Person

al-Ghazali

Also known as: Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Algazel, Hujjat al-Islam, the Proof of Islam

11th–12th century Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and Sufi (1058–1111) — one of the most consequential thinkers in the history of Islamic thought, and the figure most responsible for the integration of Sufism into mainstream Sunni orthodoxy. As a young scholar he taught at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad and was the leading Sunni jurist of his generation. In 1095, at the height of his career, he experienced a profound crisis of conscience, abandoned his teaching post, and spent eleven years in voluntary obscurity — traveling, retreating, and writing. Out of this period came his major works: the encyclopedic *Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din* (*The Revival of the Religious Sciences*) — a forty-book guide to integrating outer Islamic practice with inner contemplative life — and his autobiographical *al-Munqidh min al-Dalal* (*The Deliverance from Error*), one of the great spiritual autobiographies in any language. Influenced subsequent Christian thought (Thomas Aquinas read him), shaped Sunni theology decisively, and remains the standard via which classical Sunni Islam embraces Sufi practice.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in 1058 in Tus, in the Khorasan region of Persia. Orphaned young, he was educated through the patronage of his teachers and rose rapidly: by his early thirties he held the most prestigious teaching post in the Sunni world — the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, founded by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk. He was admired, prosperous, and famous; he was also, by his own later account, increasingly tormented by the suspicion that the elaborate intellectual edifice of his work was disconnected from any actual experience of God.

In July 1095, after a period of intensifying inner crisis (during which, he tells us, he was for some weeks unable to speak in public), he left Baghdad. He gave away most of his wealth, made arrangements for his family, and traveled — to Damascus, Jerusalem, Hebron, Mecca, and back to Tus — spending stretches in solitary retreat in mosques and Sufi lodges. He stayed away from public teaching for eleven years.

Out of this period came the work that defines his legacy: the Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) — a forty-book treatise covering ritual practice, social conduct, the destructive vices, the saving virtues, and the contemplative ascent. The work integrates fiqh (Islamic law) and Sufism more thoroughly than any predecessor, and remains the standard reference text for combining the two in Sunni Islam to this day.

What he taught

Three durable contributions:

The integration of law and the heart. Al-Ghazali insisted that Islamic ritual practice — prayer, [[fasting|fasting]], charity, pilgrimage — was empty without the inner work of the heart, and that the inner work without the outer practice was rootless. The Ihya’ is the systematic working-out of this integration: each book treats both the outer form and the inner reality of a particular practice or virtue.
The autobiographical method. Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (The Deliverance from Error), written near the end of his life, traces his intellectual journey through the four major schools of his time (theology, philosophy, the esotericism of the Ismailis, and Sufism) and concludes that only Sufism actually delivered what the others promised. The book is one of the earliest sustained spiritual autobiographies in world literature and prefigures Augustine’s Confessions in shape if not in influence.
The critique of philosophy. His Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) argued that the Greek-influenced Islamic philosophy of Avicenna and others had reached, on certain key questions (the eternity of the world, the resurrection of the body, divine knowledge of particulars), conclusions incompatible with Islamic revelation. The work shaped later Sunni theology and provoked a major response from Averroes.

Honest about al-Ghazali

His critique of the philosophers has sometimes been blamed for a long decline of philosophical inquiry in the Sunni world; this charge is contested by recent scholarship (Frank Griffel, Robert Wisnovsky, others), which has shown that philosophy continued to flourish in Iran and elsewhere long after him, often within a frame al-Ghazali himself made possible. Whatever the historical effects, the intellectual integrity of his life — the willingness to abandon a prestigious career when he could not make it cohere with his deepest convictions — remains exemplary.

Sources

al-Ghazali. The Deliverance from Error. Trans. R.J. McCarthy. Twayne, 1980 / Fons Vitae, 2000. Source class: primary text.
al-Ghazali. The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din). (Multi-volume; various translators; Islamic Texts Society, ongoing.) Source class: primary text.
al-Ghazali. The Niche of Lights. Trans. David Buchman. Brigham Young University Press, 1998. Source class: primary text.
Frank Griffel. Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology. Oxford, 2009. Source class: book / definitive scholarly study.
W. Montgomery Watt. Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Ghazali. Edinburgh, 1963. Source class: book / classic study.

Lenses still to grow

The Ihya’ in detail — its forty books cover so much ground that any single entry only points at it.
The Avicenna–Ghazali–Averroes thread as a piece of intellectual history; one of the great philosophical exchanges of the medieval world.
Al-Ghazali and Aquinas — the route by which his thought reached Latin Christendom (through Andalusi translation) and influenced Aquinas.
The Niche of Lights as a piece of mystical theology in its own right.

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