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 the middle of the 5th cent. that they came to be admitted generally as orthodox Muslims. Their triumph was assured in 459 A.H., when Nizam al-Mulk, the wazir of Alp Arslan, founded at Baghdad the Nizamite academy as a theological college of Ash'arite teaching. Still the Hanbalites raised occasional riots, and demonstrated against those whom they regarded as free thinkers; but these were put down by authority, and in 516 the Khalif himself attended the Ash'arite lectures. The Mu'tazilites were now merely a survival; as broad church theologians they had fallen into general disrepute in the eyes of the orthodox, and they were equally disliked by the philosophers as defective in their adherence to the Aristotelian system. The educated fell now into three broad groups: on the one hand were the orthodox, who came under the influence of al-Ash'ari or al-Mataridi; on the other were those who accepted the doctrines of the philosophers, and in the third place were those who rejected all philosophy, and confined their attention solely to Qur'an tradition and the canon law, and who should not be excluded from the ranks of the educated, although their studies ran in somewhat narrow lines.

The final triumph of the Ash'arite theology was the work of al-Ghazali (d. 505). He was born at Tus in 450 (= 1058 A.D.); early left an orphan he was educated by a Sufi friend, and then attended the school at Naisabur. As his education progressed he cut loose from Sufi influence and became an Ash'arite,