The Nizamiyya College which Al-Ghazali attended and in which he was one of the leading lecturers at two periods of his life, was built on the eastern river bank of the Tigris, near the Bridge of Boats and close to the wharf and the large market-place. The college was founded in A. D. 1065, being especially established for the teaching of Shafiʾite law. Close to the college was another college called the Bahaiyah and the hospital Maristan Tutushi. The traveller, Ibn Jubayr, attended prayers in the Nizamiyya on the first Friday after his arrival in Bagdad, in the year 581 (A. D. 1185), and he describes it as the most splendid of the thirty and odd colleges which then adorned the City of East Bagdad.... Ibn Jubayr further reports that in his day the endowments derived from domains and rents belonging to the college amply sufficed both to pay the stipends of professors and to keep the building in good order, besides supplying an extra fund for the sustenance of poor scholars. The _Suk_, or market of the Nizamiyya, was one of the great thoroughfares of this quarter, and it is described as lying adjacent to the “_Mashraʾah_” or wharf, which proves that the college must have stood near the Tigris bank.[32] ... Writing a dozen years later than Ibn Batuta, Hamd-Allah, the Persian historian, briefly alludes to the Nizamiyya, which he calls “the mother of the Madrasahs” in Bagdad. This proves that down to the middle of the fourteenth century A. D. the college was still standing, though at the present time all vestiges of it have disappeared, as indeed appears already to have been the case in the middle of the last century, for Niebuhr found no traces of the Nizamiyya to describe in his painstaking account of the ruins in the city of Caliphs, as these still existed in the time of his visit. It was here, at the Nizamiyya School, that Al-Ghazali first embarked on his career as an independent teacher. His lectures drew crowds. He gave _fatwas_, or legal opinions, on matters of the law,[33] he wrote books, he preached in the mosque, and was a leader of the people. Then suddenly in the midst of all this prosperity a great change came over him. He seemed to be attacked by a mysterious disease. His speech became hampered, his appetite failed, and his physicians said the malady was due to mental unrest. He suddenly left Bagdad in the month of Dhu-l-Qada, 488, appointed his brother Ahmed to teach in his place, and abandoned all his property, except so much as was necessary for his own support and that of his children. This sudden retirement from active life and academic honour was unintelligible to the theologians of his days. They looked upon it as a calamity for Islam. Some interpreted it as fear of the Government, a flight from responsibility, but the real reason of his renunciation he himself tells us in his “Confessions.” This book reveals the story of his spiritual experiences from his youth up to his fiftieth year.