English Channel and defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Al-Ghazali lived through the start of one of the key events in western medieval history: the Crusades. He was actually living in Jerusalem just a couple of years before the city was conquered by the Crusaders. Yet the fact that nowhere in his writings does he mention the Crusades indicates clearly the contemporary Muslim attitude to the invading westerners: for them, it was not particularly important. In fact, the Crusaders’ success in establishing short-lived kingdoms in the Middle East was only possible because of fighting between Muslim states – once Saladin had established control of the region he destroyed the Crusader kingdoms in short order. The flowering of Islamic civilisation that witnessed the life of al-Ghazali and the building of great mosques and centres of learning in Baghdad and elsewhere was brought to a shuddering, dreadful halt a century later, when the Mongols invaded and destroyed, well, almost everything. The Muslim world would recover from the trauma of those events, but it would take centuries. So this period when al-Ghazali lived and worked marked an apotheosis which, in some ways, could never be repeated.
(c) Kube Publishing 2013. All rights reserved 13