Of his spiritual experiences during these ten years of retirement and wandering, and during the years that followed, when he taught others the way of the mystic, we will speak later. We know that he left Bagdad, returned to Tus, his native place, and settled down to study and contemplation. Strange to say, at this time of his life he seems to have found the greatest delight in going back again to the study of Tradition, especially the collections of Al-Bokhari and of Muslim. All his biographers seem to agree in this. He had charge of a _madrasa_ and of the _khanka_ or monastery for Sufis. Every moment was filled with study and devotion until in the fifty-fifth year of his life (lunar calendar) the end came. The austerity and privations of his long wanderings doubtless wore down his strength. One who had risen to so high a position of authority on religious matters also had to pay the price of leadership in controversy with opponents, and of their envy, and their slander, as we are told by al-Ghafir. This may have been, Macdonald thinks, one of the causes for his removal from Nishapur to Tus. A friend remarks in regard to his attitude towards those who opposed his teaching and envied his influence: “However much he met of contradiction and attack and slander, it made no impression on him, and he did not trouble himself to answer his assailants. I visited him many times, and it was no bare conjecture of mine that he, in spite of what I saw in him in time past of maliciousness and roughness towards people, and how he looked upon them contemptuously through his being led astray by what God had granted him of ease in word and thought and expression, and through the seeking of rank and position, had come to be the very opposite and was purified from these stains. And I used to think that he was wrapping himself in the garment of pretense, but I realized after investigation that the thing was the opposite of what I had thought, and that the man had recovered after being mad.” Al-Ghazali died on Monday, the fourteenth of Jumada II, A. H. 505 (Dec. 18th, 1111). His brother Ahmad (quoted by Murtadha from Ibn Jawzi’s _Kitab ath-thabat ʾind al-mamat_) gives the following account of his death: “On Monday, at dawn, my brother performed the ablution and prayed. Then he said, ‘Bring me my grave-clothes,’ and he took them and kissed them and laid them on his eyes and said, ‘I hear and obey to go in to the King.’ And he stretched out his feet towards Mecca, and was taken to the good will of God Most High. He was buried at, or outside of, Tabran, the citadel of Tus, and Ibn As-Samaʾni visited his grave there.”