Risālat al-ṭayr (or al-ṭuyūr) ( Epistle of the Birds): In this work Ghazālī employs the metaphor of a bird and its journey to speak of the spiritual path to illumination in God.It was innovative in form, for at a time when Persian Sufi authors used only prose, Ghazālī had recourse to verse in order to illustrate in metaphorical fashion the themes he expounded more technically in the prose sections of his work. Sawāneḥ, a little book written around 1114 and comprising some 77 short chapters.He died in Qazvin in 1123 or 1126 and is buried there. He initiated and trained eminent masters of Sufism including Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, Abu al-Najib al-Suhrawardi, The latter was the founder of the Suhrawardiyya Order and its derivatives such as the Kubrawiyya, Mevlevi and Ni'matullāhī orders. He visited Nishapur, Maragheh, Hamadan and Isfahan. Hence the practice of naẓar-bāzī or šāhed-bāzī, gazing on young and beautiful faces, a practice for which he became notorious.Īhmad Ghazālī travelled extensively in the capacities of both Sufi master and a popular preacher.
Since God is both absolute beauty and the lover of all phenomenal beauty, Ahmad Ghazālī maintained, to adore any object of beauty is to participate in a divine act of love. His belief that all created beauty is an emanation of divine beauty was likewise Hallajian or neo-Platonic in origin. Many of the topoi ( maẓāmīn) used by later poets such as ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī, ʿIrāqī, and Ḥāfeẓ, to name but a few, can be traced to his works, particularly the Sawāneḥ.Īmong his predecessors, he was influenced most strongly by Ḥallāj, and he made of his idea of essential love the basis of his own thought. He was advanced in Sufism by 1095, and his brother Abū Ḥāmid asked him to teach in his place in the Nezamiya of Baghdad and assume responsibility during his planned absence.Īhmad Ghazālī’s thought, centered as it was on the idea of love, left a profound mark on the development of Persian Islamic mystical literature, especially poetry celebrating love. He turned to Sufism while still young, becoming the pupil first of Abu Bakr Nassaj Tusi (died 1094) and then of Abu Ali Farmadi (died 1084). Here he was educated primarily in jurisprudence. The younger brother of the better known theologian, jurist, and Sufi, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Ahmad Ghazālī was born in a village near Tūs, in Khorasan.
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