Al-Mustasfa min 'ilm al-usul. (On Legal theory of Muslim Jurisprudence) is Imam Ghazali's work on the subject of Usul Al Fiqh. It is considered as one of the four great works in the subject. The other three being, 1. The mu`tazalite `Abd al-Jabar (d. 415) al-Qadi's al-`umad; 2. abu al-Husain (d. 473) al-Basri's al-mu`tamad(commentary on al-`umad); 3. al-Imam al-Harmian abu al-Ma`ali (d. 478) Juywani's al-Burhan Ghazali's approach to usul al-fiqh, as articulated in this last and greatest work of Law, al-Mustafa, is based on the premise that, in essence, this science is knowledge of how to extract ahkam (rules) from the Shari'ah sources. (As for the science of fiqh, it concerns itself particularly with the Shari'ah rules themselves which have been established in order to qualify the acts of the locus of obligation, man.) Accordingly, Ghazali views it as imperative that any discourse on usul focus on three essential the ahkam; the adilla (sources); and the means by which rules are extracted from these sources, which ultimately includes examination of the qualifications of the extractor, namely, the mujtahid.
Muslim theologian and philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali of Persia worked to systematize Sufism, Islamic mysticism, and in The Incoherence of the Philosophers (1095) argued the incompatibility of thought of Plato and Aristotle with Islam.
Born in 1058, Ab奴 岣つ乵id Mu岣mmad ibn Mu岣mmad al-Ghaz膩l墨 ranked of the most prominent and influential Sunni jurists of his origin.
Islamic tradition considers him to be a Mujaddid, a renewer of the faith who, according to the prophetic hadith, appears once every century to restore the faith of the ummah ("the Islamic Community"). His works were so highly acclaimed by his contemporaries that al-Ghazali was awarded the honorific title "Proof of Islam" (Hujjat al-Islam).
Al-Ghazali believed that the Islamic spiritual tradition had become moribund and that the spiritual sciences taught by the first generation of Muslims had been forgotten.[24] That resulted in his writing his magnum opus entitled Ihya 'ulum al-din ("The Revival of the Religious Sciences"). Among his other works, the Tah膩fut al-Fal膩sifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers") is a significant landmark in the history of philosophy, as it advances the critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th-century Europe.
An exemplary exposition by one of the most eminent scholars of the Islamic tradition on the principles of Jurisprudence (usul al fiqh). Quite a dense read but worth it for those that are interested in this rich subject.