<![CDATA[The dispute between al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) is typically told as a doctrinal fight over twenty metaphysical theses, with Ibn Rushd's charge that al-Ghazālī confuses demonstrative (burhānī), dialectical (jadalī) and rhetorical (khaṭābī) argument treated as polemical cover. We argue the dependency runs the other way. The doctrinal disputes are downstream of a prior conflict over the ontology of discourse: what a register is, and what fixes the register of an utterance. Ibn Rushd holds register-realism: registers are capacity-indexed, tracking stable divisions among kinds of mind, thus a text's register is settled in advance by its audience. Al-Ghazālī holds register-instrumentalism: registers are function-indexed, chosen for an occasion and a therapeutic end, so one author may shift registers within a work, and one text may act differently on different readers. Three consequences follow. Ibn Rushd's charge of “mixing” detects no fallacy but commits a category error, his taxonomy has no gap for immanent critique. His own second-order theory is performatively bound, the Faṣl al-Maqāl asserts demonstration's supremacy in a juridical-dialectical register that cannot, by his criteria, establish it. And beneath both lies a semantic disagreement: reading the veils of light in the Mishkāt al-Anwār, we take al-Ghazālī to locate obstruction in conceptuality rather than falsity, prising truth-yielding apart from adequacy to the object. The dispute prefigures a modern contest between ascriptive and enactive theories of genre.]]>
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