Abstract:
“Naive imagination is like a dark glass that prevent the shining lights entering
the heart, but when is ripe enough become a clear glass that points those lights.”
(Ghazali, the Niche of Lights, P.73)
Iranian philosopher and educator, Abu Hamid Ghazali (1058-1111 A.D.) is the
author of more than seventy books and essays on philosophy, education,
mysticism, ethics, jurisprudence and dialectical theology. Throughout his
works, one can easily observe that among the tools of acquiring knowledge
(i.e., the senses, the imagination, and the intellect), imagination has become
subject of special attention due to its capacity in recalling, analyzing, and
synthesizing pre-acquired images, concepts and meanings and creating new
and noble ones. Because of his unequivocal attention to imagination, instead of
intellect, and the great impact imaginative thinking has had on Islamic
philosophy of his times, some critics have maintained that “Islam has turned
against science in twelfth century.”
This article consists of two parts. The first part deals about Ghazali’s
perspective the place of imaginative faculty among the other faculties; the
external faculties (i.e. the senses), the internal faculties (i.e. common-sense,
imagery, memory, estimation), and the intellect and hence; it is observed that
the faculty of imagination itself is a part of the internal faculties and links the
external faculties with the intellect as well as comprehensive and continuous
interaction with other internal faculties. Upon defining imagination, tasks and
types associated with it, its priority and superiority over the intellect, the
relationship between (1) the internal senses and the imagination and (2) the
imagination and the intellect are addressed. In the second part, the authors
follow the practical implications of such imaginative thought in Ghazali’s
teaching approach. To do so, and because of the comparative analysis pursued
in the article (i.e., comparing Ghazali with contemporary western educational
thinker Kieran Egan) about children’s education, we concentrated on the
“mythic understanding” that Egan has proposed for these ages and then,
contrasted it with Ghazali’s works. The results show that as Egan, but not in
such a complete and detailed form, Ghazali considered the elements of play,
story, binary opposites, rhyme, rhythm, images, gossip, mystery, and
metaphor in his approach. But there are no clear and sufficient evidence for
other elements (i.e., joke and humor) in Ghazali’s teaching approach.