About The Book

This book contains al-Ghazali's views on the Qur'an, the sacred Scripture of Islam. Al-Ghazali is acclaimed in both East and West as the greatest religious authority of Islam after the prophet Muhammad. At an advanced age when he had already composed numerous works on various Islamic intellectual disciplines and had already completed traversing the Sufi path, he freely expressed his own understanding of the Qur'an which took the form of a clear-cut and complete theory.

The nineteen chapters which constitute the first part of this book present us with al-Ghazali's views on several broad problems relating to the Qur'an as a whole, e.g. the method of its understanding, its principal aims, the process by which all diverse branches of Islamic learning have stemmed from it, the reasons why similitudes and allegories are employed in it, variance in the excellence of its surahs and verses, and the relationship between the perceptible world and the world of the unseen. Various parts of the Qur'an are compared to various types of valuables, such as jewels, pearls, rubies, red brimstones, corundums, strongest musk and aloe-wood.

The two chapters which form the second part of this book contain, in translated form, more than 1500 verses which al-Ghazali calls the jewels and the pearls of the Qur'an - verses which concern the two greatest of the six major aims of the Scripture. Such a sifting out of the most important verses from the entire Qur'an is unprecedented in the history of Qur'anic studies. These verses are translated in free-flowing, modern English in order to make the book not only scholarly but also interesting and enjoyable.