Extrapolating a Ghazalian Position on Shame

This study attempts to construct a Ghazalian position on the psychosocial concept of shame. Al Ghazali's work was famously psychologically astute, and along with many classical polymaths, he was a colourfully interdisciplinary thinker; his oeuvre is thus replete with both scriptural maxims and theoretical insights bearing directly on the concept of shame. This study relies primarily, though not exclusively, on Al Ghazali's magnum opus, Iḥyaʾ ʿulum al-din. The crux of the derived Ghazalian position is that shame can be a useful psycho-ethical force, and one which infuses the believer's heart with an acute sense of his or her shortcomings before God. The Ghazalian conception of the spiritual necessity of sin and the abundance of divine mercy means, however, that shame is far removed from, even opposed to, a crippling, cyclical 'despair'. The Ghazalian position is then compared with the work of modern psychologists. Shame has been conceptualised by psychologists in a number of ways; two primary modes of treatment can be found within the literature. The first treats shame as a maladaptive force, stemming from early childhood experiences, while the second affords shame an adaptive potentiality, akin to a moral barometer. Three further facets of the psychological narrative are brought into the discussion: namely, modernity and the rise of the self, Freud's concept of repression, and psychological profiles of the modern human. This study is necessarily limited by its exclusive focus on the psychological aspects of shame and the inability to attend to the specifically gendered modalities of shame. Future directions should validate the Ghazalian position proposed here, while the works of other Islamic scholars, both classical and modern, would contribute substantially to the formulation of a broader Islamic position on shame.