Coming Down from the Mountaintop: Al-Ghazal s Autobiographical Writings in Context

1366 1..161..16

muwo_

Kenneth Garden
Tufts University

he starting point for understanding the life of Abu Hamid al-Ghazal (d. 505/1111) is justiably the account that he himself wrote of it in his famous al-Munqidh min al-dalal. The Munqidh is an intricately crafted work that draws on autobiographi cal tropes of writers from Galen (d. 199 or 217) to al-Muhasib (d. 857/244) to Umar Khayyam (d. 526/1131) to Nasir-i Khusraw (d. 1088/481), and yet makes these tropes its own.1 There are many ways of depicting a life, and in the Munqidh al-Ghazal presents his own as an almost exclusively interior drama, consisting of doubt, investigation, and insight, hesitation and conversion, reclusion and emergence. Other characters in this drama are few. The main one is God, who intervenes at critical junctions. Caliph and Sultan summon him to tasks but only in accordance with his prior inclination and the will of God. Children put in an appearance in summoning him back to Tus, and lords of hearts and visions and righteous men (salihun) urge him to return to teaching. The al-Ghazal of the Munqidh begins as a solitary seeker and becomes the proverbial Wise Man on the Mountaintop, divested of worldly relations. The disembodied context of this life is spiritual, while relationships to the major gures and events of the age are, through their omission, implied to be insignicant. But although the Munqidh is al-Ghazal s most extensive autobiographical account, he also wrote other descriptions of his life that differ from this interiorized narrative. It has been argued that there are autobiographical elements to the biography which Abd al-Ghar al-Faris wrote of al-Ghazal in that he based it in part on conversations with the
1 On al-Ghazal s debt to Galen in the Munqidh, see Stephen Menn, The Discourse on the Method and the Tradition of Intellectual Autobiography, in Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Menn mentions that this connection had already been identied by Misch in his Geschichte der Autobiographie. For the debt to al-Muhasib , Umar Khayyam, and Nasir-i Khusraw, see Josef van Ess, Quelques remarques sur le Munqidh min ad-dall, in Ghazl: La raison et le miracle, Table ronde UNESCO, 910 dcembre 1985, ed. A. -M. Turki (Paris: ditions Maisonneuve et Larose, 1987), 6465, 6567, and 6768 respectively. Van Ess also points to others who have seen these parallels, 67 n. 47.

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great scholar.2 This treatment situates al-Ghazal much more among the men and events of his time, though when it comes to the period of retreat, Abd al-Ghar offers an even more decontextualized account, mistakenly claiming that al-Ghazal wandered among the holy sites in the vicinity of Damascus for ten years rather than two.3 There is also a much less well-known account of al-Ghazal s life, penned by his own hand and found in his letters, which will be the focus of our comparison here. Unlike the Munqidh, it is not a self-standing work, but a passage found in one of al-Ghazal s letters, which, unlike his scholarly writings, were written in his mother tongue, Persian. It is a much briefer account an autobiographical fragment, really but it differs in striking ways in its presentation of the details of al-Ghazal s life and in its overall tone. In it, the worldly details of al-Ghazal s life begin to emerge: his age, his ties to his home city of Tus, his career, his relations with political gures, and very different facets of this famous crisis and repentance of 488/1095. The exact context of this autobiographical fragment can be deduced from the letter in which it appears. It is the same broad context that both of the other auto/biographies were written in, namely a campaign against al-Ghazal and his writings that erupted after his return to teaching in Nishapur in 499/1106. Some scholars have raised questions about the sincerity and accuracy of the Munqidh in the past, and the connection with the Nishapuri controversy in particular has been made.4 What this comparison will show is that not only modern scholars but al-Ghazal himself, when circumstances called for it, presented his life very differently than he does in the Munqidh. Situating both texts in their context will help us determine how to weigh some of the features found in each. This can only be done by looking at his other writings and seeing which biographical framework they support.

The Context of al-Ghazal s Autobiographical Writings

Josef van Ess has argued on the basis of his letters that al-Ghazal wrote his famous autobiography not in a ight of introspection in his autumn years, but in response to a campaign against him that erupted after his return to teaching in Nishapur in 499/1106.5 These collected letters reveal a chronology of the controversy and some details of its
Taj al-D n al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra, ed. Abd al-Fattah Mahammad al-Hilu and Mahmud Muhammad al-Tanah, 1st ed., 10 vols. (Cairo: Matbaa Isa al-Bab al-Halab , 1968), vol. 6, 20414. Abd al-Ghar writes of visiting him and speaking with him on pp. 208209. 3 Ibid., 206. Al-Ghazal himself informs us in the Munqidh that he returned to Tus some two years after his crisis, Abu Hamid al-Ghazal , al-Munqidh min al-dalal, in Majmuat rasail al-imam al-Ghazal , ed. Ahmad Shams al-D n (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 1997), 6162. His letters conrm that he was again in Tus in 490/1096. Dorothea Krawulsky was able to date a letter to Muj r al-Dawla, clearly written from Tus, to this year. See Dorothea Krawulsky, Briefe und Reden des Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Gazzal bersetzt und erlutert, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1971), vol. 7, 5455. 4 See van Ess, Quelques remarques sur le Munqidh min ad-dall. 5 Ibid.
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substance. But for a fuller account of what was at stake, we have to turn to al-Ghazal s al-Imla f ishkalat al-ihya, a rebuttal al-Ghazal wrote after the controversy had run its course. From the Imla we learn that the campaign in Nishapur focused on the great work that emerged from al-Ghazal s repentance of 488/1095, Ihya ulum al-d n. In the Imla he describes the campaign he faced as follows:
You have asked me . . . about some points in the composition entitled The Revival that were difcult for men of limited understanding and limited knowledge. Their darts and arrows enjoyed no royal favor (lam yafuz bi-shay min al-huzuz al-malakiyya qidhu-hu wa-sahmu-hu). And I showed my sorrow at the contempt shown for [The Revival ] by the populace, the commoners, the ranks of the plebians, and the foolishly deluded, and those who frighten the people of Islam to the extent that they slandered it and prohibited its being read and studied. They issued capricious fatwas without insight, repudiating and opposing it. They linked its author to perdition and leading others into perdition, and they repudiated its readers and those who adopted it as departing from the shar a and lacking balance.6

Al-Ghazal s enemies critiqued and attacked his Revival of the Religious Sciences as well as its author, the partisans of its revivalist agenda, and its readership more broadly. As we shall see below, al-Ghazal s opponents also denounced him before Sanjar, the Seljuk King of the East, but without success, as this passage states. The text of the Imla consists mainly of al-Ghazal s rebuttal of 13 points of criticism leveled against an allegory found in book 35 of Ihya ulum al-d n, Kitab al-tawhd wa-l-tawakkul (The Book of Divine Unity and Reliance on God). But the wide-ranging campaign the Imla describes is unlikely to have been motivated by this single passage. Religious scholars would have found plenty to dislike in the Ihya. Al-Ghazal meant his title literally: with this book, he set out to revive a religious scholarly tradition he portrays as dead. What killed the religious sciences were qh and kalam, which had grown beyond their rightful roles.7 These two religious sciences emerged because of the unfortunate necessity of enforcing the law and combating heresy. Because these two sciences, properly construed, deal with worldly issues, al-Ghazal calls them Sciences of 8 this world (ulum al-dunya). He contrasts them to the science that should be the central concern of all scholars, as it was, he insists, for the companions of the Prophet, the Pious Ancestors (salaf ), and even the founders of the legal schools: the Science of the Hereafter (ilm al-akhira).9 The dunya/akhira contrast is Quranic, of course, and thus invokes scripture in support of this distinction. The Revival aims to revive the religious
Abu Hamid al-Ghazal , al-Imla f ishkalat al-ihya, in Ihya ulum al-d n, ed. Sidq Muhammad Jam l al-Attar (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1997), vol. 5, 13. 7 For an explanation of the mortication of the religious sciences that centers on qh, see Abu Hamid al-Ghazal , Ihya ulum al-d n, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1997), vol. 1, Kitab al-ilm, 44. For an explanation that faults kalam, see ibid., 7576. 8 For example, ibid., vol. 1, Kitab al-ilm, 2223. 9 For example, ibid., vol. 1, Khutba, 7.
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sciences by demoting law and theology to their proper role and elevating the Science of the Hereafter to its proper role by making the case for this hierarchy and spelling out in exhaustive detail what the Science of the Hereafter entails. Beyond the polemical intent of the Ihya, there is the ambiguous substance of the Science of the Hereafter that it advocates. It has long been assumed that the Ihya is a compendious work of Susm. But while al-Ghazal draws heavily from Susm in crafting his Science of the Hereafter, it is clear that he also drew heavily from philosophy. This is not surprising given that his restricted teachings that he shared only with advanced initiates, the Madnun corpus, recently analyzed by M. A al-Akiti, consist, in many cases of lightly but signicantly edited synopses of works of Ibn S na.10 Al-Ghazal writes that the Science of the Hereafter is divided into the Science of Practice (ilm al-muamala) or ethics, which is the primary focus of the Ihya, and the Science of Divine Disclosure (ilm al-mukashafa). The Science of Divine Disclosure, he writes, cannot be divulged by those who know it, though he describes its terrain generally in the rst book of the Ihya (the Book of Knowledge), and goes into its details in scattered passages throughout the book.11 It has long been established that the ethics of the Ihya have a partially philosophical framework,12 and it has been shown that the Science of Divine Disclosure owes a deep debt to Ibn S na.13 In fact, this very distinction between metaphysical theory and ethical practice is philosophical to begin with.14

M. A al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa: Al-Ghazalis Madnun, Tahafut, and Maqasid, with Particular Attention to their Falsaf Treatments of Gods Knowledge of Temporal Events, in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols), 51100. 11 For a comprehensive account of al-Ghazal s treatment of ilm al-mukashafa, see Alexander Treiger, The Science of Divine Disclosure: Al-Gazal s Higher Theology and its Philosophical Underpinnings, PhD diss. (Yale University, 2008). 12 See Mohamed Sherif, Ghazalis Theory of Virtue (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), 2476. 13 See Treiger, The Science of Divine Disclosure: Al-Gazal s Higher Theology and its Philosophical Underpinnings, 4498. Treigers work is one of several important studies of the past two decades that contradict the long established image of al-Ghazal as the decisive refuter of falsafa in the Islamic tradition and establish him rather as one of the most decisive gures in appropriating and naturalizing (in al-Akitis terms) the Avicennan legacy. Some of the most important of these studies include Richard Frank, Creation and the Cosmic System: al-Ghazal and Avicenna (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Univer sittsverlag, 1992), and Al-Ghazal and the Asharite School (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Frank Griffel, Toleranz und Apostasie im Islam: Die Entwicklung zu al-Gazazal s Urteil gegen die Philosophie und die Reaktionen der Philosophen (Leiden: Brill, 2000), and al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jules Janssens, Al-Ghazzal and His Use of Avicennan Texts, in Problems in Arabic Philosophy, ed. Mikls Marth (Piliscaba, Hungary: Avicenna Institute of Middle East Studies, 2003) 3749, and Al-Ghazzal s Tahafut: Is it Really a Rejection of Ibn S nas Philosophy? Journal of Islamic Studies 12 (2001): 117; and al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, op. cit. 14 Avner Giladi, On the Origins of Two Key Terms in al-Gazzal s Ihya ulum al-d n, Arabica 36 (1989): 8192.

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In the letters we nd specic charges brought against al-Ghazal in the course of the controversy. Unsurprisingly, we nd that philosophy holds a prominent place in the list of the deviant sects and schools he was accused of adhering to. The collected letters do not consist solely of al-Ghazal s voice; rather, most letters are prefaced by an introduction written by the anonymous compiler of the collection, providing contextual background. It is the compiler who tells us that al-Ghazal s enemies charged that he:
Did not have any belief whatsoever in Islam, but rather that he held the creed of the philosophers and the heretics ( falasifa va mulhidan) and he mixed all of his books with their words. He mixed unbelief (kufr ) and nonsense (abatl ) with the secrets of the revelation. He called God the true light and this is the belief of the Zoroastrians (madhhab-i majus), who speak of light and darkness.15

These do not seem to have been the only dubious creeds al-Ghazal was accused of following. Contemporary criticisms of the Ihya from Alexandria and Ifr q ya, by critics likely aware of the controversy in Nishapur, contain further charges of Batinism and borrowings from the Ikhwan al-Safa.16

The Case for the Munqidh as an Apology in the Face of the Controversy
Knowing that al-Ghazal wrote the Munqidh shortly after his return to teaching and therefore in the midst of this controversy over the Ihya that focused on philosophical borrowings, we nd new signicance in passages where the Munqidh refers to the Ihya,
Abu Hamid al-Ghazal , Makatib-i fars -yi Ghazzal bi-nam-i fazail al-anam min rasail Hujjat al-Islam, ed. Abbas Iqbal (Tehran: Kitabforush Ibn S na, 1333/1954), 3. 16 Abu Bakr al-Turtush (d. 520/1126) makes the charge of Batinism and borrowings from the Ikhwan al-Safa along with charges of philosophical borrowings in response to a query from al-Andalus on whether or not the Ihya should be burned. The charge of Batinism is based on al-Ghazal s claim in the Ihya that the Science of Divine Disclosure cannot be revealed to those not initiated into it. Turtush s letter is reproduced in Sad Ghurab, Hawla ihraq al-Murabitn li-Ihya al-Ghazal , Actas del IV coloquio Hispano-Tunecino (Palma de Mallorca, 1979) Madrid, 1983 (1983): 15863. Al-Mazar al-Imam (d. 536/1141), writing from Ifr qiyya and referring to questions he has received about al-Ghazal from both the Maghrib and Mashriq, also charges that al-Ghazal was inuenced by the Ikhwan. The passage is cited in al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra., vol. 6, 241. For a Spanish translation of al-Mazar s critique of al-Ghazali, see Miguel Asn-Palacios, Un faq h Siciliano, contradictor de al-Ghazal (Abu Abd Allah de Mazara), in Centenario della nascita di Michele Amari (Palermo: 1910) vol. 2, 216244. There is good evidence that al-Ghazal was inuenced by the Ikhwan al-Safa. See Treiger, The Science of Divine Disclosure: Al-Gazal s Higher Theology and its Philosophical Underpinnings, 8385; Martin Whittingham, Al-Ghazal and the Quran: One Book, Many Meanings (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 6869; and Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 199200. Anna Akasoy has suggested that charges of having been inuenced by the Brethren of Purity were a repeated trope of Maghribi anti-Su polemic. See her The al-Ghazal Conspiracy: Reections on the Inter-Mediterranean Dimension of Islamic Intellectual History, in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepolis), 117142 at 126.
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and denies or justies a debt to philosophy. Starting from these more direct references to the controversy, we can move on to less direct ways in which al-Ghazal formulated his autobiography to respond to the campaign against him. In the following passage of the Munqidh, al-Ghazal responds to charges of philosophical inuence in his Ihya:
A faction of those whose minds are not rooted in the sciences, and whose vision is not open to the furthest degrees of the schools of thought (madhahib), objected to some words scattered in our compositions on the secrets of the religious sciences and claimed that those words were from the discussions of the ancient philosophers. This despite the fact that some of them were my own original ideas and it is not impossible that one hoof should fall where another has trod. And some of them are present in the books of religion, and the sense of most of them is found in the books of Susm. And even assuming that they are not present except in [the philosophers] books, as long as those discussions are rational in themselves, guided by rational proof, and not at odds with the Book and the Sunna, then why is it necessary to renounce and abandon them?17

Here we see not only a reference to the charges of borrowing from philosophy but also a roundabout admission that this is so and a justication for having done so. Al-Ghazal s reference to criticisms of his compositions on the secrets of the religious sciences seems a clear reference to The Revival of the Religious Sciences. A few passages later, he comes back to a defense of his borrowings from philosophy. A boy who sees a snake charmer may try handling snakes and be poisoned. A snake charmer, however, has the expertise to do so without fear of being bitten. What is more, a snake charmer has an obligation to handle snakes in order to extract an antidote from snake venom for the benet of those in need. Just so, al-Ghazal has a duty to extract from philosophy what is needed by the community.18 The charge of philosophical borrowing was one of the chief accusations al-Ghazal faced. The most likely explanation for these two justications of philosophical borrowing in the Munqidh is that they are a response to the controversy, especially given the reference to the Ihya in the rst one. In another passage in the Munqidh, al-Ghazal claims divine sanction for his project of revival. Near the end of the book al-Ghazal justies his return to ofcially sponsored teaching in the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Nishapur, writing that some noble and insightful men of Tus had interpreted his return to teaching in 499 (of the Hijr calendar) as evidence that he was the mujaddid or renewer of the fth Islamic century, in keeping

17 Al-Ghazal , Al-Munqidh min al-dalal, 4546. Emphasis added. This passage has also been cited and analyzed by Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute over al-Ghazal s Best of all Possible Worlds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 209, and al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa, 8485. I have followed al-Akiti in translating al-kutub al-shar iyya as books fo religion. 18 Ibid., 47.

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with the hadith of the Renewer.19 As Hans Bauer has pointed out, Ghazal alters the standard wording of the hadith of the Renewer in a telling way, writing not, At the head of every century, God sends to this religious community whosoever (man) will renew for it the affairs of its religion, but rather, whosoever will revive for it the affairs of its religion.20 Ghazal presents himself as the Renewer of the 5th century insofar as his appointment to teach at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Nishapur at the head of that century would allow him to promote the agenda of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Finally, there is evidence that al-Ghazal s enemies saw the Munqidh as a work related to the controversy. Al-Ghazal writes that one of them, a Sicilian Malik named Abu Abdallah al-Mazar al-Dhak (d. 510/1116), approached him with a copy to ask for his certication (ijaza). Al-Ghazal writes that he examined the copy and found a trap: incriminating interpolations in the text; he refused to sign. Al-Mazar al-Dhak was then banished from Nishapur and went to the court of Sanjar, where he denounced al-Ghazal .21 These references provide the plainest evidence that the Munqidh was a work of apology written in the context of the Nishapuri controversy. Approaching the Munqidh from this point of view reading it as an apology written in the midst of an intellectual furore over Ihya ulum al-d n, and keeping in mind the controversys key debating points puts the Munqidh in a new light. Even passages that do not explicitly refer to the Ihya or to al-Ghazal s critics take on new signicance. In particular, it becomes clear that al-Ghazal s limited rejection of philosophy, utter rejection of Isma l Shiism, and several passing dismissals of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa) are to be understood in part as rebuttals to charges that he adhered to these very schools of thought. There are several threads of apology that run through the Munqidh. Here I will focus on al-Ghazal s effort to abstract his life of most of its worldly particulars to cast himself as an almost accidental religious authority, guided by God and driven by interior, spiritual motives, with no thought of worldly gain. Knowing the context in which al-Ghazal wrote this autobiography helps us understand what considerations moved him to craft the narrative of his life as he did. Comparison to his briefer second biography will further highlight his rhetorical artistry.

The Man on the Mountaintop

In the Munqidh al-Ghazal presents a largely decontextualized and disembodied life. The drama of the Munqidh is almost exclusively mental and spiritual. Ghazal weighs different intellectual positions, comes to doubt them, lapses into radical
Ibid., 7576. On the tradition of the mujaddid, see Ella Landau-Tasseron, The Cyclical Reform: A Study of the Mujaddid Tradition, Studia Islamica 70 (1989): 79117. 20 H. Bauer, Zum Titel und zur Abfassung von Ghazalis Ihja, Der Islam IV (1913): 159160. 21 Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 3, 1112. On al-Mazar al-Dhak and his role in the controversy, see Kenneth Garden, Al-Mazar al-Dhak : Al-Ghazal s Maghribi Adversary in Nishapur, Journal of Islamic Studies 21, no. 1 (2010): 89107.
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skepticism, recovers, investigates various schools of thought, separates their wheat from their chaff, settles on one of them (namely Susm), practices it for some ten years in seclusion, and concludes that the unique fruits of this trajectory have made him indispensable to his troubled age. His initial inquisitive disposition is determined by God, and so are most of the turning points in his life. It is God who cures him of his original aporia, who forces him to leave his position in Baghdad, and who creates the conditions for him to return to teaching in Nishapur. The specics of place play little role in the Munqidh, and relations to other human beings even less. But we know from other sources that al-Ghazal had close connections to the political powers of his age. Seljuk ofcials played an important role in his movements, the positions he held, and, in some cases, what he wrote. Abd al-Ghar al-Faris writes of al-Ghazal beginning his career after his studies by nding a patron in his fellow Tus , Nizam al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), and joining him in the military camp of the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah (d. 485/1092), which was in Isfahan. It was Nizam al-Mulk, Malik Shahs 22 vizier, who appointed him head of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad. In the Munqidh, al-Ghazal does mention the caliph al-Mustazhir bi-Llah (d. 512/1118) (though not by name!) and his role in requesting the composition of a refutation of Isma l Shiism, Fadaih al-batiniyya wa fadail al-mustazh riyya. But he makes a point of noting that he did not write the book solely at the Caliphs request. Rather, this was an incentive from outside, in addition to the original motive from within (li-l-baith al-asl min al-batin).23 And when he mentions the role of the Seljuk King of the East in summoning him to return to teaching in Nishapur in 499/1106, he is careful to note that it was God who moved Sanjar to summon him, and that this was likewise in accordance with his own prior intention.24 He omits to mention the role of Fakhr al-Mulk, son of his former patron, who Abd al-Ghar al-Faris tells us was the one who issued the 25 actual invitation to teach in Nishapur. Al-Ghazal s relations with these and other men of state were far more extensive than the Munqidh implies, a fact certainly known to his contemporaries. By omitting the context of his life and career, al-Ghazal presents himself as the proverbial Man on the Mountaintop, having severed all ties to the world and possessed of unique wisdom shared with those who seek him out to solicit it.

A Life in Context

The campaign al-Ghazal describes in al-Imla f ishkalat al-ihya came to a head in 26 500/1106 or 501/1107 when his enemies complained to Sanjar that he had slandered

Al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra, vol. 6, 205. Al-Ghazal , al-Munqidh min al-dalal, 48. 24 Ibid., 75. 25 Al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra, vol. 6, 207. 26 Frank Griffel has argued that the controversy began in 501/1108. In a letter to Sanjar that we will analyze below, al-Ghazal gives his age as 53. Griffel has argued based on evidence from the letters that
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Abu Han fa, founder of the Hanaf legal school, in a youthful work of legal theory entitled al-Mankhul min tal q al-usul 27 which he had.28 This charge would have troubled Sanjar for two reasons. First, he, like all members of the Seljuk house, was a Hanaf . More importantly, Nishapur was plagued by communal violence between followers of the Hanaf and Sha madhhabs. This rivalry had led to the banishment of al-Ghazal s teacher, al-Juwayn (d. 478/1085), from Nishapur and his exile in the Hijaz, from which he took his title Imam al-Haramayn.29 A few decades after al-Ghazal s 30 death, sectarian rioting contributed to the destruction of Nishapur. Fierce madhhab partisanship was referred to as taassub, fanaticism, and this was the charge leveled at al-Ghazal a charge Sanjar could not ignore. On the basis of this accusation, he summoned al-Ghazal for a hearing. Al-Ghazal appeared before Sanjar and won him over with his testimony. In the Imla, al-Ghazal reports that his enemies attacks won no royal favor, a reference to his acquittal. Al-Ghazal returned to Tus after his trial, and there Sanjar sent him some wild game he had hunted as a display of his favor toward him. Al-Ghazali responded by 31 writing a short Mirror for Princes for Sajar entitled Nashat-i muluk. But al-Ghazal communicated with Sanjar before the hearing. He set out from Tus for Sanjars camp at Turugh, 7 km south of Mashhad on the road to Nishapur.32 He stopped in Mashhad, the site of the still-venerated tomb of a descendent of the Prophet, Imam

al-Ghazal s birth date is not 450/1059, as is often assumed, but rather, in descending order of likelihood, 448/1057, 447/1056, or 446/1055. The most likely of these dates would give us 501/1108 as the date of the controversy. On the date of al-Ghazal s birth, see Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 2325. On the dating of the controversy, see ibid., 54. On the basis of a biography of a Maghribi participant in the controversy named al-Mazar al-Dhak found in Qad Iyads Tart b al-madarik, I have argued that the controversy occurred in 500/1106. See Garden, Al-Mazar al-Dhak : Al-Ghazal s Maghribi Adversary in Nishapur, 102. 27 Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 3. For al-Ghazal s denial of the charge, see ibid., 10. 28 Van Ess consulted the Mankhul and conrmed that al-Ghazal denies that Abu Han fa is worthy of being called a mujtahid. See van Ess, Quelques remarques sur le Munqidh min ad-dall, 60., and Abu Hamid al-Ghazal , al-Mankhul min tal q al-usul, ed. Muhammad Hasan H tu (Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 1970), 471. In the Mankhul, al-Ghazal further charges that Abu Han fa turned the shar a inside out, jumbled its method, and altered its rules. Ibid, 500. Al-Ghazal goes on to list errors committed by Abu Han fa and concludes the list by writing, Perhaps the reader of this chapter will think that we are fanatical partisans of al-Sha , furious at Abu Han fa, due to the our long-windedness in the arrangement of this chapter. Nonsense! We are nothing if not even-handed judges, limiting ourselves to a small portion of abundant [examples]. Ibid, 504. 29 On the controversy that led to al-Juwayn s exile, see Heinz Halm, Der Wesir al-Kundur und die Fitna von Niapur, Die Welt des Orients 6 (197071): 205233. 30 On Hanaf -Sha rivalry in Nishapur, see Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 3132. On the remarkable story of the gradual destruction of Nishapur between 548/1153 and 557/1162 through a combination of attacks by Ghuzz tribesmen and Hanaf -Sha violence, see ibid., 7681. 31 Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 11. 32 Modern day Turuq. Krawulsky provides its location. Krawulsky, Briefe und Reden des Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Gazall bersetzt und erlutert, 219, n. 5/1.
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Riza, and wrote a letter to Sanjar, asking to be excused from appearing before him. He spends the rst half of the letter urging Sanjar to use his ofce justly in order to store provisions in this world for the world to come. In particular, al-Ghazal asks him to be merciful towards the people of Tus, who are enduring famine due to drought and extreme cold that have destroyed their grain crops and their orchards. After this, we come to an autobiographical segment that, despite its brevity, differs markedly from the Munqidh in its overall specicity and the details it includes. It reads as follows:
Know that 53 years of the life of this supplicant have passed. For forty of these, he plunged into the sea of the religious sciences, until he reached the point that his words remained closed to the understanding of the majority of his contemporaries. He lived for twenty years in the days of the martyred sultan (Malik Shah), whose favor was bestowed upon him in Baghdad and Isfahan. He was often a messenger in important matters between the Sultan and the Commander of the Believers and wrote some seventy books about religious sciences. Then he saw the world as it was and rejected it utterly. He spent some time in Jerusalem and Mecca, and swore at the grave of Abraham, the Friend of God may Gods prayers be upon him no longer to go to any sultan, not to take the money of a sultan, and not to practice theological disputing or fanaticism (munazara va taassub na kunad). He was true to this oath for twelve years and the Commander of the Believers and all sultans knew him to be excused.33

For such a brief autobiographical fragment, it is striking how much information it conveys that is absent from the much longer Munqidh, which shows how differently al-Ghazal was capable of presenting his life. He does not appear here as a disembodied spiritual seeker shorn of worldly attachment. He prefaces the passage by appealing to the Sultan on the behalf of his fellow Tus s. He gives us his age and tells us roughly when he began his studies. He reminds Sanjar of his service to Sanjars father, Malik Shah, specically of his mediation between the Sultan and the Caliph. He makes it clear that his position in Baghdad was the result of his service to the Sultan, mentioning Malik Shahs favor to him in Isfahan and Baghdad.34 The other important differences between this passage and the Munqidh lie in their respective representations of al-Ghazal s famous crisis and repentance of 488/ 1095. There is no mention of Susm or a period of vacillation before nding the resolve to follow the Su path. There is no mention of God robbing him of his powers of speech or digestion. He simply saw the world as it was and rejected it. While the Munqidh emphasizes his spiritual exercise in Damascus, here he neglects even to mention the city, writing only of Jerusalem and Mecca. We cannot conclude that this is simply for the sake of concision. Al-Ghazal does make space for an important and dramatic event he does not mention in the Munqidh: a series of vows
33 34

Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 45. Malik Shah reigned 465485/10721092.

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he took at the tomb of Abraham: nevermore to appear before a ruler, to accept no more money from a ruler, not to engage in any further theological disputation, and to forswear all fanaticism (taassub).35 These vows are illuminating in several ways. Apart from his travel through the Levant and Hijaz, they are the only actions al-Ghazal mentions in relation to his repentance. As such they point to a very different set of motives behind the transformation of 488/1095, namely a repentance of involvement with men of state. His reference to Malik Shah as the martyred sultan (sultan-i shah d) reminds us of the period of political turmoil in which his repentance occurred. In 485/1092, Nizam al-Mulk, al-Ghazal s patron, was assassinated and his rival, Taj al-Mulk, became Malik Shahs vizir. With this change of the guard, Malik Shah ordered the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtad to leave the capital within ten days. Before the ten days had elapsed, Malik Shah himself died of a fever. The Caliph stayed in Baghdad and Malik Shahs sons began struggling to succeed him. Nizam al-Mulks entourage of thousands, known as the Nizamiyya, murdered Taj al-Mulk, and his sons struggled over his inheritance.36 Al-Ghazal himself played a role in these events. One of Malik Shahs widows, Terken Khatun, prevailed upon the Caliph to name her ve year old son as Malik Shahs successor, but only on the condition that he also be allowed to name the commander of the army and the vizier. These had been the prerogatives of the Sultan and not the Caliph and Terken Khatun initially refused. It was al-Ghazal who mediated between the parties, upholding the Caliphs position and telling Terken Khatun that the religious law forbade the installation of a minor as fully sovereign ruler. In the event, it all came to naught as mother and son died of disease in 486/1097. Within sixteen months of the death of Nizam al-Mulk, the entire political elite of the realm was dead, including the Caliph al-Muqtad , who died in 487/1094. 37 The result was chaos. That al-Ghazal vowed to renounce ties with rulers within these circumstances suggests that a very worldly set of factors also played a role in his crisis and repentance of 488/1095. Numerous studies have emphasized the political element of al-Ghazal s career and writings.38
Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 45. For recent and thorough discussion of these events, see Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 3639. The estimate of the size of the Nizamiyya and the reference to Nizam al-Mulks sons struggling over his inheritance is from Aziz Basan, The Great Seljuks: A History (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 3437. 37 Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 3637. 38 Henri Laoust, La Politique de Gazal (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste de Paul Guethner, 1970); Erika Glassen, Der Mittlere Weg: Studien zur Religionspolitik und Religiositt der Spteren Abbasiden-Zeit, ed. Hans Robert Roemer, Freiburger Islamstudien (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981); Mustapha Hogga, Orthodoxie, Subversion et Rforme en Islam: Ghazal et les Seljuqides, suivi de textes politiques de Ghazal , tudes Musulmanes (Paris: Libririe Philosophique J. Vrin, 1993); Omid Sa, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 10524.
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Al-Ghazal tells us that these vows were well known: the Caliph and all sultans knew not to summon him because he had removed himself from their orbit. It is striking that this facet of his repentance merits no mention in the Munqidh. Josef van Ess has suggested that assuming an ofcial position at the Nizamiyya at the urging of Fakhr al-Mulk and the backing of Sanjar would have constituted enough of a compromise of the rst two clauses of this publically known vow that al-Ghazal would not want to call attention to it in the Munqidh, in which he justies his return to teaching.39 The renunciation of theological debate (munazara) is also political. In the Ihya, al-Ghazal condemns the practice, and in his description of it, he makes it clear that what he has in mind is public theological debate before rulers, whose winners were often richly rewarded by the patrons of this sport.40 Such debates may have been occasions for Hanaf s and Sha s to face off, which may be why al-Ghazal writes of renouncing debating and taassub in the same breath, though the inclusion of a renunciation of fanaticism in his report of his vows may be opportunistic. Al-Ghazal refers to his vow at the tomb of Abraham in another letter in the collection, but this time omits reference to renouncing taassub.41 Given that he was on his way to Sanjars camp to answer charges of sectarian fanaticism, al-Ghazal s motive for adding a clause to his vow is clear. It is another illustration of the elasticity of his self-presentations. Al-Ghazal continues, writing that he has been summoned by Sanjar for an audience, and to this end he has come to Mashhad-i Riza. But because of his oath to Abraham, he has not come to the camp. He then prays to Imam Riza to convince Sanjar to excuse him:
Oh son of the Prophet, be an intercessor with God Most High to elevate the King of Islam above his father in this world and in the world to come, to the position of Solomon, who was a king and a prophet. Support him in upholding the inviolability of the oath before Abraham, the Friend of God peace be upon him and in not torturing the heart of him who has turned himself from men to You, God Most High great is He.42

Allowing him to respect his oath, he tells Sanjar, would be better than having him appear before him as a soulless body. Sanjars order is binding, of course, but if he commands al-Ghazal to appear before him, the responsibility for breaking the oath would not be al-Ghazal s. Of course, this brief account of al-Ghazal s life is every bit as apologetic as the Munqidh; its author has carefully included the details calculated to shape Sanjars opinion of him prior to his hearing. It is unlikely that he actually thought that Sanjar
39 40

Van Ess, Quelques remarques sur le Munqidh min ad-dall, 61. Al-Ghazal , Ihya ulum al-d n, vol. I, Kitab al-ilm, 4446. 41 Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 45. 42 Ibid., 5.

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would excuse him from the summons. Aside from disavowing responsibility for breaking his oath by appearing before Sanjar, the supplication serves to set the stage for al-Ghazal s hearing. He presents himself a loyal, long-time servant of the Seljuks which accounts for many of the worldly details he includes in this passage and omits from the Munqidh. He establishes himself as an unrivaled religious authority whose writings are beyond the grasp of most religious scholars, much as he does in the Munqidh. Thus the charges against him are rooted in the misunderstanding of his scholarly inferiors. And he is able to stress his otherworldly piety in addition to his service to Seljuk sultans. Otherworldliness is at the core of al-Ghazal s self presentation in the Munqidh, but here, writing for Sanjar, he writes of a vow to break relations with worldly rulers, rather than eliding any mention of having had such relations in the rst place. Neither the Munqidh nor this autobiographical element of al-Ghazal s petition to Sanjar can be taken as the authoritative account of his life. The two of them together show that there was a range of details and narrative frameworks al-Ghazal drew on in presenting accounts of his life depending on his aims in writing autobiography. The true test of the merits of the elements of each account it to compare them to al-Ghazal s other writings, especially Ihya ulum al-d n and his letters. Such a comparison shows that both accounts of al-Ghazal s life contain vital information, and the Munqidh naturally contains more, being a longer work. But the tropological elements of the Munqidh must be discounted for a richer and more accurate picture of al-Ghazal to emerge. The sequential survey of the four categories of the seekers, borrowed from Umar Khayyam, and especially the depiction of al-Ghazal s relationship with philosophy, is undermined, as we have seen, by passages found in the Munqidh itself, and by recent scholarship on his debt to philosophy. More importantly, the interiorized account of al-Ghazal s quest, shorn of worldly context, must be rejected in the face of evidence from the Ihya and the letters. These show that al-Ghazal was, from the moment of his repentance in 488/1095 to his death in 505/1111, actively campaigning to transform the religious landscape of his age and actively lobbying the men of state he knew from his former life in support of this agenda.

Al-Ghazal : Engaged Scholar of the Hereafter

While in the Munqidh al-Ghazali describes the years after his repentance as a period of seclusion and solitude (uzla wa khalwa43) and writes of his days shut inside the minaret of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, al-Ghazal s other writings tell a different story. In fact, we nd that he had made the decision to engage the world very soon after leaving his position in Baghdad. He did so by writing his Revival of the Religious Sciences, a book whose transformative agenda, as we have seen, is every bit as ambitious as its title suggests. Far from allowing the Ihya to speak for itself, al-Ghazal actively spread its
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Al-Ghazal , Al-Munqidh min al-dalal, 71.

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message and recruited scholars to his Science of the Hereafter. Second-hand reports tell of his reading from the work publically already in Damascus.44 First-hand reports tell of his teaching it in Baghdad.45 Over the nal seventeen years of his life, al-Ghazal sought to expand his audience by writing synopses of the work and a Persian version for an audience with a tenuous grasp of Arabic.46 In the letters, as well, we nd al-Ghazal actively promoting his revivalist agenda. We see him trying to recruit talented young students to the study of the Science of the Hereafter.47 We see him promoting the career of a like-minded scholar, Ibrah m-i Sabbak (d. 513/1119), who we learn was al-Ghazal s companion for twenty years, not only from Tus to Nishapur to Baghdad, but also during his years of retreat in the Levant and Hijaz.48 Al-Ghazal writes to Fakhr al-Mulk (d. 500/1106), Sanjars vizier, asking him to promote this man to the position of qad. One of the most striking things about the letters is the very active engagement with men of state they reveal, especially Persian administrators of the Seljuk empire. Of the thirty-three letters in the collection, no fewer than eighteen are correspondence with Seljuk men of state: one to Sanjar and seventeen to various ministers and administrators. His vow at the tomb of Abraham was to abstain from appearing before rulers, a category his letters tell us included Sultans and Caliphs. But he did not abstain from political involvement altogether. Al-Ghazal s correspondence with Fakhr al-Mulk, the vizir of Sanjar at the time of his return to teaching in Nishapur, is particularly interesting, as it shows that a master-disciple relationship existed between the two men. There is one letter that is especially revealing in this respect. In it, al-Ghazal writes that honoric addresses such as am r, Sword (husam), and Order (nizam) are mere titles, and quotes a hadith that states, I and the believers of my community are free of dissimulation. He further writes that the true princes are those who possess both the exterior and interior traits of a prince, though they may not be recognized as such, while one who is recognized as a prince but lacks the inner essence of princedom is in fact a prisoner. Thus, Fakhr

Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 44. Griffel cites Ibn Ath r. Abu Bakr Ibn al-Arab , al-Awasim min al-qawasim, ed. Ammar Talib (Cairo: Maktabat Dar al-turath, 1997), 24. 46 Arabic synopses of the Ihya include al-Arba n min usul al-d n, and al-Lubab min al-Ihya. This latter work has been attributed to al-Ghazal s brother, Ahmad, but Frank Griffel has recently argued that it should be attributed to Abu Hamid. See Griffel, Al-Ghazal s Philosophical Theology, 62 and n. 7. 47 Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 7374. 48 Ibid., 10507 and 3435. The man referred to in the rst letter is not named. Ibrah m-i Sabbak is named in the second letter. Krawulsky argues that the two letters refer to the same man. See Krawulsky, Briefe und Reden des Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Gazall bersetzt und erlautert, 2627. Ibrah m-i Sabbak may be one of the group of youths from Tus that Abd al-Ghar al-Faris says attended the lectures of al-Juwayn with al-Ghazal in Nishapur. See al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra, vol. 6, 204.
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al-Mulks earthly rank is discounted; he is addressed as a member of a fellowship of would-be otherworldly amirs standing below al-Ghazal in a relationship of disciple to mentor.49 That al-Ghazal was Fakhr al-Mulks spiritual mentor is particularly signicant, as Abd al-Ghar al-Faris tells us that it was Fakhr al-Mulk and not Sanjar who issued the invitation to return to ofcial teaching (clearly he was already actively engaged in teaching) in Nishapur. As al-Ghazal s disciple, Fakhr al-Mulk did so with full awareness of what his mentor stood for and thus actively promoted al-Ghazal s revivalism. Al-Ghazal s letters tell us that Fakhr al-Mulk summoned al-Ghazal with Sanjars backing.50 After the hearing that resulted in al-Ghazal s acquittal, Sanjar seems to have promised al-Ghazal more resources in support of his controversial agenda.51 Al-Ghazal s effort to revive the religion of his age had become thoroughly enmeshed in politics, much as he tells us in the Munqidh when he writes of God moving Sanjar to summon him again to teach. What the letters reveal that the Munqidh omits is that it was never so far from politics in the rst place.

Conclusion
Al-Ghazal s resumption of a position at a Nizamiyya madrasa in Nishapur in 499/1106 sparked a major controversy that threatened al-Ghazal and the revivalist agenda he hoped to promote through his new position. Abd al-Ghar al-Faris writes of his response to the campaign against him: He was unaffected by it and did not busy himself with answering the slanderers, nor did he manifest any distress at the calumny of the confused.52 In fact, though, he did respond to his detractors by presenting accounts of his life that aimed to deect their criticism. Writing for a more general audience in al-Munqidh min al-dalal, he presented himself as a seless and other worldly gure who had interrupted a life of seclusion only to guide his fellow men to the salvation that he, uniquely, had discovered. Writing for Sanjar en route to a hearing, al-Ghazal reminded the King of the East of his service to the Seljuk house, especially of serving them as an envoy to the Caliph. He mentions the turning point in his life that gures so prominently in the Munqidh, but ties it to a series of vows conspicuously absent from that work, to shun political rulers and religious disputation and factionalism. Each account draws on the events from al-Ghazal s life that best served him in the immediate circumstances of its composition and weaves them into a suitable narrative framework.

Al-Ghazal , Fazail al-anam, 2428. Ibid., 10. 51 Ibid., 1011. 52 Al-Subk , Tabaqat al-shaiyya al-kubra, vol. 6, 208. Translation from McCarthys introduction: R. J. McCarthy, Deliverance from Error: Five Key Texts Including his Spiritual Autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1980), 16.
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Neither of these accounts reveals the real al-Ghazal . Both have their virtues as sources for his biography. The much more extensive account in the Munqidh provides unique information and is the much richer and more subtle of the two works. His active campaign to revive the religious sciences can also be discerned in that work. But in returning al-Ghazal and his thought to the worldly circumstances that shaped them, the autobiographical fragment in the letter to Sanjar performs a valuable service. Once we set aside the image of al-Ghazal as a solitary seeker on an inner quest for the truth, his writings come alive as the works of an engaged scholar, striving by all the means at his disposal to Revive the religious landscape of his age.

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