A Meditation on Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
By Yahia Lababidi
Jul/Aug 25
In 1095, at the age of 37, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) stood at the height of his fame. A scholar among scholars, he dazzled minds from Nishapur to Baghdad, commanding the respect of sultans and students alike. But inside of him, a storm was brewing. One day, while giving a lecture, he fell mute. What he once commanded effortlessly — speech, persuasion, rhetoric — had abandoned him. It was not illness alone that had afflicted him; it was a rupture of the soul.
“I was convinced,” he later wrote, “that I stood on the edge of a crumbling cliff.” All the knowledge he had amassed — philosophy, jurisprudence, theology — now felt to him like sham and pretense. And so, he did what few in his position ever dare. He left his post. He walked away from prestige and power, turned his back on empire and applause, and withdrew into silence and solitude.
He did not lose his voice. He surrendered it.
With the world at his feet, al-Ghazali disappeared into obscurity — wandering, praying, weeping, seeking. His departure was not a rejection of reason. It was a search for something reason could no longer provide. “The visible world is a trace of that invisible one,” he wrote, “and the former follows the latter like a shadow.” He was searching for the spiritual light behind the physical forms.
“Were it not,” he said, “that He has placed an image of the whole world within your very being, you would have no knowledge of that which is apart from yourself.” His retreat was a descent into the Self in an effort to encounter the Real. It was an engagement of a deeper kind.
Ghazali’s crisis did not mark the collapse of his intellect; it marked its transcendence. He had reached the limit of philosophy’s power to nourish the soul. The polymath who once bested everyone who stood to argue against him now found himself undone by longing. Still, he did not denounce reason. Instead, he called for harmony between reason and revelation.
“He who is a proponent of mere blind imitation… is ignorant,” he wrote, “and he who is satisfied with the intellect alone… is deluded.” One must unite both sources. “The intellectual sciences are like foods,” he said, “and the sciences of religious law are as medicines.” One nourishes, the other heals. Together, they lead to wholeness.
He became whole not through conquest, but through surrender.
But what is healing in an age of spiritual illness? Mohammad Abu Laylah, writing on Ghazali, observed, “Great reformers have their sicknesses and sorrows, not because of their own state of health, but because the state of their nation drags them down.” Ghazali’s illness was not personal, it was prophetic — a rupture brought on by the sickness of the world. His silence was both protest and prayer.
20th century Czech novelist Franz Kafka glimpsed this paradox too. “No more psychology,” he wrote. “All these so-called illnesses… are facts of faith.” To suffer, for some, is to bear the weight of the collective. Ghazali suffered for us while also pointing toward a way through.
The modern world, obsessed with analysis and performance, often bypasses the soul’s cry. Ghazali saw the danger. “Desire makes slaves out of kings,” he wrote, “and patience makes kings out of slaves.” And again: “Only that which cannot be lost in a shipwreck is yours.” His medicine always addressed what endures.
The book Ghazali: The Revival of Islam by Eric Ormsby traces the drama of his life with clarity and admiration, revealing a man who combined the razor’s edge of logic with the humility of a mystic. If we were to search for a Western parallel, we might arrive at Augustine or Aquinas — the alliance of reason with revelation.
Ghazali remains a colossus in the Muslim world. His influence shaped centuries of thought. He restored inwardness to outward practice and gave permission to question. “Anyone who does not doubt will not investigate,” he said, “and anyone who does not investigate cannot see.”
In his book The Marvels of the Heart, al-Ghazali explores the hidden architecture of the soul. “The guardian of the riddle must speak in riddles,” I once wrote in an aphorism. This idea hints at the way of those entrusted with secrets. T. J. Winter, in this book’s foreword, puts it in these terms: “Because of the danger of misunderstanding by those who understand only outward words… the full doctrine of the soul must remain veiled.” This isn’t secrecy; It’s reverence. Some things must ripen before they can be revealed.
Here, one hears echoes of Greek philosopher Plotinus, who spoke of the soul’s ascent beyond intellect, and the need to “withdraw into oneself” to discover the light that burns behind all appearances. “Withdraw,” he said, “into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue.” Both thinkers, from different worlds, describe the same journey: inward, upward, onward, and into silence.
Scholar and President of Zaytuna College Hamza Yusuf called Ghazali the single most important Muslim after the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam). Yusuf’s own spiritual project echoes Ghazali not only in content but in tone: disciplined, introspective, grounded. He was a scholar with the heart of a poet and soul of a mystic. A reminder that reform does not require novelty. It demands a return to the source, with cleaner hands.
Yusuf’s edition of The Marvels of the Heart, with its lucid translation and luminous introduction, is itself an act of devotion — bridging the centuries with clarity and grace. His eloquence, steeped in both tradition and tenderness, brings Ghazali’s insights into the present with renewed urgency. To listen to Yusuf speak on the maladies of the heart is to hear the echo of Ghazali’s voice — calm, corrective, and ultimately, fixed upon the soul’s final destination.
Ghazali’s voice, first silenced, then renewed, teaches something essential. Knowledge alone is not enough. Speech can be shallow. The soul speaks best when the heart has been broken open. In his silence, he became a witness. And when he spoke again, it was not as a jurist or philosopher, but as a true shaheed, one who had seen the transcendent.
Ghazali shows us that the path to truth runs through the heart, that surrender deepens strength, and that it is possible to walk away from everything and return with more than you ever had.Yahia Lababidi is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently Palestine Wail and What Remains To Be Said.
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