AL-GHAZALI-The Alchemy Of happiness

Man was not created in jest; he is not immortal, yet he lives for ever. His body is mean and earthly, yet his spirit is divine. When he is purged from carnal passions, he attains to the highest, and in place of being a slave to lust and anger, becomes endued with angelic qualities. The spiritual alchemy which operates this change in man, like that which transmutes base metals into gold, is not easily discovered. This alchemy turns man away from the world to God, and its constituents are four: the knowledge of God, of Self, of This World and of the Next World. Rebuking those whose piety was only lukewarm or who uttered empty phrases, Imam al-Ghazali explains in these pages how to achieve contentment of the heart, the window into the spiritual world. Originally written in Persian as his own abridgement of his 12th-century magnum opus, Ihya Ulum al-Din, this little book contains eight sections of that abridgement. the greatest of Muslim thinkers and needs no introduction. His greatest work, Ihya Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), is the definitive word on Islamic beliefs until today and it immortalized his name and earned him the title Hujjat al-lslam (Proof of Islam).

• TRANSLATED BY CLAUDE FIELD
• ISBN 978-983-9154-95-5 789839 15495