In the closing decades of the eleventh century, a jurist trained in the rigor of Islamic law walked away from the most prestigious teaching post in Baghdad and disappeared into a decade of near silence. What drove Abu Hamid al-Ghazali to abandon position, wealth, and reputation was not despair but an unrelenting search for certainty — a search this study follows book by book, stage by stage, across the whole of his intellectual life.
Dr. Mustafa Abu-Sway traces the development of al-Ghazali's theory of knowledge from his earliest training in jurisprudence (fiqh) and its legal methodology (usul al-fiqh), through the systematic doubt recorded in al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, to the Sufi epistemology that defined his final works. Rather than treating al-Ghazali's thought as static, the book reconstructs it chronologically, working directly from the Arabic corpus — more than seventy titles catalogued by Badawi — and cross-referenced against medieval biographical sources such as al-Subki's Tabaqat al-Shafi'iyyah al-Kubra.
The result is a study built on primary sources rather than secondary paraphrase. It situates al-Ghazali within the political turbulence of the late 'Abbasid caliphate — the rivalries of the Seljuk sultans, the assassinations carried out by the Batiniyah, the arrival of the Crusaders in Jerusalem — and asks how these pressures shaped a scholar's inward turn. It examines his engagement with the Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite theologians, his critique of the philosophers Ibn Sina and al-Farabi, and his eventual conviction that the highest knowledge, 'ilm yaqini, could be reached only through the discipline and unveiling (kashf) of the Sufi path.
Along the way, the book addresses long-standing controversies: whether al-Ghazali's departure from Baghdad reflected political retreat rather than spiritual crisis, whether accusations of Shi'ite sympathy have any basis, and whether his final writings show a retreat from Sufism toward the method of the traditionalists. Each question is weighed against al-Ghazali's own testimony and the historical record rather than received opinion.
Written for students and scholars of Islamic intellectual history, theology, and Sufism, this study offers a rigorously sourced account of how one of Islam's most influential thinkers arrived at his understanding of what can be known, and how.