The Epic of Imam Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali appears here as a city walking on foot and a question larger than his age, a man from Tus who carried no army and conquered no city, yet opened hearts and minds in a Muslim world crowded with scholars, philosophers, jurists, theologians and mystics. The chapters follow the child who sought knowledge as a thirsty traveler seeks water, moving from city to city and teacher to teacher, until Baghdad called him to teach at the Nizamiyya, where audiences gathered before he arrived and rulers listened to him. At the height of that glory his voice fell silent, and an inner earthquake made him ask whether he was seeking God or fame, so he left his post, his wealth and the applause for solitude and tears in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, then traveled to Jerusalem and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He returned with The Revival of the Religious Sciences, joining law, ethics, spirituality, education, heart and intellect to say that religion is life, and with The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which fought the arrogance of reason and never reason itself, while his Sufism was a struggle against the ego with no escape from the world. The book closes with his works outliving him among Muslims, Christians and Jews, in the East and the West, and with his counsel to seek the truth and, before that, to search for one's own soul.