Frank Griffel
Professor of Islamic Studies
University Göttingen;
Damascus University;
M.A. Free University Berlin;
Dr. phil. Free University Berlin
After studying philosophy, Arabic literature, and Islamic studies at universities in Göttingen (Germany), Damascus, Berlin, and London, I received my PhD in 1999 from the Free University in Berlin. In my thesis I write about the development of the judgment of apostasy in classical Islam. After that I worked as a research fellow at the Orient Institute of the German Oriental Society in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2000 I came to Yale where I teach courses on the intellectual history of Islam, its theology (both classical and modern), and the way Islamic thinkers react to Western modernity.
In my research I deal with very similar issues. Much of my published work covers the contribution that al-Ghazali made to the development of Islamic theology and the history of philosophy, be it written in Arabic, Latin, or Hebrew. Al-Ghazali lived at the turn of the 12th century in what is now Iran and Iraq. He marks one of the turning points of Islamic thought, when the role of major intellectual movements such as the Arabic tradition of Aristotelianism (falasfa) and Islamic mysticism (Sufism) was reassessed. I think that the way he integrated these two traditions into mainstream Islam is still, despite its importance, not very well understood. I recently published Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology, where I study his life and the way he made philosophical metaphysics and cosmology compatible with Muslim theology. In earlier books I studied the development of the judgment of apostasy in Islam (Apostasie und Toleranz in Islam), and I translated a work by al-Ghazali (the Faysal al-tafriqa) into German. Together with Abbas Amanat I edited a volume on the role of Shari’a (Islamic law) in contemporary debates within Islam. In 2007 I was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship. I am currently working on a two-year research project on the continuation of the Arabic philosophical tradition (falsafa) within Muslim Theology supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
