Reading the Iḥyāʾ in 2026

Imam al-Ghazali finished writing the Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn — the Revival of the Religious Sciences — in the year 1106. It is a forty-book work, organised into four quarters, running to several thousand pages. It is, depending on who you ask, the second-most influential work in Sunni Islamic history after the Qurʾan itself.

It is also, if you pick it up expecting medieval content, startling. It reads like it was written last week.

What al-Ghazali actually wrote about

The first quarter of the Iḥyāʾ is about worship — prayer, fasting, the Qurʾan, the etiquette of calling upon Allah. You might expect the second quarter to be about law. It is not. The second quarter is about how to live in the world: how to eat, how to marry, how to earn a living, how to travel, how to choose your friends, how to sit in a room with someone you disagree with.

The third quarter is the heart of the book. It is about the diseases that destroy a person from the inside — envy, pride, showing off, the love of wealth, the love of status, the particular danger of self-delusion. It is a catalogue of the ways the self lies to itself.

The fourth quarter is the cure. Repentance, patience, gratitude, fear and hope held in tension, sincerity, contemplation, the remembrance of death. This is the part of the Iḥyāʾ that Muslims copy into their notebooks and reread all their lives.

What is striking about the sequence is how little of it is what we would call "religion" in the narrow modern sense. The book is an atlas of the interior. The outward rituals (quarter one) are there to prepare you for the social life (quarter two); the social life is the context for the work on the self (quarter three); and the work on the self is the condition under which the virtues (quarter four) can actually grow.

Why it still hits

We are, roughly, the most psychologically self-aware generation in history. We have vocabularies for burnout, attachment styles, nervous-system regulation, identity diffusion, parasocial relationships, executive dysfunction. We also have, by most measures, higher rates of anxiety and loneliness than any generation before us. Something has not added up.

Al-Ghazali's diagnosis, nine hundred years early, is that the problem is not a lack of information about the self. It is a lack of disciplined attention to the self. The modern condition he would recognise immediately: a person who knows the name of every trap and still falls into each one, because knowing a trap by name is not the same as avoiding it.

His prescription sounds old-fashioned until you try it. Less input. Shorter hours. A stricter distinction between what you say and what you mean. Time each day — not every week, every day — given to reviewing what you did. A refusal to let the appetites rule the schedule. Friendship that is chosen on the basis of character rather than convenience.

None of this is culturally specific to 12th-century Persia. It is the architecture of a human life lived with care.

Knowledge without action is a tree without fruit. Action without knowledge is a tree without roots.

What reading the Iḥyāʾ in 2026 actually feels like

The first book — The Book of Knowledge — will make you uncomfortable. Al-Ghazali distinguishes between knowledge that draws you closer to Allah and knowledge that only inflates the ego. He is not talking about secular knowledge versus religious knowledge. He is talking about any knowledge, religious or not, that is pursued for the wrong reason. The chapter is, in effect, a diagnostic of every scholar, every teacher, every influencer, every Substacker — including the person reading the book.

The book on the tongue (Book 24) will change how you hold your phone. Al-Ghazali enumerates something like twenty sins that issue from the mouth — not just the obvious ones like lying and backbiting, but the subtler ones like excessive joking, unsolicited advice, self-flattering anecdotes, the pleasure of being the one who delivered the bad news. He does not moralise. He describes. The description is enough.

The book on envy (Book 25) is the one most often quoted today and for reason. Envy, al-Ghazali says, is the first sin — it is what Iblis did when commanded to prostrate to Adam. It is, therefore, older than human sin, and it lives in the human as the original inheritance. He dissects its motivations with a precision that feels as clinical as anything in contemporary psychology.

And then the fourth quarter — the virtues — reads like an entirely different book. The tone shifts. The prose slows. Al-Ghazali is no longer diagnosing; he is inviting. The chapter on love of Allah (Book 36) is one of the most beautiful things written in any spiritual tradition. He is not theorising about divine love. He is describing what it is like to have it, and what it costs.

Why we made the Iḥyāʾ the anchor of our library

When we were designing Joyful Muslims, the question was always: what goes first? The classical library is vast. We had to choose.

We chose the Iḥyāʾ because of how little of modern Muslim life is accidentally excluded by it. Al-Ghazali covers the Qurʾan, the prayer, the fast, the family, the workplace, the inner life, and death — in a single coherent sequence. A listener who completes the Iḥyāʾ has, in effect, apprenticed with one of the greatest minds in Islamic history for about eighty hours. There is almost no contemporary question the book does not touch.

We also chose it because it is pastoral. Al-Ghazali is not writing to other scholars. He is writing to the ordinary Muslim — the merchant, the farmer, the young student, the retired soldier — who wants to live this life seriously without giving up everything else. That is, roughly, our audience.

We built a 24-week plan around reading the whole Iḥyāʾ. Most listeners will not do it in six months. That is fine. The Iḥyāʾ rewards every hour you give it, in any order. You can start with Book 22 (on disciplining the soul) and move backward. You can start with Book 1. You can open the book on envy in a week when you need the book on envy.

A note to the sceptical

If you are reading this and thinking: I am not a religious person. This isn't for me. — I would ask you to give Book 24 (on the tongue) or Book 21 (on the heart) an hour of your time.

Al-Ghazali is writing inside an Islamic framework, and he means it. But what he is describing — the structure of the ego, the mechanics of self-deception, the physics of envy, the discipline of attention — is not sectarian. It is observational. He watched people for a lifetime and wrote down what he saw. A good book on any of those subjects is useful no matter where you sit.

Nine centuries later, it is still the case that the people who have sat with the Iḥyāʾ come out of it looking slightly different from the people who haven't. If it did not work, it would not still be in print.