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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