Preface
THERE are a score of lives of Mohammed, the great Arabian Prophet, in the English language, yet there is no popular biography of the greatest of all Moslems since his day, Al-Ghazali. Even the Encyclopœdia Britannica gives only scant information. Professor Duncan B. Macdonald prepared a life of Al-Ghazali with special reference to his religious experiences and influence in a paper published in the twentieth volume of "The Journal of the American Oriental Society" (1899), but now out of print. His scholarly investigations and conclusions, however, deal with Al-Ghazali’s inner experiences and his philosophy, rather than with his environment and the events of his life. We acknowledge our great indebtedness to his paper and to the original Arabic sources on which it was based, especially the introduction to the Commentary on the Ihya by Sayyid Murtadha in ten volumes and entitled Ithaf assa'ade, I have found additional material in Al-Ghazali’s writings and other books mentioned in the bibliography given in the appendix of this book, especially the Tabaqat ash-shafai'ya by As-Subqi, who wrote long before Murtadha and to whom Macdonald refers, but whose work he did not use.
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