Scholars
al-Ghazali
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali al-Tusi, the Proof of Islam: an eleventh-century Shafi''i jurist, Sufi and philosopher who answered the philosophers in the Incoherence of the Philosophers and renewed the religious sciences in the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Nizam al-Mulk made him professor at the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, then he left the chair in a spiritual crisis for ten years of seclusion and Sufism. He returned to teach in Nishapur then Tus, joining law and Sufism in one school. He died in Tus in 1111; to Europeans he stayed ''Algazel'' and to Muslims Islam''s renewer. Out of that crisis came the Revival — a book joining jurisprudence, Sufism and reason in one project that became Islamic education's charter for centuries, and the west knew him as Algazel. He stayed the model of the scholar who doubts, then seeks, then finds — a life read today as the story of the search for certainty.