Al-Ghazālī and the Ideal of Godlikeness

The idea that improving our character requires modelling ourselves on another will seem natural to many. But what might it mean to take God as a model for virtue? This book investigates how Muslim thinkers developed this idea against a rich backdrop of historical reflection on the topic and how one particular intellectual, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, shaped the conversation. The idea that becoming virtuous means becoming like God has a long history. It was a calling card of Plato's philosophy and popular among many of the ancient philosophical schools. In the Islamic world, it assumed a vivid form at the hands of Sufi thinkers who took the beautiful names of God as the headline of a project of self-transformation. God's beautiful names aren't just objects for abstract understanding; they represent moral and spiritual ideals. Moved by both philosophical and Sufi inspirations, al-Ghazālī casts the idea in a distinctive form which lets us into the sources of its fascination--and to the welter of questions it provokes. What, for example, does it even mean to ascribe virtues to God, given how closely the virtues seem to be tied to human limitations? Does the imitation of God set an achievable standard-and given the risks of aiming for it, should we even try? Drawing on a range of broader perspectives on virtue, character education, and the role of exemplars, this book works through such questions and places al-Ghazālī at the heart of an unfolding conversation.

Sophia Vasalou studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham. Her published works include Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite Ethics (2008, winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award for Middle Eastern Studies in 2009), Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (2013), Wonder: A Grammar (2015), Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics (2016), and Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition (2019).