A couple of the pseudo-scientists who are currently visiting this site got me thinking about Al-Ghazali]
When the Muslims started interpreting Aristotle’s works, that they had sitting around for a thousand years, they sowed the seeds of the scientific revolution. But that scared the crap out of some theologians and they wrote stuff like “The Incoherence of Philosophy”. Maybe it was sophisticated in it’s time, but to me, it boils down to an argument that you can’t prove anything to 100% certainty. Worse, he goes on to delineate belief in Allah as something that you come to humbly, with the knowledge that you can’t know everything but God does, and science is something that you do because you think you’re smarter than Allah and you are only interested in your own self-aggrandizement.
I haven’t read his works in detail, but I’ve never heard of how he deals with the person who approaches learning in a humble manner. He is not against learning or discovery using logic, but it seems you first have to prostrate yourself to Allah, say you’ll never approach his greatness, then you’re ready to go to school. This allows Al-Ghazali to assert that apostasy and the Qur’an are untouchable by scholars. This is similar to what happened when these Aristotelian ideas were passed on to Europe and Aquinas and Catholics shut down their schools in 1277.
It is also very similar to how anti-AGW, anti-vaccine, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, historical revisionists and racists speak.