Abu Hamid al-Ghazali represented the state of intellectual and philosophical conflict that the Abbasid era experienced; the era of the flourishing of translation and transmission, the era of theologians and philosophers. Al-Ghazali drank from all sciences and knowledge, and walked in the paths of philosophical schools, until he reached the stage of doubt in everything, and found that the sources of religion and the first laws were in danger after they were surrounded by the stagnation of thought; so he began to liberate the soul and the heart from the restrictions of the era, by returning the public to the origins of religion and its first spiritual and doctrinal sources. The writer here monitors the circumstances of Al-Ghazali’s upbringing, his view of the soul and the self, which preceded the great scholars of the West, his adoption of doubt as a method and his belief in it, and his belief in the esotericism of knowledge; and then his connection to Sufism, and his theorizing about it, until he became an authority for Islam, and its renewer in the fifth century AH.
