His father appears to have been a pious merchant of modest means. Al-Ghazali was to point in directions which would relieve this sense of frustration for Moslem thinkers.Īl-Ghazali was born in the town of Tus in eastern Persia, not far from the modern city of Meshed, in 1058. This appears to have led to a sense of alienation on the part of the influential class of scholar-jurists, steeped in the best of Islamic religion and culture. Beginning with the Buwayh family in 945, who were supplanted in 1055 by the Seljuks, the disintegrating empire of the caliphs was partially restored by secular rulers who took power in Baghdad, eventually claiming the title of sultan while retaining the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty as useful figureheads. The period to 945 had seen a demographic change in Islam, from being a religion adhered to almost exclusively by the conquering Arab minority to the faith held by the majority of the inhabitants of the caliphal empire.ĭuring the period from 750 to 945, however, the empire had disintegrated into petty states ruled by Moslem governors turned dynasts, each only theoretically subordinate to the increasingly powerless caliph in Baghdad, whose chief prerogative came to be the issuing of certificates of legitimacy in exchange for having his name retained on the local coinage and mentioned in the Friday congregational prayers. The vast area now known as the Islamic world had been quickly conquered by the Moslem Arabs in the century following the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632. Personal discontent with scholastic orthodoxy led him to mysticism and the writing of a monumental work which harmonized the tendencies of both orthodoxy and mysticism within Islam. Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was one of the foremost intellects of medieval Islam.
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