[2] Griffel’s first monograph study, which is based on his dissertation, is a history of the judgement of apostasy (irtidād) in Islamic law up to al-Ghazālī.
In a famous fatwa at the end of his book Tahāfut al-falāsifa, al-Ghazālī declared that all Muslims who teach three positions that stem from the philosophical system of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) were apostates from Islam who can be killed.
In several books and articles, published between 1987 and 1994, Frank argued that al-Ghazālī was in reality a follower of Ibn Sīnā’s Aristotelian cosmology who hid his opposition to Ashʿarite theology behind a smokescreen of confusing statements that seemed to support Ashʿarism.
Marmura rejected Frank’s findings and, although admitting that he expressed himself sometimes in confusing language, maintained that al-Ghazālī was a faithful Ashʿarite theologian, who taught an occasionalist cosmology in all of his works.
While Frank’s and Marmura’s works are the thesis and the anti-thesis (or the other way round), this book wishes to be considered a synthesis.”[4] For Griffel, al-Ghazālī was both an occasionalist and a follower of Ibn Sīnā in his cosmology of secondary causation.
Early on in his oeuvre (in the 17th discussion of his Tahāfut al-falāsifa), al-Ghazālī decided that both cosmologies offer equally convincing explanations of how God creates.
First, a group of reformers, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose most influential members were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida.
Then, second, a group of contemporary Sunni activists who often reject any affiliation with the four schools of law (referred to as an attitude of “lā madhhabiyya”) and who try to establish norms of correct Islamic behavior and action by direct recourse to the sources on the Prophet Muhammad’s life, most importantly by an independent study of the hadith corpus.
In a 2010 article[7] and in his subsequent 2016-book,[8] Lauzière argues that the conflation of these two groups in one (analytical) label is a mistake, for which the French scholar of Islamic studies Louis Massignon is responsible.