HIS DEATH

of revelation. His search for truth occupied several years, in the course of which he renounced his professorship of theology at Bagdad and went into devotional retirement at Jerusalem and Damascus, and also performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

He returned for a short time to Nishapur, the birthplace of Omar Khayyām, his elder contemporary, whom, as Professor Browne tells us in his History of Persian Literature, he met and disliked. He finally went back to Tus, his native place, where he died, 1111 A.D. The original text uses A.D. (Anno Domini), marking the year in the Western calendar. Professor D. B. Macdonald, in an article on Ghazzali in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, quotes the following account of his death as related by his brother Ahmad: "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 the command to go into the King.' And he stretched out his feet and went to meet Him and was taken to the good-will of God Most High."

The great service which Al Ghazzali rendered to the Sufis Sufis are practitioners of the mystical dimension of Islam, focusing on the inward search for God. was, as Mr. Whinfield has pointed out, in the preface to his translation of the Masnavi, to provide them with a metaphysical terminology which he had derived from the writings of Plotinus the Neo-Platonist A philosopher from the 3rd century who expanded on Plato's ideas, emphasizing the "One" from which all existence flows.. He also gave them a secure position in the Church of Islam.