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/150



swer his assailants. I visited him many times, and it was no bare conjecture of mine that he, in spite of what I saw in him in time past of maliciousness and roughness towards people, and how he looked upon them contemptuously through his being led astray by what God had granted him of ease in word and thought and expression, and through the seeking of rank and position, had come to be the very opposite and was purified from these stains. And I used to think that he was wrapping himself in the garment of pretense, but I realized after in vestigation that the thing was the opposite of what I had thought, and that the man had recovered after being mad."

Al-Ghazali died on Monday, the fourteenth of Jumada II, A. H.505 (Dec. 18th, 1111). His brother Ahmad (quoted by Murtadha from Ibn Jawzi’s Kitab ath-thdbat ind-al-mamat) gives the follow ing account of his death: " On Monday, at dawn, my brother performed the ablution and prayed. Then he said, Bring me my grave-clothes/ and he took them and kissed them and laid them on his eyes and said, I hear and obey to go in to the King. And he stretched out his feet towards Mecca, and was taken to the good will of God Most High. He was buried at, or outside of, Tabran, the citadel of Tus, and Ibn As-Sama ni visited his grave there."

Later biographers were not satisfied with the bare facts of his decease. Murtadha gives a far