Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/220



The formation of an orthodox scholasticism within the Muslim church appears as a development spread over the 4th–5th centuries of the Hijra (10–11 cent. A.D.), and is in three strata associated with the three leaders, al-Ash'ari, al-Baqilani, and al-Ghazali. Such a development, of course, is principally of interest for the internal history of Islam and the evolution of Muslim theology, but it had its influence also on the transmission of Arabic thought to Latin Christendom in two ways: (i.) directly, in that al-Ghazali was established as one of the great Arabic authorities when the Latins began to study the interpreters of Aristotle, and his teaching is quoted by St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic writers; and (ii.) indirectly, because a considerable part of the work of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) takes the form of controversy against the followers of al-Ghazali; his Destruction of the Destruction, for example, is a refutation of al-Ghazali's Destruction of the Philosophers. It thus becomes imperative to know something about the position and teaching of al-Ghazali and the influences which prepared the way for his work.