ガザーリーの思想におけるタファックルの意味

『宗教諸学の再興』第4部第9書の場合

抄録

In the context of tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism, or Sufism), the Arabic term fikr and the synonymous tafakkur mean ‘meditation’ (in Japanese, ‘meisou’) as one of the Sufi practices. This is why the title of al-Ghazali (d. 1111)'s “Kitab alTafakkur” (in his Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din) has been translated as“The Book on Meditation”. But the term fikr/tafakkur has been employed in fields other than tasawwuf For example, in Islamic philosophy, fikr means ‘cognition’, one of the internal senses of man. In the field of natural science, fikr means scientific pursuits which originate in religious motives. Al-Ghazali was surely aware of this wide scope of the term, so we cannot understand his concept of tafakkur as a whole just by considering it from the viewpoint of tasawwuf.
From the descriptions al-Ghazali gives us, we can find various elements introduced from different fields; logic (tafakkur means a definition in the form of a syllogism), Sufi practice (in relation to a person's acts and qualities, taffakur is that which is done to make oneself a better believer), and natural science (in relation to the world as God's creation, tafakkur is that which is done to understand God's greatness through observation of nature). The term ‘meditation’ does not represent all these elements, nor does ‘meisou’. It would probably be best to use the transcription tafakkur as the name of the practice and to translate it differently according to each context.