Rethinking the Divide between Avicenna and al-Ghazālī

The Possibility and Nature of the Afterlife

Abstract

This article reconsiders the familiar opposition between Avicenna and al-Ghazālī on the afterlife by distinguishing the question of possibility from the question of nature. It argues that the fundamental divide in Islamic eschatological thought is not initially between Avicenna’s bodiless immortality and al-Ghazālī’s bodily resurrection, but between theistic materialist and dualist accounts of the self. Materialist models that appeal to reassembly or re-creation fail to secure numerical identity after bodily death. By contrast, dualism grounds post-mortem survival in the persistence of the immaterial soul, a framework shared by Avicenna and, with qualifications, al-Ghazālī. Their real disagreement concerns the mode of post-mortem existence: whether the surviving soul remains bodiless or is rejoined to a body. The article argues that neither side decisively refutes the other. Consequently, Avicenna and al-Ghazālī should be seen as dualist allies on possibility and intra-dualist rivals on nature. This redrawing clarifies the philosophical structure and significance of Islamic eschatological debates.