The Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn, mapped
Al-Ghazālī's Revival of the Religious Sciences is the most influential work of the Islamic spiritual tradition — forty books, in four quarters, that move from the outward acts of worship to the innermost diseases and cures of the heart. Here is the whole map. Every volume is a free English audiobook, translated in-house from the original Arabic.
Acts of Worship
Knowledge, belief, purification, prayer, zakāt, fasting, ḥajj, recitation, invocations, and the order of the litanies — the outward foundations of the religion.
Norms of Daily Life
Eating, marriage, earning, the lawful and unlawful, companionship, seclusion, travel, music and ecstasy, enjoining good, and the manners of the Prophet ﷺ — worship carried into the world.
- 11 Etiquettes of Eating
- 12 Etiquette of Marriage
- 13 Etiquettes of Earning and Living
- 14 The Lawful and the Unlawful
- 15 Friendship and Brotherhood
- 16 Etiquettes of Seclusion
- 17 Etiquettes of Travel
- 18 The Book of Listening and Ecstasy
- 19 The Book of Commanding Good and Forbidding Evil
- 20 The Book of the Prophetic Character
The Ways to Perdition
The diseases of the heart — the wonders of the heart, training the soul, the two appetites, the tongue, anger and envy, the world, miserliness, status, ostentation, pride, and self-delusion.
The Ways to Salvation
The cures and the ascent — repentance, patience and gratitude, fear and hope, poverty and abstinence, divine unity and trust, love and longing, intention and sincerity, self-examination, contemplation, and the remembrance of death.
- 31 Repentance
- 32 Patience & Gratitude
- 33 Fear & Hope
- 34 Poverty & Asceticism
- 35 The Book of Divine Unity and Trust in God
- 36 The Book of Love, Longing, Intimacy, and Contentment
- 37 The Book of Intention, Sincerity, and Truthfulness
- 38 The Book of Self-Examination and Self-Reckoning
- 39 The Book of Contemplation
- 40 The Book of the Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife
Begin the revival.
Most readers start with Book 1, The Book of Knowledge, or with the quarter that meets you where you are.
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