The Ghawth of Baghdad

About this book

He walked into Baghdad with nothing. Nine centuries later, people are still weeping in his courtyard.You know the feeling that something essential is missing, even when nothing is obviously wrong. You have probably had the experience of doing everything correctly and lying awake inside the correct life anyway. That restlessness has a long history, and one man spent twenty-five years in the Iraqi wilderness learning what it is actually asking for.His name was Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. He arrived in Baghdad in 1095 as a penniless eighteen-year-old from a wet green province at the far end of the Caspian, carrying forty gold coins his mother had sewn into the lining of his coat and one instruction: never lie. He became a master of Islamic law, walked away from a brilliant career into the desert, and came back at fifty to spend the rest of his life telling crowded rooms the truth about themselves.The Ghawth of Baghdad is a narrative biography, told as a story rather than a study. It follows him from the orphan's house in Gilan to the wilderness to the pulpit, and it takes his teaching seriously as something you might actually use. Recognize the restlessness you have been trying to fix as the one thing in you that has always known where it was going Learn what he taught about the gap between who you appear to be and who you are, and why closing it changes everything Find a practice for the mornings when you feel nothing at all, which are the mornings that decide it See how a man with a vast household, a school to fund and a city coming apart around him held an interior life together anyway Understand why he refused to make the spiritual life a retreat from your actual, crowded, interrupted days This is a book for anyone who has ever suspected that the life they are living and the life they are meant to be living are not quite the same life, and has not known what to do about it.He did not promise peace, certainty, or an ending. He offered something smaller and far more durable: a way of standing in your own life that does not depend on your life going well.The courtyard is still full every morning. Come and see why.