Author: Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali held the most prestigious teaching chair in the Islamic world, at the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, and in 1095 suffered a collapse in which he could not speak. He left the post, settled property on his family and spent eleven years as a wandering ascetic. The Revival of the Religious Sciences came out of that, forty books reconciling law, theology and Sufism, and the volume here is one part of it, on discipline and the appetites. The Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna's use of Greek metaphysics, and Averroes answered with The Incoherence of the Incoherence. He is often blamed for closing off Islamic philosophy, and specialists largely reject that reading. He died in 1111.