ABSTRACT
Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī was one of the most prominent theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunnī Islam. Later Arabic medieval historians say he was born in 1058 or 1059 in Tabaran-Tus (15 miles/25 kilometers north of modern Meshed, northeast Iran), yet notes about his age in his letters and his autobiography indicate that he was born in 1055 or 1056. Al-Ghazālī received his early education in his hometown of Tus together with his brother Aḥmad (d. 1123 or 1126–7) who later became a famous preacher and Ṣūfī scholar. Muḥammad went on to study with the influential Ashʿarite theologian al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in nearby Nishapur. This brought him in close contact with the court of the Grand-Seljuq sultan Malikshāh (r. 1071–92) and his grand-vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 1092). In 1091 Niẓām al-Mulk appointed al-Ghazālī to the prestigious Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Baghdad. In addition to being a confidante of the Seljuq sultan and his court in Isfahan, he now became closely connected to the caliphal court in Baghdad. He was undoubtedly the most influential intellectual of his time, when in 1095 he suddenly gave up his posts in Baghdad and left the city. Under the influence of Ṣūfī literature al-Ghazālī had begun to change his lifestyle two years before his departure. He realized that the high ethical standards of a virtuous religious life are not compatible with being in the service of sultans, viziers, and caliphs. Benefiting from the riches of the military and political elite implies complicity in their corrupt and oppressive rule and will jeopardize one’s prospect of redemption in the afterlife. When al-Ghazālī left Baghdad in 1095 he went to Damascus and Jerusalem and vowed at the tomb of Abraham in Hebron never again to serve the political authorities or teach at state-sponsored schools. He continued to teach, however, at small schools (singular zāwiya) that were financed by private donations. After performing the pilgrimage in 1096, al-Ghazālī returned via Baghdad to his hometown Tus, where he founded a small private school and a Ṣūfī convent (khānqāh). In 1106, at the beginning of the sixth century in the Muslim calendar, al-Ghazālī broke his vow and returned to teaching at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Nishapur, where he himself had been a student. To his followers he justified this step with the great amount of theological confusion among the general public and the pressure from authorities at the Seljuq court. Al-Ghazālī regarded himself as one of the renewers (singular muḥyī) of religion, who, according to a ḥadīth, will come every new century. He continued to teach at his zāwiya in Tus where he died in 1111.
