Abu ʿĀmir al-ʿAbdarī said, “I heard Abu Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Ṭūsī swear by Allah that he saw in a dream as though he were examining al-Ghazālī’s books, only to find that they were all nothing but illustrations.”

I replied, “Al-Ghazālī is a great imam, and it is no condition of scholarship that the scholar never errs.”

Muḥammad ibn al-Walīd al-Turtūshī wrote in a letter to Ibn Muẓaffar: “With regard to Abu Ḥāmid, as you mentioned: I have seen him and spoken with him. I found him a man of stature among the people of knowledge—endowed with sound intellect and discernment. He devoted the length of his life to the study of the sciences and remained upon that for most of his days. Then he turned aside from the scholars’ path and threw himself in with the ascetics; after that he adopted Sufism, abandoned the sciences and those who pursue them, and entered the fields of inner promptings, the ‘masters of hearts,’ and the whisperings of Satan. He then blended all this with the views of the philosophers and the cryptic sayings of al-Ḥallāj, and he began to assail the jurists and theologians. He very nearly slipped out of the religion altogether. When he composed the Iḥyāʾ, he set out to speak about the sciences of spiritual states and the esoteric symbols of the Sufis, though he was neither familiar with them nor knowledgeable of their reality; thus he fell headlong and filled his book with fabricated reports.”

I say: As for the Iḥyāʾ, it does contain a number of baseless hadiths (1), yet it also offers much good.