Moral Realism and Character Formation: Abu Hamid Al-Ghazālī and Muḥammad Taqī Miṣbāḥ Yazdī on the Foundations of Qur'anic Ethics

Abstract

Contemporary discourse on character education in Muslim societies frequently invokes al-Ghazālī's virtue ethics as a source of moral formation, yet rarely interrogates the meta-ethical foundation on which such formation rests. This absence becomes acute when confronted with moral relativism, since neither a habituated disposition nor a curriculum policy can be normatively binding without a defensible account of moral objectivity. This study argues that Imam al-Ghazālī's virtue-psychological ethics, though pedagogically robust, requires supplementation by an explicit meta-ethical layer, and that the moral realism of Muḥammad Taqī Miṣbāḥ Yazdī (1935–2021) supplies precisely this layer within an internal Islamic dialogue. Using philosophical hermeneutics and comparative conceptual analysis of primary Arabic and Persian sources, the study advances three findings. First, al-Ghazālī grounds moral formation in a habituated hayʾah rāsikhah (settled disposition) whose telos is qurb ilā Allāh, but leaves the ontological status of value under-theorised. Second, Miṣbāḥ Yazdī, drawing on Ṣadrian ḥikmah mutaʿāliyah and Ṭabāṭabāʾī's theory of idrākāt iʿtibāriyyah, argues that moral propositions are ḥaqīqī (real) in that they designate a real relation between an act and human perfection. Third, a two-layered synthesis—in which al-Ghazālī contributes the method of internalisation and Miṣbāḥ Yazdī the rational justification of moral objectivity—yields a defensible model of revelation-grounded virtue ethics that can operate within a plural society without collapsing into either Islamisation or moral neutrality. The study proposes this synthesis as an original contribution to Islamic meta-ethics and reframes character formation beyond the pedagogical vocabulary in which it is usually conducted.