Ken Garden’s Review of Al-Ghazali, The Condemnation of Pride and Self-Admiration

Abstract:

“The Revival of the Religious Sciences is an enduring masterpiece of the Islamic tradition, a summa of Islamic religious disciplines (law, theology, etc.) within a rubric of virtue ethics, written by one of the most renowned thinkers of that tradition, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). Admirers of the book in subsequent centuries enthused that, “if all the books of Islam were lost, the Revival would suffice for them,” and that the Revival “verged on being a Qur’an” (Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn bi-sharḥ iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, 2nd ed., 14 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002), vol. I, 37)”