each refuting the other, and we are not among those who disparage a scholar out of whim or ignorance.

Indeed, the Imām also authored Kīmiyāʾ al-Saʿādah (The Alchemy of Happiness); al-Muʿtaqad (The Creed); Iljām al-ʿAwām (Silencing the Common Folk); al-Radd ʿalā al-Bāṭiniyyah (A Refutation of the Esoterists); Muʿtaqad al-Awāʾil (The Belief of the Early Muslims); Jawāhir al-Qurʾān (The Jewels of the Quran); al-Ghāyah al-Quṣwā (The Ultimate Goal); Faḍāʾiḥ al-Ibāḥiyyah (The Scandals of the Libertines); Masʾalat ʿAwz al-Dawr (The Question of Circular Causation); and other works besides.

ʿAbd al-Ghāfir al-Fārisī said: “He passed away on Monday, the fourteenth of Jumādā al-Ākhirah in the year 505 AH, at the age of fifty-five, and was buried in the Tabrān cemetery in the township of Ṭūs. The forms al-Ghazzālī, al-ʿAṭṭārī, and al-Khabbāzī are Persian-style nisbahs derived from trades, produced by attaching the nisbah yāʾ to the word-pattern.”

Al-Ghazālī had a brother who was a celebrated preacher, Abū al-Futūḥ Aḥmad. He enjoyed great popularity in the pulpit, though he was suspected (1) of religious laxity and permissivism. He lived on until roughly 520 AH and, when his brother undertook a lengthy pilgrimage, he substituted for him in teaching at the Niẓāmiyyah of Baghdad.

I read in the hand of al-Nawawī—may Allah have mercy on him—that Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, when asked why the Imām was called al-Ghazālī, replied:

“I was told by someone I trust, from Abū al-Ḥaram al-Māksī the man of letters, who narrated to us from Abū al-Thanāʾ Maḥmūd al-Farāḍī, who said:

Tāj al-Islām Ibn Khamīs told us that al-Ghazālī once said to him, ‘People keep calling me al-Ghazzālī, but I am not al-Ghazzālī; I am al-Ghazālī, so named after a village called Ghazālah’—or words to that effect.”