Ghazzali's wish to withdraw from public affairs and
give himself to a contemplative life was now interrupted. The requests
of his children and other family affairs, of which we have no exact
information, caused him to return home. Besides this, the continued
progress of the Ismailians, the spread of irreligious doctrines, and the
increasing religious indifference of the masses not only filled Ghazzali
and his Sufi friends with profound grief but determined them to stem the
evil with the whole force of their philosophy, the ardour of vital
conviction, and the authority of noble example.

In addition, the governor of Nishapur, Muhammad Ibn Malikshah, had asked
Ghazzali to proceed thither in order to help to bring about a religious
revival. Thus, after an absence of ten years, he returned to Nishapur to
resume his post as teacher. But his activity at this period was directed
to a different aim than that of the former one. Regarding the contrast
he speaks like a Muhammadan Thomas a Kempis. Formerly, he says, he
taught a knowledge which won him fame and glory, but now he taught a
knowledge which brought just the opposite. Inspired with an earnest
desire for the spiritual progress of his co-religionists and himself,
and convinced that he was called to this task by God, he prays the
Almighty to lead and enlighten him, so that he may do the same for
others.

How long Ghazzali occupied his professorship at Nishapur the second time
is not precisely clear. Only five or six years of his life remained, and
towards the close he again resigned his post to give himself up to a
life of contemplation to which he felt irresistibly drawn, in his
native city of Tus. Here he spent the rest of days in devotional
exercises in friendly intercourses with other Sufis and in religious
instruction of the young. He died, devout as he lived, in the
fifty-fourth year of his age, A.D. 1111. He founded a convent for Sufis
and a professorship of jurisprudence.

Ghazzali's activity as an author during his relatively short life was
enormous. According to the literary historians, he is the author of
ninety-nine different works. These are not all known to us, but there
are existing in the West a considerable quantity of them, some in Latin
and Hebrew translations, as he was much studied by the Jews in the
Middle Ages. A writer in the Jewish Encyclopaedia says (_sub. voc._),
"From his 'Makasid-al-Falasifah' in which he expounded logic, physics
and metaphys