Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment
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Translator
Eric Ormsby
Description
About The Book
Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment is a translation of the thirty-sixth chapter of ‘The Revival of the Religious Sciences’ (Ihya’ Ulum al-Din). This chapter falls in the last of the four sections of the Ihya, the section dealing with the virtues or what is conducive to salvation.
This work was of radical importance to the history of Sufism and the arguments that al-Ghazali sets out in it formed the basis of the development of whole schools of Sufi theory and practice of mystical love, including the extensive Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz.
The text starts by elucidating the love of God for humanity and the love of man for God, and proceeds to discuss the deepening of this love to include different degrees of longing, intimacy and contentment.
About the Contributor(s)
About the author
al-Ghazali: Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (450-505 AH / 1058-1111 CE) was born in Tus, in the Khorasan region of Persia, and is remembered as one of Islam's most influential thinkers. Losing his father young, he studied at Nishapur and was appointed, while still in his thirties, to the prestigious Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. He was Shafiʿi in law and Ashʿari in creed, and his contemporaries honored him as Hujjat al-Islam, the Proof of Islam. At the height of his fame al-Ghazali passed through a profound spiritual crisis, recounted in his autobiography al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Deliverance from Error). He abandoned his teaching post, traveled, and devoted years to the inward discipline of the Sufis before returning to instruction with a renewed purpose. His landmark work, Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), reconstructs the religious life across four parts, acts of worship, social custom, the vices that ruin the soul, and the virtues that save it. In philosophy he wrote Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a careful critique of the Hellenistic thinkers of his age. Bridging law, theology, philosophy, and mysticism, al-Ghazali shaped the direction of Sunni thought for centuries, and his books remain widely read and translated. His many works are available here in English translation.
About the translator
Eric Ormsby: Eric Linn Ormsby, born in Atlanta in 1941, is a poet, scholar, and man of letters. He was a long-time resident of Montreal, where he served as Director of University Libraries and subsequently as Professor of Islamic Thought at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. He later moved to London, where he became Professor and Chief Librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. His scholarly expertise spans Islamic philosophy and Sufi thought, with a particular focus on the work of Imam al-Ghazali, rahimahullah. He translated Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment for the Islamic Texts Society (Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din series) and authored Ghazali: The Revival of Islam for the Makers of the Muslim World series published by Oneworld. As a poet, Ormsby has published six collections, including Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for best poetry, Coastlines (1992), For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems (1997), Araby (2001), Daybreak at the Straits (2004), and Time's Covenant (2006). His verse has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
Specifications
EAN 13 / ISBN
9781903682272
Publisher
Islamic Texts Society
Author
al-Ghazali
Pages
280
Translator
Eric Ormsby
Year Published
2012
Size
W-6.1 in | H-9.1 in | D-0.9 in
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