I Sat Before al-Ghazali

Reviewing the drawings for a new house in New York, an architect wonders why he knows how to make a house fit to live in yet cannot live at peace within himself, and in a brief sleep he finds himself in a simple room facing Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, in a meeting the book presents as imagined. He confesses that he writes about mercy and is overcome by anger, praises humility and is hurt when overlooked, and al-Ghazali answers that knowledge needs action and that the building site where it shows is his own life: when he grows angry, when he is wronged, and when he has the power to wrong someone else. Their talk moves through arguments won while the other man left wounded, the place of reason and evidence, the fear of doubt, doing good that nobody will know about, and a father who gives strangers his kindest words and leaves his family whatever patience remains. When the narrator admits he hoped to leave with a great secret, al-Ghazali asks whether he has done the things he already knows and tells him to begin with something he can do today. He wakes beside his drawing, calls the person to whom he has been postponing an apology and this time lets him speak, so that the house stays on paper while a stone has been laid in his life.