Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali, known in Latin as Algazelus, lived from around 1058 to 19 December 1111 and was a Shafi'i Sunni Muslim Persian scholar and polymath regarded as one of the most prominent and influential jurisconsults, legal theoreticians, muftis, philosophers, theologians, logicians and mystics in Islamic history, considered by many the eleventh century's mujaddid, a renewer of the faith said by prophetic hadith to appear once every hundred years, and awarded the honorific Proof of Islam. Much of his work stemmed from a spiritual crisis following his appointment as head of the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, then the most prestigious academic position in the Muslim world, after which he disappeared from public life for over ten years, believing he had chosen status and ego over God; during this period he wrote his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, out of a belief that the Islamic spiritual tradition had grown moribund and the spiritual sciences of the first generation of Muslims had been forgotten. Among his other works, The Incoherence of the Philosophers is a landmark in the history of philosophy, advancing a critique of Aristotelian science that anticipated arguments developed later in fourteenth century Europe.