Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali, Latinized as Algazelus, was Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Ghazālī Ṭūsi, a Persian Shafi'i Sunni Muslim scholar and polymath born around 1058 in Tus, in Khorasan. He lived in an age marked by growing Seljuk influence over the caliphate, not long after the Seljuks entered Baghdad and ended Shia Buyid rule there. In Islamic history he is known as one of its most prominent and influential jurisconsults, legal theoreticians, muftis, philosophers, theologians, logicians, and mystics.

His early education began in Islamic jurisprudence with Ahmad al-Radhakani, a local teacher, and Abu Ali Farmadi, a Sufi from Tus. He later studied in Nishapur under al-Juwayni, the distinguished jurist and theologian described as “the most outstanding Muslim scholar of his time.” After al-Juwayni’s death in 1085, al-Ghazali left Nishapur and joined the court of Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful vizier of the Seljuk empire. In July 1091, Nizam al-Mulk appointed him to the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, then the most prestigious and demanding professorial post in the Muslim world.

Al-Ghazali’s fame came not only from his learning but from the breadth of his work. He belonged to the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence and the Asharite school of theology, though his views differed in some respects from orthodox Asharism. He was seen as a leading member of the Asharite school of early Muslim philosophy and as the most important refuter of the Mutazilites. His contemporaries gave him the honorific title Ḥujjat al-Islām, “Proof of Islam,” and he was also regarded as the 11th century’s mujaddid, a renewer of the faith.

At the height of his academic career, al-Ghazali underwent a spiritual crisis. In 1095 he left Baghdad, outwardly on the pretext of making the pilgrimage to Mecca. He made arrangements for his family, disposed of his wealth, and adopted an ascetic life. He spent time in Damascus and Jerusalem, visited Medina and Mecca in 1096, and then returned to Tus for years of seclusion. During this period he continued to publish, receive visitors, and teach in the private madrasa and Sufi lodge he had built.

This crisis shaped much of his best-known writing. Al-Ghazali believed that the Islamic spiritual tradition had become moribund and that the spiritual sciences taught by the first generation of Muslims had been forgotten. That concern led to his major work, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn, “The Revival of the Religious Sciences.” Another major work, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, “Incoherence of the Philosophers,” became a landmark in the history of philosophy through its critique of Aristotelian science, later developed in 14th-century Europe.

Al-Ghazali returned reluctantly to public teaching in 1106 at the Nizamiyya of Nishapur after pressure from Fakhr al-Mulk, but later went back to Tus. In 1110 he declined an invitation from the grand vizier of the Seljuq Sultan Muhammad I to return to Baghdad. He died on 19 December 1111 and was buried near his home in Tus, Iran. His words still speak because they came from both high scholarship and hard self-examination, joining law, theology, philosophy, and Sufi discipline in the search for a faithful life.