De Lacy O'Leary

“ The soul, which has no dimension, shape, or locus, rules the body in the same way as God rules the world, so that the body is a microcosm reproducing the conditions of the world. The essential element of this soul is not the intelligence which is concerned with the bodily frame, but the will: just as God is primarily known not as thought or intelligence, but as the volition which is the cause of creation. ”

“ The pen, tablet, etc., mentioned in the Qur'an are not mere allegories; they belong to the world of reality, and so are something other than what we see in this world of perception. These three worlds or planes are not separate in time or space, they are rather to be considered as modes of existence.
The theories of the astronomers as to movements of the heavenly bodies are to be accepted—al-Ghazali adhered, of course, to the Ptolemaic system—but these deal only with the lowest plane, the world of sense. Behind all nature is God, who is on the plane of reality. ”

“ Inspiration means the disclosing of realities to the prophets or saints, and these realities can only be known by such revelation or by the personal experience of ecstasy by which the soul is raised to the plane of reality. Not only are the religious truths in the Qur'an revealed, but all ideas of good and evil are similarly revealed, and could not be attained by the unaided use of reason, a view which is obviously intended to refute the Mu'tazilite claim that moral differences can be perceived by reason. ”

“ The substances perceived by us are atoms which come into existence from vacuity and drop out of existence again. Thus, when a body moves from one position to another the atoms in the first position cease to be, and a group of new similar atoms come into existence in the second position, so that movement involves a series of annihilations and creations.
The cause of these changes is God, the only permanent and absolute reality. There is no secondary cause, as there are no laws of nature; in every case God acts directly upon each atom. ”

“ Thus, fire does not cause burning, but God creates a being burned when fire touches a body, and the burning is directly His work. So in the freedom of the will, as, for example, when a man writes, God gives the will to write and causes the apparent motion of the pen and of the hand, and also directly creates the writing which seems to proceed from the pen. ”

“ The educated fell now into three broad groups: on the one hand were the orthodox, who came under the influence of al-Ash'ari or al-Mataridi; on the other were those who accepted the doctrines of the philosophers, and in the third place were those who rejected all philosophy, and confined their attention solely to Qur'an tradition and the canon law, and who should not be excluded from the ranks of the educated, although their studies ran in somewhat narrow lines. ”

“ Al-Ghazali completes the development of orthodox Muslim theology. From this time forth it ceased to have any originality, and for the most part showed signs of decadence. Here and there we find Sufi revivals; indeed, Sufism is the only phase of Islam which kept free from the rigid conservatism which has laid its iron hand of repression upon Muslim life and thought generally. In Yemen the system of al-Ghazali was kept alive by generations of Sufis, but for the most part Sufism preferred less orthodox paths. ”

“ Revelation indeed is given by means of the Qur'an and tradition, and it is sufficient to accept what is thus revealed, but the ultimate truth of revelation can be tested and proved only by the experience of the individual. So far as men are concerned this is possible by means of ecstasy whereby one becomes a knower ('arif) , and receives assurance and enlightenment by direct communication from God. The soul of man differs from all other created things ”

“ This system is an attempt to deal with the difficulties raised by philosophy, but al-Ash'ari considers it preferable that the difficulties should never be raised, and so strongly urges that the mysteries of philosophy should never be discussed with the multitude. ”

“ It will be noted also that the Ash'arite teaching evades and does not answer an old difficulty: if the substance of the Qur'an is the wisdom of God and is co-eternal with Him, even though emanating from Him, we have something other than God, namely, His wisdom, eternally existing with Him, and this can be represented as parallel with the persons of the Christian Trinity, so as to be inconsistent with the absolute unity of God. ”

“ God has qualities—indeed, no less than twenty are enumerated, but amongst these is mukhalafa, which is the quality of uniqueness in qualification, so that the qualities and attributes ascribed to God must either be such as cannot be applied to men, or else, if the terms can be used of created beings, they must have quite different meanings when applied to God, and these qualities thus signified must be such as could not be predicated of men or of any other created being. ”

“ It is admitted that such qualities exist in the ens, but they are only adjuncts which come into being with the ens and go out of existence with it. Therefore the world consists of entia or substances on which the mind reflects the qualities which are not in the thing itself but only in the mind. Against the Aristotelian theory that matter suffers the impress of form, he argues that all impress is subjective in the mind: if all qualities fall out substance itself ceases to exist, and so substance is not permanent but transitory, which opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter. ”

“ The orthodox Muslim adhered strictly to tradition, and entirely refused to admit "innovation" (bid'a) : he had been forced into this position as a reaction against his earlier ready acceptance of Plato and Aristotle as inspired teachers, for the later errors of the Mu'tazilites showed what extremely dangerous conclusions could be drawn by those who came under Hellenistic influence, and the more accurately the Greek philosophers were studied the worse the heresies gathered from them. ”

“ Such a system involves ethical difficulties; it appears that there can be no responsibility if there is no connection between action and the act done. Al-Ash'ari replied that there is a unity in the will of God, so that cause and effect are not isolated as though independent atoms, but all is disposed according to a Divine plan. ”

“ It is noted also that God is qiyam bi-n-nafs, or "subsisting in Himself," that is to say, independent of any other than Himself, and so God's knowledge does not depend on the existence or nature of the thing known. ”