Al-Ghazali Story - Part 6

MYSTICISM

1. Introduction.-It will not be quite true to say that al-Ghazālī’s final resort to Sufi-mysticism was merely the result of his disillusionment with philosophy and dissatisfaction with scholastic theology. This is only a part of the truth; his own confessional statement to this effect in al-Munqidh seems to be rather an over-statement of the actual facts. Sufistic influences had all along been working upon his mind right from his early childhood. 



We need only recall that his father was a pious dervish and his guardian a Sufi devout, that in his youth he studied1 and even practised Sufism first under Yusuf al-Nassaj in Tus and then under al-Farmadhi at Nishapur and that his own brother Ahmad al-Ghazālī (d. 520/1126) made a name as a great Sufi. It is not improbable that he should have also learnt of Sufism from his teacher Imam al-Haramain, for it is reported that the Imam himself had been the pupil of the renowned Sufi abu Nu‘aim al-Isfahani (d. 430/1038). So al-Ghazālī’s eventual adoption of the Sufi way of life was in reality a continuation of these early influences and not simply the consequence of his failure to find the philosophical solution of theological problems. Further, it has to be emphasized that, in spite of his explicit official denunciation of philosophy, al-Ghazālī could never completely part company with it. His Sufi-mysticism was as much influenced by his thorough study of philosophy as by theology; in its final development it was the mysticism of a philosopher and a theologian. There is a marked note of Hellenic thought in his mystical doctrines and even the tracings of Neo-Platonism, and yet paradoxical though it may seem they remain circumscribed within the limits of orthodoxy. His is surely a sober kind of mysticism carefully eschewing all kinds of pantheistic extravagances and severely criticizing the antinomian tendencies of the intoxicated Sufis. 

On the one hand, he tried to make mysticism orthodox and, on the other, orthodoxy mystical. It is the mystical element in religion, he insisted, which is most vital and makes religious life a reality. Both to the philosophers {617} and the scholastic theologians he brought home the fact that the basis of all religious certainty is the first-hand living experience of God. He indeed did his best to vitalize the Law and the doctrine of Islam through this emphasis on the living religious experience, and this is evident from the very title of his magnum opus, Ihyā’ `Ulum al-Din (Revivification of the Sciences of Religion). But the mystical teaching of al-Ghazālī found in Ihyā’, meant for all to read, must be studied in conjunction with what is given in his other works dealing more specially with the Sufi doctrine such as Mishkāt al-Anwar, al-Ma’ārif al-`Aqliyyah, Mukāshafat al-Qulūb and the like. The theory developed in these works represents what may be labelled as theosophical mysticism and this cannot be properly understood without reference to al-Ghazālī’s specific views about the nature of God and the human soul. From the point of view of our present study his mystical views with regard to God and soul may be profitably compared with those of the philosophers, i. e., al-Farabi, ibn Sina, and their followers.

2. God.-The philosophers have particularly emphasized the absolute unity of God. No positive attributes can be ascribed to God for that leads to the subject-predicate dualism. Even existence can only be referred to Him. He is above all distinctions and above all the categories of thought. This overemphasis on unity shorn of all qualities reduces God to a mere contentless inanity. He becomes an ineffable, indescribable, impredicable something. Such is the result of the dialectic of the philosophers’ monistic reductionism. As mentioned in the preceding chapter, some (if them, following Aristotle, have described God as thought thinking thought. That which He knows comes into being emanating from the over-effulgence of His Being, but He does not positively will anything, for willing implies a need-a deficiency. He recognizes only Himself or at best His first emanent, the first intelligence, and, thus, is purely transcendent to this world of change and multiplicity.

Like the philosophers, al-Ghazālī lays stress on the unity of God: God is the sole-existent and the ultimate cause and ground of all being, the only self-subsisting reality. Yet He possesses the fullness of being, all the attributes mentioned in the Qur’an inhere in Him, only the modality of this inherence is rationally unknowable. We should, however, understand that all His attributes are spiritual. He is perfect goodness and perfect beauty: the supreme object of love.2 He is the light of lights, the eternal wisdom, the creative truth, but above all He is the eternal will.

To the philosophers God is primarily thought or intelligence, but to al-Ghazālī He is primarily a will which is the cause of creation. “The First Principle,” he says, “is an omnipotent and willing agent, He does what He wills, and ordains as He likes, and He creates the similar and dissimilar things alike, whenever and in whatever manner He wills.” 3 So Ultimate Reality is {618} essentially will. The entire choir of the heavens and the furniture of the earth are the direct work of God, produced out of sheer nothingness simply through His terrific “Be.” 4 God has created the universe through His will, sustains it through His will, and one day will let it pass away by His will. According to the philosophers, God wills the world because He thinks of it. According to al-Ghazālī, “God has cognizance of the world because He wills it and in His willing it.” 5

Like the philosophers, al-Ghazālī also emphasizes the transcendent aspect of God. He is exalted beyond the limitations of space and time, for He is the creator of space and time. He was before time and space were. But He is also immanent in this apatio-temporal order; His eternal wisdom and supreme beauty manifest themselves through the wonders and glory of His creation. His eternal will is in action throughout the universe; it is in the swing of the sun and the moon and in the alternation of day and night. Everywhere around is the touch and working of God.6 Al-Ghazālī’s God is not the Absolute of the philosophers who is bleak and cold, but a personal God, a living God. He desires intercourse with His creatures and makes it possible for them to enter into fellowship with Himself through prayer and contemplation and, above all, through the gift of mystical gnosis.

3. Soul.-The difference between al-Ghazālī and the philosophers with regard to the nature of the soul is not so very well marked. He only insists, like Kant, 7 that the philosophers through their rational arguments cannot give any conclusive proof for the spirituality, substantiality, unity, immortality, etc., of the human soul. His attack on the philosophers on this issue is as incisive and analytic as that of Kant but probably more violent. He actually smashes one by one all the ten arguments which he himself expounds as forcefully as they could be in favour of their thesis. 8 Like Kant again, he does not disagree with their basic position but only with their method. He even joins the philosophers in their refutation of the position of some of the scholastic theologians, who maintained that the soul is a kind of subtle body or an accident and not a substance. 9 What is more and rather strange, while determining the place of the soul in the realm of beings, al-Ghazālī talks the very language of {619} the Neo-Platonic philosophers. His cosmological triad of the divine world (`ālam al-malakūt), the celestial world (`ālam al-jabrūt), and the material, phenomenal world (`ālam al-mulk w-al-shahādah) runs closely parallel to that of Plotinus consisting of the universal mind, the universal soul, and matter. 10 Like Plotinus, he seems to vouchsafe that the human soul belongs to `ālam al-jabarūt, i.e., midway between the divine world and the material world, and so is neither purely eternal like the former nor merely temporal like the latter but partakes of them both.

Al-Ghazālī’s conception of the human soul, however, is essentially based on the teachings of the Qur’an and the Tradition. The interesting thing about this conception is that it runs parallel to his conception of God. Soul like God is a unity and like Him it is primarily and essentially a will. Further, as God is both transcendent to and immanent in the universe so is soul with reference to body. “Man is made in the image of God,” 11 is a saying of the Holy Prophet and it is twice stated in the Qur’an that “Allah breathed into man of His own spirit.” 12 The soul is a mirror illumined by the divine spark reflecting the qualities and even the essence of God. “Not only are man’s attributes,” says al-Ghazālī, “a reflection of God’s attributes but the mode of existence of man’s soul affords an insight into God’s mode of existence . . . .” Knowledge of the self is the key to the knowledge of God, for so is the oftquoted tradition: “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” “Both God and soul,” al-Ghazālī adds, “are invisible, indivisible, unconfined by space and time, and outside the categories of quantity and quality: nor can the ideas of shape, colour, or size attach to them . . . .”13

The soul of man is different from everything else in the sensuous world. There are two worlds: the world of command (amr) and the created world (khalq).14 Everything devoid of quantity and dimension belongs to the world of amr. Soul belongs to the world of amr also because it proceeds from the command of God: “Say, the spirit proceedeth at the command of my Lord”15 is God’s instruction to the Prophet. It is the world of amr that rules the created world; the command is the divine force which directs and regulates the world. Thus soul is a spiritual principle which having life in itself vitalizes the body and controls it and regulates it. Body is the instrument and vehicle of the soul. God is primarily a will and man is akin to God especially in respect of will. Volo ergo sum is the dictum on which al-Ghazālī builds his mystical {620} psychology and epistemology. The essential element of the soul is not thought which in the  final analysis is based upon the bodily perceptions and the categories of thought but will which created them both for its own purposes. Man in himself has the infinite spiritual possibilities and it is through his will that he comes to realize them and thus brings himself close to the mind and will of God till God says: “O’ soul at rest! return to thy Lord, satisfied with Him, giving satisfaction unto Him. So enter among My servants and enter My garden.”16 This final encounter of the soul with God through the unfolding of its own spiritual possibilities and the realization of its inmost aspirations is attained by walking on a mystic Path, under the guidance of a Shaikh, and constitutes what is the very essence and acme of religious experience.

4. Religious Experience and Moral and Intellectual Values.-Whatever the essence or inner content of religious experience may be, it certainly is not a mere state of pure contemplation or knowledge as the philosophers proclaim it to be. It is a vital experience which must translate itself into good action. Religion without good works, according to al-Ghazālī, is a dead religion. The life of the true mystics is the best life and their character the purest character. “Were the intellect of the intellectuals and the learning of the learned and the scholarship of the scholars . . . brought together to improve the life and character of the mystics, they would find no way of doing so.”17 Indeed, the source from which the philosophers derive their ethical theories is the lives and teachings of these moral geniuses, i. e., the saints and the mystics. In the final analysis the mystics themselves are illumined by the light of the lamp of the prophetic revelation. But what if you were to doubt the prophethood of a prophet? So close is the relation between the inner religious life and the outer moral expression of it that you can move from one back to the other. The authenticity of a prophet can be attested by applying a moral test, that is, by making a close study of his conduct, by assessing the transformations which his creative will has wrought in human history and by evaluating the new socio-politico-legal system that he has introduced and established in a society. Of the truths of religion, we acquire not a theoretical but a moral certainty: the deed is more important than mere idea, the will is more ultimate than pure intellect.

Though the philosophers do not deny the importance of transforming truth values into moral values, ideas into deeds, so far as their theory of prophecy is concerned, yet in pursuance of the dominant Hellenic tradition they seem to hold that knowledge without consequent action has its own intrinsic value. Good deeds are preparatory to correct thinking. The ultimate perfection of the soul consists in God-like contemplation, in a state of pure knowledge which though not without joy is certainly without action. Al-Ghazālī strongly revolted against this extreme intellectualism of the {621} philosophers, yet he did not remain altogether unaffected by it. It is indeed futile to look for any lifeless consistency in his attitudes which make a happy synthesis of voluntarism, pragmatism, and idealism. 

He concedes, for example, that a prophet is a person endowed with extraordinary intellect which enables him to attain contact with the active intellect, the proximate source of prophetic revelation.18 Like the philosophers, he also affirms that perfection of the soul consists in knowledge, albeit intuitive knowledge; like them, he also shows predilections for knowledge for its own sake. “The ink of the scholar is better than the blood of the martyr.”19 It is certainly true so far as by knowledge we here understand knowledge of the religious sciences, but it is also in a sense true of all other sciences. Knowledge of the sciences dealing with things that God has made is regarded by al-Ghazālī as a necessary prelude to the knowledge of God Himself. The study of all branches of knowledge and taking the greatest share of most of them is a necessary part of the mystic discipline. “If the soul has not been exercised in the sciences dealing with fact and demonstration, it will acquire mental phantasms which will be mistaken by it to be truths descending upon it .... Many Sufis remain stuck for years in such figments of imagination, but they certainly would have been saved from these, had they first followed the path of scientific study and acquired by laborious learning as much of the demonstrative sciences as human power could encompass . . . .”20

It has almost become a fashion to label al-Ghazālī as an anti-intellectualist and to ascribe to him much of the backwardness of Muslim community ever since the sixth/twelfth century: its conservatism and its anti-liberalism.21 It is alleged that al-Ghazālī through his emphasis on fundamentalism and spiritualism initiated a movement in Muslim thought that killed all zest for philosophic inquiry and scientific reflection, if it did not outright create an antipathy for them. The anti-intellectualism or the anti-liberalism of the Muslim community is a highly complex sociological phenomenon and its causes shall have to be explored in a great many areas; it would be too much of an oversimplification of facts to ascribe it to a single name, however great that name may be. We have only to remember that al-Ghazālī never left philosophy altogether and that he himself was very well acquainted with the scientific knowledge of his day,22 most of which he accepted as true. The charge of the kind mentioned above may be made only with reference to some one {622} particular work but it cannot at all be justified if the whole course o£ his works is taken into consideration.

Considering, however, the number and complexity of the subjects with which his works deal, the various levels of readers for whom they were written and the fact of his own spiritual development, it is not always possible to reconcile his various views and attitudes and to defend him against all charges of inconsistency.23 One such difficulty arises when, after having considered his views about the nature of the soul and God, we come to formulate his position with regard to the relation between the two. Whether his conception of this relation makes an allowance for pantheism, is a question which has puzzled some students of al-Ghazālī.24

5. Pantheism.-Al-Ghazālī’s view of God as being both immanent and transcendent, his firm belief in God being a personal God who allows His creatures to enter into communion with Him, his emphasis on God’s being a creator who created the universe at a specific time through an act of volition, one and all, can hardly fit into any scheme of pantheism. The description of the mystic’s experience of God at the higher reaches of his ecstatic flights as identification (ittihad) or unification (wusūl) with God or inherence or indwelling (hulul) in Him, al-Ghazālī has expressly mentioned as false and erroneous.25 At beat the mystics can claim only a nearness to or proximity with God and no more. But it has been pointed out that in his doctrine of the soul he makes it resemble God so closely both in essence and qualities that there remains hardly any difference between the two. 

Al-Ghazālī is aware of this dangerous deduction and asserts most emphatically that there is one special quality (akhassu wasfihi) . which belongs to God alone and of which none else partakes and that is the quality of self-subsistence. God is self-. subsistent (qayyūm)26 while everything else exists through Him and not through its own essence. “Nay, things through their own essence have nothing {623} but non-existence, and existence comes to them only from something else, by way of a loan.” But surely there is the lurking danger of pantheism in such a statement if it is stretched to its logical limits. If the contingency of the world should be over-emphasized, it becomes nothing more than a show of shadows having no reality or actuality of its own whatsoever. All actuality is devoured by the being of God. This conclusion is confirmed by al-Ghazālī’s own approval of the pantheistic formula: la huwa illa huwa (there is no it but He) to which may be added his statement: “He is everything: He is that He is: none but He has ipseity or heity at all.”27 To this may be added that al-Ghazālī has taken a very lenient view of some of the obviously pantheistic utterances of the Sufis of extreme type such as “I am the Creative Truth;”28 “Glory be to Me! How great is My glory”; “Within this robe is naught but Allah,”29 etc. Statements of this kind clearly indicate a sense of complete self-deification. But al-Ghazālī has no word of condemnation for them except the comment that “the words of passionate lovers in the state of ecstasy should be concealed and not spoken of.” True, the statements of this kind should not be taken strictly philosophically but only as emotive expressions indicative of a deep inner experience which has many phases and aspects and a language and a logic of its own. But then al-Ghazālī seems to forget sometimes the advice he has so strongly given to those who have attained the mystic state that they should not try to speak the unspeakable and follow the poet who said:

“What I experience I shall not try to say;

Call me happy, but ask me no more.”30

M. Saeed Sheikh, M. A.

Professor of Philosophy, Government College, Lahor (Pakistan)