An Analysis of Ghazālī’s Viewpoint on Revelatoriness of Logics

Ghazālī is one of the greatest theologians who have believed in a revelatory origin for logics. He would consider God as the first Master, the Gabriel as the second Master, and the Holy Prophet as the third Master. Ghazālī’s most important innovation in the science of logics is his extraction of logical deductions from the Holy Qur’an, which he has combined with doctrinal (uṣūlī) and Islamic examples and presented in his Al-Qisṭās al-Mustaqīm (The Just Balance). From Ghazālī’s point of view, the Holy Qur’an is pure light and is called so because it consists of logical standards. The Holy Qur’an contains all the truths of the world in a succinct and implied form. He has maintained a profound relation between logics and the Qur’anic doctrines through reference of logical standards to five scales of the Holy Qur’an. He has used legal, jurisprudential, and theological terms to be replaced with Greek terminology. This relation is as follows: balance scale conforms to “categorical conjunction syllogism”, correlation scale to “exceptive conjunctive syllogism”, and reciprocal enmity (ta‘ānnud) scale to “exceptive disjunctive syllogism”. Balance scale is in turn of three types: major scale (first form), middle scale (second form), and minor scale (third form), which are totally summed up to five instances. The outcome of Ghazālī’s theory is that he has replaced logic for Imamate and stressed that given the existence of logic, there is no need for the Infallible Imam. In this article, we have undertaken to conform these standards to logical syllogism.