MUAMMER İSKENDEROĞLU KHOJAZĀDA’S TAHĀFUT AL-FALĀSIFAH: A CRITICAL EVALUATION 1. Introduction: Tahāfut tradition From Ghazālī to Khojazāda With the beginning of the translation movement and the emergence of Greek style philosophy in the Islamic world, opposition to this style of think- ing began to appear amongst Muslim groups, in particular the theologians. However, before Ghazālī, criticism of philosophy was not a primary goal for mainstream Muslim theologians who mainly concentrated on the criticism and rejection of the views of non-Muslim religious groups and the views of what they considered as heretical Muslim groups. It may be said that with Ghazālī’s (d.1111) Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, for the first time the philosophers became the main target of the theologians. After Ghazālī, a number of works were written either with the same title as Tahāfut al-Falāsifah or with other titles such as al-Muṣāra‛at al-Falāsifah, for the purpose of criticising Mus- lim philosophers. So Ghazālī with his Tahāfut can be considered the initiator of this tradition. As he says in the introduction, Ghazālī’s initial aim in the Tahāfut was to show the inconsistencies of the philosophers who adopted Aristotle as their leader. In particular, he challenged the Muslim philoso- phers, Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, who followed Aristotle and he attacked a number of their philosophical theories. Most of the theories which Ghazālī opposed are related to their metaphysics. His aim was to refute the theories of the philosophers, not to establish his own and in his pursuit, he did not hesitate to defend some theories simply for the sake of winning the argument. More- over, in the end Ghazālī not only argued that contrary to what they claim, the philosophers could not prove their theories, but also determined that three of their theories, namely their assertion of the eternity of the world, their denial of God’s knowledge of particulars and their denial of bodily resurrection, were against the principles of religion, and thus he charged the Muslim phi- losophers with unbelief 1 . A response to Ghazālī’s Tahāfut came from the western part of Muslim world: Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) wrote his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut and argued that in relation to the issues discussed in the Tahāfut, neither the arguments of the theologians nor the arguments of the philosophers were sufficient to reach ________________ 1. Ghazālī, Abū Hāmid, Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, New edition and translation by Michael E. Marmura as The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1997, 4, 7-8, 226-227.