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This essay highlights how contemporary Muslim fundamentalists reduce Islam's rich and complex intellectual legacy to a set of authoritarian rules. The three branches of classical Islamic educationÑtheology, jurisprudence, and ethicsÑare particularly targeted. The reductionist pattern applied to these areas is designed to eliminate both the scholarly space of inquiry and the room for individual reflection traditionally granted to its followers by Islamic religion. The essay ends with an analysis of the language used by Osama bin Laden in various documents over the last ten years that show how he has abused Islam's jurisprudential tradition to confer on him a convenient likeness of legality.

In his autobiographical account, the Munqidh min al-Dalāl, al-Ghazālī reflects on his conversion from skepticism to faith. Previous scholarship has interpreted this text as an anticipation of Cartesian positions regarding epistemic certainty. Although the existing similarities between al-Ghazālī and Descartes are striking, the focus of the present essay lies on the different philosophical aims pursued by the two thinkers. It is thus argued that al-Ghazālī operates with a broader notion of the Self than Descartes, because it is inclusive of the body. And it is shown that the two philosophers use completely diverging paradigms. While Descartes models his notion of evidence after mathematical certainty, al-Ghazālī draws his famous 'ilm al-yaqīnī (certain knowledge) from a religious context.

In his exemplary study on The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (1958) Eugene Rice explored the wide range of 'sapientia-ideals' developed in medieval and Renaissance texts. Depending on what ancient and/or patristic sources were consulted, sapientia focused on the divine, the divine and the human, or the human realm only. Accordingly, it was viewed either as a divine gift or a naturally acquired virtue. To complicate matters further, wisdom could be an intellectual, moral, and/or civic virtue with either the intellect or the will as the leading faculty. Finally, wisdom was considered the embodiment of vita contemplativa, or, on the contrary, of vita activa. Moreover, links to related notions such as scientia, pietas, prudentia, or virtus also influenced the ideal of wisdom pursued. 1 The present essay proposes to introduce one more notion: the figura heroica. The hero not as an alternative to the wise but as another means to implement an ideal of wisdom. In Renaissance philosophy the figure of the hero is usually associated with the thought of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). After all, he wrote a vibrant dialogue entitled De gl'Eroici Furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585) in which he expressed that true thinking is an act of self-transformation. And since transformation is a form of death, so Bruno argued, true thinking presupposes heroic qualities. Clearly, philosophy as a fatal undertaking in the process of which the philosopher receivesintellectualdeath by his or her own hand, challenges the more traditional understanding of philosophy as a quest for wisdom. But there may be an assumption here in that one thinks of having to make a choice: wisdom or heroism, as if there would have to be a crossroad at which one would be compelled to abandon one path for the other. How about wisdom and heroism as two intertwined paths? That would be much more in the spirit of the Renaissance with its well-known ideals of harmonia, concordia, and reconciliatio. Could Man thus be wise and heroic? Maybe a wise hero or a heroic wise? 2The following will first discuss Hercules as an example of a powerful hero who symbolized wisdom already in humanistic sources, then work out the heroic dimension in Giordano Intellectual History Review

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