The seclusion consisted in abstaining from teaching at state-sponsored institutions, but he continued to publish, receive visitors and teach in the zawiya (private madrasa) and khanqah (Sufi monastery) that he had built.įakhr al-Mulk, grand vizier to Ahmad Sanjar, pressed al-Ghazali to return to the Nizamiyya in Nishapur. Macdonald, the purpose of abstaining from scholastic work was to confront the spiritual experience and more ordinary understanding of “the Word and the Traditions.” After some time in Damascus and Jerusalem, with a visit to Medina and Mecca in 1096, he returned to Tus to spend the next several years in ‘ uzla (seclusion). Making arrangements for his family, he disposed of his wealth and adopted an ascetic lifestyle. He underwent a spiritual crisis in 1095, abandoned his career and left Baghdad on the pretext of going on pilgrimage to Mecca. After bestowing upon him the titles of “Brilliance of the Religion” and “Eminence among the Religious Leaders,” Nizam al-Mulk advanced al-Ghazali in July 1091 to the “most prestigious and most challenging” professorial at the time: in the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad. After al-Juwayni’s death in 1085, al-Ghazali departed from Nishapur and joined the court of Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful vizier of the Seljuq sultans, which was likely centered in Isfahan. Al-Ghazali’s contemporary and first biographer, ‘Abd al-Ghafir al-Farisi, records merely that al-Ghazali began to receive instruction in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) from Ahmad al-Radhakani, a local teacher. He later studied under al-Juwayni, the distinguished jurist and theologian and “the most outstanding Muslim scholar of his time,” in Nishapur, perhaps after a period of study in Gurgan. Modern estimates place it at AH 448 (1056/7), on the basis of certain statements in al-Ghazali’s correspondence and autobiography. He was a Muslim scholar, law specialist, rationalist, and spiritualist of Persian descent. He was born in Tabaran, a town in the district of Tus, Khorasan (now part of Iran), not long after Seljuk captured Baghdad from the Shia Buyid and established Sunni Caliphate under a commission from the Abbasid Dynasty in 1055 AD.Ī posthumous tradition, the authenticity of which has been questioned in recent scholarship, is that his father, a man “of Persian descent,” died in poverty and left the young al-Ghazali and his brother Ahmad to the care of a Sufi. The believed date of al-Ghazali’s birth, as given by Ibn al-Jawzi, is AH 450 (1058/9).
Some muslims consider him to be a Mujaddid, a renewer of the faith who, according to the prophetic hadith, appears once every century to restore the faith of the ummah (“the Islamic Community”). His works were so highly acclaimed by his contemporaries that al-Ghazali was awarded the honorific title “Proof of Islam” ( Hujjat al-Islām).Īl-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 resulted in his writing his magnum opus entitled Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”). Among his other works, the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”) is a significant landmark in the history of philosophy, as it advances the critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th-century Europe. The Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Clandestine UnbeliefĪl-Ghazali (full name أبو حامد محمد بن محمد الطوسي الغزالي, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsī al-Ġazālī latinized Algazelus or Algazel c. 1058 – 19 December 1111) was one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunni Islam. He was of Persian origin.
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