W. R. W Gardner

“ What prevents men from knowing God, is not that God is far away or that He hides Himself, but that the mirror which ought to reflect Him is for some one of many reasons unable to give a correct image of Him.
It is impossible in the space at our disposal to say more on this subject here.
But what of this world of realities which the soul reflects more or less clearly? There exist, according to Al-Ghazali, two worlds : the seen and the unseen. Speaking generally, the seen is symbolical of the unseen. ”

“ But while Al-Ghazali may thus be said to have gained for Sufiism a recognised place among Moslems, he insisted most strongly that there could be no true Sufiism apart from revealed religion. There must be a historical foundation for belief and for one's knowledge of God's will, and nothing must be permitted or accepted by the Sufi which rang counter to this divine revelation. Sufiism, he maintains, will never enable a man to dispense with revealed religion, or free him from the duty of performing its prescribed observances. ”

“ Orthodox Islam holds out no "hope of salvation," and can therefore never be a religion of joy and confidence. [1] Nor does Islam point out to a man how he can overcome his sins and evil self, and thus qualify for direct entrance into heaven, and the enjoyment of the highest happiness of which he is capable.
For a means of such cleansing, Moslems in all times have turned to Sufiism. In the time of Al-Ghazali, and for some time before and after his day, there was more than a tendency to distinguish and contrast Islam and Sufiism. ”

“ The Qur'an, so Al-Ghazali says, is full of such symbols, and uses throughout symbolic and figurative language to represent spiritual truths. Such language is employed because in no other way could man understand the divine relations, and he admits that even at times figurative language is employed with the object of hiding, as though through a veil, the unseen, which man could not understand were it revealed, at least most men, and concerning which he would but argue and contradict had any further revelation of the truth been given.
Man lives as in a dream. Death is the awakening. ”

“ Some may reach the goal by one path and some by the other. The former path is according to Al-Ghazali, the harder and the longer, and few among men are so gifted with intellectual attainments as to be able to traverse it without falling into one or other of the many pitfalls by which it is beset. Indeed, for most men it leads only to doubt and unbelief. ”

“ As one interprets his dream on awakening, and thus learns the reality of the things which were typified by it, so when man awakes at death, he will understand the true reality of those things which were on earth bound by the trammels of the body and the animal life-desires which form part of his composite nature. In this life one can never attain to a full or uninterrupted knowledge of the divine realities. ”

“ However pure and clean the soul of man may become, a man cannot attain to a true realisation of God so long as he endeavors to conceive what the nature of God is for in such a case he will still be held down by the bonds and fetters of imagination, which is quite unable to free itself from the ideas associated with form and shape and space and the various relations which these imply. ”

“ According to Al-Ghazali, religion consists of three parts; Belief, Works or Conduct, and Experience of Spiritualities. The two former make up what may be called formal religion. Each of them is necessary; but even- both together are not sufficient to give a man a complete conception of truth, or fit him for the highest joys of the life to come. They do not afford even any reliable guarantee of salvation. ”

“ It is most interesting and instructive to note that Al-Ghazali here admits that outward profession of Islam without inward spiritual knowledge puts one no higher than this first division of those who are veiled by pure darkness.
2. The second class are those who are veiled by light and darkness mixed. In this class are included all who have some conception of the existence of God and of a spiritual world, however imperfect or mistaken this conception may be, as well as all those who, while they have accepted the revelation of the Qur'an have for various reasons gone astray in their theology. ”

“ Further, the seeker must learn the qualities, characteristics, and dispositions of this soul: wherein its nobility consists, and wherein lies the possibility of its defect and ruin. He must know what passions can possess it, what motives can influence it, and how these passions and motives may be purified and controlled. A man's life, then, must be a continual struggle. To begin with, he must have clear ideas and thoughts concerning realities and vanities, so that he may know which are the things that are enduring and which are those that are evanescent and temporary. ”

“ But all this, in the life of the Sufi, is but a means to an end, for even such a life of inward struggle and outward watchfulness does not of itself qualify him for the highest happiness of which man is capable. ”

“ Even the desire after spiritualities in preference to the vanities of this world must be avoided. To bring out this point Al-Ghazali employs the illustration of the position of the lover in the presence of his beloved. The lover who in the presence of the object of his affection compares his experiences with the lesser joys and pleasures of life, is not for the moment whole-hearted in his devotion. The true lover, when in the presence of his be- loved, knows nought else. ”

“ The second subdivision includes those who have advanced beyond this and have recognised that the spheres being many the One God cannot be the Mover of all; for this would be to deny the Unity of God in Action. They therefore understand that each sphere must have its own Mover (or Angel) , and that there is an outer sphere containing all the others, and that God is the Mover of this outer sphere, and that he does this at the command of God Al-Muta.' God is therefore the Mover of all, not directly, but by way of Command. ”

“ This class includes all who have found themselves from all anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity and have understood truly the spirituality of God, and who have understood further that in describing or defining the at- tributes of the Deity we employ such terms as speech, will, poicer, etc., in a different sense from that which the words have when used to describe the attributes and powers of human nature, but who from the very glory of the light itself are unable to comprehend the true relation of the First Cause to the World which He has created. ”

“ He must even lose consciousness of his very joy; lose himself, in fact, in his beloved. Similarly, the seeker after God must lose himself in God; he must not even be conscious of the greatness of his desire after God, for that would mean that he is comparing this desire with other desires and realising that this is greater than these. ”

“ Now, every man can know spiritual truth, but every one cannot know it in the same degree, because all have not arrived at the same degree of purity or receptivity or preparedness. Every man is "aid fitratia" which may be translated "with right religious feelings and disposition," and therefore has potentially the power of knowing because of the original purity and the original attributes of the soul. But the souls of all men are more or less sick through evil. ”

“ If God please, of His grace, to give him entrance into paradise without first causing him to pass through the fires of hell, well and good. It will be a supreme act of grace and mercy. But he must be ever ready, should God will it, to pass through the fire and there expiate the sins and evils of his earthly life. ”

“ But the man who has advanced beyond these and, having realised that his real self is spiritual (akin to God Himself) , has found his chief pleasure on earth in the purification of this spiritual nature, and the freeing of it from the trammels and fetters of this passing world and all its weaknesses and evils, has thereby attained to at least a partial understanding of spiritual attainments whereby he approaches the Deity and becomes like Him. ”

“ He must know, in other words, that the world around him is a fleeting show : that there is an unseen world which deserves more truly the name of real. He must be able to see the difference between truth and falsehood in speaking: and he must know wherein consists the difference between virtue and vice. ”

“ The seeker loses, as it were, his consciousness of self as apart from God, yet never comes to that state which some falsely or mistakenly claim to have reached and which they describe as finding consciousness in God. ”

“ Such is a short and imperfect statement of Al-Ghazali's doctrine of happiness. Now, according to Al-Ghazali, the means whereby a man can attain to this spiritual happiness is two-fold. There are, in other words, two paths which lead to true spiritual knowledge — that knowledge of spiritual realities which may be described as experience of them. ”

“ The other path, that followed by the Sufis, is, the states, the easier path for most men; for it does not depend on intellectual capacities and mental abilities. In itself, it is true, it is also a path of difficulty, and is likewise beset by many a pitfall; yet of the two it is the easier and therefore the more suitable for most men. ”

“ His whole being is absorbed by the object of his affection; and, for the moment, nought else for him exists. His every thought and feeling and emotion must be so absorbed by the beloved that he is indifferent — unconscious indeed — whether ought else exists. ”

“ There was, of course, a Sufiism which was non-Islamic, and there appears to have been a strong tendency on the part of Moslem Sufis to break away from formal Islam as soon as they had reached a certain stage in their Sufi life. In all times and in all religions there has been a similar tendency among those who have followed the path of the Mystic. ”

“ All these are unable to conceive of a Deity whom they cannot present to their imagination. He must have some form or shape, or at least have some relation which can be defined only in terms of form and shape. Their conception of God cannot therefore be purely spiritual. ”

“ We have already said that the highest joy and pleasure of which man, who is a spiritual being, is capable lies in the realisation of spiritual truth — as Al-Ghazali puts it, "the knowing spiritual realities" ”

“ And this expectation of immediate entrance into the gardens of delight and escape from the torments of hell fire has been the cause of much of the fanatical courage which has, from the earliest times, characterised Moslem warriors; but this belief is no real part of the faith as a theological system. ↑ The word akin must, however, be taken figuratively, for Al-Ghazali carefully states that when God breathed into man nothing passed out of the divine into the human. Man's soul is not something from God, it is created. ”

“ To obtain this salvation far more is necessary than simply to be an orthodox and strict Moslem. It is possible that some may escape hell fire through a special and particular outpouring of the abounding mercy of God, or in virtue of the mediation of others ”