The Whatness and the Whyness of Interpretation of Religious Texts from Ghazali's Perspective

Correct perception of the religious resources and texts has always been the main and permanent concern of the Islamic researchers and they have applied certain methods for correct perception of the religious texts. One of the important methods in this field is “interpretation”. In his own two intellectual periods, Ghazali encounters the issue of interpretation by two perspectives. In the first period, like other Islamic scholars, he believes interpretation is the remote meaning of words and only the ambiguous verses are interpretable; however, by accepting the mystical approach in the final period of his life, he sees interpretation as a real and external issue; accordingly, all verses of the Quran including clear and ambiguous ones are interpretable. In methodology of text understanding from the late Ghazali’s viewpoint we realize that by adopting a certain approach in interpretation, he has been able to propose a modern pattern based on which others would also be able to take steps in this path and achieve a systemic understanding of the religious texts. Thinkers such as Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, and Feiz Kashani have enjoyed his research model in text understanding. In addition to explaining the mentioned model with an analytic approach, this study deals with necessity, importance and whyness of using this method from Ghazali’s viewpoint.