Faculty Colloquium - Ken Garden on "The Augustine of Islam?" (Al-Ghazālī)
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
On April 10, 2018, Bard College Berlin will host Ken Garden (Tufts University) for a talk on "The Augustine of Islam? Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and his Deliverer from Error" in the frame of the "Faculty Colloquium Series."
Abu Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī became one of the best known and widely read Muslim religious thinkers in the West, not because of his seminal works in Islamic religious sciences, but because of his short autobiographical work, the Deliverer from Error. The understanding of al-Ghazālī that emerged from this book was distorted both by the misperceptions of Western readers and misleading elements of the Deliverer put there by its author, whose aims were apologetic rather than autobiographical. This talk will offer a contextualized reading of the Deliverer, but also ask about the desires of its Western readers that led them to misunderstand it.
Ken Garden is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Tufts University. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford, 2014).
Email: [email protected]