132 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Then in 1092 they murdered the recently retired Nizam al-Mulk him-
sel£ Scarcely a month later, they dispatched his master, Sultan Malik Shah,
son of Alp Arslan. In the space of weeks, they had eliminated the two men
most crucial to the shaky unity the empire enjoyed. These murders set off
a debilitating power struggle among Seljuk sons, brothers, cousins, and rel-
atives, as well as miscellaneous adventurers, a struggle that left the western
portion of the empire in pieces. From Asia Minor to the Sinai, practically
every city ended up in the hands of a different prince-Jerusalem, Damas-
cus, Aleppo, Antioch, Tripoli, Edessa--each was a de facto sovereign state
owing only nominal fealty to the sultan in Baghdad. Each petty prince
huddled over his possession like a dog over a bone and eyed all the other
princes with suspicion.
By 1095 CE, the dream of a universal community had failed at the po-
litical 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.