Of Piety and Heresy

This book examines and contextualizes Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Ghazzālī’s (d. 505/1111) fierce response to antinomian and freethinking currents in twelfth-century Persia. Seyed-Gohrab offers a translation of Ghazzālī’s treatise on antinomians, and one of his religious rulings (fatwa) on the topic. Both were written after Ghazzālī’s intellectual crisis in 488/1095, when he voluntarily withdrew from his position as a Professor at the prestigious Niẓāmiyya College in Baghdad. He determined to live an ascetic life, devoting all his attention to God. In this period, Ghazzālī wrote his masterpieces in Arabic and Persian. Seyed-Gohrab shows that these two less-known works shed new light on the motivation for Ghazzālī's major works. The book depicts Ghazzālī’s Persian intellectual context, and the tumultuous political period in which a strong literary and Sufi antinomian trend emerged from the social periphery to become central to literary activities at the Saljuq court. The book also treats Ghazzālī’s Persian poetry, offering original insights into Ghazzālī’s contemporary, the celebrated polymath ʿUmar Khayyām (d. about 525/1131), whose transgressive quatrains are interpreted as a response to a suffocating religious context.

Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Universität Utrecht, Niederlande.

"Of Piety and Heresy is a welcome addition to the literature on expressions of antinomian Islam, in this case, in the works of Muḥammad Ghazzālī who refuted what he considered to be libertine, misguided and reckless interpretations of Islam. Seyed-Ghorab’s lucidly written book provides an excellent historical overview of antinomianism that includes insightful observations on the contribution to "Islamic" thought from various Sufis, qalandars, poets, and Umar Khayyam, while thoughtfully reflecting on Ghazzālī’s perspective on the topic. Of major importance, this work includes Ghazzālī’s writings in Persian as well as an accurate and eminently readable English translation. This is a milestone in scholarship and is essential reading for researchers of Sufism and Islam."

Lloyd Ridgeon, Reader in Islamic Studies at Glasgow University.

"This is a richly rewarding and elegantly succinct study. The title is spot on, since Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Ghazzālī, one of the most influential thinkers of the Islamic world, himself lived a life on the strange hinterland between the ‘ascetic gnosis’ (ʿirfān-i zāhidāna) of the pietists among the theologians and ascetic philosophers, and the ‘amorous gnosis’ (ʿirfān-i ʿāshiqāna) of the ‘heretic’ antinomians (ibāḥatiyān). He wrote some of the most important Islamic theological works of all time, yet also rejected the life of a merely intellectual approach to God. After a crisis at the end of his thirties, he came to relinquish the exclusively scholastic life in order to embrace one of renunciation, practising and teaching Sufi knowledge. Professor Seyed-Gohrab has kept this book masterfully brief, with a focused plan that follows the pattern of Ghazzālī’s own life of two unequal halves. Giving an account of Ghazzālī’s life and times, he contrasts him with significant figures of the day, his brother, the mystically adept Aḥmad Ghazzālī, his contemporary ‘Umar Khayyām, and poets such as Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār and Rūmī . In the second three chapters the author naturally comes to his principal focus, which accords with the general topic of his ERC-funded project Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. This monograph is the first in the series on antinomianism, namely the Islam of the ibāḥatiyān, vis à vis the ‘orthodoxy’ of the theologians. Rather than merely discussing the subject abstractly, Seyed-Gohrab illustrates the problem by first analysing, then presenting a translation of Ghazzāli’s treatise, the Treatise in Explanation of the Idiocy of the People of Ibāḥat, along with the appended Persian text."

Alan Williams, Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion, The University of Manchester