One of meat-space friends posted a question on a social media site that asked everyone what are some of the most influential books you’ve ever read. He wanted people to understand “influential” as having the most impact on your worldview. Asking this type of question always invokes a bit of story telling because important books are often embedded into the context of our lives. I’ve decided to list 5 books that have made a major impact on me.
1. Marcus Aurelius’ 'Meditations'
This is the first philosophy book I read from front to back and actually felt I had a decent understanding of. I picked up a Penguin edition of the Meditations at Bagram Air Force Base for free (from some box of library books donated “4 TEH TROOPS”) late 2004 on my way to some hovel called Asadabad. It was lost on me then I was just a stones throw away from the ancient site of Kapisa founded by Alexander the Great. It also would have been meaningless to me that the hovel I was traveling to was the birthplace of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, the great 19th century Islamic thinker.
Asadabad was miserable time for me. I spent more time tromping around in the mountains surrounding the squalid little town than in the town itself. Days were spent on the boarder of Pakistan during Afghanistan’s first free elections and I distinctly remember reading this passage one day while I was suppose to be listening to the radio (From Book IV, Part 4):
Men seek seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains- a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul; above all, he who possesses resources in himself, which he need only contemplate to secure immediate ease of mind- the ease that is but another word for a well ordered spirit.
I’ve never been able to achieve this ease of mind, but I hope one day I’ll grasp what the Emperor was trying to teach me. Still, this little book was able to keep me preoccupied with the higher things in life instead of always dwelling on just where I was, given the history of the area, that was a good thing. The Soviets were pressed into the dirt by the Mujahideen here a few decades beforehand and not a few months later Lt. Michael Murphy would meet his own fate at the end of the Taliban rifles, being the first person to be awarded (posthumously) the Medal of Honor.
This was the book that convinced me that philosophy as a discipline was something that I needed, something to help give my life direction and infuse it with meaning, a task that contemporary religion could not accomplish.
2. Abū Ḥamed Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī ’s ‘Deliverance From Error’ from which the namesake of this blog comes from.
I had the fortunate honor to study this text under the philosopher Omar Mirza (he is also a bit of an expert on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism: see here and here). The project Al-Ghazālī sets out on is very similar to that of Descartes’ ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ but eminently more substantive (in my opinion). Taking on the burden of doubting everything that is possible, Al-Ghazālī tries to go from not being sure if he should even believe in his own senses to accepting Sufism as the best path to God. While I certainly don’t agree with his conclusions or arguments, this text opened up so many different facets on the uses of philosophy and its application to the universal plight of humanity’s own self doubt (page 54):
You should first of all know-God give you good guidance and gently lead you to the truth!-that the diversity of men in religion and creeds, plus the disagreement in the Community of Islam about doctrines, given the multiplicity of sects and the divergence of methods, is a deep sea in which most men founder and from which few only are saved.
A Candid recognition of the ambiguity in religious life is rare in modern day thinkers, much less Medieval Islamic philosophers. While Al-Ghazālī assures us this is a state of affairs intended by God, I was left feeling the problem was unresolved but intrigued by Islamic notions of fitra. Reading Al-Ghazālī reminded me of my brief encounter with a Sufi in our little camp outside Asadabad who, for reasons beyond me, kept this monkey in a cage near a little market area:
He traded me this book for an old leatherman multi-tool I had:
Which I’ve come to discover is a commentary on the Kitab Al-Dhikr (Book of Remembrances), a book from the Sahih Muslim hadith. Hearing him sing a Sufi chant later that evening is probably one of the more beautiful things I can remember hearing and combined with studying Al-Ghazālī, has convinced me that Sufi worship is one of the most earnest and serious expressions on the planet. While I can't quite find a video that captures what I heard, I think this Somali gentlemen does a fantastic job:
This kind of communal expression simply isn’t available to someone like me and has no parallel in the secular community. The depths of this experience is only something I can glean from watching Youtube.
