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Al-Ghazali’s Hermeneutics and Phenomenology Muhammad Kamal Abstract: Professor Kamal approaches the issue of how to correctly understand a sacred text through an examination of the eleventh-century Persian philosopher al-Ghazali’s guidelines for understanding the Qur’an. Al-Ghazali advocated reading the Qur’an with devotion and with an open mind that is free of prejudgments learned from traditional exigeses of philosophical schools. Professor Kamal suggests similarities between al-Ghazali’s hermeneutic and aspects of several European philosophies, especially to Husserl’s phenomenology. This article appeared in Religion East & West, Issue 4, June 2004.

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n the study of Islamic hermeneutics, the question whether the meaning of the Qur’an is clear, or else can only be understood via the methodology of a tradition, highlights two different points of view. The first holds that the Qur’an possesses clarity and that a reader can gain direct access to its meaning without relying on pregiven judgments and commentaries. The second is that the revelation testified to in the Qur’an cannot be correctly understood without the aid of pregiven exegeses, that is, the interpretations and commentaries that our predecessors have left us. These two points of view occupy distinct hermeneutic positions. The former insists on the sufficiency of the Qur’an and the immediacy of its meaning when it is read without presuppositions. The latter, in stressing the lack of clarity, relies on exegesis provided by tradition. This paper examines the first of these hermeneutic positions as developed by al-Ghazali, the great Sufi theologian (1058–1111). It also explores the similarity between al-Ghazali’s hermeneutic position and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) with regard to understanding the meaning of a text. Whatever precise definition may be given to the Qur’an, Muslims agree in considering it a text that was not written by a human being, as a novel or philosophical text. It was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad orally over a period of almost twenty-two years (from 610 to 632) and

Issue 10, October 2010

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