The burning of al-Ghazālī’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn) in Cordoba in 1109 - during the author’s lifetime - is well known, and has been taken as evidence both of the rapid diffusion of that epochal work from one end of the Islamic world to the other and of the aberration of the Islamic West in its reaction to the work. In fact, the violent rejection of the Revival in al-Andalus followed a pattern. This paper will explore the rapid transfer of both al-Ghazālī’s masterpiece and the controversies it engendered within three years through networks of Mālikī scholars from Khoresan to Alexandria to Ifriqīya to Cordoba.

Ken Garden is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Tufts University in Boston. He received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2005. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: 2014). His current research centers on the development of Sufism in North Africa and Muslim Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries.