Al-Ghazali: The Properties of Friendship and Brotherhood (Book 15 of The Revival of the Religious Sciences)

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 translators

Muhtar Holland: Muhtar Holland (1935-2010 CE) was an English translator whose patient, faithful renderings opened a large body of classical Islamic literature to English readers. He was born in the city of Durham in northeast England and was drawn from school onward to the study of languages, reading Arabic and Turkish at Oxford and learning Russian during national service in the Royal Navy. He embraced Islam in 1969, taking the name Muhtar, after a period connected to the Subud movement.\n\nOver the following decades he held academic and research positions at the University of Toronto, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (with a period studying Islamic law in Cairo), and Universiti Kebangsaan in Kuala Lumpur, and he served as a senior research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester and as director of a translation center in New York.\n\nHis most enduring contribution was an extensive series of translations of the discourses and writings of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, among them Revelations of the Unseen (Futuh al-Ghaib), The Sublime Revelation (al-Fath al-Rabbani), Utterances (Malfuzat), and The Removal of Cares (Jalaʾ al-Khawatir). He also translated treatises of al-Ghazali, including works on inner worship and the celebrated Deliverance from Error. Shaykh Nuh Keller described him as a translator's translator, and many regarded him as foremost among English renderers of these texts. He died on 5 November 2010 in New Jersey.

James Pavlin: James Pavlin is an American scholar of Islamic studies and comparative religion. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University in 1998 and has served as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Religion at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, since 1999, where he teaches courses on Islam and comparative religion. He also held a position as adjunct professor in the History Department at William Paterson University in New Jersey from 1998 to 2017. As a translator, Dr. Pavlin has contributed to the English transmission of Imam al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din, rendering into English The Properties of Friendship and Brotherhood (Book 15 of The Revival) and The Proprieties of Retreat (Book 16 of The Revival), as well as the Epistle On Worship.