Introduction

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in 450 AH (1058 CE) in Tus, in the Khorasan region of present-day Iran. He studied under the leading scholars of his age, most notably Imam al-Juwayni at the Nizamiyyah madrasa in Nishapur, before being appointed head of the Nizamiyyah in Baghdad — the most prestigious academic post in the Islamic world of his time. At the height of his fame and influence, al-Ghazali underwent a profound spiritual crisis that led him to abandon his position and withdraw from public life for eleven years, traveling to Syria, Palestine, and the Hijaz in a period of intense personal renewal. The Ihya Ulum ad-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences) was composed in the aftermath of this transformation and stands as the fruit of a lifetime of scholarship united with lived spiritual experience.

The Ihya is organized into four quarters, each comprising ten books. The first quarter, Acts of Worship (Rub al-Ibadat), covers the outer obligations of the religion: purification, prayer, zakah, fasting, and pilgrimage, treated not merely as legal acts but as spiritual practices whose inner realities must be understood. The second quarter, Norms of Daily Life (Rub al-Adat), addresses eating, marriage, commerce, travel, and companionship, examining the ethical dimensions of ordinary conduct. The third quarter, The Causes of Perdition (Rub al-Muhlikat), constitutes one of the most searching analyses of the diseases of the heart ever written in Arabic — pride, envy, miserliness, anger, love of the world — each disease diagnosed through Qur'anic evidence, hadith, and the sayings of the righteous predecessors, with precise prescriptions for cure. The fourth quarter, The Causes of Salvation (Rub al-Munjiyat), charts the positive virtues — repentance, patience, gratitude, fear, hope, love, and the longing for Allah — culminating in a treatise on death and the states that follow it.

Al-Ghazali's singular achievement in the Ihya is the integration of three disciplines that had largely remained separate: Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), scholastic theology (kalam), and spiritual purification (tasawwuf). He insisted that outward compliance with the law is hollow without an understanding of its inner purposes, and that spiritual discourse untethered from the Quran and Sunnah leads only to deviation. Every major claim is grounded in scripture and the practice of the Companions and early generations, reflecting al-Ghazali's Shafi'i legal formation and his Ash'ari theological commitments. The work was composed in an era when the Muslim world faced significant intellectual challenges from Greek-derived philosophy and from antinomian strands within Sufi circles, and it responded to both with systematic rigor.

The reception of the Ihya among the scholars of Ahl us-Sunnah has been overwhelmingly positive, though not uncritical. Imam Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi and others defended its use of certain narrations that hadith specialists had questioned, while scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi and, centuries later, al-Iraqi — whose Takhrij Ahadith al-Ihya is typically printed alongside the text — assessed the reliability of its hadiths in detail. Readers are encouraged to consult al-Iraqi's notes, available in the margins of most standard editions, to distinguish the well-authenticated narrations from the weak or unestablished ones. Despite these caveats, the Ihya has never ceased to be read, taught, and memorized across the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia.

For readers approaching the Ihya today, the most productive method is to take one book at a time, reading slowly and reflectively, using the text as a basis for self-examination rather than mere information. Al-Ghazali himself warns repeatedly against reading about spiritual medicine without applying it. Translations in English by Nabih Amin Faris (selected books) and the more recent complete translation by Winter (T.J. Winter) of selected books offer reliable access to the text. The Arabic critical edition published by Dar al-Minhaj provides the most reliable base text for those reading in the original. The Ihya is not a book to be finished; it is a book to be lived with.

Editorial Note: The Ihya Ulum ad-Din is one of the most influential works in Islamic history and is widely accepted across the ummah. However, readers should be aware that some hadiths cited within it are weak or ungraded. Ibn al-Jawzi and later scholars catalogued these narrations. The Iraqi hadith scholars Zayn al-Din al-Iraqi and others verified many of the hadiths — a significant portion are sahih or hasan, but some are weak, and a small number are fabricated. Islam.wiki presents this book as a classical reference while noting that each hadith should be checked against verified hadith collections. The fiqh and spiritual guidance within it generally reflects sound Shafi'i scholarship.