After finishing the Quran earlier in the year, I remembered a distinct feeling of exhaustion upon finishing it. The text is extremely narrow and repetitious, and it was refreshing to read really anything else, especially other less depressing holy books. The Bible is the most famous one for a reason: it contains various genres, personalities, histories, proverbs, poems, and more. The Quran by contrast feels like a desert. No, not even the wide expanse of a desert: an island with only two trees. What are they? al-Ghazali explains that every verse in the Quran either describes who God is, or how to reach him. My initial reason for reading this text was because of an interesting parallel between this approach and Luther's Law/Gospel distinction. But whereas Luther's approach is dialectical, al-Ghazali's is a straightforward division into one or the other; at the end, he literally lists every verse of the Quran and which category they go into.
This is, as the Buddhists call it, an extremely straightforward example of 'dualistic thinking.' While reading some Zen Koans recently, I realized that the essence of theology is paradox: in other words, all legitimate religions negate something we take for granted. For example, in Buddhism, the "self" is negated. We normally assume that we have a persistent, essential self, but Buddhism resolutely denies it, and insists that the more we strive to egotistically serve it, the more suffering we cause, and the more Karma we'll accumulate. Fair enough. In Christianity, the self is also negated, but in a different way; rather than arguing there is no self, it argues that you have a soul, but it's not an automatically "good" or "holy" one. Christianity at its core casts doubt upon the human ego, which, when left unchecked, threatens to make itself a god. Christianity insists that, despite how sure we always are of ourselves, that we are not God, and that we can't save ourselves.
Islam, by contrast, only really negates polytheism. This is strange, since polytheism has been on steep decline ever since the ascendancy of Christianity. So, Mohammed's message was extremely narrow and shallow in comparison. You can only argue against polytheism so much, and eventually you run out of things to say. Which is why I was offended when al-Ghazalli claimed "There is no repetition in the Quran, for repetition is defined as that which does not contain any additional benefit." This is a factually false statement, one which only a dogmatic partisan could make. Most of the Quran is repetition; if not rote, at least mind-numbingly similar. The result is that Mohammed never really makes any interesting points in his holy book, certainly nothing paradoxical, no negations of the devastating kind that is required for a legitimate religion. Thus, I am forced into the conclusion that Islam doesn't deserve the name of being a religion, at least in the wisdom-sense we usually imply. It is a religion in a superficial, secondary way, because it provides a premodern framework for life, and it makes some basic philosophical arguments in favor of monotheism, but it adamantly refuses depth.
This is the third book I've read by al-Ghazali, and I keep coming back in the hopes that he'll say something interesting, that I'll learn about hermeneutics or philosophy or something, anything at all. But what I keep getting is all chaff, which pales in comparison to Christianity's (and Buddhism's) barnfulls of wheat. The Quran strains out a gnat to somehow still get gnats in the water, and their theologians are little more than glorified metaphysical philosophers.
al-Ghazali's points sometimes almost become dialectic, such as when he posits that the jewels (verses describing God) and the pearls (verses describing right-action) are the cognitive and practical parts respectively, but that's an exceptionally basic observation. Yes, both orthodoxy and orthopraxy are important. So what? Even the one beautiful quote from the book, "men are asleep and they wake up from their sleep when they die" is a quotation, not from Mohammed, but from someone else downstream from the prophet. I just can't be asked to care about this dead end much longer, there's no more water to be wrung from this rock. This is of course supremely ironic, given that al-Ghazali starts this book with a metaphor about how the Quran is like a sea so deep you could drown in it. The problem with this metaphor is that it kills, it doesn't give life. Returning back to my more accurate island metaphor: sure, we're surrounded by "life giving" water, but you can't call it that when none of it is potable.