This chapter analyzes the core elements of Ghazālī’s practical ethics, using The Alchemy of Happiness, a guidebook for Muslims wishing to live a good life in this world (dunyā) while striving toward salvation through faith (dīn). Ghazālī prescribed a pragmatic attitude toward fiqh prioritizing everyday practice and recognized dīn and dunyā as two interconnected but distinct spheres, which he joined through a broadly conceived Islamic ethics. Ghazālī criticized the Sufi tendency to decry all knowledge. In The Alchemy of Happiness, he understood that people held distinct responsibilities, and in turn embedded “responsibility” in the diverse economic and political institutions essential to the functioning of the Abbasid Empire. Ghazālī conceived of the “heart” (dil) as a selective intelligence permitting differentiation among ethical alternatives. His view did not prescribe utilitarian obedience to divine command. For Ghazālī, everyday human need, interaction, and conviviality provided reason to appreciate God’s work. Obedience is not the primary source of correct religious conduct, then, but a disposition of kindness in everyday life.

The chapter reviews interpretations of Ghazālī’s thought prevalent in debates on political Islam, predicated on Islam’s encounter with the West and modernity, inquiring into Ghazālī’s relevance to contemporary Western conceptions of Islam. Participants consistently invoked Ghazālī in terms of his significance to rationalism. Ghazālī is either depicted as an enemy of Enlightenment or a precursor to postmodern critiques of modernity. We analyze three contemporary Ghazālī representations, including Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), Abdul Latif Salazar’s documentary Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness (2004), and a 2010 academic conference on “The Rise of Intellectual Reform in Islam,” hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center featuring Baber Johansen, Ebrahim Moosa, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Talal Asad. We posit that Ghazālī was a reformer responding to a theologico-political crisis. Ghazālī’s The Alchemy of Happiness, written shortly before 1105 CE, and his dīn/dunyā distinction, separated universal truth from religious identity to secure the autonomy and validity of worldly knowledge crucial to the functioning of the Abbasid Empire.

This investigation of Ghazālī’s life and thought is contextualized within the social and intellectual dynamics of the expanding Abbasid Empire of the philosopher’s lifetime. This close contextualization refutes prevailing Islamist and postmodernist readings of Ghazālī that decontextualize his thought in the service of ideological predilection. We use Persian sources to show how Ghazālī’s Islam revolutionized language, creating an accessible discourse intended to transcend the narrow ulema and madrasa milieu that had been in Arabic. Ghazālī’s Islam created an autonomous space for nonreligious sciences, notably logic and mathematics, as part of a reformist project responding to the Abbasid crisis of governance. This reformist discourse, based on the din/donya duality, helped to create an Islamic worldview suited to an expanding multi-civilizational society that depended on new economic and technological ensembles to flourish and survive.

This paper discusses the succession ceremony organized by Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn in 270/884 for his son and heir, Khumārawayh, as described by Egyptian Arabic sources, notably Sīrat Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn of al-Balawī, an underutilized text for Abbasid history. The paper considers three overlapping questions. First, how should the accounts be read, as “representational” or, alternatively, as prescriptive, thus of a piece with elements of the Mirror for Princes literature? Second, were Ṭūlūnid networks of loyalty and dependence solely reliant on material inducements or did individuals invest themselves in the Egyptian regime beyond the point of self-interest? The question goes to the problem of material vs. emotional ties of dependency. And, third, was Ibn Ṭūlūn successful in creating a lasting power base? The question goes to the extent to which his contemporaries signed on to his “project” of redefining relations with the Abbasid center.