Abu Hamid-al Ghazali was born in Persia in 1058 A.D. and died in 1111 A.D. He is considered to be a great authority on Islamic theology.
Al-Ghazali became a professor at Baghdad University in 1091. Following a spiritual crisis in 1095, he abandoned his career to become a Sufi mystic. After ten years of wandering, he settled down to teach again, inspired by his new mystical insights.Al-Ghazali wrote many books. Amongst others, he wrote a book called “The Alchemy of Happiness” in which he describes his vision of how to lead a happy life.
For Al-Ghazali, one of the most important ingredients is self-knowledge. He believed that we are all born with a perfect heart and spirit, which is obscured by our desires. If we get rid of all our selfish desires, we can access that pure self.
Al-Ghazali also thought that happiness could only be attained if we exercise our higher faculties such as imagination and reason.
That is why, he believed, prophets, throughout history, were happy people. They spent their lives using these higher faculties and had the moral discipline to purify their hearts of desires and resentment as well. They combined two essential elements to be able to seek the Ultimate Truth.
Finally, according to Al-Ghazali, we are all born with what he called, a “knowing pain of the soul”. We all seek happiness in order to appease that pain. However, we are trying to find it through physical pleasure when, in fact, it is located at the spiritual level.
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