By 1095 CE, the dream of a universal community had failed at the political level. The ulama were barely holding society together with Qur’an, hadith, and shari’a. The philosophers were a scattered breed, still adding to the conversation, but with voices that were growing ever dimmer. This was the world in which Ghazali lived and worked, a world in which trusting to reason could easily seem unreasonable. And then the catastrophes began.
