The Years of the Retreat of Al-Ghazali

In the spiritual history of Islam there is a decade that continues to radiate an extraordinary force, a period in which a man at the height of his career interrupted every public activity and withdrew in order to work on his inner life with a radical intensity almost without precedent. Born in 1058 in Ṭūs in Khurasan and dead in the same city in 1111, this master had already achieved fame, prestige and academic authority when a sudden inner collapse shattered his deepest certainties. In the early stages of that crisis he felt his voice fade during lessons, sensed his mental energy slipping away and experienced an increasing difficulty in sustaining the public image of a celebrated scholar. It was then that al-Ghazali realised that knowledge was no longer transforming him but weighing him down. The retreat began in 1095, when he left Baghdad with a decision no one expected and set out for Damascus, where he spent long months in the great Umayyad Mosque, living as an anonymous ascetic, avoiding recognition, seeking only silence, meditation and freedom from the ambitions he had cultivated until that moment. The next stages took him to Jerusalem, at the Dome of the Rock, and then to Mecca for the pilgrimage, in an itinerary that was both geographical and interior, a migration from intellectual certainties to the bare essence of spiritual experience. During those years he dedicated himself to continuous prayer, fasting, contemplation and fragmentary writing, not to produce works to present to the world but to understand what inside him was being transformed. He discovered that authentic knowledge is not accumulation but purification, not a public triumph but a secret and austere labour. The result of that decade, which ended around 1105, became evident when he decided to return to social life with a renewed orientation: his mind remained sharp, but now it responded to a deeper truth linked to the transformation of the heart rather than the force of argumentation alone. The work that matured from that long retreat, the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, represented the synthesis of knowledge reconciled with lived spirituality and became one of the most influential texts of Islamic ethics and mysticism. The retreat of al-Ghazali remains the symbol of a process in which a man, when he understands that the outer world is no longer sufficient to sustain the weight of his quest, chooses silence as a battlefield, solitude as a workshop and sincerity as the only path to be reborn.

Roberto Minichini

January 2026