Logical Treatises of al-Ghazālī

Josef Waleed Meri’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to human interaction across diverse cultural, geographical, and socio-political contexts, examining social cohesion, pluralism, and coexistence, including questions of identity, belonging, community, and ritual. He is General Editor of the updated edition of Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2017) and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Muslim–Jewish Relations (2016), as well as author of The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (2002). He has taught in Cambridge, Munich, and Doha, received the Goldziher Prize in Jewish–Muslim Relations in 2014, and is a Senior Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

"For the first time in a single annotated English volume, J. W. Meri brings together al-Ghazālī's three logical treatises — Miʿyār al-ʿIlm (The Standard of Knowledge), al-Qisṭās al-Mustaqīm (The Correct Balance), and al-Maʿārif al-ʿAqliyya (Intellectual Insights) — the works in which Islam's most consequential medieval thinker forged the Greek logical inheritance into an instrument of Muslim theology, philosophy and jurisprudence. This masterful translation, with its unified introduction, consolidated glossary, and full scholarly apparatus, reveals al-Ghazālī's boldest wager: that reason, properly disciplined, could serve revelation without supplanting it. The result reshaped the course of Sunni intellectual life."Ebrahim Moosa, Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame and author of Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsNote on Transliteration and TranslationNote on the Translation and the EditionsList of Abbreviations1. Introduction: Al-Ghazālī and the Science of Logic2. The Standard of Knowledge (Miʿyār al-ʿIlm)Book One: On the Premises of the SyllogismBook Two: The Syllogism (Kitāb al-Qiyās)Book Three: Definitions (al-Ḥudūd)Book Four: The Divisions of Existence and Its Determinations3. The Correct Balance (al-Qisṭās al-Mustaqīm)4. Intellectual Insights (al-Maʿārif al-ʿAqliyya)Part One — On Reason and what it depends uponPart Two — On Speech (al-kalām) and the Speaker (al-mutakallim)Part Three — On Speech-utterance (al-qawl)Part Four — On Writing (al-kitāba)Part Five — On the Object Pursued (al-gharaḍ al-maṭlūb), in Five ChaptersConclusion of the BookGlossaryBibliographyIndex