The chapter discusses Abdolhossein Zarirnkoub’s Persian-language biography of Ghazālī, Farār az Madrasa (Escape from Madrasa), which argues that Ghazālī’s intellectual formation was significantly shaped by the Persian mystical tradition of his time as well as by a broader Islamic tradition of learnedness. An appreciation of the historical and cultural confluence of the Abbasid and Seljuq Empires is crucial to explaining Ghazālī’s reformist vision. Within Ghazālī’s lifetime, the ideals and promises of the Seljuq state gave way to sudden, chaotic collapse, revealing in the process the malfunctioning of a self-professed regime of salvation. Ghazālī was a child of the Niẓām al-Mulk revolution in administration and politics, with its hopes for unifying the Seljuq and Abbasid states under the banner of justice and governance. Yet Ghazālī witnessed the sudden and tragic collapse of the Seljuq state, after Niẓām al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshāh were assassinated in an explosive chain of events. Ghazālī was witness to a failed state-building project, who nevertheless clung to the ideals of that lost revolution while plotting to reinstate its normative mission by other means.