title: The Alchemy of Happiness
author: Al Ghazzali
description: "This man, if ever any have deserved the name, was truly a 'divine,' and he may be justly placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skilful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble, and sublime that his great soul had compassed he bestowed upon Muhammadanism, and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning that, in the form given them by him, they seem, in my opinion, worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the philosophy of Aristotle or in the Sufi mysticism he discreetly adapted to the Muhammadan theology; from every school he sought the means of shedding light and honour upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Muhammadan divines." -- Dr. August Tholuck
zlib_text: ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS
  PREFACE
  Converted to HTML format
  by
  Bill McLean
  http://www.mcleanministries.com
  bill@mcleanministries.com
  RENAN, whose easy−going mind was the exact antithesis to the
  intense earnestness of Ghazzali, calls him "the most original
  mind among Arabian philosophers."[1] Notwithstanding this, his
  fame as a philosopher has been greatly overshadowed by
  Avicenna, his predecessor, and Averroes, his successor and
  opponent. It is a significant fact that the Encyclopædia
  Britannica devotes five columns to each of the others and only
  a column and a half to Ghazzali. Yet it is doubtful whether it
  is as a philosopher that be would have wished to be chiefly
  remembered. Several of his works, it is true, are polemics
  against the philosophers, especially his Tehafot−al−falasifa,
  or "Destruction of the philosophers," and, as Solomon Munk
  says in his Melanges de philosophie Juive et Arabe, Ghazzali
  dealt "a fatal blow" to Arabian philosophy in the East, from
  which it never recovered, th