Travelling Controversy: Mālikī Networks and the Diffusion of Critiques of al-Ghazālī’s Revival of the Religious Sciences

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.