Abu Hamid al-Ghazali: How one of Islam’s most revered figures still speaks to the modern world

It's early morning and we are standing at the Lions' Gate entrance to Al-Aqsa Mosque. In front of us stand a hostile cluster of Israel police, who interrogate our documents with suspicion.

Their boss, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, never faces such issues getting into Al-Aqsa. In fact, he'd been among settlers who stormed the compound twice in the week before we arrived. On the second occasion he declared: "I feel like the owner here."

It was very different for us, even though we had arranged our visit in advance with the Islamic Waqf Department, the Jordanian-appointed body responsible for managing the Al-Aqsa compound and other Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City, which always notifies Israeli security about visits by Waqf guests.

Mahdi, the Waqf representative who had come to meet us, was visibly upset that Israeli police didn't respect their guests.

When we were finally allowed in we found that Al-Aqsa was all but empty, barring the baleful presence of Israeli security forces and a group of Israeli visitors.

The atmosphere in this profoundly spiritual and ancient compound, one of the three holy sites of Islam, should have been calm and peaceful. Instead it was nervous, strained and troubled.

Under the centuries-old Status Quo arrangements - reinforced by judgments from the International Court of Justice - Israel soldiers and police have no right at all to enter. Yet at the centre of the compound there's an Israeli police station.

The walls of Al-Qibli Mosque, the ancient prayer hall at the southern end of the site, are pitted with bullet holes, reminders that Israeli forces have gunned down worshippers.

Israel controls Al-Aqsa down to the most trivial detail in direct violation of the status quo.

'I've been waiting four years for [Israeli] police permission. If you make any change without permission you will be arrested'

Our guide, Mahdi, has paint peeling off the wall of his tiny office: "I've been waiting four years for police permission. If you make any change without permission you will be arrested."

A few days earlier, in a rare intervention prompted by Ben Gvir's invasions of Al-Aqsa, Abu Sway told Middle East Eye that Israel ought "not to mess" with the sacred site.

We are here to talk to Abu Sway, a professor of philosophy and Islamic studies for 30 years at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, about his role as Al-Ghazali professor at Al-Aqsa, an endowed academic chair established by Jordan's King Abdullah II.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali is widely recognised as one of the greatest scholars in the history of Islam.

A polymath who mastered every discipline of his day, Ghazali's work continues to have profound relevance.

His greatest book, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, was at least partly written at Al-Aqsa's Golden Gate (Bab al-Rahmah).

The room where Ghazali pondered and wrote this masterpiece is still there - and we asked if we could interview Professor Sway inside it.

It would have been magical, but the building has been taken over by Israeli occupation forces. Access to the eastern part of the mosque is also restricted during raids by settlers.

Above the room where Ghazali once thought and wrote there are today two police posts.

Instead, we met Sway inside the tiny, frugal imam's office. Sway has written many books on Ghazali during an illustrious academic career. We listened spellbound as he told us Ghazali’s timeless story.

Ghazali, born in Tus in modern-day Iran in 1058, was considered such a brilliant scholar that he was appointed as a young man to the most coveted academic post in the Abbasid empire: professor at Nizamiyyah University in Baghdad.

Sway told us that hundreds of students and scholars attended Ghazali’s lectures.

By his mid-thirties, Ghazali had established himself as one of the greatest public thinkers of his age. But before he turned 40 he descended into a deep personal crisis.

Fame, power, affluence

In his book, A Treasury of Ghazali, Sway cites Ghazali's personal account of his trauma:

"For nearly six months I was continuously tossed between the attractions of worldly desires and the impulses towards eternal life… the matter ceased to be one of choice and became one of compulsion. [Allah] caused my tongue to dry up so that I was prevented from lecturing… my tongue would not utter a single word, nor could I accomplish anything at all."

Sway explained: "He had become so famous. He was sought by Caliph and the Vizier. He had fame, power, affluence. But Ghazali repudiated all these things."

The great thinker's solution to his spiritual crisis, said Sway, was to drop out.

"He left his job, distributed his wealth except for the very little that he kept for the needs of his family. And to give up his power and fame he left Baghdad to lands where he was not known.

Ghalazi travelled to Damascus, probably by caravan, where he sought solitude in the Umayyad Mosque. When he became too well known he trekked to Jerusalem, where he is believed to have stayed in the rooms above the Golden Gate at Al-Aqsa Mosque for two years.

"He then visited Hebron," recounted Sway, "where, at the Ibrahimi Mosque he took an oath not to debate anyone, not to visit anyone in power, nor to accept any gifts for fear that they might influence him."

'Ghazali's teaching is to do the opposite of the rules of modern social media, which is a world almost devoid of care for others and obsession with self'

He journeyed onto Mecca and Medina to perform pilgrimage before finally returning to Tus, the town of his birth, 11 years after he had left. Here he remained in seclusion, living a life of intellectual effort and contemplation but continuing to teach.

The grand vizier begged Ghazali to return to his old life of scholarship and teaching at the Nizamiyya of Nishapur – one of a number of madrasa-like educational institutions established by the Seljuks who ruled an empire from central Asia to Anatolia.

Sway tells us that Ghazali was reluctant to accept, asking himself: "Am I strong enough spiritually to teach without vanity?"

"Ghazali's teaching," the professor said, "is to do the opposite of the rules of modern social media, which is a world almost devoid of care for others and obsession with self".

Trump, he suggests, is the direct antithesis of Ghazali.

But men of power are not the only victims of egotism, Sway cautions. He recalls Ghazali's warning that even scholarship is laden with mental and religious traps:

"You who are avid for knowledge and who have a sincere desire and excessive thirst for it, that if your intention in seeking knowledge is rivalry, boasting, surpassing your peers, drawing peoples' attention to you, and amassing the vanities of this world, then you are in reality in the process of ruining your religion, destroying yourself and selling your Hereafter in exchange for this worldly life."

Angelic and demonic

It's nearly a thousand years since Ghazali wrote his books. Sitting at the feet of Professor Sway, it becomes clear to us that he did not just speak to his own time.

The great scholar was also sending a direct message to the world we live in today.

"Western people have heard of Ramadan and how Muslims do not eat and drink, but Ghazali tells us that there are many other forms of abstinence," said Sway.

"Abstinence from the ills of the tongue: lying, back-biting, cursing, insulting, idle talk. Abstinence of the hand. Don’t forge cheques, don't commit white-collar crime, don't commit torture. Abstinence of the feet. You should not walk into harm. Nightclubs, gambling, casinos. You don't walk into a rally in support of a dictator.

'The Mongols obliterated Baghdad, the centre of Islamic civilization in the east. They killed the elite, the politicians and scholars, destroyed most schools and libraries... That wasn’t Ghazali'

"If you tame a wild horse it’s tamed for life. But if you tame the self in the evening, in the morning it’s wild again. There’s an ongoing fight between angelic forces and demonic forces in the hearts of all of us."

Ghazali's colossal achievement was to convince orthodox Muslim theologians and jurists that Sufi Islam, which teaches the suppression of the ego in a search for direct contact with Allah, was not a heresy.

He established that Sufism is compatible not just with conventional Sunni Islam, with its emphasis on rules and outward observance, but also the teaching of the Quran.

Sway powerfully defends Ghazali against the charge, levelled at him by some western intellectuals, that in the process he stifled the development of scientific thought in Islam.

"Ghazali had no problem with science. He did have a problem with Greek metaphysics. He had no problem with logic. Logic is a necessity. It is the same with mathematics.

"These critics don't understand Ghazali. In 1258 the Mongols obliterated Baghdad, the centre of Islamic civilization in the east. They killed the elite, the politicians and scholars, destroyed most schools and libraries, took women as concubines. That wasn’t Ghazali. It was the Mongols.

"I have been to Andalusia and seen the Islamic heritage there. I have seen the surgical tools used in open abdominal surgery in medieval Andalusia. These tools are very sophisticated, close to the ones used today.

"Look at the achievements in agriculture and medicine, architecture and literature. Consider Mariam al-Astrulabi's great achievements in astronomy in creating astrolabes."

Sway suggests that it was the reconquest and unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella in the 15th century, when many Muslims and Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or leave the Iberian Peninsula, ending the Andalusian civilisation, and the brutal rule imposed on Jerusalem for much of 12th century by the Crusaders, which did more to undermine Islam's intellectual traditions.

"The eastern wing of Islam, the western wing of Islam and the centre of Islam were all devastated by foreign powers. It’s simply not fair to blame a Muslim scholar," he says.

We could have listened to Sway all morning, but under the meddlesome rules of the Israeli occupation our time was up and we were under orders to leave.

Outside in the compound there were still very few worshippers. Al-Aqsa, on Israeli orders, has just ended a five-week shutdown.

The return of Crusaders

This is the longest closure since Jerusalem was seized by the Crusader armies in 1099. Thousands of Muslims and Jews were slaughtered in what modern historians have called the Massacre of Jerusalem. Chroniclers reported that the streets were knee deep in blood.

Ghazali had left the compound just months before it was captured.

Today Al-Aqsa Mosque is under threat once again.

Incited by Israeli politicians like Ben Gvir, the fanatical Temple Mount movement is on a religious mission to build a third temple in place of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

With support from within the Trump administration there is a danger that, almost a millennium after Ghazali departed the city, they might succeed.

For 13 centuries Al-Aqsa has been a destination for pilgrims, truth-seekers, scholars, men and women of faith - including Abu Hamid al-Ghazali more than 900 years ago.

But today the Israeli occupation makes it hard enough for many Muslims even to enter Al-Aqsa, let alone pray at this sacred site.