imam al-ghazzali - ihya'ul ulum al-din - volume 3

Ihya'ul ulum al-din, "Revival of Religious Sciences", Ghazali's most important work! The book is the English version of Imam Ghazzali's Ihya Ulum-ud-Din.. It deals with worship and divine service.Imam Abu-Hamid al-Ghazzali is unquestionably the greatest theologian of Islam and one of its noblest and most original thinkers. He was born in 1058 A.D. at Tus, where he died in 1111. He reproduced in his religious experience all the spiritual phases developed by Islam.Starting his religious life as orthodox, Al-Ghazzali soon turned Sufi, and when still under twenty he had broken with all the past. In 1091 he was appointed lecturer at the Nizamiyah in Baghdad, where he became a skeptic. Four year later he returned to Sufism after a terrific spiritual struggle that left him a physical wreck. Intellectualism had failed him. As a dervish he roamed from place to place enjoying peace of soul and acquiescence of mind. After about twelve years of retirement in various places, including two years of retreat in Syria and a holy pilgrimage, he returned to Baghdad to preach and teach. There he composed his masterpiece lhya Ulum-id-Din (the revivification of the sciences of religion).The mysticism of this work vitalized the law its orthodoxy leavened the doctrine of Islam. In it and such other works of his Fatihat-al-Ulum, Tahafut of Falasifah, Iqtisad fi-al-Itiqad, orthodox speculation reached its culminating point.