To this growing body of scholarship we may now add Kenneth Garden’s The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Moreover, these scholars have sought to treat al-Ghazālī not only as a scholar but also as a historical actor whose intellectual corpus was shaped by the sociopolitical matrix of the Seljuk-Abbasid order of which he was a prominent member. Such work has questioned portrayals of al-Ghazālī as an “orthodox Sufi” by bringing attention to the ways in which his thought, far from rejecting the philosophical tradition, was grounded in it, particularly that of Ibn Sīnā (known also by his Latin name, Avicenna) (d. However, this paradigm has been increasingly subverted by a series of revisionist studies since the 1990s from such scholars as Richard Frank, Jules Janssen, Frank Griffel, and M. This narrative, taken from al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, The Deliverer from Error ( al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl), has long served as the hermeneutical key by which many scholars interpret his life and thought. Upon his return and in the closing years of his life, al-Ghazālī returned to teaching a changed man. Prodded on by this crisis, al-Ghazālī assumed the life of a spiritual and reclusive peripatetic, setting out on a two-year journey that took him through Damascus, Jerusalem, Medina, and Mecca. Al-Ghazālī finally discovered in Sufism that which had been eluding him however, his love of public prestige hindered his full embrace of its self-renouncing ways, to which God responded by striking him mute and unable to eat. His early life included a bout with radical skepticism, acclaim as a celebrated scholar, and a search for Truth which carried him through the four celebrated schools of thought of his day: Islamic theological discourse ( kalām), philosophy ( falsāfa), Ismāʿīlism, and mysticism ( taṣawwuf or Sufism). The basic contours of Persian scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s (d. Published on H-Mideast-Medieval (August, 2015)Īl-Ghazālī the Ascetic Orthodox Sufi or the Philosophically Inclined Revivalist? A Reassessment Reviewed by Sam Houston (Department of Religion - Florida State University) The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and His Revival of the Religious Sciences.
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