Building on recent revisionist scholarship, this book offers a new account of the last two decades of the life of the seminal twelfth-century Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111). It refocuses attention on his masterpiece, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and argues that al-Ghazali was the first Muslim thinker to self-consciously marshal the rhetoric of revivval to promote his new vision of the Islamic religious sciences.