Page:A Moslem seeker after God - showing Islam at its best in the life and teaching of al-Ghazali, mystic and theologian of the eleventh century (IA moslemseekeraft00zwem).pdf/102



wharf, which proves that the college must have stood near the Tigris bank. 1 . . . Writing a dozen years later than Ibn Batuta, Hamd-Allah, the Persian historian, briefly alludes to the Nizamiyya, which he calls " the mother of the Madrasahs " in Bagdad. This proves that down to the middle of the fourteenth century A. D. the col lege was still standing, though at the present time all vestiges of it have disappeared, as indeed appears already to have been the case in the middle of the last century, for Niebuhr found no traces of the Nizamiyya to describe in his painstaking account of the ruins in the city of Caliphs, as these still ex isted in the time of his visit.

It was here, at the Nizamiyya School, that Al Ghazali first embarked on his career as an inde pendent teacher. His lectures drew crowds. He gave fatwas, or legal opinions, on matters of the law, 2 he wrote books, he preached in the mosque, and was a leader of the people. Then suddenly in the midst of all this prosperity a great change came over him. He seemed to be attacked by a myste rious disease. His speech became hampered, his appetite failed, and his physicians said the malady was due to mental unrest. He suddenly left Bag dad in the month of Dhu-1-Qada, 488, appointed his brother Ahmed to teach in his place, and aban

1 " Baghdad under the Abbasside Caliphate," G. L,e Strange, Oxford, 1900, p. 298. 8 Several of these are given at length by Murtadha.