Al-Ghazali

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in 1058 at Tus in Khurasan, orphaned young, and educated in fiqh at Jurjan and then Nishapur under al-Juwayni, the leading Ashari theologian of the age. Talent carried him to the court of the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who in 1091 appointed him — barely past thirty — to the chair of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the most prestigious teaching post in Sunni Islam, where hundreds attended his lectures on law and theology.

In 1095, at the height of his fame, he broke. By his own account in al-Munqidh min al-Dalal ("The Deliverer from Error") — one of the earliest intellectual autobiographies in any tradition — a crisis of certainty and of sincerity left him unable to speak or teach. He gave away his wealth, left Baghdad in the garb of a Sufi, and spent roughly a decade in retreat and travel — Damascus, Jerusalem, the Hijaz — during which he composed his masterwork, Ihya Ulum al-Din ("The Revival of the Religious Sciences"). He returned briefly to teaching at Nishapur under state insistence, then withdrew to Tus, where he founded a small lodge for students and died in 1111. His brother Ahmad, himself a noted Sufi, reported his last morning: he asked for his shroud, kissed it, and lay down facing qibla.

Al-Ghazali's decisive struggle was internal: the crisis he describes in al-Munqidh as a systematic loss of trust in every organ of knowledge — the senses, then reason itself — resolved not by argument but by what he calls a light God cast into his breast. The philosophical honesty of that account, examined skeptically and accepted by most scholarship, made it a document of world literature.

His outer struggles were the age's: the assassination of his patron Nizam al-Mulk in 1092, the death of the sultan Malikshah weeks later, and the collapse of settled order in Baghdad framed his withdrawal. He wrestled too against what he saw as the corrosion of religion from two sides — philosophers whose metaphysics he judged had slipped from demonstration into unbelief on key points, and an esoteric Ismaili mission whose claims of an infallible teacher he wrote repeatedly against. And he indicted his own profession: the Ihya's opening books are a sustained polemic against scholars who learn for prestige — the disease he confessed had been his own.

The Ihya Ulum al-Din is his monument: forty books moving from worship through daily custom to the "destructive" and "saving" qualities of the soul, arguing that law without inner life is husk without kernel. It became — with the possible exception of the hadith collections themselves — the most read work of Sunni religious literature, and its abridgments and imitations fill the tradition.

In theology and philosophy his Tahafut al-Falasifa ("The Incoherence of the Philosophers") examined twenty theses of the Avicennan system and judged three — the world's past eternity, God's knowledge of universals only, and the denial of bodily resurrection — to be not merely error but unbelief; Ibn Rushd's rebuttal, the Tahafut al-Tahafut, answered it a century later, and the exchange remains the most famous debate in Islamic philosophy. Yet his Maqasid al-Falasifa expounded the philosophers so fairly that Latin Europe first knew him as one of them, and his logic primers naturalized Aristotelian logic inside the madrasa. His reconciliation of sober Sufism with Sunni orthodoxy — the argument, lived and written, that the mystical path is the heart of the law rather than its rival — is his most consequential legacy; the honorific the tradition gave him, Hujjat al-Islam, "the Proof of Islam," registers its acceptance.

Al-Ghazali fought no battles; his wars were doctrinal, and he chose them deliberately. Against the Ismaili da'wa of Alamut — whose assassins had killed his patron — he wrote the Fada'ih al-Batiniyya at the commission of the caliph al-Mustazhir, contesting the doctrine of the infallible imam with the counter-claim that the Prophet's guidance, preserved in text and community, suffices. Against the philosophers he waged the Tahafut campaign. Against antinomian mysticism he drew lines no less firmly, defending al-Hallaj's sincerity while condemning public utterances that dissolve the law.

He lived through the First Crusade — Jerusalem, where he had recently kept retreat, fell in 1099 — yet his surviving works are silent on it, a silence historians note and debate. His chosen battlefield remained what he took to be the deeper front: the state of the Muslim soul and the sciences that form it.

Al-Ghazali drew fire from every direction he fought, and the disputes are documented in the tradition's own texts. The Maliki west burned the Ihya in Cordoba around 1109 — the jurist Ibn Hamdin condemned it — for its Sufi content and its free use of weak hadith; the hadith critics, al-Iraqi's famous takhrij among them, later graded its narrations, finding a number without established basis, a deficiency Ghazali's defenders concede while distinguishing exhortation from law. The philosophers' party answered through Ibn Rushd that his takfir of Avicenna misfired; later Hanbali critics, Ibn Taymiyya foremost, judged that he had conceded too much to philosophy and to Sufism both. Within Sufism itself, some found his mysticism too sober, a system rather than a state.

Modern scholarship debates a further question the classical one implied: whether his Tahafut throttled the sciences in Islamic lands. Against it stands the documented flourishing of logic, astronomy, and medicine in the madrasa centuries after him, and the counter-reading that he domesticated rather than destroyed philosophy. Each of these positions is carried in the sources; the entry records them without verdict.

The tradition's own verdict is in the report, transmitted in the generations after him, that if there could be a prophet after Muhammad it would have been al-Ghazali — hyperbole that measures his standing. He is the pivot on which Sunni intellectual history is usually turned: after him, Ashari theology absorbed logic, Sufism held a licensed place at the center of piety, and the Avicennan system survived chiefly inside the theology that had refuted it.

The Ihya remains a living curriculum from Morocco to Indonesia; al-Munqidh is read beside Augustine's Confessions in the world's comparative literature courses; the Tahafut exchange is taught wherever Islamic philosophy is taught. Latin scholastics cited him as "Algazel"; Aquinas engaged his arguments; modern revivalists of every stripe — reformist and traditionalist alike — claim him. Few thinkers of any civilization have been owned so widely by so many parties to so many arguments.