 If al-Ash‘ari was the first of the Islamic occasionalists, it was al-Ghazālī (c.1055–1111), the great philosopher and theologian of the Ash‘arite school, who presented some of the most significant and influential arguments for occasionalism in his influential work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahâfut al-falâsifa). This work has long been the source of the interpretation that al-Ghazālī himself was a committed global occasionalist, but recent interpretations have challenged this view, arguing that al-Ghazālī’s goal simply is to defend the possibility of miracles against the claims of the falâsifa, and that he leaves open the possibility of some kind of genuine causality in creatures (Griffel 2007). Notwithstanding this issue of whether al-Ghazālī was an occasionalist or not, no one doubts that al-Ghazālī found some key views of the falâsifa Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) problematic and worthy of criticism. In particular, it seems to have been Avicenna’s “Aristotelian” approach to creaturely natures and powers that was most problematic for al-Ghazālī in rendering consistent with Ash‘arite  kalām.[1]  The main point of tension seems to stem from the Avicennan view that, given the natures or essences of creatures, there are causally necessitating relations between creaturely causes and their effects such that the creaturely cause necessarily brings about the effect. Al-Ghazālī took this view to be in tension with the doctrinal claim that theological orthodoxy requires the possibility of miracles, which consist in the divine interruption of the ordinary course of events in nature. Thus, what worried al-Ghazālī most is the idea that if creatures genuinely necessitate their effects, this would seem to imply that even in the face of divine miraculous intervention, the natural effects would have to follow from the cause. But such an implication was unacceptable for those holding the standard understanding of divine omnipotence, which al-Ghazālī and other philosophers of the Ash‘arite theological tradition thought to be essential to kalām. Any natural necessitating relation resistant to the exercise of divine causal power was thought to be inappropriate, and thus causally necessitating relations, properly understood (that is, in ways consistent with divine omnipotence), are only instantiated in cases of divine causation. In addition to this theologically motivated argument, al-Ghazālī’s criticism of causally necessitating relations between creaturely causes and effects also incorporates his distinctive views on the modal relations between distinct entities or facts, according to which “the connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary” (TF 170) Al-Ghazālī’s central claim, as we will examine in more detail later, was that “each of the two things has its own individuality and is not the other, and neither the affirmation nor the negation, neither the existence nor the non-existence of the one is implied in the affirmation, negation, existence, and non-existence of the other” (Weinberg 1964,  123).[2]