In 1095 the most prestigious academic in the Islamic world walked into his Baghdad lecture hall, opened his mouth, and could not speak. Within days he could not eat, and the empire's best doctors concluded his illness was spiritual. This episode traces the life of Al-Ghazali, born around 1058 in Tus, Persia, who studied under Al-Juwaini in Nishapur, caught the eye of the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and was appointed head of the Nizamiyya in Baghdad in his early thirties, tasked with dismantling Ismaili arguments and defending Sunni orthodoxy. We explore why the higher he climbed, the more hollow he felt, until he recognized his motives as ego and prestige rather than truth.

We follow his fabricated Hajj cover story, his liquidation of his wealth, and his decade of seclusion sweeping floors at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, moving between  ...