our desire for our personal well-being and our fear of coming
to harm that gives the religious Law its psychological purchase and
power to obligate. We all want what’s good for us. Call this an eval-
uative judgement if you wish—we all judge our welfare to be good—
so long as we’re clear that it stems from a natural inclination rather
than from a pure exercise of rationality. “We do not deny,” al-Ghazālī
writes in Moderation, that human beings are “incited by their natu-
ral disposition (ṭabʿuhu) to protect themselves from harm … there is
nothing objectionable in applying the term ‘obligation’ to this incite-
ment.”11 In its basic sense, an act is “obligatory” if failure to perform
it would lead to harm. When the Law confronts us with its commands
and prohibitions, it engages this fundamental natural inclination by
informing us that certain actions carry have beneficial consequences
while certain others will be followed by harm.12
 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 33
This natural mode of evaluation, it will be noted, is egoistic: what
is good and bad is what is good and bad for me. The emphasis on
egoistic motivation was a signature of al-Ghazālī’s and his Ashʿarite
predecessors’ theology. In the words of the Quintessence, “every per-
son is formed by nature to love himself.”13 This emphasis partly came
as a response to Muʿtazilite efforts to establish that human beings are
motivated by moral considerations and are capable of acting disinter-
estedly. Ordinary people (so the Muʿtazilites) are known to act in ways
that cannot be simply explained by self-interest: they rush to intervene
when they see the blind about to come to harm, they help guide those
who have lost their way, they cling faithfully to their oaths even at the
cost of their lives. They do these kinds of things even when they have
no expectation of praise (nobody is looking) and no expectation of a
heavenly reward (they believe in no God). The only conceivable rea-
son, hence, is their knowledge that such acts are morally right.
I have set this out at some length because it is essential for explain-
ing why al-Ghazālī’s account of moral beauty in the Revival should
strike us as deeply puzzling. A person studying al-Ghazālī’s treat-
ment of ethics in his theological and legal works, and then turning to
consider the account of moral beauty in the works we have surveyed,
could be forgiven for supposing these works were written by entirely
different individuals. In the former set, al-Ghazālī denies that reason
gives access to ethical value. Any extra-scriptural evaluative judge-
ments we make are grounded in our nature conceived in appetitive
terms. “Nature” (ṭabʿ) is a concept that also features centrally in the
discussion of the Revival. Yet there, it is explicitly framed in rational
terms. It is our rational nature that we manifest in responding to moral
beauty: we perceive it through “inner insight,” a cognitive power that
al-Ghazālī is happy to identify with reason.14 “The beauty of those
elements perceived through reason (al-maʿānī al-mudraka biʾl-ʿaql),”
we heard him say before introducing moral beauty, “surpasses the
beauty of the forms available to sight.” Unlike the naturalistic evalu-
ations considered in al-Ghazālī’s theological and legal works (good is
whatever agrees with my purposes), this reaction to the good/beautiful
does not vary among individuals, though it may occasionally fail
where nature has been perverted from its course: people typically if
not unfailingly respond with love to the perceived excellence of others’
character. This reaction is also not subjective: although, as noted ear-
lier, al-Ghazālī’s overall account implies that it might require a certain
degree of education, the emphasis in the Revival is that it responds to
what is truly beautiful and a genuine perfection in itself. Most aston-
ishing of all, human beings love the good/beautiful for its own sake,
34  A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
and not for any narrow egoistic purposes it may serve. We love the
beautiful “not for any gain (ḥaẓẓ) we stand to make beyond it; rather,
its being is itself the gain.” This was the point illustrated, among other
things, by al-Ghazālī’s example of the king living in a far-flung corner
of the earth who is bruited to be a paragon of justice and beneficence.
“[P]eople are overcome with a sense of love for him,” even though they
“have no reason to hope they might be [personally] touched by his
beneficence, given the … great distance that separates them.”
What makes this last example particularly startling is just how uncan-
nily it echoes the examples that Muʿtazilite theologians appealed to in
building their own case for moral rationalism. The basic architecture
is identical. Conjure a situation where human beings exhibit morally
interesting behaviour (Muʿtazilites: a person sees a blind man in danger
and leaps to help; al-Ghazālī: a person hears about a just and beneficent
man and responds with love). Construct situation so as to artificially
bracket personal gain (Muʿtazilites: the good deed takes place in a
remote location that precludes praise; al-Ghazālī: the good man is based
in a remote location that precludes benefit). In his theological and legal
works, al-Ghazālī had ripped these kinds of arguments to shreds using
a variety of strategies. One of these involved querying whether personal
gain could ever be isolated as effectively as the Muʿtazilites suggested.
We have been habituated from a young age to associate certain kinds of
actions with the pleasant experience of praise; this hardwiring will not be
undone by the contingent absence of an actual observer.15
It is by no means difficult to imagine how this last weapon could
be mobilised against al-Ghazālī’s own example. Other responses sug-
gest themselves with equal facility. The moral exemplars he focuses
on, for instance—prophets and other religious personalities—would
be naturally viewed by the average believer as enhancing or as having
enhanced their personal good.16 As for the case of the distant king, one
might simply redeploy a point al-Ghazālī himself makes in an earlier
book of the Revival, On the Condemnation of Status and Dissimulation,
in the context of defending his claim that human beings seek status
and honour ( jāh) because this gives them power over others and makes
others serve their advantage. To the objection that people are known
to thirst for fame even in faraway lands where there is no realistic pros-
pect of deriving advantage, al-Ghazālī essentially responds: nothing
seems unrealistic to our anxious self-concern. In other words, it may
be an irrational hope, but a hope of advantage is still involved.17
In his legal and theological works, of course, al-Ghazālī’s focus was
on actions as evaluative objects. In the Revival and affiliated works,
by contrast, his focus is on character and the virtues. This is reflected
 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 35
in the cases constructed above: whereas the Muʿtazilites focus on an
action (an instance of helping behaviour), al-Ghazālī focuses on the
emotional response to a state of character (justice and beneficence). Yet
what is the significance of this distinction, and what help could it pro-
vide towards resolving the puzzle? It is true that the relation between
the action-focused ethical viewpoint of al-Ghazālī’s theological and
legal works and the virtue-centred viewpoint of the Revival and affil-
iated works requires clarification. In one of the books of the Revival,
On Patience and Gratitude, al-Ghazālī offers us a limpid account of the
relationship between action and character in which he assigns evalua-
tive primacy unequivocally to the latter.18 This programmatic view is
reflected in the discussion of beauty in the book On Love, where at one
point al-Ghazālī remarks that while the real object of our love is the
inner state of character, it is of course through its external effects that
this inner state becomes knowable to us—and that is to say, through
the actions that express it. We love people like the prophet Muḥammad,
his companions, or the founders of the schools of law

on account of the fineness (ḥusn) of what they manifest to us, yet

not on account of the fineness of their [outer] form, nor on account
of the fineness of their actions. Rather, the fineness of their actions
reveals the fineness of the attributes that are the source of the
actions.19

Virtue is expressed in action; and while we indeed experience virtu-

ous action as fine, our ultimate object of love is the virtuous character
it reveals. Taken both as a psychological and an ethical claim, this is a
view that unites al-Ghazālī to many philosophical theorists of the virtues,
ancient and modern. Hume puts the point relevantly in his Treatise:

[W]hen we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that

produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications
of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external per-
formance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral
quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention
on actions, as on external signs.20

Now this account of the relationship between the value of action and
character as presented in the Revival is not the same as an explanation
of the relationship between the viewpoints of the two sets of works,
action-focused and virtue-focused. Yet if we take our bearings from
this account, it will be hard to see how the differential focus of each
36  A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
set could explain the overall differences in their viewpoints on ethical
value, and why positions that al-Ghazālī adopted vis-à-vis one evalua-
tive object (action) should cease to apply vis-à-vis another (virtue). As
the last quotation suggests, action may not be the ultimate resting place
of our judgement “fine,” but our judgement rests on it nevertheless; and
although its value may be relative, it crucially presupposes a judgement
about what has non-derivative intrinsic value.21 This is a view to which it
is difficult to imagine the al-Ghazālī of the Moderation assenting.
Coming from the Revival, it is in fact easy to envisage how many
of the standard Muʿtazilite examples of morally interesting behaviour
might in principle be re-described using virtue terms. Keeping an
oath at pain of death: an instance of fidelity and courage. Saving the
drowning and helping the blind: an instance of kindness and benevo-
lence. This is a redescription that the al-Ghazālī of the Revival would
wholeheartedly approve of. Yet what is interesting is that the possi-
bility of such a move is signalled by the Quintessence itself, for all its
monocular focus on action as an object of evaluation. Reporting on
the Muʿtazilites, he states their claim that all intelligent beings judge
it good to “show fortitude before the sword” (al- ṣabr ʿalaʾl-sayf ) rather
than betray one’s faith; nobody would deny that the noble traits of
character (makārim al-akhlāq) are fine things.22
These and other considerations make it impossible to keep the
accounts of the two sets of works apart and to prevent them from enter-
ing into relations; and once brought together, they would appear to
be in open conflict. What makes al-Ghazālī’s position in the Revival
doubly remarkable, viewed against the history of theological debates
about ethics, is the following observation. In these debates, the aesthetic
application of the term “fine” or “good” (ḥasan) had been weaponised
by Ashʿarites against the Muʿtazilite position. Al-Ghazālī himself pro-
vides an exemplary specimen of this pattern of argument in both the
Moderation and the Quintessence. Judgements of “moral” approval
regarding actions are not objective, reason-based, and universal—they
are as relative, temperament-based, and idiosyncratic as judgements of
“aesthetic” approval. One person finds x beautiful, another does not.
Wasn’t that exactly what al-Ghazālī said about our moral responses?
One person finds x good, another does not. The following remark from
the Quintessence brings the argument into full view:

the application of the term “good” (ḥasan) and “bad” to actions

… resembles its application to [physical] forms. If a person’s
nature (ṭab ʿ ) is attracted to the form or sound of a certain indi-
vidual he declares them “fine” (ḥasan), whereas if his nature is
 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 37
repelled by an individual he declares them “ugly”. Many people
are experienced as repulsive by one nature and as attractive by
another, so they will be “fine-looking” as far as the one is con-
cerned and “ugly” for the other.23

In the Revival, the appeal to “nature” serves to make a claim about the
universality of aesthetic reactions. “Nature” means “human nature.”
Here, by contrast, it refers to individual nature, to what is peculiar to
each person rather than shared by all. Aesthetic reactions are taken
to reflect this peculiar nature and to vary accordingly. Nothing in
this discussion or the discussion of the Moderation allows the reader
to entertain the hypothesis that there might be a form of aesthetic
response that is universal and that responds to a moral kind of beauty.
The two views of aesthetic experience are not, after all, mutually
exclusive; it is possible to hold that certain responses are purely indi-
vidual while others are universal. In al-Ghazālī’s own time, this view
was clearly enunciated by a philosopher with whose oeuvre al-Ghazālī
had more than a passing acquaintance, Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh (d. 1030).
In a compendium of questions and answers exchanged with the litter-
ateur Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023), Miskawayh fields a question
about what causes us to judge certain kinds of forms beautiful or fine
(istiḥsān al-ṣūra al-ḥasana). He replies by making a distinction between
a “universal and essential” (dhātī kullī) response, which we experience
towards forms that nature has been most successful in imprinting on
matter and that thus correspond most faithfully to the transcendent
ideal found in the soul, and a “particular and accidental” (ʿaraḍī juzʾī)
response that is relative to the (imbalanced) humoural mixture of given
individuals. In the latter case, “what one person finds pleasant the other
finds repugnant, and vice versa.”24 If al-Ghazālī is aware of this type of
possibility, he gives no sign of it, and makes no use of it that would allow
us to unify his positions.
In the above, I have helped myself to the labels “moral” and “aesthetic”
in distinguishing between the different applications of the term ḥasan.
This reflects the kind of conceptual distinctions we ourselves find it nat-
ural to make on both a theoretical and ordinary-language level. Thus,
although I did my best to stick to my principled translation of ḥasan as
“fine” in the above, this translation comes under strain in kalām texts,
and in many regards, it seems more natural to translate “good” or “right”
in one case and “beautiful” in the other. Yet the terms “moral” and
“aesthetic” have no exact counterpart in the parlance of the texts and
thinkers we are considering. This raises an important question about the
relationship between these two meanings of ḥusn which is of immediate
38  A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
relevance for the point under discussion. In what sense are they distinct,
from the perspective of these thinkers, in the absence of a definite termi-
nological demarcation? Does this assumption reflect our own theoreti-
cal and linguistic prejudices rather than real features of the intellectual
schemes of these Muslim thinkers? As we saw earlier, this is a question
that has a counterpart in the case of the Greek term kalon. One argu-
ment we reviewed (Irwin’s) suggested that Aristotle, for his part, clearly
distinguished between two different senses of the word, “morally right”
and “beautiful,” recognising these as two distinct properties. What about
these philosophical speakers of Arabic?
Now it is important to keep in mind that the theological works writ-
ten by Ashʿarites, Muʿtazilites, and others were polemical in nature,
and the positions expressed were always functional to some argu-
mentative end. The argumentative ends of Ashʿarite theologians, as
the above makes clear, were best served by refusing to make a strong
distinction between different semantic dimensions of the terms ḥasan
and qabī ḥ.25 Things were otherwise for the Muʿtazilites, who, for obvi-
ous reasons, were deeply invested in developing that distinction and
putting clear blue water between (what we may call) the terms’ moral
and aesthetic applications. This reflects the important fact that the
Muʿtazilites accepted the Ashʿarite understanding of aesthetic experi-
ence as relative, idiosyncratic, temperament-based.
In his magnum opus, The Sufficiency in God’s Unity and Justice, the
Baṣran Muʿtazilite thinker ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1025) makes the point by
distinguishing between the different objects to which the term qabī ḥ
may be applied—actions on the one hand and physical forms on the
other—and between the basis on which it is applied in each case. The
application of the term to actions is based on cognitive judgements of
desert shared by all people. When an action is called “bad” (qabī ḥ),
this means that a person who freely chooses it deserves blame for per-
forming it unless mitigating circumstances are present. Thus, “every
person endowed with reason (ʿāqil) knows that someone who commits
injustice deserves blame on that account, unless a preventative factor
arises.” The application of the term to physical forms is based on con-
tingent emotional reactions of repugnance or attraction which vary
from person to person and even from time to time. Thus, “a [physi-
cal] form is called ‘ugly’ (qabī ḥ) insofar as one finds it repugnant to
look at it.”26 Especially important is the specific suggestion that ʿAbd
al-Jabbār offers about how to understand the relationship between
these meanings. He identifies two possible positions: that both mean-
ings are proper or primary (ḥaqīqa), and that one is proper and the
other figurative or metaphorical (majāz). His own stated preference
 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics? 39
lies with the latter view: it is the meaning that is sound from the per-
spective of reason (ya ṣiḥḥu ʿaqlan) that is proper and the term is applied
to physical objects by way of resemblance or analogy (tashabbuh).27
ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s definition of the term in its moral sense, of course,
reflects the basic commitments of the Muʿtazilites. And taken as an
account of ordinary linguistic usage, it was contested by Ashʿarite
thinkers (recall al-Ghazālī’s account of good and bad as whatever
agrees with the speaker’s purposes). It is not my concern here to adju-
dicate between these competing accounts, though at a minimum, we
might agree that taking “conformity with a rational perspective” as
a criterion is probably not the best methodological foundation for a
faithful descriptive account of actual linguistic usage. The important
point to notice, however, is that Muʿtazilite thinkers had thus made a
distinction between different semantic dimensions of the ḥasan-qabī ḥ
pair, “moral” and “aesthetic,” albeit avant la lettre. As an Ashʿarite
polemicist, al-Ghazālī would likely have been familiar with this way of
articulating the distinction. This is what makes it so striking that in his
discussion in the Revival, he should make no allusion to the issue and
give no evidence of recognising that the space for such a distinction
might fundamentally exist, let alone provide a principled account of
it to vie with the Muʿtazilites’. Doing so, crucially, would have meant
forging direct links between the type of discussion taking place in
works of dialectical theology and the type of discussion undertaken in
the Revival and affiliated works.
Al-Ghazālī comes close to offering a principled view of this type of
semantic relation in connection with the concept of beauty ( jamāl), as
we saw earlier. Referring to its two applications in the Exalted Aim—
to outward and inward form—he identifies the latter as a historically
posterior semantic expansion. Yet among other things, it is signifi-
cant that the focus of these comments is the term jamāl. This term, as
mentioned earlier, featured strongly in texts influenced by philosoph-
ical ideas, but it was not the term that organised theological debates
about ethics. The key term in these debates was ḥusn. In the Revival,
al-Ghazālī treats the terms ḥusn and jamāl as interchangeable, often
juxtaposing them in the same breath, and he says nothing that would
call to mind the special life the former concept had led in theological
debates. Above all, he does not engage with the semantic distinctions
that certain parties to this debate had made between the ethical and
aesthetic applications of this concept. This is also a way of saying that
he marks no distinction comparable to Aristotle’s, and ultimately
provides no explicit account of the relation between the good and the
beautiful on our terms.
40  A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
The effect of this, combined with everything mentioned above, is
to make one wonder whether al-Ghazālī was going out of his way to
discourage the reader from considering the links between the two
contexts represented by his legal/theological and philosophical/Sufi
ethical works. And even if we don’t go so far as to attribute to him a
deliberate intention to thwart certain natural comparisons, the prob-
lem is one and the same: the viewpoints expressed by al-Ghazālī in
these two separate contexts appear to be in fundamental conflict.
6 Resolving the conflict
An interpretive toolbox

What, then, to make of this problem?

First, it must be observed that this problem forms part of a broader
pattern of dissonances between the emphases and assumptions gov-
erning al-Ghazālī’s two sets of works. The ethical focus of each set—
action as the primary object of ethical assessment in one, virtue in
the other—is one such dissonance, already mentioned. The present
case can be seen as an instance of a larger dissonance between the
epistemological assumptions underpinning each set and the different
ways they represent the functions and limitations of rational reflec-
tion.1 Here, an acknowledgement of the availability of value (specif-
ically the value of certain kinds of character) to the untutored mind
is coupled with an apparently objectivist understanding of that value.
The aspects of human character we naturally experience as beautiful
are genuine perfections, truly constitutive of (for intellectual virtues)
or instrumental to (for moral virtues) the human good.
Some of these emphases channel ideas that had found expression in
Hellenistic philosophical texts, whose influence is especially palpable in
al-Ghazālī’s virtue-centred writings. Seen from this perspective, the pres-
ent problem would appear to be simply the newest case in a very old file:
al-Ghazālī’s elusive intellectual relationship to the ideas of the philoso-
phers against whom he famously took up the cudgels in the Precipitance
of the Philosophers. This question has received considerable attention in
recent scholarship from different angles, such as al-Ghazālī’s views on
prophecy, causality, or the soul. Yet the general problem of how to recon-
cile the apparently conflicting messages of al-Ghazālī’s works was posed
far earlier, and was recognised already barely a generation or two after
his death by a number of prominent Muslim intellectuals, including Ibn
Ṭufayl (d. 1185) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198).
What approaches have commentators ancient and modern adopted
in the face of this general problem, and how can they help resolve the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-6
42  Resolving the conflict
present one? Here, I will focus on three strategies: chronology, doc-
trine of discourse, and supercharged hermeneutics.

Chronology
The first strategy is the simplest: it takes the appearance of conflict
at face value and postulates that it is the result of intellectual change.
This strategy has the virtue of recognising that even the greatest
thinkers may change their minds on important issues over their life-
time. This was the solution adopted by Montgomery Watt, for exam-
ple, when faced with the most philosophical of al-Ghazālī’s treatises
on ethics, The Scale of Action, which he found to be incompatible
with the critical view of philosophical ethics he took to be expressed
in al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, the Deliverer from Error. His opinion
was that al-Ghazālī likely rejected much of what he had written in
that treatise as his enthusiasm for philosophy deflated. The momen-
tous events depicted in the Deliverer, where al-Ghazālī chronicles the
rupture his social and professional life underwent in 1095 following
his dramatic decision to abandon his teaching post and family life
in Baghdad and devote himself to the practice of Sufism, have often
served as a keystone for this type of interpretation, with his “spiritual
conversion” taken to herald seismic changes on an intellectual level.2
This understanding of al-Ghazālī’s biography has come under heated
criticism more recently, and there has been a considerable body of work
highlighting the continuity in his intellectual commitments, particularly
his commitments to philosophical views (including views on ethics).3 Yet
be that as it may, this strategy is of no help in the present case, for the
simple reason that the works in which al-Ghazālī expresses apparently
conflicting views resist arrangement in a suitably tidy chronological
order. On one widely accepted view, the Revival was written after the
Moderation (which was likely written in the same year as the Scale) and
before the Quintessence.4 That is, it was sandwiched between two works
in which al-Ghazālī appears to defend traditional Ashʿarite views.

Doctrine of discourse
The term was coined by Timothy Gianotti in a book dedicated to set-
tling the fractious question of al-Ghazālī’s understanding of the soul
as expressed across different works.5 The concept, however, is much
older. On one account, in fact, it was introduced by al-Ghazālī himself
in a much-discussed passage at the end of the Scale. Asked to state his
doctrine (madhhab) in the book—is it ranged with Ashʿarite doctrine
 Resolving the conflict 43
or with Sufism?6 —he distinguished between three doctrinal levels, or
three senses in which we might speak of a person’s doctrine. There’s
the doctrine to which one pledges allegiance in public disputations,
which depends on environmental and geographical contingencies and
inherited loyalties (that’s how one person ends up a Muʿtazilite, say,
and another an Ashʿarite); the doctrine one teaches, which depends
on the understanding and capabilities of one’s student; and the doc-
trine one privately believes based on the results of one’s own reflec-
tive inquiry, which one only shares with those who share one’s level of
comprehension. Al-Ghazālī concluded with an admonition to inquire
into the truth independently and to avoid pre-packaged doctrines.7
Numerous commentators past and present, beginning from
Ibn Ṭufayl, have converged in regarding this passage as the key for
unlocking al-Ghazālī’s work and resolving its apparent tensions.
From this standpoint, these tensions are no accident, but the result
of a deliberate and judiciously chosen method on al-Ghazālī’s part.
Specifically, the positions that al-Ghazālī expresses need to be consid-
ered against the genre of the particular work in which they appear and
against al-Ghazālī’s reflective view of the nature and function (and
hence audience) of that genre. Each genre, Gianotti notes, has its own
“parameters and qualifications”; once we have taken stock of this and
relativised al-Ghazālī’s statements to the relevant genre, “perceived
conflicts between statements belonging to separate genres are rendered
far less problematic.”8 This hermeneutic incorporates a pro tanto com-
mitment to the fundamental consistency of al-Ghazālī’s work. In the
words of Richard Frank, one of the best-known latter-day exponents
of this approach: “There is a basic, integrated theoretical system that
underlies al-Ghazālī’s logical and theological writings, orders them,
and gives them consistency.” Al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre turns out to be an
“essentially consistent, albeit rhetorically modulated, address” to his
intellectual community.9
This obviously requires a careful sorting of the different genres
that al-Ghazālī plied, a task that both Frank and Gianotti undertake.
Without going into the details, I will mention one shared element of
their analysis, and this is the emphasis on the epistemic limitations of
one specific discourse, namely, dialectical theology (kalām). Dialectical
theology, in al-Ghazālī’s view, has indeed a legitimate function in the
religious community, to defend correct theological doctrine against
heresy. Yet its role is purely defensive, and its disputational character
and dialectical reliance on endoxa (mashhūrāt) make it a poor instru-
ment for the discovery of truth (kashf al- ḥaqāʾiq wa-maʿrifatuhā ʿalā
mā hiya ʿalayhi).10 The inferior epistemic status of theological works is
44  Resolving the conflict
reflected in the profile of their intended audience. Frank describes both
the Moderation and the Jerusalem Epistle—the short theological tract
incorporated in the Revival—as “lower-level handbooks” for “simple,
uneducated people.”11 In Frank’s view, al-Ghazālī’s theological works
are Ashʿarite solely in veneer and camouflage his true metaphysics,
which rather owes to Avicenna. If we wish to hear al-Ghazālī’s real
views, we should look away from his theological works.
Now how might this help us approach our present question?
Following the example of these commentators, one obvious possibil-
ity would be to query the depth of al-Ghazālī’s commitment to the
viewpoint on ethics expressed in his theological works (or the theo-
logical segments embedded within his works of legal theory, such as
the Quintessence). Here is one way of fleshing out this possibility more
concretely. Perhaps we should distinguish between the propositions
that constitute the true creed defended in kalām works—and it seems
we must uphold al-Ghazālī’s commitment to the truth of that12—and
between the arguments used in such works to defend them. Perhaps
al-Ghazālī’s rejection of ethical rationalism and objectivism should
be seen as merely dialectical: a claim he thought effective for defend-
ing the proposition that really mattered, but not necessarily true. The
proposition that really mattered is that God is not subject to obliga-
tion. It was this proposition that Muʿtazilites had denied, and their
claims about ethical rationalism and objectivism had also been devel-
oped in a functional relationship to it.13
I will be returning to this last proposal shortly from another direc-
tion. Yet how satisfying does this view seem in the present context?
On the one hand, it will resonate with those of us who have often been
beset by a not dissimilar suspicion of dialectical theology as a genre,
and who have wondered how its rigid rules of operation and artifi-
cial polarities of polemical engagement affected the spirit in which
inquiry was pursued, and whether they supported the intellectual
qualities required for the best sort of inquiry to flourish, such as good
faith, open-mindedness, and intellectual honesty. (This would also be
al-Ghazālī’s moral complaint against dialectical theology: that it fos-
ters a pernicious pride and love of glory.) This translates into a sneak-
ing suspicion that perhaps theologians did not always quite believe the
things they declared to great fanfare.
But there is a more germane observation.14 Because if we are to take
the genre of writing in which certain claims appear as a basis for quali-
fying the epistemic status of these claims, this needs to be done consist-
ently. This means that we also need to take into account the nature of
the competing genre (or discourse, given its mould-breaking qualities)
 Resolving the conflict 45
in the case we are considering, the one represented by the Revival. Now
certainly the Revival is a work that is more hand-over-heart in certain
obvious ways. It is literally a guide to matters of the heart, and its mis-
sion is to guide its readers along the true road to the true salvation.
Importantly, the Revival also internally includes an evaluation of differ-
ent discourses (a topic of book 1, On Knowledge), and internally declares
its superiority to the discourses of dialectical theology and law. There is
a nice analogy here: just as law ( fiqh) does not deliver the highest form of
practical knowledge required for this spiritual journey (what al-Ghazālī
calls ʿilm al-muʿāmala), so dialectical theology does not deliver the high-
est form of metaphysical knowledge (what he calls ʿilm al-mukāshafa).
Yet the rub is that the Revival does not take it upon itself to provide
the latter kind of knowledge either, often alluding to it but always hast-
ily pulling down the veil over it, in a constant and provocative exercise
of self-limitation. Its stated province is the domain of the practical.
In Gianotti’s description (echoing many other readers’), the Revival is
“designed to be a detailed and accessible handbook for human perfec-
tion.”15 Its goal is to help its readers become better people—the kind
of people they need to be in order to achieve ultimate happiness. This
practical aim explains the overall “non-confrontational style” of the
book, as Taneli Kukkonen has observed, which makes al-Ghazālī
steer clear of the more pugilistic treatment of abstract issues that typi-
fies his theological and legal works.16 While al-Ghazālī does deal with
a host of issues on higher-level terms (the account of love we have seen
is a prime example), he does so within the more-or-less firm bounda-
ries dictated by his practical aims.
Now clearly, al-Ghazālī needs to tell his readers what (he believes)
represents the true road to happiness. But that is eminently compatible
with not telling them the whole truth, and sticking to the truths that
are absolutely essential on a strict need-to-know basis. Readers look-
ing to mend their souls, for example, don’t need to understand the true
nature of the soul (ḥaqīqatuhā fī dhātihā); they only need to under-
stand its qualities and states (ṣifatuhā wa-aḥwāluhā).17 And here is a
key point to consider. In the polemical discussions of ethics featured
in his theological (and legal) works, al-Ghazālī had ultimately con-
ceded to the Muʿtazilites that ordinary people make apparently deon-
tological moral judgements and even choose to act in certain ways that
do not appear to serve their interest and potentially conflict with it.
(Even minds bent to the rigid rules of operation and artificial polari-
ties of polemical engagement of kalām eventually had to acknowledge
such empirical phenomena.) This was the newest and most devastat-
ing Ashʿarite strategy: grant that people make such judgements and
46  Resolving the conflict
perform such actions, but question what really stands behind them.
As al-Ghazālī put it in the Quintessence, “we do not deny that such
judgements are widespread among people and are praiseworthy and
widely accepted (maḥmūda mashhūra)”; rather we deny their founda-
tion (mustanad). His ruthless analysis had suggested that this foun-
dation was invariably egoism, suitably harnessed and moulded by
psychological and social processes.18 To use a modern expression,
the al-Ghazālī of the Moderation and the Quintessence subscribed to
the “veneer theory” of morals. Al-Ghazālī’s more immediate frame
of reference was Avicenna’s analysis of moral judgements as widely
accepted propositions (endoxa or mashhūrāt). Yes, people widely make
such judgements, but this says nothing about their epistemic creden-
tials. It would certainly be a mistake to assume such judgements are
grounded in pure reason, as the Muʿtazilites alleged.19
With this in mind, al-Ghazālī’s discussion of moral beauty may
appear in a new light. Given the practical aims of the Revival, is it
not conceivable that al-Ghazālī may have weighed the options and
decided that from a pedagogical perspective, the moral endoxa were
best left untouched? That the best course was to leave his readers to
the phenomena—to their ordinary moral reactions—and to draw
a veil of silence over his higher-level view of their true nature and
foundation, as revealed in his works of Ashʿarite theology? Between
Muʿtazilite moral objectivism and the Ashʿarite deconstructive
alternative, it’s not hard to say which meta-ethical position is likely
to have better results on the plane of concrete ethical practice. That,
for example, was the reason one later thinker, the Ḥanbalite the-
ologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), would take up arms against the
Ashʿarite position: it makes for bad ethics (or what’s the same, bad
religion).20 If you think “good” picks out a real property, you’re
more likely to do it.
Thus, one genre seems too dialectical, the other too practical, to
supply an expression of the undiluted truth. Is this the final word to
be pronounced on the topic? I am not too sure. It is not clear to me,
for example, whether the hypothesis just outlined—that al-Ghazālī
stood by the Ashʿarite view of value in the Revival but calculatingly
suppressed it for pedagogical reasons—is entirely consistent with the
role the antagonistic claims are asked to play in the Revival. We may
remember that the human reaction to ethical value (moral beauty)
serves al-Ghazālī as a basis for articulating an ideal of the superior
form of love we can and should direct to God. Within al-Ghazālī’s
scheme, there could be few higher spiritual stakes. Similarly, in
this part of his discussion, al-Ghazālī does not merely let common
 Resolving the conflict 47
intuitions be—he enthusiastically embellishes them in calligraphic
print. His affirmation of the existence of a disinterested form of love is
simply too strong and explicit.
There is other evidence one could consider from both sides. In short,
the argument is not over. What my brief discussion at the very least
suggests is that this argument is complex and any solution is unlikely
to please all parties.

Supercharged hermeneutics
For certain of al-Ghazālī’s readers, this type of strategy is inherently
dissatisfactory and should be avoided at all costs. Frank Griffel,
for example, has objected to the use of al-Ghazālī’s remarks in the
Scale as an interpretive key to his project, particularly when coupled
with a division of his works into the “esoteric” and “exoteric.” Such
approaches are usually both a consequence and a cause of shirking the
duties of interpretation. As he acerbically puts it:

Often, assigning esotericism to an author or referring to inconsisten-

cies in a textual corpus is a hermeneutic device to mask the failure of
interpreters to understand the texts … A good interpretation readily
admits the lacunae in its understanding. Only such a frank admission
will encourage us to work harder, to read these texts again and again,
and to consider new levels of meaning that might reconcile apparent
contradictions. Thus, finding such contradictions should lead us to
take these texts more—and not less—seriously.21

Instead of using the dates or genres of particular works to discount

their content, we should roll up our sleeves and supercharge our efforts
to come up with interpretations of the content that allow us to rec-
oncile any conflicting messages. This hermeneutic, it will be clear,
also departs from a commitment to consistency. Applied to the vexed
question of al-Ghazālī’s understanding of causality, Griffel discov-
ers this consistency in an attitude of agnosticism— itself not at odds
with Ashʿarite epistemology—between the two competing metaphys-
ical explanations, Ashʿarite and Avicennan. “Although both theories
offer possible and consistent explanations of God’s creative activity,”
according to al-Ghazālī “neither of them can be demonstratively
proven.” Importantly, whatever the metaphysical truth of the matter,
it leaves our practical life untouched, and we can still carry on think-
ing and talking about causes and effects as we ordinarily do, that is to
say, as if they were inseparably linked.22
48  Resolving the conflict
My decision to leave this approach till last should not be taken to sug-
gest that we should treat this option as the last resort. On the contrary, I
agree with Griffel that it ought to be the first. It is simply that I am not
confident that I have a robust proposal for the present case that can be
comfortably fitted under this description. In practice, it is not clear to me
that we can neatly separate this supercharged interpretive approach from
the discourse-centred approach outlined above. Interpretation makes ref-
erence to aims and intentions, and a description of an author’s ends will
often coincide at least in part with a description of the ends he had as a
typical contributor to a particular genre. This point is relevant for con-
sidering one proposal I would like to cautiously put forward as a possible
contender (if not a perfect fit for this category) for removing the contra-
diction I have plotted between al-Ghazālī’s ethical views as expressed in
the Revival and his views as expressed in his theological and legal works.
I hypothesised earlier that al-Ghazālī’s rejection of Muʿtazilite-
style ethical rationalism and objectivism may have been merely dia-
lectical, an expedient for defending the theological tenet that really
mattered and that he genuinely believed to be true. This was the tenet
that God’s freedom is not subject to any limitations that might derive
from homegrown human concepts of right and wrong. The rallying
cry, ever since al-Ashʿarī (d. 935), was that God is under no sharī ʿa.
“There is no-one above him to permit or command, restrain or pro-
hibit, prescribe rules and impose limits.”23 He is not subject to obliga-
tion (wujūb), not subject to human claims (ḥaqq); there is nothing he
ought to do and could be reproved for failing to do. Reason bothered
the Ashʿarites mainly insofar as it was the source of bombastic anthro-
pocentric claims about God’s obligations. The Ashʿarite analysis of
key moral terms like “obligatory,” “good” and “bad,” or more sub-
stantively, “unjust,” accordingly served to show why they are inap-
plicable to God and invalid as sources of normative restriction on his
activity. God transcends human measurements. A glance at the loca-
tion where these ethical questions were discussed in al-Ghazālī’s and
his fellow-theologians’ kalām works already tells half the story: they
appear under the rubric of God’s acts. A glance at the titles of the
subsections, corresponding to the propositions under defence, tells the
other half. In the Moderation, they include: “That God is not obliged
to do what is optimal for human beings,” “That God is not obliged to
reward human beings if he imposes obligations on them and they obey
him,” “That God has the right to impose obligations on human beings
that they can but also cannot fulfil.”
Yet if this was the fundamental concern of Ashʿarite theology in the
question of ethics, we could perhaps see why a thinker like al-Ghazālī
 Resolving the conflict 49
might have been prepared to acknowledge the evaluative insights of
human reason so long as this did not appear to carry the same prob-
lematic implications. Unlike theological and legal literature, where
the concept of duty or obligation reigns supreme, shadowed by its
alter ago the concept of prohibition,24 in virtue literature across its
different forms—especially philosophical, but not exclusively—the
evaluative emphasis is different. The objects of ethical attention, the
virtues, present as beautiful ( jamīl) or noble, commanding love and
admiration. (Makārim al-akhlāq, “the noble traits of character,” was
a common designation in less philosophical texts on the virtues). The
evaluative register, to adapt Henry Sidgwick’s expression, carries
“attractive” rather than “imperative” force; it centres less on the right
than on the good.25
This point has sometimes been used to draw a broad contrast
between the moral theories of ancient philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle and many modern theories. The former, Aryeh Kosman
observes, “are essentially informed by their allegiance to a notion of
the good rooted in what we are attracted to rather than to a notion of
the good rooted in a concept of the right.” For Kosman, this general
point flows out of a reflection on the place of the kalon in their theo-
ries, with its melting rainbow of aesthetic-moral connotations. Among
these philosophers, “the moral sphere is governed by a principle …
clearly cousin-german to the beautiful. And when we recall that it has
a foundation, shared by the kalon and the beautiful alike, in the faces
of the young and fair, we will recognize this principle as specifically
erotic—rooted in what we are attracted to.”26
The contrast between a “morality of attraction” and “a morality
of right,” to be sure, should not be drawn too sharply, as Kosman
himself emphasises. Among these philosophers, the sense of attrac-
tion or desire is after all informed by reason, which instructs us to
desire appropriately. Yet even taken loosely, this contrast may be help-
ful in trying to understand how an intellectual like al-Ghazālī, as he
negotiated two types of ethical literature characterised by divergent
evaluative registers and emphases—the theological-legal literature
centring on action and duty (a morality of right) and the philosophical
literature centring on virtue and beauty (a morality of attraction)—
may have concluded that he could safely endorse the perspective of
the latter without prejudice to his fundamental theological concerns.27
Reason acknowledges certain qualities of character as real perfec-
tions. Yet this is an acknowledgement of a natural object of love rather
than a normative constraint. Moreover, in al-Ghazālī’s appropriation
of the philosophical-Sufi topos of Imitatio Dei, it is God who forms the
50  Resolving the conflict
true object of such love and also the standard of the virtues. It is God
that measures and constrains us, rather than the other way around, as
Muʿtazilite thinkers had appeared to argue. The standard of virtue is
transcendent. Al-Ghazālī’s concern with preserving God’s transcend-
ence is thus fully satisfied within this paradigm and remains the con-
stant that holds both his theological-legal works and his virtue-ethical
works together.28
It may be counted as more than circumstantial evidence in favour of
this view that we find a related pattern in the work of Ibn Taymiyya,
an avid reader of al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre and undeclared re-articulator
of some of his trademark ideas. Ibn Taymiyya, for his part, offers far
more vocal support to a seemingly Muʿtazilite-style view of ethics; and
in his account, it is an overwhelming focus on the evaluative register
of the “good” (ḥasan) as against the “obligatory” (wājib) that turns
out to grease the wheels and remove any theological friction this view
might create for his own fundamental theological concern with God’s
transcendence.29
Whether the two concepts—and the overall moral paradigms
they are associated with—can be plausibly pulled apart seems
even more open to question in al-Ghazālī’s case than in Aristotle
and Plato’s. Vice, after all, leads to harm, in al-Ghazālī’s view; and
as we briefly saw, in his theological-legal works he had recognised
that, in a basic sense, acts are designated as “obligatory” insofar
as failure to perform them would expose the person to harm. In
that sense, the acquisition of virtue is also obligatory. Yet we may
note that in his theological-legal works, al-Ghazālī, like many of
his fellow-Ashʿarites, had laid emphasis on one particular type of
harm, obtaining in the otherworldly realm. It is this that he had most
strongly insisted human beings only know about through scripture,
which communicates the fact that God attached certain kinds of
otherworldly consequences (viz., punishment) to certain acts and in
doing so rendered them obligatory.30 This suggests another hypoth-
esis as to why al-Ghazālī may not have viewed the account of moral
beauty he presented in the Revival as incompatible with his account
of ethics in those other works. What he affirmed in his discussion of
love in the Revival was our natural ability to recognise and respond
to the beauty of virtue. But the insight that a certain state of char-
acter is admirable is logically separable from the insight that it is
conducive to certain metaphysical outcomes. (As al-Ghazālī puts it
pithily albeit metaphorically in one place: the vices are “gateways
that open out to God’s burning Fire” while the virtues are “gateways
of the heart that open out to the bliss of paradise.”31) Just because
 Resolving the conflict 51
we experience a certain quality as beautiful, it need not mean we
understand why it merits this response—that is to say, why it is a true
virtue or perfection. The more basic point that our emotional reac-
tions to moral excellence, notably admiration, may require a certain
type of cognitive processing or reflective articulation before we can
identify their objects is something that a number of contemporary
philosophers would be prepared recognise.32 In al-Ghazālī’s case,
the key issue would be less about identifying what we admire than
why we ought to. The latter is an explanation that belongs (at least
in part) to the sphere of higher-level metaphysical theorising, along
with a number of other claims, notably al-Ghazālī’s claim that what
makes a certain quality a virtue is its being a virtue in God.33
This, of course, serves to underline the fact that our natural reac-
tions are fallible and corrigible. Our intuitive judgements may stand
to be revised once informed by this higher-level understanding.
Al-Ghazālī does not go out of his way to emphasise this point in his
discussion of moral beauty in the Revival, as mentioned earlier, but
perhaps we need to assume it is working in the background if we are
to weave everything into a coherent whole. Our natural reason-based
reactions require correction from scripture. This is the very kind of
correction we may see al-Ghazālī as supplying in the Revival both by
expanding the roster of substantive virtues to include not just the phi-
losophers’ (wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, and their subdivi-
sions) but also the mystics’ (such as gratitude, trust, or love in God),
and by offering higher-level explanations of the nature of virtue and
its metaphysical foundations. That reason (or nature) is completed by
scripture is a claim on which even the al-Ghazālī of the Moderation
and the Quintessence would have been happy to sign off.
Read in this manner, the conflict begins to melt away. Is this herme-
neutics one charge too far—hermeneutics on steroids? I will leave this
to readers to judge.
7 Concluding comment

There are, no doubt, other explanations and interpretive proposals

that could be developed to clear up the puzzle I picked out. Yet I will
stop here, leaving this task to al-Ghazālī’s many other dedicated read-
ers. On the relationship between the different parts of the universe of
al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre, it will be impossible to ever have the last word.
The question pursued above, as will be clear, stems from a funda-
mentally interpretive concern about how to unify al-Ghazālī’s ethical
thinking. This type of question is hard to avoid to the extent that we
seek to understand a thinker as a whole and we are naturally driven to
scrutinise the relationship between the different ideas he has expressed.
If our main interest lies in exploring the development of one of these
ideas on its own terms, on the other hand, our ability to resolve such
questions will seem of secondary importance.
This study has been guided by both kinds of concern. But one of its
chief aims was to recover al-Ghazālī’s account of moral beauty with a
view to enriching the historical resources we look back to and situate
ourselves against when we seek to rearticulate the relationship between
the good and the beautiful, ethics and aesthetics. This relationship, as
mentioned earlier, has come under a sharp spotlight among philosophers
recently, and there have been incisive new efforts to take possession of it.
In Arabo-Islamic culture, as in Greek culture, it was a relationship that
was firmly embedded within the givens of language. Should we regard
that as a pure coincidence? This is a large question that I cannot tackle
as such, but I will draw on one of Kosman’s observations in connection
with the Greek case to provide a more modest final reflection.
Commenting on the opposition between the terms kalon and aischron
found in Plato’s Gorgias, Kosman points out that the latter is less about
being “ugly” than about being “shameful.” The argument of the Gorgias
reveals “that these concepts are together importantly situated in the
register of honor and shame, and what this means more generally is that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-7
 Concluding comment 53
they are in the register of our appearance to one another.”1 In Kosman’s
view, it is the notion of “appearance,” taken in the broad sense of “pres-
entation to subjective awareness,” that gives us the key to unlocking
the larger ethical conception that is reflected in the complex semantic
profile of the term kalon. In particular, it reveals the close connection
between ontology and phenomenology, being and appearance. We mod-
erns “tend to think of beauty in cosmetic terms, as though it concerned
always and only a superficial façade of being,” which is linked to the fact
that we tend to think of appearance as at the very least independent and
separate from being, in the best case failing to represent it, in the worst
falsifying it. It is this tendency that surfaced at an earlier moment of our
discussion when we found ourselves querying the idea that the desire
for beauty could be an appropriate sort of moral motivation (“isn’t it a
desire to appear a certain way, rather than to be a certain kind of per-
son?”). Things are different with Plato:

[F]or Plato, appearance is not something separate from being, but

simply the presentation of what is to a subject: being, as we say,
making its appearance. It is not therefore essentially deceptive; the
phenomenological is not standardly the illusion of being … face
not as façade, but as organic expression. The kalon in turn reveals
the integrity of being and its proper appearance; it constitutes the
virtue of proper and expressive appearance … The kalon is, then,
not something in addition to the good, and so to speak on its sur-
face. It is the mode of the good that shows forth; it is the splendor
of the appearance of the good. The kalon, we might say, is the
splendid virtue of appearance.2

Kosman does not speculate on what caused the displacement of this

understanding on a historical level. But in isolating social reactions of
honour and shame as the location where the moral-aesthetic meanings
of kalon come together, he indicates one possible way of understand-
ing the genealogy (in some sense of this word) of its composite profile,
and why we should perhaps not be surprised to see it replicated in the
evaluative language of other moral communities where such reactions
play a prominent regulative role.
Taken as ideal types, such communities are sometimes termed
“shame cultures,” most basically defined by their preoccupation with
the achievement of social status and public esteem. Shame, as Bernard
Williams has pointed out, bears a special relation to sight and hence
appearance. “The basic experience connected with shame is that
of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong
54  Concluding comment
condition,” and its motivations always make reference to “an idea of the
gaze of another”—though in its most developed forms, this will be the
imagined gaze of an idealised observer.3 Heroic societies with an aris-
tocratic warrior class tend to be shame cultures, as Peter Hacker notes,
governed by a moral code whose central values include military prow-
ess, generosity, hospitality to guests, and the zealous defence of one’s
honour against slight.4 Homeric society is often taken as a textbook case
of such a culture, whose moral framework—including its concern with
status, honour, and appearance and its characteristic fusion of moral
and physical excellence into a unitary ideal (kalokagathia)—lived on
in later Greek culture, though subjected to important renegotiations
at the hands of Athenian intellectuals. A similar preoccupation with
honour and shame, joined to a heroic code defined by similar values,
has commonly been taken to characterise pre-Islamic Arabian society.
And just as in the Homeric case, the latter maintained a literary pres-
ence in the Islamic world that ensured its continuing cultural influence,
albeit in modified form.5
In light of Kosman’s discussion, it may seem paradoxical to observe
that al-Ghazālī in fact shares the distrust of appearances Kosman
attributes to us moderns. For al-Ghazālī, the social reactions that our
actions attract have a morally corrosive effect, often leading us to pur-
sue appearance at the expense of being. This is the running theme of
two books of the Revival dedicated to the study of the vices of a concern
with appearance: pride, conceit, the quest for honour and standing.6
Appearance can be falsified; being and appearance often come apart. In
al-Ghazālī’s account of love, by contrast, we see this chasm sealed, with
virtue allowed the peculiar splendour of its appearance. Al-Ghazālī’s
philosophical view that beauty simply is perfection perceived encapsu-
lates directly his commitment to the fundamental unity between how
things are and how they appear. The two perspectives can be reconciled
on one level by distinguishing between the moral subject with whom
they are principally concerned: it is legitimate to admire virtue in oth-
ers, but not to desire such admiration for one’s own. They can also be
reconciled on another level by noting that even where al-Ghazālī takes
a negative view of appearances, it is not that the concern with appear-
ances has entirely gone away; it is only that the relevant observer has
been replaced. What matters is not our appearance to other members
of the human community and the reactions of shame and honour with
which they receive us. What matters is our appearance before God. This
is the subject of another book of the Revival, dedicated to the practice
of vigilance and self-examination, which teaches readers how to hold
themselves in the perpetual consciousness of God’s awareness.
 Concluding comment 55
From the perspective of the cultural transitions evoked above, the
displacement of the concern with social status and public honour
by a concern with the esteem meted out by God can be seen as one
of the central modifications of the pre-Islamic moral code effected
by Muslim intellectuals—even if, as al-Ghazālī’s strictures suggest,
human nature being what it is, this normative displacement was less
than completely realised in actual practice. This displacement, from
public esteem to the voice of conscience coinciding with the all-seeing
eye of God, is in fact one of several indices often invoked to articulate
the difference between shame culture and its other, that is, “guilt cul-
ture.” Another concerns the primary focus of moral attention. Where
the former type of culture prizes ways of being, the latter prizes ways
of doing. As Peter Hacker puts it: “The form of the dominant norms
of a shame-culture determine what one ought to be … The form of
the dominant norms of a guilt-culture is the imperative or dominative
tense (‘thou shalt’), which determines what one is obligated to do. This
is the typical form of the obligation-imposing laws of God.”7
As Hacker emphasises, this contrast should not be taken simplis-
tically. To do so, after all, would be to overlook the well-attested
interest taken in moral character among many religious traditions.
Certainly, it would be a mistake to foreclose questions about how
best to understand the relation between this interest and the equally
well-attested interest in right action within such traditions. These
are questions, as we have seen, that come up internally within
al-Ghazālī’s ethics given the different paradigms of ethical reflection
that find expression in different parts of his oeuvre: one (expressed
in his theological and legal works) shaped by an emphasis on duty,
action, and obedience, the other (expressed in a different set of
ethical works) shaped by an emphasis on beauty, character, and
love. Reading this relation requires us to keep an open mind, and to
remain sensitive to many possible layers of explanation. Yet however
we read it in this case—whether as a reflection of al-Ghazālī’s chang-
ing commitments or negotiation of different audiences, as the result
of a broader cultural struggle to integrate the different intellectual
frameworks (Hellenistic, pre-Islamic Arab, scriptural Islamic, and
others) that gave Islamic culture its materials, and/or as a particular
stage in the confrontation of a shame-centric culture and a guilt-
centric one—it suggests that there is much to learn from this exercise
that can enrich the historical context against which we understand
the longstanding connection between the beautiful and the good.
For a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and other pro-
cesses that may underwrite the linguistic connection between the
56  Concluding comment
beautiful and the good more widely across history, we would do well
to look to anthropology and studies of linguistic etymology. Taking
all these resources together and joining them to a study of these ideas
as they have been unfolded historically, we may be able to set the rela-
tion between ethics and aesthetics on new foundations and find fresh
ways of articulating its truth.
Distinguishing between the different reasons that might motivate
the study of history, Nietzsche isolated a type of study one might pur-
sue “as a being who acts and strives,” whose hallmark is its quest for
“models, teachers, comforters” and images of greatness to serve the
purposes of action and life. The ruling commandment for this form
of study is: “that which in the past was able to expand the concept
‘man’ and make it more beautiful must exist everlastingly, so as to be
able to accomplish this everlastingly.”8 Looking back, there will obvi-
ously be many such concepts, not all of which Nietzsche would have
been equally happy to acknowledge as images of human beauty and
greatness. Though the history of great exemplars is not the history of
ideas, many of us who study the latter are driven by a hope that such
ideas might bring beauty closer. And for this, no offer of intellectual
fellowship is worth refusing.
Notes

Section 1
1. In the epigram, I rely on the translation of the Symposium by Reginald
E. Allen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
2. The quote is from Jan A. Aersten, Medieval Philosophy and The Transcenden-
tals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), though Aersten
himself isolates kalokagathia as the relevant notion in this context. Just how
to understand the Janus-faced nature of the term kalon, and how to handle
the challenges it poses on translation level, is a question that still attracts
debate. Good starting points for considering these questions are Terence
H. Irwin, “The Sense and Reference of Kalon in Aristotle,” Classical Phi-
lology 105 (2010), 381–396 (Special Issue: Beauty, Harmony, and the Good,
ed. Elizabeth Asmi), and Aryeh Kosman, “Beauty and the Good: Situating
the Kalon,” Classical Philology 105 (2010), 341–357.
3. Kosman, “Beauty and the Good,” 344, though this remark reflects a par-
ticular dialectical stage of his discussion, and Kosman himself is not
arguing this gulf. Cf. Irwin’s related remarks in “Sense and Reference,”
381–382.
4. Panos Paris, “On Form, and the Possibility of Moral Beauty,” Metaphi-
losophy 49 (2018), 711–729.
5. Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 117; Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 98–99.
6. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York and London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2001), 62.
7. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, 2nd edn), 470.
8. On the Symposium, see Dimitri Gutas, “Plato’s Symposion in the Ara-
bic Tradition,” Oriens 31 (1988), 36–60, and for a general survey of
the reception of Platonic writings, idem, “Platon. Tradition arabe,”
in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. Va, ed. Richard Goulet
(Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2012), 845–863.
For the Theology of Aristotle, see Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus:
A Study of The Theology of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 2002).
9. Two gateway discussions of this theme in Sufi thought are Kazuyo
Murata, Beauty in Sufism: The Teachings of Rūzbihān Baqlī (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2017) and Cyrus Ali Zargar,
58  Notes
Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in Ibn Arabi and
‘Iraqi (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). See
also, with a broader brush, William C. Chittick’s brief but illumi-
nating meditation, “The Aesthetics of Islamic Ethics,” in Sharing
Poetic Expressions: Beauty, Sublime, Mysticism in Islamic and Occi-
dental Culture, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht; New York:
Springer, 2011), 3–14, whose themes intersect especially closely with
those of the present study.
10. Existing discussions of this theme of al-Ghazālī’s work include Bin-
yamin Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings
of Al-Ghazâlî and Al-Dabbâgh (London; New York: Routledge, 2003),
Chapter 2; Richard Ettinghausen, “Al-Ghazzālī on Beauty,” in Fine Arts
of Islamic Civilization, ed. Muḥammad Abdul Jabbar Beg (Cambridge:
M. A. J. Beg, 2006), 25–36; Carole Hillenbrand, “Some Aspects  of
al-Ghazālī’s Views on Beauty,” in Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit
(God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty), ed. Alma Giese and J. Christoph
Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 249–265; Taneli Kukkonen, “The Good,
the Beautiful and the True: Aesthetical Issues in Islamic Philosophy,”
Studia Orientalia 111 (2011), 87–103; Simon Van Den Bergh, “The ‘Love
of God’ in al-Ghazālī’s Vivification of Theology,” Journal of Semitic
Studies 1 (1956), 305–321; Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of
Virtue (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975), 145–153;
and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from
Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus, trans. Consuelo López-Morillas
(Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), Chapter 3.7.

Section 2
1. There have been a number of recent studies and survey pieces explor-
ing the status of aesthetics in Arabic-Islamic culture more generally
and philosophical culture more particularly. They include Deborah
L. Black, “Aesthetics in Islamic Philosophy,” in Routledge Encyclope-
dia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London; New York: Routledge,
1998), 75–79; Samir Mahmoud, “Beauty and Aesthetics in Classical
Islamic Thought: An Introduction,” Kalam Journal 1 (2018), 7–21;
Valerie Gonzalez, “Beauty and Aesthetic Experience in Classical Ara-
bic Thought,” in Beauty in Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Archi-
tecture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Aaron Hughes, “‘God is Beautiful
and Loves Beauty’: The Role of Aesthetics in Medieval Islamic and
Jewish Philosophy,” in The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medi-
eval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington; Indianapolis, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2004); Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in
Arabic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998); Oliver Leaman,
Islamic Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and
Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought.
2. A recognition that I will here assume does not presuppose agreement
on definitional questions such as what makes an experience, attitude, or
property aesthetic, at least when it comes to core cases such as the ones
discussed next in the main text. These definitional questions remain
open to philosophical debate.
 Notes 59
3. Al-Ghazālī, The Revival of the Religious Sciences/I ḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo:
Lajnat Nashr al-Thaqāfa al-Islāmiyya, 1356–1357 AH [1937–1938]), 9: 1736;
I cite this edition based on the pagination of the Dar al-Shaʿb edition (n.d.).
4. Above all, the pleasure appears to attach to the object simply insofar as it
is seen or heard, and not insofar as it might serve as a means for satisfying
some other desire; we don’t go on to eat the vegetation and we don’t take
pleasure in the birdsong as an indication of where to point our hunting
weapon. Al-Ghazālī’s entire point (which requires him to single out the
most inoffensive forms of sensory pleasure) pivots on that basis.
5. For some extra comment on this point from the perspective of
al-Ghazālī’s understanding of virtue, see my “Does al-Ghazālī Have
a Theory of Virtue?” in Mysticism and Ethics in Islam, ed. Bilal Orfali,
Mohammed Rustom, and Atif Khalil (Beirut: American University of
Beirut Press, forthcoming).
6. The Scale of Action/Mīzān al-ʿamal, ed. Sulaymān Dunyā (Cairo: Dār
al-Maʿārif, 1964), 310–311; cf. 299: “anything that helps satisfy the needs
of the present world also helps with the next, as the next world is reached
through these worldly means.”
7. I ḥyāʾ, 15: 2833. Al-Ghazālī’s The Wisdom in God’s Creation/al-Ḥikma f ī
makhlūqāt Allāh can be read as a companion piece to this book of the
Revival, as can the earlier book dedicated to the topic of gratitude (and
patience: Kitab al-Ṣabr waʾl-shukr), though its specific focus is on the cre-
ated order qua beneficial. For a comment on the Book of Contemplation
from a different direction, see Binyamin Abrahamov, “Al-Ghazālī and
the Rationalization of Sufism,” in Islam and Rationality: The Impact
of al-Ghazālī, vol. 1, ed. Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 35–48,
though Abrahamov’s “syllogistic thinking” as a translation for tafak-
kur seems too narrow to capture the more empirically oriented type of
inquiry al-Ghazālī considers under this heading. This empirical dimen-
sion is also Ahmed El Shamsy’s emphasis in his remarks on al-Ḥikma
f ī makhlūqāt Allāh in the context of a broader argument in “The Wis-
dom of God’s Law: Two Theories,” in Islamic Law in Theory: Studies in
Jurisprudence in Honor of Bernard Weiss, ed. Robert Gleave and Kevin
Reinhart (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 19–37; see esp. 32–33.
8. Al-Ghazālī’s taxonomy of the different types of relationship in which
we may stand to our physical needs and their material in I ḥyāʾ,
15: 2755–2756, offers a helpful though partial compass for thinking
through this question.
9. See Hillebrand, “Some Aspects,” 257; the Revival’s dedicated discus-
sion of the topic takes place in book 18. Al-Ghazālī’s attitude to music
has complex roots and reflects a philosophical view that found notable
expression in the work of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.

Section 3
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
154. For a fuller development of this observation, see Robert R. Clewis,
The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), especially Chapter 2.3.
60  Notes
2. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1: 206–207.
3. Irwin, “Sense and Reference,” 381.
4. Ibid, 395.
5. Though jamāl is more hospitable to the latter, more aesthetically
valenced two options. As Franz Rosenthal points out, there is a small
minority of words denoting what is good or excellent that cannot be
used in an aesthetic sense (“On Art and Aesthetics in Graeco-Arabic
Wisdom Literature,” in his Four Essays on Art and Literature in Islam
[Leiden: Brill, 1971], 12). Jayyid is one example; khayr is another. From
the other direction, Doris Behrens-Abouseif notes that there are a few
terms that denote physical beauty which do not admit a moral applica-
tion, such as malī ḥ or wasīm (Beauty in Arabic Culture, 17). Be that as it
may, the evidence both of ordinary language and of intellectual articu-
lations such as those we will be considering here weighs heavily against
her surprising claim concerning “the separation between the good and
the beautiful in Arabic culture” (ibid, 8). Speculating on the question
which sense—moral or aesthetic—was historically prior, Rosenthal
draws on the evidence of Akkadian to suggest that in at least one case,
jamīl, it was the former, and that the original meaning of the word was
“obliging,” “kind,” and the like (“Art and Aesthetics,” 12–13).
6. Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, An Exposition of the Obscure Terms of the Qurʾan/
Mufradāt f ī gharīb al-Qurʾān, ed. Ṣafwān ʿAdnān Dawūdī (Damascus:
Dār al-Qalam; Beirut: al-Dār al-Shāmiyya, 2009, 4th edn), 202 (al-jamāl
[huwa] al- ḥusn al-kathīr). Compare the definition of jamāl in the Lisān
al-ʿarab and the Tāj al-ʿArūs; the term ḥusn appears as a definiens in
both works. See respectively Ibn Manẓūr, The Arabic Tongue/Lisān
al-ʿarab (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1956), 11:126 and Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, The
Bridal Crown from the Gems of the Dictionary/Tāj al-ʿArūs min jawāhir
al-Qāmūs, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Tanāḥī, rev. ʿAbd al-Salām
Muḥammad Hārūn and editorial committee (Kuwait: Maṭbaʿat Ḥukū-
mat al-Kuwayt, 1993), 28:236.
7. Part of this awkwardness is a product of the substantive analyses of
the concepts advanced by specific schools. Among Baṣran Muʿtazilites,
for example, “good” (ḥasan) was a superordinate category that incor-
porated three separate qualifications: “obligatory” (wājib), “recom-
mended” or “supererogatory” (nadb and tafa ḍḍul), and “plain good” or
“permissible” (mubā ḥ). See briefly my Moral Agents and their Deserts:
The Character of Mu ʿtazilite Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 72–73, and also 237, n. 5.
8. “Mukhtaṣar min Kitāb ‘al-Akhlāq’ li-Jālīnūs,” in Dirāsāt wa-nu ṣū ṣ
fiʾl-falsafa waʾl-ʿulūm ʿinda al-ʿarab, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (Beirut:
al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya liʾl-Dirāsāt waʾl-Nashr,  1981), 190–211; see,
e.g., p. 199.
9. The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and
Alexander Fidora, with an introduction and annotated translation by
Douglas M. Dunlop (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 163.10. Usually but not invari-
ably; see the editors’ glossary entry on to kalon. Jamīl is also the term of
choice for kalon in the Arabic translation of the Topics, though the trans-
lator had to reach for more creative alternatives to convey the intricacies
 Notes 61
of Aristotle’s remarks about kalon as a homonymous term at 106a20–22.
He opted for naẓīf, whose meanings include both “clean” and “beautiful.”
See the relevant passage in Manṭiq Arisṭū, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī
(Beirut: Dār al-Qalam; Kuwait: Wakālat al-Maṭbūʿāt, 1980), 2:511.
10. Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought, 585.
11. “Mukhtaṣar,” 196.
12. For all the above, see “Uthūlūjiyā Arisṭāṭālīs,” in Plotinus Apud Arabes/
Aflū ṭīn ʿinda al-ʿarab, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (Cairo: Maktabat
al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1955), 56–64.
13. Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus, 3.2.
14. Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State/Mabādiʾ ārā ʾ ahl al-madīna
al-fā ḍila, trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985),
83–85. Cf. Avicenna’s remarks in The Book of Salvation/Kitāb al-Najāt,
ed. Majid Fakhry (Beirut: Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1985), 281–282: “the
beauty and splendour of an entity consists in its being as is necessary for
it to be (or: as it ought).”
15. See Avicenna, “Risāla fiʾl-ʿishq,” in Jāmiʿ al-badāʾiʿ, ed. Muh ỵ ī al-Dīn Ṣabrī
al-Kurdī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda, 1917), 68–91. Avicenna’s concrete ref-
erence points include well-ordered sounds and tastes, though he takes a
special interest in the response to the physical beauty of human beings.
16. Vílchez suggests that the term jamīl as applied to patience does not
mean “beautiful” but “abundant,” taking this to illustrate the broader
point that “the lexicon related to the root j-m-l in the Quran can rarely
be understood in a purely aesthetic sense” (Aesthetics in Arabic Thought,
64). He is likely basing this point on al-Rāghib’s discussion (Mufradāt,
202: yuqālu ‘ jamīl’…ʿalaʾl-takthīr); but al-Rāghib, it is worth recalling,
defines jamāl as an abundance specifically of ḥusn. The semantic scope
of the latter, of course, is not confined to the aesthetic domain. More
could be said about this, yet what is at the very least clear is that ḥasan
is a term of praise; this is also the force of jamīl in the relevant Qurʾanic
passages. Can the same be said of “abundant”?
17. See Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, The Keys to the Unseen/Mafātī ḥ al-ghayb
(Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1981), 18:106–107, for the above, and for a fuller
explication of the criteria of the appropriate kind of patience. As
al-Rāzī suggests, self-command is ultimately submission to God’s com-
mand (dhālika al- ṣabr lā yakūnu jamīlan; waʾl- ḍābiṭ anna…kulla mā
kāna li- ṭalab ʿubūdiyyat Allāh ta ʿālā kāna ḥasanan wa-illā fa-lā). Note
the unselfconscious reduction of jamīl to ḥasan in this account.
18. Tāj al-ʿArūs, 28:236.
19. Mufradāt, 202. In his discussion of ḥusn (ibid, 235–236), al-Rāghib dis-
tinguishes between a type of fineness/beauty that is accessible to sight
(ba ṣar) and to insight (ba ṣīra); this distinction will play an important
role in al-Ghazālī’s account, as we will see shortly.

Section 4
1. Good starting points for this part of al-Ghazālī’s oeuvre include Sherif,
Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue; Muhammad Abul Quasem, The Ethics of
al-Ghazālī: A Composite Ethics in Islam (Petaling Jaya: Muhammad
62  Notes
Abul Quasem, 1976); and Kenneth Garden, The First Islamic Reviver:
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and His Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014). See also my “Does al-Ghazālī Have a
Theory of Virtue?” for an exploration of some aspects of this intellectual
“partnership” (between Sufi and philosophical ideas) in al-Ghazālī’s
ethics.
2. Just how to understand the relationship between these disparate ethi-
cal emphases is a topic I have explored from one direction in “Virtue
and the Law in al-Ghazālī’s Ethics,” in Islamic Ethics as Educational
Discourse: Thought and Impact of the Classical Muslim Thinker Miska-
wayh, ed. Sebastian Günther and Yassir El Jamouhi (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2021).
3. I ḥyāʾ, 8:1434.
4. Ibid.
5. I ḥyāʾ, 1:89.
6. This of course presupposes that the connection between virtue and
beauty may not be transparent to the inquirer. The possibility of this
cognitive shortfall is consistent with al-Ghazālī’s discussion elsewhere,
as we will see.
7. I have discussed this concern further in relation to al-Ghazālī’s and other
intellectuals’ articulation of the virtues of magnanimity and greatness
of spirit in Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019); see especially 31–34 and 144 ff. Cf. Panos Paris’
comment on this point in “Moral Beauty and Education,” Journal of
Moral Education 48 (2019), 406–407.
8. The normative accent in the quoted remark is in fact partly a construct
of the context, as al-Ghazālī is distinguishing between different types of
motivation for the pursuit of intellectual understanding, and urging this
motivation over a less salutary type directed to external goods such as
honour and wealth.
9. This idea finds its clearest expression in The Most Exalted Aim in Expound-
ing God’s Beautiful Names/Al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ maʿānī asmāʾ Allāh
al-ḥusnā, ed. Fadlou A. Shehadi (Beirut: Dar El-Machreq, 1971), 126–127.
10. I ḥyāʾ, 13:2335 (innamā al-maḥmūdu f ī nafsihi…kullu mā yajūzu an yū ṣafa
Allāhu ta ʿālā bihi, wa-mā lā yajūzu…fa-laysa bi-kamālin f ī dhātihi).
Though it is one of the main thrusts of the Maqṣad to add a twist to this
view: what is a virtue in God will typically have to be exemplified in a
rather different sense by human beings.
11. Maqṣad, 44.
12. This may of course seem question-begging, and not to fully address the
depth of the concern framed above. See the concluding section for an
additional set of remarks that place this point in context.
13. Love of an object, after all, depends on awareness of that object, as
al-Ghazālī points out in On Love (I ḥyāʾ, 14:2574). This is also a key
theme of the discussion in Maqṣad; see especially 42 ff.
14. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2574. Once again this echoes ideas expressed by the falāsifa;
compare e.g. the discussion in Avicenna, Najāt, 282.
15. There is some textual prevarication as to whether this sense consists in
the heart or is located in the heart: I ḥyāʾ, 14:2575.
16. Ibid.
 Notes 63
17. Al-Ghazālī seems to present different drafts of this taxonomy as his
discussion progresses; I rely on the overview provided at ibid, 2581.
18. It may be noted that many of these objects of attachment correspond to
the objectives of the Law (maqā ṣid al-sharī ʿa) as tabulated by legal theo-
rists, including al-Ghazālī himself. Al-Ghazālī clearly tags these objects
as egoistic—a point that can be placed in conversation with his account
of the limitations of jurisprudential science in book 1 of the Revival.
19. There is a related paradox, as we will see shortly, as to why beneficence
2 is not filed under intrinsic love. Further, logically speaking, love of self
is also a form of intrinsic love. I am not the first to notice certain wrin-
kles in al-Ghazālī’s presentation, or to attempt to iron them out; from
a different direction, see e.g. Abrahamov, Divine Love, 51, and Van Den
Bergh, “The ‘Love of God’,” 314.
20. Al-Ghazālī unfolds this argument in concentration at I ḥyāʾ, 14:2581–2592.
21. This is the sort he describes as the “profound true love that can be
trusted to endure” at ibid, 2577.
22. Ibid.
23. In combination, more broadly, with the ancient tendency to make the
ethical focus the quality of our lives as a whole. Good starting points
for thinking through these questions are Julia Annas, The Morality of
Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 2.7; idem,
Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 152–163; and
more briefly with reference to Aristotle, Terence H. Irwin, The Develop-
ment of Ethics, vol. 1: From Socrates to the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), §114.
24. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2577–2578.
25. Ibid, 2578.
26. Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (South
Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), 148. This view is certainly not
without its critics; see, for example, briefly, Gaut, Art, Emotion and Eth-
ics, Chapter 2.1. This view of aesthetic experience is often taken to sup-
ply important grounds for distinguishing between art and pornography.
Al-Ghazālī himself does not focus on the outward human form as an
aesthetic object, so does not confront the special challenges this poses.
This contrasts interestingly with Avicenna, who takes pains to distin-
guish between two different modes of responding to (of loving) physical
human beauty, one associated with our appetitive animal nature and
the other with our intellectual nature. See “Risāla fiʾl-ʿishq,” 80–83.
27. The World as Will and Representation, 1:197. The therapeutic effect of
exposure to nature is of course also widely discussed outside philosoph-
ical circles these days.
28. See the discussion in Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca,
NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2001), Chapter 8; 127 quoted.
29. See text to notes 4 and 5, Section 1.
30. Or “course of life”; the term can also refer to a record or account of this
course (vita), as will emerge further on.
31. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2578–2579.
32. Maqṣad, 126.
33. An alternative translation is possible: “making the truthful Abū Bakr
truthful.”
64  Notes
34. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2579–2580.
35. See, respectively, I ḥyāʾ, 14:2578, and Maqṣad, 126.
36. “Typically,” though al-Ghazālī’s terminology raises difficult ques-
tions which complicate this statement. For a survey of scholarly
perspectives on the topic and an attempt to resolve these questions,
see my “Does al-Ghazālī Have a Theory of Virtue?” And see I ḥyā ʾ,
12:2171 for the passage cited. Insofar as the love of virtuous exem-
plars incorporates an express judgement of value, al-Ghazālī’s
understanding aligns itself closely with some of the most prominent
recent cognitivist accounts of emotions. See e.g. Martha C. Nuss-
baum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cam-
bridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), for a notable
account along these lines intended to contest the conception of emo-
tions as irrational or brute.
37. For a well-known statement of this “paradox,” see Colin Radford,
“How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49 (1975), 67–80. As
Derek Matravers reformulates the point (without endorsing it), it is the
problem posed by the fact that “[a]mongst the causes of an emotion
felt towards p, it is necessary that there be a belief that p is actual, or
likely to be actual, or has been actual”—a condition that our emotional
response to fictional characters and events appears to violate. See his
Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103, and
generally Chapter 8 for critical discussion.
38. For discussion, see Anne-Marie Schimmel, And Mohammed Is His
Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel
Hill, NC; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), Chap-
ter 2. One of the best-known exemplars of this genre, by the Mālik-
ite jurist and traditionist Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 1149), dwells at some length
on the necessity of loving the Prophet. See al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, The Cura-
tive Knowledge of the Claims of the Chosen Prophet/al-Shifā ʾ bi-ta ʿrīf
ḥuqūq al-mu ṣṭafā, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Bajāwī (Beirut: Dār
al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1984), 2:563ff. (Parts of this discussion in fact echo
al-Ghazālī’s account of love in the Revival so closely they can only be
thought of as a direct adaptation of it; see especially 2:579–581.) At
the same time, the author clearly presupposes the existence of such
attitudes in his reader and seems to think of his persuasive aim not so
much to generate them ab ovo as to deepen and develop them, as the
opening lines of 1:77 suggest (“You who love this noble Prophet … and
who are seeking to go beyond generalities to grasp the particulars of
his sublime status …”).
39. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2580.
40. Ibid.
41. On one level, al-Ghazālī theorises the virtues as simply different ways of mas-
tering the bodily appetites and attachments to worldly goods. This is reflected
in his description of the virtues and the vices as, respectively, “dispositions
of domination” (hayʾāt istilāʾiyya) and “dispositions of subservience” (hayʾāt
inqiyādiyya)—that is, relative to the appetites. The Scale of Action/Mīzān
al-ʿamal, ed. Sulaymān Dunyā (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1964), 204.
42. A more literal translation: “in describing him as courageous, generous,” etc.
 Notes 65
43. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2580.
44. Ibid, cf. 2585.
45. Kukkonen, “The Good, the Beautiful,” 87.
46. Al-Ghazālī has rather more to say on this topic in an earlier book
of the Revival, namely On Intimacy, Brotherhood and Companionship,
where he offers a related but not identical taxonomy of the different types
of love that human beings may attract (I ḥyāʾ, 5:931). The first type, intrin-
sic love, anticipates the discussion of beauty in On Love (ibid, 931–934).
Interestingly, in one passage al-Ghazālī appears to discount this as a form
of love “based [merely] on natural disposition and psychic appetite” (ḥubb
biʾl-ṭabʿ wa-shahwat al-nafs) which even non-believers may experience. It
is unclear from the context, however, whether this evaluation concerns
only the response to physical beauty (mentioned in the vicinity of this
remark) or also to moral beauty, thus declaring the human love based on
the latter inferior to the spiritual companionship that al-Ghazālī goes on
to describe as “love for and in God” (ḥubb liʾl-Lāh wa-fiʾl-Lāh), in which
love of other human beings derives from the relation they bear to God as
the primary object of love. If the latter, it would suggest that the intrinsic
love of moral beauty is deficient insofar as it makes no reference to God,
and that the best way of loving virtue is not for its own sake (under its
aspect as beautiful) but for the sake of God (under its aspect as loved
by God). Cf. e.g. the phrasing at ibid, 938: athmara ḥubba kulli man fīhi
ṣifa murḍiya ʿinda Allāhi min khuluq ḥasan, though this remark admits
of more than one reading. This focus—on evaluative objects as valued
or disvalued qua loved or hated by God—also dominates the perspec-
tive of the book On Meditation, though mainly apropos action. Taken
as an account of the best type of moral motivation (we should love the
virtues because God loves them), my sense is that this interpretation can
be harmonised with al-Ghazālī’s overall approach. Taken as an account
of moral ontology (they are in fact virtues because God loves them), it
seems more problematic, and it would have important implications for
the present discussion, especially for the issues raised in the next section;
but the evidence for it does not seem decisive.
47. Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment, §25,” in Phil-
osophical Investigations, ed. Peter M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 4th rev. edn).
48. Cf. George Orwell’s well-known epigram, as I read it: “At 50, everyone
has the face he deserves.”
49. Ian James Kidd, “Admiration, Attraction and the Aesthetics of Exemplar-
ity,” Journal of Moral Education 48 (2019), 373–374. See also his “Beauty,
Virtue, and Religious Exemplars,” Religious Studies 53 (2017), 171–181. His
account in turn builds on David E. Cooper’s discussion, e.g. in his “Beau-
tiful People, Beautiful Things,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008), 247–
260, in the context of a larger and rather radical conception of beauty. Kidd
does not directly address the limitations of this view taken as a general
account of the aesthetic experience of character, given that it is restricted
to exemplars with whom one has “personal” rather than “testimonial” or
“narrative” encounters, on his terms (“Admiration, Attraction,” 370–371).
50. Mīzān, 299.
66  Notes
51. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Holling-
dale (London: Penguin, 1990), 40.
52. This is the line suggested by Avicenna, for example, in “Risāla fiʾl-ʿishq,”
81–82. And see Rosenthal, “On Art and Aesthetics,” for some references
to the idea in wisdom literature, with an emphasis on its contestation.
53. Mīzān, 300. Al-Ghazālī’s specification of beauty further down (300–301)
introduces an extra layer of complexity, which I won’t try to grapple
with here.
54. See, respectively, Sara B. Algoe and Jonathan Haidt, “Witnessing Excel-
lence in Action: The ‘Other-Praising’ Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude,
and Admiration,” Journal of Positive Psychology 4 (2009), 105–127;
Jonathan Haidt, “Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality,”
in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived, ed. Corey
L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt (Washington, DC: American Psycho-
logical Association, 2003), 275–280; Kristján Kristjánsson, “Emotions
Targeting Moral Exemplarity: Making Sense of the Logical Geography
of Admiration, Emulation and Elevation,” Theory and Research in Edu-
cation 15 (2017), 20–37; Panos Paris, “The Empirical Case for Moral
Beauty,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2018), 642–656.
55. Compare Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of human nature as discussed
in my Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2016), Chapter 2, esp. 89–90. Taken together, in fact, all
the above suggests that we must regard al-Ghazālī as one of the most
important influences on the special brand of moral sentimentalism
developed by Ibn Taymiyya, which likewise drew the moral into close
connection with the aesthetic and was articulated as a form of ethi-
cal naturalism. For further comment on al-Ghazālī’s conception of
fi ṭra from a different direction, see Frank Griffel, “Al-Ghazālī’s Use
of “Original Human Disposition” (Fi ṭra) and Its Background in the
Teachings of al-Fārābī and Avicenna,” Muslim World 102 (2012), 1–32.
56. An alternative or complementary explanation is that the Revival is not
the type of work in which al-Ghazālī would confront such challenges;
see the discussion in Section 6.
57. On this point, see, briefly, my “Does al-Ghazālī Have a Theory of Vir-
tue?” As al-Ghazālī puts the point more generally in I ḥyāʾ, 13:2340, using
fa ḍīla in the sense of “value”: “the value of any given thing depends
on its utility for conducing to the happiness that consists in encounter-
ing God” (inna fa ḍīlat al-shayʾ bi-qadr ghināʾihi fiʾl-ifḍāʾ ilā saʿādat liqāʾ
Allāh). The question how these two explanatory views relate could take
interesting discussion.

Section 5
1. Put very briefly: his account of God’s virtues is overwhelmingly nega-
tive and rests on an analytical reduction of the virtues (in their entire
colourful rainbow) to two features, knowledge and power. Both moves
would seem to introduce a gulf between our reaction to God and our
ordinary reactions to human beauty of character.
2. I have especially in mind Paris, “On Form.”
3. “Mukhtaṣar,” 195 ff; 199: mayl al-nās ilaʾl-jamīl biʾl- ṭabʿ kabīr.
 Notes 67
4. See Rosenthal, “On Art and Aesthetics.”
5. Arent J. Wensinck’s view (La Pensée de Ghazzālī [Paris: Adrien-Mai-
sonneuve, 1940], 24ff) is approvingly echoed by Richard Walzer in The
Perfect State, 350–351; Van den Bergh makes the same assumption,
though apparently more from prejudice than from evidence, in his
rather patronising discussion in “The ‘Love of God’.” Vílchez also views
al-Ghazālī’s discussion as derivative (Aesthetics in Arabic Thought,
737ff) though his focus is not exclusively on philosophical influences.
6. “On Art and Aesthetics,” 12.
7. Mufradāt, 202 and 235–236, as quoted earlier.
8. For this point, and for al-Rāghib’s influence on al-Ghazālī, see Wilferd
Madelung, “Ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī und die Ethik al-Ġazālīs,” in
Islamwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten
Geburtstag, ed. Richard Gramlich (Steiner: Wiesbaden, 1974), 152–163;
Hans Daiber, “Griechische Ethik in islamischem Gewande: Das Beispiel
von Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī (11. Jh.),” in Historia Philosophiae Medii Aevi: Stu-
dien zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. Burkhard Mojsisch
and Olaf Pluta (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: Grüner, 1991), 1:181–192; Jules
Janssens, “Al-Ghazālī’s Mīzān al-ʿAmal: An Ethical Summa Based on Ibn
Sīnā and al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī,” in Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages:
Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation in Honour of Hans Daiber, ed.
Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 123–137; and Yasien
Mohamed in several pieces, including “The Ethical Philosophy of
al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī,” Journal of Islamic Studies 6 (1995), 51–75, and “The
Ethics of Education: al-Iṣfahānī’s al-Dharī ʿa as a Source of Inspiration for
al-Ghazālī’s Mīzān al-ʿAmal,” Muslim World 101 (2011), 633–657.
9. This would be the case even if we took the (contestable) view that Islamic
ethics just is Islamic law.
10. The Quintessence of the Principles of Law/Al-Musta ṣfā min ʿilm al-u ṣūl
(Būlāq: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, 1322 [1904]), 1:56, in the context of a
threefold classification of the meanings of the term ḥasan. Cf. Vasalou,
Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, 26–27.
11. Moderation in Belief/Al-Iqti ṣād fiʾl-iʿtiqād, ed. Ibrahim Agâh Çubukçu
and Hüseyin Atay (Ankara: Nur Matbaasi, 1962), 190.
12. For more detail on this aspect of Ashʿarite ethical thinking, and on
al-Ghazālī’s more specific contribution, see my Ibn Taymiyya’s Theolog-
ical Ethics, Chapter 3.
13. Musta ṣfā, 1:61; cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, 38–39.
14. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2575, as quoted earlier. Cf. the apposition of reason and nature
two lines down (“the inclination of sound nature and right reason,”
mayl al- ṭabʿ al-salīm waʾl-ʿaql al- ṣaḥī ḥ).
15. For more on the Muʿtazilite use of such empirical claims and on
al-Ghazālī’s and his fellow-Ashʿarites’ critique, see my Ibn Taymiyya’s
Theological Ethics, 38–39, 110–113.
16. It’s not incidental to note that the emphasis on the Prophet’s extensive
beneficence shapes the corresponding discussion in al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s
al-Shifāʾ bi-ta ʿrīf ḥuqūq al-mu ṣṭafā (2:579–581) which, as suggested
above, reads like a direct adaptation of the Revival.
17. See I ḥyāʾ, 10:1837–1838, and my Virtues of Greatness, 35–37, for some
context and discussion.
68  Notes
18. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my “Virtue and the Law in
al-Ghazālī’s Ethics.”
19. I ḥyāʾ, 14:2586.
20. Treatise of Human Nature, 477.
21. “Intrinsic value”? This characterisation might seem open to question
given what was said earlier concerning al-Ghazālī’s higher-level views
about virtue: a character trait is a virtue if it is a virtue in God, and for
moral virtues, if it is instrumental to the realisation of our intellectual
potentialities. Both of these views entail that the value of the virtues
exemplified by human beings is in fact relative on either one or both of
those levels. This description would appear to align the viewpoint of the
Revival rather more closely with the viewpoint of al-Ghazālī’s theological
and legal works. It would also suggest that ordinary judgements on the
virtues may be mistaken insofar as they take the virtues to be intrinsically
valuable (presumably al-Ghazālī would not consider that when ordinary
people perceive certain kinds of character as beautiful, their judgements
are grounded in an awareness, however inarticulate, of these higher-level
facts about what makes a character trait a virtue). There would then be an
ostensible analogy with the viewpoint expressed in al-Ghazālī’s theologi-
cal and legal works (to be outlined shortly in the main text) with reference
to ordinary judgements on certain classes of actions. Just as we may think
certain actions, such as lying, are intrinsically/absolutely bad because we
don’t grasp the psychological foundations of our evaluative responses
(namely, our egoistic drives), we may think certain traits are intrinsically
good because we don’t grasp the metaphysical foundations of the right
evaluative responses (and in both cases, mistakes on this meta-ethical
level translate into mistakes in the evaluation of substantive actions and
traits). Yet the analogy is ultimately not the strongest, as closer scrutiny
of this last framing would already show. In the main text, I will suggest
some additional reasons why I am sceptical of this attempt to reconcile
the two viewpoints (taking the al-Ghazālī of the Revival to be deliberately
limiting himself to epistemically dubious moral endoxa), but I am aware
the issue could take far more discussion and disentangling.
22. Musta ṣfā, 1:58; though it is worth noting that the Muʿtazilites, like the
al-Ghazālī of the Musta ṣfā, viewed acts, not states of character, as the
main object of moral concern.
23. Ibid, 1:56; cf. Iqti ṣād, 164. Compare briefly, apropos Ibn Taymiyya’s
related move, Vasalou, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, 42–43.
24. See Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh, The Philosopher
Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence From the Tenth Century, ed.
Bilal Orfali and Maurice A. Pomerantz, trans. Sophia Vasalou and
James E. Montgomery (New York: New York University Press, 2019),
1:212–219. Cf. Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought, 210–212.
25. Though even al-Ghazālī marks a certain sort of distinction in the Mod-
eration when he refers to the “aesthetic” application of ḥasan as “sen-
sory” or “physical” (al- ḥusn al-maḥsūs). Iqti ṣād, 164.
26. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, The Sufficiency in God’s Unity and Justice/al-Mughnī
f ī abwāb al-tawḥīd waʾl-ʿadl, vol. 6/1: al-Taʿdīl waʾl-tajwīr, ed. Aḥmad
Fuʾād al-Ahwānī (Cairo: al-Muʾassasa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma liʾl-Taʾlīf
waʾl-Tarjama waʾl-Ṭibāʿa waʾl-Nashr, 1962), 19–21. As ʿAbd al-Jabbār
 Notes 69
makes clear, from his perspective it is of secondary importance whether
the analysis of the terms he provides (ḥusn, qubḥ, etc.) constitutes an
accurate descriptive account of linguistic usage, as against of intelligi-
ble reality (the level of ma ʿnan); yet he nevertheless maintains that his
analysis does represent such an account. See especially the remark at
ibid, 25. For further comment on ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s definition of evil,
including his attempt to differentiate between ethical and aesthetic
judgements, see George F. Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of
ʿAbd al-Jabbār (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Chapter 4, especially
49–55. Interestingly, Hourani assumes the aesthetic meaning was pri-
mary and was transferred to ethical qualities at a secondary stage.
27. Taʿdīl, 25. Cf. Mānkdīm Shashdīw’s distinction between what is bad/
ugly “from the perspective of look and appearance” (min jihat al-marʾā
waʾl-manẓar) and “from the perspective of reason and wisdom” (min
jihat al-ʿaql waʾl- ḥikma) in [Ta ʿlīq] Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, ed. ʿAbd
al-Karīm ʿUthmān (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 1965), 505–506.

Section 6
1. For more context on this point, see my “Ethics as Medicine: Moral Ther-
apy, Expertise, and Practical Reasoning in al-Ghazālī’s Ethics,” Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie (2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2020-5006
2. For the above, see W. Montgomery Watt, “Al-Ghazālī,” in  Encyclo-
paedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E.
Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 23
August 2020: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0233. Cf.
the remarks in Watt, Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazālī (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 67–68. The Deliverer’s view
of philosophical ethics that Watt references is arguably more irenic
than he suggests. For some discussion, see Vasalou, Virtues of Great-
ness, 53–54, in the context of trying to resolve another apparent conflict
in al-Ghazālī’s expressed positions; Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue,
17–18; and more extensively, Taneli Kukkonen, “Al-Ghazālī on the Ori-
gins of Ethics,” Numen 63 (2016), 271–298. Another strategy for negoti-
ating observed conflicts is to take them as grounds for reappraising the
authenticity of certain of al-Ghazālī’s works, or certain parts of these
works. This strategy was also adopted by Watt apropos the Mīzān in
“The Authenticity of the Works Attributed to al-Ghazālī,” Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1/2 (1952), 38–40.
3. See, e.g., Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), especially the positioning statement on
p. 43. The point has been made with reference to al-Ghazālī’s ethics
more specifically by Garden in The First Islamic Reviver; cf. his “Revis-
iting al-Ghazālī’s Crisis Through his Scale for Action (Mizān al-ʿAmal),”
in Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī, vol. 1, ed. Georges
Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 207–228. This is also Sherif’s implicit
assumption in Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue.
4. See George F. Hourani, “A Revised Chronology of Ghazālī’s Writings,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984), 289–302.
70  Notes
5. Timothy J. Gianotti, Al-Ghazālī’s Unspeakable Doctrine of the Soul:
Unveiling the Esoteric Psychology and Eschatology of the Iḥyāʾ (Leiden:
Brill, 2001).
6. This styling of the question itself represents a fine instance of dust-
throwing given that little in the book evokes the Ashʿarite perspective
and much evokes the philosophical one, which al-Ghazālī does not even
entertain as a possible self-identification.
7. Mīzān, 405–409.
8. Gianotti, Al-Ghazālī’s Unspeakable Doctrine, 6.
9. Richard M. Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School (Durham, NC;
London: Duke University Press, 1994), 86, 87. I should note that this
basic methodological convergence leaves ample room for other disa-
greements between Gianotti and Frank.
10. I ḥyāʾ, 1:168; and see generally the discussion 163–171. Cf. Gianotti,
Al-Ghazālī’s Unspeakable Doctrine, 45–50; Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the
Ashʿarite School, Chapter 2 and passim.
11. Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School, 75. In terms of the three-
tiered scheme of the Scale (discussed in ibid, 96–97), Frank reads the
Moderation as belonging either to the first or the second tier (represent-
ing al-Ghazālī’s doctrine for scholastic disputation or public teaching);
ibid, 99.
12. Al-Ghazālī, to be sure, distinguishes between different levels of assent
to, and understanding of, the truth; but he remains adamant that these
different levels—exterior and interior, overt and covert (ẓāhir/bā ṭin,
ʿalin/sirr, jaliyy/khafiyy)—cannot be in conflict. See the discussion in
I ḥyāʾ, 1:171–180. As far as I can see, the fivefold taxonomy of esoteric
truths he provides in this context also furnishes no analytical tools that
would help us account for the apparent conflict we are considering,
though that could take longer discussion.
13. For some discussion of this point, see my Moral Agents and their Deserts,
Chapter 2.
14. Besides the point outlined next, there is a further consideration, which
introduces too many complexities to mention in the main text. The
epistemic demotion of al-Ghazālī’s theological works has usually been
proposed in the context of—and motivated by—a perceived conflict
between his expressed views, where his other views are aligned with the
intellectual paradigm of the philosophers (notably Avicenna). Yet what-
ever conflicts might be perceived in other areas, in the specific topic of
metaethics Ashʿarite theology had entered into a deep partnership with
Avicennan ideas, harnessing Avicenna’s account of widely accepted
propositions or endoxa (mashhūrāt) to serve the campaign against the
Muʿtazilite claim that moral qualities are objective and moral prop-
ositions are known by reason. (For more on this, see my Ibn Taymi-
yya’s Theological Ethics, esp. 58–65, 112–113; for a number of reasons,
I am unconvinced by Frank’s attempt to bring out the latent conflict
of al-Ghazālī’s account of ethics in the Moderation with traditional
Ashʿarite doctrine in Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School, 32–36.) In this
case, therefore, the motivation for this type of hermeneutic appears to be
lacking. At the same time, this will seem curious given the influence of
philosophical texts in shaping the very rationalist-objectivist perspective
 Notes 71
of al-Ghazālī’s virtue-centred works, which I have been describing as
conflicting with that of his kalām works. Buried here might be the seed
of some yet-unimagined “supercharged” interpretation.
15. Gianotti, Al-Ghazālī’s Unspeakable Doctrine, 32.
16. Kukkonen, “The Good, the Beautiful,” 99–100.
17. I ḥyāʾ, 8:1344, using the term qalb. The former knowledge belongs to the
science of disclosure, ʿilm al-mukāshafa (I ḥyāʾ, 1:91). Cf. I ḥyāʾ, 8:1406,
responding to a request that he clarify whether it is one devil or many
discrete ones that collude to entice one to discrete kinds of sin.
18. Musta ṣfā, 1:58. Al-Ghazālī names a second possible cause or founda-
tion, namely adherence to religious belief (al-tadayyun biʾl-sharāʾiʿ); but
at least at the stage of initial motivation, the two coincide.
19. See note 14 (this section) and references there. The term “veneer theory”
is associated with the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal in his writings
on morality.
20. I’m slightly simplifying, and there’s also a more complex story to be told
concerning Ibn Taymiyya’s relation to Ashʿarism, as I’ve argued in Ibn
Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, especially Chapter 3.
21. Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, 286. While I wholeheart-
edly agree with this sentiment, I am far less convinced of the interpreta-
tion of the Scale to which Griffel conjoins it; see ibid, 359, n. 45.
22. The quoted remark is from ibid, 278. Griffel’s emphasis on the disjunction
between the domains of metaphysical explanation and practical action
(where “commonly held assumptions” about causality, p. 285, may be
allowed to operate unchecked) may evoke al-Ghazālī’s earlier distinc-
tion between commonly held assumptions about ethics (mashhūrāt) and
their deeper foundations (mustanad). Might it thus be possible to rede-
ploy Griffel’s explanation to the latter case and use it to unlock its puzzle?
The analogy seems suggestive, but closer consideration would reveal too
many differences between the two cases to make it fruitful.
23. Abuʾl-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, Spotlights on the Confrontation of Deviance and
Innovation/Kitāb al-Lumaʿ fiʾl-radd ʿalā ahl al-zaygh waʾl-bidaʿ, ed. Ḥam-
mūda Ghurāba (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Miṣr, 1955), 117.
24. This is not meant to overlook the more expansive evaluative spectrum
to be found in both theological and legal works, such as the concept of
supererogation (tafa ḍḍul) in Muʿtazilite ethics, or the concept of dis-
couraged (makrūh) and recommended (mustaḥabb) actions in the con-
text of law. The latter evaluations, in particular, have sometimes been
described as testaments to the aspirational aspect of the sharī ʿa, where
its concern shades out of the legal and into the ethical and it seeks to
promote, in Mohammad Hashim Kamali’s words, “moral virtues and
the attainment of excellence in conduct” (Shari’ah Law: An Introduction
[Oxford: Oneworld, 2008], 18).
25. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1981, 7th edn), 105.
26. Kosman, “Beauty and the Good,” 356.
27. Carl Ernst’s implicit distinction between two different ways of regarding the
Prophet—as an object of obedience, and as an object of attraction, the lat-
ter particularly pronounced in Sufi literature—seems especially suggestive
in pointing to this diremption of paradigms, one defined by obedience and
72  Notes
a morality of law-like command, the other by admiration and a morality of
beautiful example. See his “Muḥammad as the Pole of Existence,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Muḥammad, ed. Jonathan E. Brockopp (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 129–132, for discussion.
The contrast, again, cannot be drawn too sharply. Inter alia, Sufis typically
emphasised the importance of adherence to the sharī ʿa taken as a system
of rules. And the Prophet’s personal example also has legislative force and
serves as the source of law-like commands. Unsurprisingly, these two para-
digms coexist in important representatives of the textual tradition; al-Qāḍī
ʿIyāḍ’s al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-muṣṭafā is again a good example, the
emphasis on the human obligation of loving the Prophet sharing its space
in the book with the emphasis on the obligation of obeying him.
28. This concern registers strongly in the Maqṣad, which develops the idea
of imitating God’s attributes (or acquiring His beautiful names) against
a sharp distinction between the sense in which these attributes are pred-
icated of God and the sense in which they apply to and can be realised
by human beings. This points to a fundamental tension in the Maqṣad
about how to reconcile God’s immanence and transcendence, or his com-
parability and incomparability. For a deeper meditation on this theme,
see Yousef Casewit, “Al-Ghazālī’s Virtue Ethical Theory of the Divine
Names: The Theological Underpinnings of the Doctrine of Takhalluq in
al-Maqṣad al-Asnā,” Journal of Islamic Ethics 4 (2020), 155–200.
29. See my brief remarks in Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, 47–48.
Though Ibn Taymiyya, for his part, focuses on action rather than states
of character in developing his view; and the wheels it greases more
immediately, as I suggest, concern Ibn Taymiyya’s assertion of the nat-
ural human love for the good.
30. See, for example, the discussion in Iqti ṣād, 192–195; cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s
Theological Ethics, 156–157 and references there.
31. I ḥyāʾ, 8:1426. Al-Ghazālī’s view of this conduciveness, it is true, builds
on a claim about the serviceability of moral to intellectual virtue (hence
loving cognition of God) that he would appear to have absorbed from the
Greek philosophical tradition, where it was supposedly developed with-
out access to religious scripture. Perhaps the account he provides in the
Deliverer, where he reverses the explanatory order by claiming it was the
philosophers who derived their ethical insights from mystics and religious
men (The Deliverer From Error/Al-Munqidh min al- ḍalāl, ed. Jamīl Ṣalībā
and Kāmil ʿAyyād [Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1967], 86), should here be see-
ing as supplying the missing piece and plugging the remaining gap.
32. This point is central, for example, to the account of admiration on
which Linda T. Zagzebski builds her moral theory in Exemplarist
Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), though she
approaches the idea of “cognitive processing” on rather more specific
terms. Compare Kristján Kristjánsson’s view as discussed in Sophia
Vasalou, “Admiration, Emulation, and the Description of Character,”
Journal of Aesthetic Education 54 (2020), 47–69.
33. “At least in part,” because al-Ghazālī holds that possession of the vir-
tues is also a means to this-worldly happiness, its value thus in principle
transparent even within a naturalistic framework free from such meta-
physical baggage. See Mīzān, 190–193.
 Notes 73
Section 7
1. Kosman, “Beauty and the Good,” 353. Cf. Charles Kahn: besides its aes-
thetic overtones, the pair kalon-aischron “refers primarily to the realm
of honour and respect, social approval and disapproval” (“Pre-Platonic
Ethics,” Ethics—Companions to Ancient Thought: 4, ed. Stephen Ever-
son [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 27).
2. For all the above, see Kosman, “Beauty and the Good,” 353–355.
3. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, LA: University of
California Press, 1993), 78 and 82; the other may not be a particular
individual or the representative of a particular social group but instead
identified in ethical terms as an idealised and generalised observer
“whose reactions I would respect” (ibid, 81–84). Cf. Peter Hacker:
“the conceptual iconography of feeling ashamed is the eye of others”
(“Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy
41 [2017], 219).
4. Hacker, “Shame, Embarrassment,” 203, rehearsing an understanding
of the distinction between shame and guilt cultures popularised by the
anthropologist Ruth Benedict.
5. This is a theme of my Virtues of Greatness, which casts a spotlight on
the preservation and renegotiation of a specific set of pre-Islamic Arab
values, as represented by the heroic virtue of greatness of spirit (ʿiẓam/
bu ʿd al-himma). See especially 108ff.
6. Books 28 and 29 of the Revival: On the Condemnation of Status and Dis-
simulation, and On the Condemnation of Pride and Conceit.
7. Hacker, “Shame, Embarrassment,” 202.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Holling-
dale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67, 68.
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Index

ʿAbd al-Jabbār, on the meanings of causality 47

the term qabī ḥ 38–39 character: as an aesthetic object 2–3,
Adamson, Peter 11 8–9, 11–12; bodily manifestation
admiration 8, 29, 49, 51, 54, 71n27; of 26–28; definition of 14; relation
narratives and the evocation of 23 to action 34–55
aesthetic enjoyment: legitimacy of conceit 54
5–7 courage 21
aesthetics in the Islamic tradition 5
aesthetic response: as disinterested desert 38
19–20; variable versus universal dialectical theology (kalām) 10, 13,
36–39 32, 37, 45, 48; epistemic status
ancient philosophy connection and function of 43–44; evaluative
between ethics and aesthetics 1, 8–9 paradigm compared with virtue
Aristotle 6, 9, 10, 25, 28, 49, 50 literature 46–50
art 7 dignity 11
Al-Ashʿarī, Abuʾl-Ḥasan 48 doctrine of discourse 42–47
Ashʿarites 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44,
70n14; on applicability of obliga- egoism 33, 34, 46
tion to God 48–49; view of ethics elevation 28
32–33, 45–46 emulation 28
Avicenna 11, 12, 13, 31, 44, 46, 70n14 endoxa see widely accepted
awe 15, 28 propositions
Ernst, Carl 71n27
beauty: as an object of intrinsic ethical term: aesthetic application of
love 19–29; bodily 1, 21, 27; inner 9–12, 36–40; theologians’ defini-
versus outer 11–12, 14, 21, 26–28; tions of 32–33, 38–39, 48, 60n7
intelligible versus sensory 11, 26, evaluative paradigm in theological
30; relation to perfection 11–12, versus virtue literature 49–50
15, 16, 22, 54; semantic range of
Arabic terms for 9–12, 21–22, 32, Al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr 10, 11–12, 13, 31
37–39, 60n7; virtue as an object of forgiveness 12
2–3, 11–12, 21–29 form: geometrical 11; inner versus
beneficence, as an object of love outer 11, 14, 21–22, 25, 26–28, 39;
18, 25 of the soul 11
Brontë, Charlotte 27 Frank, Richard 43–44
Buddha 26 friends 26
 Index 81
Galen 10, 11, 30 Jane Eyre 2, 26
Gaut, Berys 2 Jesus Christ 26
generosity 21
Al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid: account kalon 1, 9, 10, 49
of ethics in theological and legal Kamali, Mohammad Hashim
works 32–34, 45–46; autobiogra- 77n24
phy 42; chronology of works on Kant, Immanuel 8, 9, 12, 20
ethics 42; consistency of view- Khālid ibn al-Walīd 25
points on ethics 31–51; pedagog- Kidd, Ian 27
ical aims of the Revival 44–46; Kosman, Aryeh 2, 49, 52, 53
view of dialectical theology Kristjánsson, Kristján 28
43–44 Kukkonen, Taneli 25, 45
Gianotti, Timothy 42–43, 45
God: beauty of 3, 11–12, 15–17, law ( fiqh) 45
31; freedom from obligation 44, legal theory 13, 32, 44
48–49; imitation of 15–16, 49, love: different forms of 17–19, 65n46;
72n28; as the most appropriate intrinsic or disinterested 19–29,
object of love 18; nature as expres- 33–34, 47, 65n46; rational basis
sive of God’s attributes 6–7; as the of 22–23; role of narratives in
standard of virtue 15–16, 29, 50, evoking 23–25; virtue as an object
51, 68n21 of 22–29, 35
Griffel, Frank 47 lying 68n21
guilt culture 55
magnanimity 11–12
Hacker, Peter 55 Mānkdīm Shashdīw 69n27
hadith 23 McGinn, Colin 2
Haidt, Jonathan 28 meta-ethics 13, 32
ḥasan/ ḥusn 31; role in theological Miskawayh, Abū ʿAlī 13, 37
literature 10, 32, 37–39; moral beauty, contemporary
semantic range 9–10, 32, 37–39, accounts of 2, 27
60n7 morality of attraction versus moral-
Ḥātim al-Ṭāʾī 25 ity of right 49–50
honour 34, 52, 53, 54, 55 moral motivation 14–16, 33, 53
human constitution ( fi ṭra) 29 moral sentimentalism 66n55
human nature 17, 20, 22, 29, 32, 33, Muḥammad 71n27; as an object of
36–37, 51 love 22, 23, 35
Hume, David 2–3, 9, 35 Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, definition of
humoural mixture 37 jamāl 12
Hutcheson, Francis 9 music 7
Muʿtazilites 35, 36, 43, 45, 46, 50,
Ibn Rushd 41 66n7, 70n14; view of ethics 32, 33,
Ibn Sīnā see Avicenna 34, 38–39
Ibn Taymiyya 46, 50, 66n55
Ibn Ṭufayl 41, 53 narratives 23–26
Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ 31 natural disposition (ṭabʿ) 17, 20, 22,
Irwin, Terence 9 32, 33, 36
nature, as an aesthetic object 5–7,
jamīl/jamāl: role in virtue literature 19–20
10–11; semantic range 9–10, 12, Neoplatonists 1, 3, 15, 30
21–22, 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 56
82  Index
obligation 32, 44, 48, 49, 50 soul 11, 14, 24, 27, 37, 42, 45
sublime 8, 12
Paris, Panos 2, 28 Sufism 3, 5, 42, 43
patience 12
Plato 1, 3, 17, 49, 50, 52, 53 Al-Tawḥīdī, Abū Ḥayyān 37
Plotinus 3, 11, 30 temperance 21
Plutarch 23
pride 54 virtue: beauty of 2–3, 11–12, 21–29;
punishment 50 fallibility of natural judgements
about 29, 51, 68n21; as imitation
Qurʾan 12, 25 of God 15–16; instrumental sta-
tus of moral 29, 72n31; intrinsic
Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī: on the con- versus relative value of 68n21;
cept of ḥusn 31; on the concept of natural human love of 22–29,
jamāl 10, 12 33–34, 35; otherworldly conse-
reason 17, 32–33, 38–39, 41, 46, 48, 49 quences 50
Rosenthal, Franz 31, 60n5
Watt, Montgomery 42
Schopenhauer, Arthur 8, 9, 20 widely accepted propositions (mash-
Scruton, Roger 20 hūrāt) 43, 45–46, 68n21, 70n14,
shame 52–55 71n22
shame culture 53–55 Williams, Bernard 53–54
sharī ʿa 48, 71n24, 72n27 wisdom literature 27, 31
Al-Ṣiddīq, Abū Bakr 22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 27
Sidgwick, Henry 49 wonder 7, 15
Smith, Adam 9
Socrates 17, 26 Zangwill, Nick 21