Assistant Professor of Religion Ken Garden finally had clear skies this past Friday - after several cancellations due to snowstorms - to give his lecture on the role of medieval Persian scholar Al-Ghazali in the stanched Islamic modernity. Last week was a salient time, though, as his favorite professor, Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa of the University of Chicago, who inspired the talk, passed away the previous Wednesday.
In last week's installment of the Experimental College's Taste of Tufts weekly lecture series, Garden began his talk about Al-Ghazali with a dedication to Mustafa.
During his time at the University of Chicago, Garden argued with Mustafa over the legacy of Al-Ghazali's criticism of philosophers of the 11th century.
My professor, Farouk, really did feel that because of Al-Ghazali, scientific knowledge of his age ... ground to a halt," he said.
According to Garden, many thinkers - European and Arab alike - have come to this conclusion. Mustafa argued that the Arab world was on track to reach modernity, but did not because of Al-Ghazali, Garden said. He added that the argument is held together by the fact that philosophy was the science of the time, very different from how we view it today.
Garden started by introducing Al-Ghazali and his text "The Deliverer from Error," in which Al-Ghazali tells of his lifelong search for a set of criteria that would provide absolute truth.
"In [Al-Ghazali's] day, he said there were four schools of thought that promised this [knowledge]
