Blurb:

This chapter is the very core of the book. The validity of a reading that takes phenomenology as its point of departure but which integrates a phenomenological perspective with a hermeneutic one (understood as tension and open demand) is reiterated. Phenomenology in Husserl’s sense is integrated with an eminently ontological vision inspired by Heidegger. Thus it is possible to deal with simple essences (èidos) and their universal value remaining far from the arbitrariness of subjectivity.

In Islam Being is God. Phenomenological hermeneutics, by showing truth as a manifestation of and tension towards, emphasises that certainty and reality establish themselves as telos and purpose. The Qur’an does not hide Being in entity, it does not reduce God to man, nor, as Sufism does, does it attribute all the Being of creatures to God. The Qur’an shows (discloses) how God, absent in transcendence, remains present as telos and truth. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali is the pivotal author studied in this chapter with other theologians like Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani and al-Shahrastani.