Being the twenty-sixth book of The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya' 'ulum al-din), The Book of the Censure of This World (Kitab Dhamm al-dunya) seeks to persuade its reader of the folly of worldly pleasures and possessions. To do so, al-Ghazali begins with a collection of Islamic primary-source texts that speak to the dangers of this world from a variety of angles. He then adds to this collection fourteen metaphors for this world that illustrate its perfidious nature. In a third subsection, al-Ghazali provides an original rationale for renouncing worldly enjoyments, and he furnishes his reader with a blueprint for determining what constitutes “ this world” in its most dangerous sense. In a fourth and final subsection, al-Ghazali applies a sociological theory to enumerate the essential human vocations and identify the mechanisms through which these lead people away from God.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) was a leading scholar, jurist, and theologian of the golden age of Islam, and he remains its truest advocate in modern times. As a teacher of both inward and outward faith, he recorded these practical teachings in his forty-book compendium of Islamic knowledge. Matthew Ingalls is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of the Dept. of International and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Dubai. He received his PhD in 2011 from Yale and completed a master’ s degree in Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo prior to this. Before joining the AUD faculty in 2016, Matthew taught Islamic Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, USA. He has published articles in the study of Sufism and Islamic Law while his current research examines pre-modern Muslim commentary works.