with a sacred enthusiasm
for the triumph of his faith, and his whole life was dedicated to one
purpose--the defence of Islam. As Browning says, "he made life consist
of one idea." His full name was Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn
Ahmed Algazzali, and he was born at Tus in Khorassan, 1058 A.D., where a
generation earlier Firdausi, the author of the Shahnama, had died. Tus
was already famous for learning and culture, and later on Ghazzali's own
fame caused the town to become a centre of pilgrimage for pious Moslems,
till it was laid in ruins by Genghis Khan, a century after Ghazzali's
death.

His birth occurred at a time when the power of the Caliphs had been long
on the wane, and the Turkish militia, like the Pretorian guards of the
later Roman empire, were the real dispensers of power. While the
political unity of Islam had been broken up into a number of
mutually-opposed states, Islam itself was threatened by dangers from
without. In Spain, Alphonso II. had begun to press the Moors hardly.
Before Ghazzali was forty, Peter the Hermit was preaching the First
Crusade, and during his lifetime Baldwin of Bouillon was proclaimed King
in the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem. But more serious than these outer
foes was the great schism which had split Islam into the two great
opposing parties of Shiahs and Sunnis--a schism which was embittered and
complicated by the struggle of rival dynasties for power. While the
Shiites prevailed in Egypt and Persia, the Turks and Seljuks were
Sunnis. In Bagdad the seat of the Caliphate during the reign of Al
Kasim, when Ghazzali was a youth, fatal encounters between the two
contending factions were of daily occurrence. Ghazzali's native city was
Shiite, and not till Khorassan had been conquered by the Ghaznevides and
Seljuks did Sunni teaching prevail there. Yet, however bitterly Shiahs
and Sunnis might be opposed to each other, they both counted as orthodox
and were agreed as to the fundamental principles of Islam, nor did their
strife endanger the religion itself. But besides the two great parties
of Shiahs and Sunnis, a mass of heretical sects, classed under the
common name of Mutazilites, had sprung up within Islam. These heretics
had studied Aristotle and Greek philosophy in Arabic translations, and
for a long time all that the orthodox could do was to thunder anathemas
at them and denounce all speculation. But at last Al Asha'ari, himself
formerly a Mutazilite, renounced his heresies, a