brothers and sisters.
imam ghazali was a great scholar and an great academic of his time.
he really inspires me. he was a great philosopher aswell. he lived in the time of averroes (ibn rushd) who was the translator of aristotle's works. during the the first part of his life he was put on a very high teaching post by the wazeer nizam al mulk, he had a very good life in which he had been given lots of wealth. but during this time he felt an emptiness within himself which he could not understand. This was due to the lack of love for allah. scholars of deen should take heed from this. many of us think that we have knowledge but what really matters is the connection and the love of allah. If we have this we have everything.He then fell ill because of this to such an extent that he couldnt even teach. When he recovered he decided to leave everything (family,wealth and home) in search for what was missing in his heart. he lived in the widerness for ten years going from 1 place to another. He underwent lots of hardship to increase his spirituality..
knowledge and taqwa are two different things. many people think if a person has knowledge or if he is an alim then he has to be pious. this is not the case. what really matters is that every person has to find that yearning and that urge within himself to find his creator. This can be done by doing the dhikr of allah. he wrote many books, the 2 which i strongly recommend are ihya uloom al-deen. and the other is bidayat al-hidayah, in this 1 he explains the best steps to take to be guided by allah.
Allah accepted him so much that even the kuffar are amazed by him. every decent university has written something on him. I work at the british library and the amount of books we have on him is astonishing.
his title is hujjatul islam, which means a proof of islam.
there is a website dedicated to him which is
http://www.ghazali.org/there is also a movie about him called the alchemist of happiness which can be found on google video.
Subject: imam ghazali 
Thu Nov 27, 2008 9:37 pm