Ghazali's Revival of the Religious Sciences and the Necessity of Reviving it in our Times

The Revival of the Religious Sciences, written in the fifth century A.H., is (Abu Hamid Muhammad) Ghazali's most important work. In this book Ghazali, as a renewer of trou knowledge of religion, seeks to revive the science of religion and, in the style of scholars of hermeneutics, reminds his readers of the original meanings of religious terms which had by his time either been distorted or restricted to only one specific aspect of their meaning. In Islamic intellectual history the title of this book became both a model and a religious project, and each time one of the subsequent great Islamic thinkers, from Mawlana Rumi to Mulla Sadra, sought to revive religion, they had this book in mind. In our times, in which the renewal and revival of true knowledge of religion has become more necessary than it has ever been, and taking into account the many false claims of revival of religion, consideration of Ghazali's revival of the science of religion takes on a greater importance than it has had at any other time.