Al Ghazali's Profile

Al-Ghazali, full name Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali (1058-1111), Islamic philosopher and theologian whose Latin name is Algazel. He was born in ??s, near Mashhad (Meshed), Persia (now Iran). Having gained an excellent reputation as a scholar, in 1091 al-Ghazali was appointed by Nizam al-Mulk, vizier to the Seljuk sultan, to teach at Nizamiya University in Baghd?d. In 1095, following a personal crisis of faith, he relinquished his position, left his family, and became an ascetic. After ten years of wandering and meditation, he accepted another teaching position in Neysh?b?r (Nishapur) but left it shortly afterward and retired to ??s.Al-Ghazali reported his internal struggle and the religious solution he finally achieved in The Deliverance from Error, a work that has been compared to The Confessions of Saint Augustine. In The Revival of the Religious Sciences he presented his unified view of religion incorporating elements from all three sources formerly considered contradictory: tradition, intellectualism, and mysticism. The work has been considered the greatest religious book written by a Muslim, second only to the Qur'an (Koran). After having mastered the methods of philosophy, al-Ghazali set out to refute the Neoplatonic theories of other Muslim philosophers, particularly those of Avicenna, which were opposed to such orthodox religious doctrines as that of the creation, the immortality of the soul, and divine providence. The resultant attack on philosophical theory and speculation, set forth in al-Ghazali's Destruction of the Philosophers, was in large measure responsible for the eventual decline of the element of rationalism in Islam.