The Revival of the Religious Sciences
Book by Al-GhazaliWikipedia
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Search complete. 20 mentions across 6 episodes found for "The Revival of the Religious Sciences".
Oct 29, 2026
Andrew M. HenryHOST
The key to it is sinking the heart entirely into the recollection of God, and the end of it is the complete dissolving into God, which he calls fene, annihilation or complete absorption.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
These experiences led him to write his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, or Ihya Ulum ad-Din.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
People compare it to Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae as a truly encyclopedic attempt to make sense of all kinds of Islamic thought.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
It's a multi-volume work on life, morality, public affairs, law, economics, and worldly politics, all with the intent of helping readers find orthodox positions on key matters of faith and piety.
7 MINS LATER
Andrew M. HenryHOST
What he denies is that fire burns by logical necessity.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
A triangle by logical necessity has three sides.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
fire blackening cotton is not that kind of fact it holds because god set it up to hold and it would run otherwise if he'd set it up otherwise al-ghazali was also wary of taking any of this on authority from a teacher in a shorter work called the balance of action he reminds us that there is no salvation except in independence and in the revival of the religious sciences that the searcher for truth should be independent and not affiliated with a specific doctrine the veil of imitation raised by leaving fanaticism to doctrines.
Andrew M. HenryHOST
Basically, he was rejecting mere imitation, or taqlid, which means holding a belief secondhand on someone else's authority.
Zohair Abdul-RahmanHOST
And their synthesis, I guess you can say, an analysis, I should say, Imam al-Ghazali's analysis of that scholarly discussion that we would have just gone through.
Zohair Abdul-RahmanHOST
I think a lot of people misrepresent Imam al-Ghazali, rahimahullah, and you'll see exactly what he was saying in Ihya Ulum al-Din.
Zohair Abdul-RahmanHOST
Ibn Hazm, he's not represented.
Zohair Abdul-RahmanHOST
He represents the most, I guess, liberal view on this.
Ubaydullah EvansHOST
And the same thing, uh, that, that, that animates this person, a heart, right, is what animates me, right? So let us bear that in mind and never become people, uh, that, that look down on other people.
Ubaydullah EvansHOST
You know, Imam Ghazali said in his Ihya that one of the signs that one is making, uh, progress on the spiritual path is that you don't see anybody that you deem yourself superior to, that you don't see anybody that you just think, you know, I, I, I have some kind of just rank over them.
Ubaydullah EvansHOST
He said, hatta, uh, uh, hatta ahadin aw wahidin ghayri muslimin, even one who isn't a practitioner of Islam, right, even someone who isn't Muslim, no matter what you see them doing, he said, you should say, hua ya'sil laha an jahlil wa ana a'asihi an il.
Ubaydullah EvansHOST
This person disobeys God and perhaps doesn't know any better.
Omar DaCosta-ShahidGUEST
He wrote Kitab al-Kasp, really, which was the first book of microeconomics in our tradition.
Omar DaCosta-ShahidGUEST
And then we see a long line of scholars Imam Ghazali rahimahullah Book 13 of the Ihyam ul-Ilm al-Din very important to read for anyone who's just working generally You have the likes of Hakim al-Tarmadi, you have Raghav al-Isfahani So many scholars they write about this concept of Kasp which means earning So the Makasib tradition is one that was very prevalent in early Islam But in modern times, it's been forgotten about and it needs to be revived.
Omar DaCosta-ShahidGUEST
This idea of bringing spirituality into the work that we do.
Omar DaCosta-ShahidGUEST
So that's what I'm trying to bring back and make applicable.
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speaker_3NARRATOR
INTRODUCTION abu hamid muhammad ibn muhammad al ghazali was born in the city of tus in khorasan a d ten fifty eight one year after the great poet and freethinker abu al ala died he was the son of a dealer in cotton thread ghazal whence his name losing his father early in life he was confided to the care of a sufi whose influence extended through his subsequent career on finishing his studies he was appointed professor of theology at here he achieved such splendid success that all the imams became his zealous partisans so great indeed was his renown so ardent the admiration he inspired that the muhammadans sometimes said if all the books of islam were destroyed it would be but a slight loss provided al ghazali's work on the revivification of the sciences of religion were preserved the following short treatise gives the history of the mind of this remarkable man in his pursuit of truth it might not inaptly bear the title Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.
speaker_3NARRATOR
In its intellectual subtlety, it bears a certain resemblance to Newman's Grammar of Ascent, and in its almost puritanical sense of the terrors of the world to come, it is akin to Bunyan's Grace Abounding.
speaker_3NARRATOR
It is also interesting as being one of the very few specimens of genuine Eastern autobiography.
speaker_3NARRATOR
The great service which al-Ghazali rendered to the Sufis was, as Mr. Winfield has pointed out, in the preface of his translation of the Masnavi, to provide them with a metaphysical terminology which he had derived from the writings of Plotinus, the Neoplatonist.
speaker_3NARRATOR
He also gave them a secure position in the Church of Islam.
speaker_3NARRATOR
in his development of muslim theology professor macdonald calls ghazali the greatest certainly the most sympathetic figure in the history of islam and the only teacher of the after generations ever put by a muslim on a level with the four great imams he further says of him islam has never outgrown him has never fully understood him in the renaissance of islam which is now rising to view his time will come and the new life will proceed from a renewed study of his works introduction Chapter 1 of the Confessions of al-Ghazali by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, translated by Claude Field, 1863-1941.
speaker_3NARRATOR
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
Nouman Ali KhanHOST
But I was just giving an idea of how a lot of the times we th- the way we think about psychology is built on a Western paradigm.
Nouman Ali KhanHOST
So Western psychology shaped the subject of psychology for us, and then Muslims tried to counter that, and generally we went, "Let's go see if our tradition has something to offer." And for the most part, we went to Imam Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, because it's a very spiritual and psychological text, right? So that's...
Nouman Ali KhanHOST
So a lot of people that talk about Islamic psychology kind of make, you know, Imam Ghazali kind of the reference point for what they build on top of that.
Nouman Ali KhanHOST
And though I think it's tremendously beneficial, I don't think it's Quran-centric.