Father Of Western Philosophy

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's was one of the greatest Islamic Jurists, theologians and mystical thinkers whose contributions to religious thought influenced not only the Islamic world but also many western thinkers after him.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was an important inflection point in human philosophy. Roughly 1000 years ago, he was instrumental in introducing Aristotle and Plato to the Islamic world. He made several improvements on the work of the previous philosophers and had a lasting impact on western philosophy. However, 500 years before the “cult of reason” swept the west, he saw the potential for a clash between rationalism and mysticism. Soon the Islamic rationalists were hard at work exterminating all traces of revealed authority by making faith subordinate to reason, while the blind faithful attacked the very core of this new threat by attempting to exterminate reason.

al-Ghazali was one of the first to use reason in service of religious doctrine, and the most honest. In comparison, the attempts of Aquinas and Pascal seem cheap and deceptive. But Ghazali also realized the futility of making faith subordinate to reason, as well as the futility of making reason subordinate to faith. He saw both parties in the reason vs. faith debate as being misguided -- the two should enrich one another, not obliterate one another. Through mastery of both systems, he argued that blind faith in reason is just as bankrupt as blind faith in revealed authority. He made the religious dogmatists just as nervous as the blind rationalists. During his life, he witnessed the birth of the strain of theocratic philosophy that led to the assassains and predated modern Islamists, and endured threats on his life from these fundamentalists. He was utimately able to see these extremists brought into check and his more balanced approach prevailed for several hundred years. It's only in recent years that Maududi and Qutb succeeded in reviving the Islamist political ideology of the revealed authority dogmatists.

There are several current theories about what the west should do in order to “save” the Arab world from the grip of the Islamists (he would call Batinists). Popular proposals include imposition of western values of liberty, democracy, free markets, scientific inquiry, and secularism. The memes competing for supremacy in the world today look remarkably like the “four doctrines“ which Ghazali described competing in his day; reading his writings it is amazing to note how little has changed. Ghazali's felt that spiritual enlightenment is a very personal thing which must be gained through experience, and cannot be taught, indoctrinated, or imposed. He predicted that true enlightenment is impossible in conditions of social strife and upheaval, when indoctrination and propaganda take precedence, and saw a function of government as a mechanism to provide the stability and framework necessary for individuals to find spiritual enlightenment for themselves (the opposite of sharia, which seeks to impose, but also not a “cult of liberty”, which is its own dogma). This balanced “Zhong Yong” philosophy could seem indecisive in a world of absolutes, but I think it's closest to what we really want.
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Understanding Revolution?

Wikipdia's brief definition is a good place to begin:

A revolution is a relatively sudden and absolutely drastic change. This may be a change in the social or political institutions over a relatively short period of time, or a major change in its culture or economy. Some revolutions are led by the majority of the populace of a nation, others by a small band of revolutionaries.

Political revolutions are often characterised by violence, and vast changes in power structures that can often result in further, institutionalised, violence, as in the Russian and French revolutions (with the "Purges" and "the Terror", respectively). A political revolution is the forcible replacement of one set of rulers with another (as happened in France and Russia), while a social revolution is the fundamental change in the social structure of a society, such as the Protestant Reformation or the Renaissance. However, blurring the line between these two categories, most political revolutions wish to carry out social revolutions, and they have basic philosophical or social underpinnings which drive them. The most common revolutions with such underpinnings in the modern world have been liberal revolutions and communist revolutions. In contrast, a coup d'état often seeks to change nothing more than the current ruler.

Some political philosophers regard revolutions as the means of achieving their goals. Most anarchists advocate social revolution as the means of breaking down the structures of government and replacing them with non-hierarchal institutions.

With Marxist communists, there is a split between those who supported the Soviet Union and other so-called 'communist states' and those who were/are critical of those states (some even rejecting them as non-communist, see state capitalism), for example trotskyists.

Social and political revolutions are often "institutionalized" when the ideas, slogans, and personalities of the revolution continue to play a prominent role in a country's political culture, long after the revolution's end. As mentioned, communist nations regularly institutionalize their revolutions to legitimize the actions of their governments. Some non-communist nations, like the United States, France, or Mexico also have institutionalized revolutions, and continue to celebrate the memory of their revolutionary past through holidays, artwork, songs, and other venues.

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