Presentation: Edward Moad (Coherence of the Incoherence)

About the Session

In this author session, Wardah Books hosts Edward Moad who will present on Coherence of the Incoherence: Between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on Divine Unity and Knowledge.

In the Tahafut al-Falasifa, al-Ghazali objects to the strict notion of God's unity, by which the falasifa deny that He has attributes distinct from His essence. This, he argues, led some of them to deny that God knows anything other than Himself; but even that violates their professed standard of unity, since His self-knowledge is distinct from His essence.

In the Tahafut al-Tahafut, Ibn Rushd responds by asserting that God both knows all things and nothing other than Himself, and that His knowledge is not distinct from His essence. To arrive at this apparently paradoxical, "mystical" conclusion, he outlines a rationalist line of argument from the rather mundane Aristotelian premise that genuine knowledge is identical to its object.

We will review and discuss this argument as one of many instances from the Tahafut debate, and the Islamic intellectual tradition generally, that undermine modern orientalist binaries between reason and faith, or the "rational" and "mystical."

About the Author

Edward Moad is Professor of Philosophy at Habib University (Pakistan). He received his PhD from University of Missouri - Columbia (2004), and was a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore (2005-2008) before joining Qatar University (2008-2025) where he established their first Philosophy program. He has published dozens of academic articles in Islamic Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Comparative Moral Epistemology. His recent book, Coherence of the Incoherence, offers a critical analysis of the debate between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd in the Incoherence of the Philosophers and Incoherence of the Incoherence.

IN-STORE EVENT

Date: 5 July 2026, Sunday
Time: 10.30am Singapore
Venue: Reading Loft (Level 2, stairs only) Wardah Books, 58 Bussorah Street S(199474)

No registration required