Living the Sunna: Practical Guidance from Imam al-Ghazali’s “Bidaya al-Hidaya”

This work was written by the greatest scholar of his time and arguably the most famous scholar of the Islamic tradition, Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali. Imam Ghazali is unanimously regarded as the renewer (mujaddid) of Islam of his century, first for his intellectual defense of traditional Islamic beliefs against Avicennan philosophy, and then for his powerful spiritual reinvigoration of the Islamic sciences through his magnum opus, the 40-part lhya’ ‘Ulum aI-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences).

Imam Ghazali was born in the year 450 AH (1058 CE) in Tabiran, near Tus (just north of present-day Mashhad, Iran). He first studied Islamic law at Tus and then travelled across the Islamic world taking Sacred Knowledge from its masters. One of his main teachers was Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni, at whose hands he became a scholar in Shafi'i law, logic, tenets of faith, debate, and the rationalistic doctrines of the philosophical schools of his time (which he was later called upon to refute). After Juwayni’s death, Ghazali was appointed to a teaching post at the Nizamiyya Academy in Baghdad, where word of his brilliance spread, and scholars journeyed to hear him.

In mid-career, after considerable reflection, he was gripped by an intense fear for his soul and his fate in the Afterlife and resigned from his post, travelling first to Jerusalem and then Damascus to engage in spiritual struggle. In Damascus, he lived in seclusion for some ten years, at the end of which he emerged to produce his masterpiece Revival of the Religious Sciences. He died in Tabiran in 505/1111.