Ta'rif al-Ahya' bi-Fada'il al-Ihya'

Ta'rif al-Ahya' bi-Fada'il al-Ihya' ("Acquainting the living with the merits of the Ihya'") is a treatise by Abd al-Qadir ibn Shaykh ibn Abd Allah al-Aydarus Ba Alawi on the merit of Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din. It is appended to editions of the Ihya': it stands at the end of the Dar al-Ma'rifa edition, Beirut, and in part 16 of the Kitab al-Sha'b edition. ^{1 2}

Al-Aydarus says that since the Ihya' was "of great weight and much benefit", without equal in its field, he decided to write a treatise serving "as a title and pointer" to something of its merit and its author's. ² He arranged it as: ²

• An introduction on the book's title, explaining the division of the sciences of conduct into outward and inward, and quoting from al-Ghazali's preface the names of the forty books and the method of each quarter. ^{3 4}
• A main part on the book's merits, the praise of great scholars for it, and answers to what was found difficult in it or attacked. ⁴
• A conclusion on the life of al-Ghazali and the reason for his turn to the Sufi way. ⁵

Al-Aydarus gathers sayings in praise of the book and its author, among them: ^{6 7}

• Al-Yafi'i's report that Isma'il ibn Muhammad al-Hadrami, asked about al-Ghazali's works, named three: Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, master of the prophets; Muhammad ibn Idris (al-Shafi'i), master of the imams; and Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, master of authors. ⁶
• The story of the Maghribi jurist Ibn Hirzihim, who meant to burn the Ihya' and turned back after a dream. ^{6 8}
• A dream related by Ibn Asakir from Abu al-Fath al-Shawi in Mecca, in which he read the Ihya's Book of the Foundations of the Creed. ^{8 9}
• Abd al-Ghafir al-Farisi's statement that the Ihya' is among his works without precedent; al-Nawawi's "the Ihya' was almost a Qur'an"; and Abu Muhammad al-Kazaruni's saying that if the sciences were erased they could be recovered from it. ⁷
• That Shaykh Abd Allah al-Aydarus "almost knew it by heart", and said he spent years reading it and each day found in it what he had not seen before. ⁷
• That Shaykh Ali made his son Abd al-Rahman read it to him throughout his life, so that he completed it with him twenty-five times. ¹⁰

Al-Aydarus divides the objections to the Ihya' into two kinds: passages "difficult on the surface", for which he refers to al-Ghazali's own answer in al-Imla' and quotes its opening; and reports whose chains were criticised. ¹¹ For the second he relies on the hadith master al-Iraqi: most of the Ihya's reports are not fabricated, weak hadith may be acted on in matters of merit and heart-softening, and the books of the great hadith masters and of the early jurists also contained weak hadith until al-Nawawi drew attention to them. ^{11 5} Here he gives the account of the burning of al-Ghazali's books in the Maghrib on the order of the sultan Ali ibn Yusuf. ⁵

Quoting Ibn Asakir, al-Yafi'i and al-Isnawi, al-Aydarus says al-Ghazali was born at Tus in 450, studied law there, then came to Nishapur and stayed with Imam al-Haramayn until he became "the keenest debater of his time"; he then attended the court of Nizam al-Mulk, who appointed him to teach at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. ^{5 12} He later left Baghdad and the standing he had there, turned to writing, including the Ihya', went to Jerusalem devoted to disciplining the soul, then returned to Tus and kept to his house, teaching mostly Qur'anic exegesis, hadith and Sufism, until he died on Monday 14 Jumada al-Ula 505. ¹² He cites dreams in his favour, including one attributed to Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, and the view of a group of scholars, Ibn Asakir among them, that al-Ghazali was the renewer of the fifth century. ¹³

• Page numbers are scan pages of the Kitab al-Sha'b edition (printed page = scan page + about 2312).
• The dreams and wonders reported in the treatise are attributed to their narrators; the museum makes no judgement on them.