Al-Warraq Library does not host book files; it takes you to the copy at the original source. Public-domain status differs from country to country, so check the law where you live before downloading or republishing the book. Do you hold rights in this work? Request its removal
This is Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's famous spiritual autobiography, known in Arabic as al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, 'Deliverance from Error'. He tells how, as a…
This is Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's famous spiritual autobiography, known in Arabic as al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, 'Deliverance from Error'. He tells how, as a celebrated professor in Baghdad, he was seized by doubt about whether anything could be known with certainty, and examined in turn the theologians, the philosophers, the Batinis who followed a hidden teacher, and the Sufis. After a crisis in which he could no longer speak to teach, he left his post and his wealth to follow the Sufi path, where he found certainty through direct experience.
Context and significance
Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), born in Tus in Khorasan, is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Islam, known as Hujjat al-Islam, 'the Proof of Islam'. This short English version by Claud Field was published in 1909 in the Wisdom of the East series. Compare Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Saint Augustine's Confessions.
About the author
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), born in Tus in Khorasan, became the most celebrated scholar of his age as a professor at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. Then, in 1095, a spiritual crisis left him unable to speak in class. He gave up his post, lived for years as a wandering Sufi in Damascus and Jerusalem, and returned convinced that true knowledge comes from experience as well as reason.
His Incoherence of the Philosophers challenged the followers of Aristotle and provoked a famous reply from Ibn Rushd; his Revival of the Religious Sciences became one of the most read books in Islam; and his autobiography, The Deliverance from Error, is still studied, and was quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.