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The aim of this contribution is to highlight al-Ġazālī’s account of ittiḥād or “union” with God; to this purpose, we have traced and examined, within his works, the various passages dedicated to the subject. This analysis shows that al-Ġazālī, although critical of the doctrine of ittiḥād understood in the literal sense, accepts it in a metaphorical way, interpreting it as the state of obliteration of the self (fanā’) in the divine uniqueness (tawḥīd). Even though he defines tawḥīd, in its highest sense, as “not seeing in existence but One”, the terminological and content analysis of the ġazalian passages clearly shows, in our opinion, that he does not adhere to the monism inherent in the so-called waḥdat al-wujūd; on the contrary he strongly supports the monotheistic paradigm. The assertion that God is the only real existent – to be understood in Avicennan terms as the only necessarily existent –, does not imply in fact that creatures are deprived of their own substantial reality and is therefore consistent with the statement that everything has God as its sole creator. In this sense, the ġazalian need to point out that the “absorption” of the Sufi into God is not ittiḥād but tawḥīd is not a mere terminological issue or an instrumental attempt to make “orthodox” an “heterodox” doctrine, but it is the proper expression of the true meaning of that “absorption”, and it’s no coincidence that it corresponds to the foundation of Islam: monotheism.

The emergence of Islamic reformist thinking in the period of the so-called Nahḍah (Renaissance), in particular in the latter part of the XIX century, entailed a revival of interest in Muʿtazilite rationalism. Among the Sunni intellectuals who reevaluated the ancient theological school, a prominent place belongs to Aḥmad Amīn (1886–1954). Muʿtazilism takes up much space in his famous trilogy Fajr al-Islām (The Dawn of Islam), Ḍuḥā al-Islām (The Morning of Islam) and Ẓuhr al-Islām (The Noon of Islam). Although the trilogy has been defined as the first critical research work carried out by a Muslim writer on Islamic civilisation, it has not been the subject of any specific or in-depth studies. The present article aims to partially fill this gap through a detailed linguistic and content analysis of selected passages from the trilogy. This analysis shows how Aḥmad Amīn’s interpretation of the Muʿtazilism fits into the wider project that he pursued to reform Islam: on the one hand, he fought against the traditional dependence on transmitted data (naql), which he considered to be the main cause of the intellectual stasis of the Muslims; on the other hand, he promoted a critical reading of the sacred texts, the Qur’ān and Sunnah, based on reason and on modern Western scientific methodology.