Al-Ghazali's Crisis and Deliverance

In 1095 CE, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was thirty-seven years old and the most celebrated Islamic scholar of his generation. He held the most prestigious academic chair in Baghdad, at the Nizamiyya madrasa. He had written major works on philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence. Students came from across the Islamic world to study with him. By every external measure, he was at the summit of a career.

Then he could not speak.

He describes it in the Deliverance from Error — one of the most remarkable autobiographical documents in medieval literature — with clinical precision: God put a lock upon my tongue. He could not lecture. He could not eat. His body gave out in a way the physicians could not diagnose or treat. He understood that what was wrong was not physical. The crisis was a confrontation with his own hypocrisy.

He had been teaching about God, about the afterlife, about the proper conduct of a human life. But he asked himself, for the first time with full honesty: Do you believe what you are teaching? Or do you teach for the sake of reputation and worldly success? The answer was devastating. He could not be certain his faith was real rather than performed. He could not be certain his knowledge had any basis that he himself could verify, as distinct from what he had simply been taught. Everything he had built his life on was suddenly in question.

He left Baghdad. He gave away his wealth. He went to Syria, to Jerusalem, to Mecca and Medina. He lived as a wandering Sufi for approximately ten or eleven years — practicing austerity, contemplation, and the spiritual disciplines he had written about but, he now admitted, not truly inhabited. He was teaching himself the religion he had been teaching everyone else.

The Deliverance from Error and the Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences) — his masterwork, written during and after the crisis — are the products of this transformation. In the Ihya, al-Ghazali undertakes a complete reconstruction of Islamic religious life from the inside out: not as a set of rules to be followed but as a living spiritual practice, rooted in sincerity and the continuous examination of one's own motivations.

He returned to teaching, briefly, in Nishapur near the end of his life. He died in 1111 CE.

What al-Ghazali's story offers that few intellectual autobiographies do is the moment of absolute stopping. Not a gradual evolution, not a gentle crisis resolved by reading — a complete seizure of the capacity to continue. The crisis turned out to be the beginning. The loss of his voice was, in retrospect, the first honest thing that had happened to him in years.