Descartes and Al-Ghazali

Rene Descartes and Abu Hamid Al Ghazali lived, worked, and studied in drastically different atmospheres under radically dissimilar social constraints; the former being an early 17th-Century Christian Frenchman, while the latter lived 500 years earlier as a Muslim in the Middle East. Even though these cultural differences existed, both men at one point sought to establish absolute truth and certainty by casting extreme doubt onto their perceptions of truth and reality. In Meditations and The Deliverance from Error, Descartes and Al Ghazali, respectively, lead the reader down comparable paths in the quest for certainty, both in a philosophical sense and in a literary one, despite the incongruities between the two writer’s eras and life experiences.