It is perhaps these factors that motivated Ghazali to apply his incisive and inquisitive mind to seek answers. Ethical and moral decline was coupled with stagnation and indolence of thought. It was a period when the Abbasid empire, as its military and political power waned, started to disintegrate. The third Abbasid age, as it was known, was a period characterized by intense political and intellectual differences.
Ghazali lived during an age of turmoil in the Muslim world. He died at the age of 54 in the year 505 H (1111 AD). After two years in Nishapur he went back to his birthplace Tous where he set up an academy for teaching Fiqh near his childhood home. The most important of these was his magnum opus a 2000-page tome entitled Ihya ‘Ulum Al-Deen – Vivification of the Religious Sciences.įrom the Hijaz he returned to Nishapur to teach. During this period of isolation in his life he wrote dozens of books. And from Jerusalem he went to the Hijaz to perform Hajj. From Damascus he travelled to Jerusalem where he spent his days isolated in the Dome of the Rock. He left Baghdad in 488 H for Damascus where he stayed for two years during which he lived the reclusive life of a Sufi. During his time in Baghdad Ghazali wrote several books on philosophy, its objectives and its pitfalls. And also, to seek guidance on an abstruse dispute among the scholars on whether the Quran was ‘created’ or ‘uncreated’. The principal objective of ‘Ilm Al-Kalam was to use the principles of Greek philosophy and logic and apply them to proving the existence of God. Now that we have an idea of the man and the age in which he lived let us return to the question we posed at the outset This was a branch of knowledge that developed out of the works of Greek philosophers which were translated into Arabic during the time of the early Abbasid Khalifas. When Juwaini died, Ghazali moved to Baghdad where he taught for six years and continued his own study of Fiqh and what came to be known as ‘Ilm Al-Kalam. In addition to the Fiqh, Ghazali studied all the Islamic schools of thought, debate, logic, and philosophy and excelled at all. At Nishapur he became a student of one of the leading scholars of the age Abu Al-M’ali Al-Juwaini better known as Imam of the Haramain. And from there, in 470 H, to the city of Nishapur, once the most important centres of learning and culture in the Abbasid Empire until it was destroyed by an earthquake in 540 H. He then moved to Gorgon now the capital of the Iranian province of Golestan. The education of the young Abu Hamid started in Tous. In the event it is this latter pronunciation that prevailed. Another view holds that he was born in a village called Ghazala (with a single z) and so was also known as “Gazali”. It is thought this is why Abu Hamid was called “Gazzali”.
His father was a spinner of wool (ghazzal in Arabic) who earned his living by selling his fabric in the local yarn market. Mohammad ibn Ahmed Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali was born in 450 H (1058 AD) in the town of Tous in Khorasan in what is now the North Eastern part of Iran. Which, if any, of these views is supported by what has come down to us of his scholarship more than a thousand years after he was laid to rest? But before we seek to answer this question it is useful to learn something about the man and his life. And then there are those who hold him exclusively responsible for suppressing scientific thought among Muslims that led eventually to their backwardness and domination by the resurgent and progressive West. There are those who label him as a saviour and reformer, who at a time of crisis in the Islamic world, rejuvenated the religion. Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, who was born in the middle of the fifth century of the Islamic calendar, is the subject of much controversy.
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