Imam Ghazzali, Kalam and certainty

[akabirofdeoband]

Assalaamu Alaikum

If kalam is the root to certainty and tawfique is just having the open ness to accept rationality,
WHy is it that in Al munqidh , Imam ghazzali(ra) states that he found certainty through the path of the sufis?

[akabirofdeoband]

This is what abdal hakim murad says


We might begin by saying that theology is the most ambitious and fruitful of disciplines because it is all about the successful squaring of circles. Most obviously, it seeks to capture, in the limited net of human language, something of the mystery of an infinite God.

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The most recurrent theme of Islamic architecture has been the dome surmounting the cube. Between the two there are complex arrangements of arabesques and pendentives. Religion is worth having because, drawing on the infinite and miraculous power of God, it can turn a circle into a square in a way that delights the eye. Through logic and definition the theologian seeks to show how the infinite engages with the finite. Imam al-Ghazali, and our tradition generally, came to the conclusion that the Sufi does the job more elegantly, while not putting the theologian out of a job. But Sufism also, as Iqbal and the consensus of Muslim theologians in the West have seen, demonstrates other virtues. Because it has been the instrument whereby Islam has been embedded in the divergent cultures of the rainbow that is the traditional Islamic world, we may suppose that it represents the best instrument available for attempting a ‘dissenting’ Muslim embedding within today’s inexorable global reality. It insists on the acquisition of compassion and wisdom as a precondition for the exercise of ijtihad, or of any other mode of knowing. Its emphasis on the potential grandeur of man’s condition, of the one who was ‘taught all the Names’, makes it more humane than any secular humanism. In short, its recognition of the limitations of rational attempts to square the circle of speaking of the metaphysical and in justifying virtue, can bring us to real, rather than illusory, enlightenment, to a true ishraq. This is because there is only one ‘Light of the heavens and the earth.’ (24:35) S

[akabirofdeoband]

In another place he says

AHM: Imam al-Ghazali's significance is manifold. He not only understood philosophy, but he showed the dangerously speculative nature of its basic premises in a way which anticipates much modern positivism. This awareness led him to develop a Muslim epistemology rooted in 'tasting' (dhawq), i.e. the illuminative fruits of systematic and divinely-assisted introspection, as the only sure path to knowledge. This makes him a figure of profound and immediate relevance to Westerners of my generation who often feel that post-modernism and the notion of the 'equality of all discourse' have thrown humanity into what is in effect, despite all the information cascading from the universities and science laboratories, a state of ideologically rigorous ignorance. We are now grasping what Ghazali and his school were explaining nine hundred years ago: no universal statements about the world or the human condition can be reached by purely ratiocinative or inductive methods, because these cannot transcend the material context of the world in which they are framed. Ghazali, in short, through his manifesto the Ihya, offers the only intellectually rigorous escape from the trap of postmodernity.

[habibati]

Don't know if this helps but:

Imam al-Ghazali says that at his time, the mutakallimun were fighting the innovative beliefs that had arised but, "in so doing they relied on premises which they took over from their adversaries being compelled to admit them either by uncritical acceptance, or because of the Community's consensus, or by simple acceptance deriving from the Quran and Sunnah." and that they focused too much on criticizing the idea of the enemy and therefore he didn't find kalam satisfactory, meaning he found it too defensive in nature.