Part 14

Christians might well regard Al-Ghazali’s mystical method of reading the Koran in their perusal of the Scriptures. He tells us we must regard eight things: the greatness of the revelation; the majesty of the Speaker; the need of a prepared heart; meditation; understanding the content of the passage, not twisting its meaning; we are to make the application to ourselves; and finally we must read it so that its effect may show in our lives. By the word Koran, he says, “we mean not the reading but the following of the teaching, for the movement of the tongue in pronouncing the words is of little value. The true reading is when the tongue and the mind and the heart are associated. The part of the tongue is to pronounce the words clearly in chanting. The part of the mind is to interpret the meaning. The part of the heart is to translate it into life. So that the tongue chants and the mind interprets and the heart is a preacher and a warner.”

The greatest chapter of his _opus magnum_ is undoubtedly that on Repentance. It may well be compared with the fifty-first Psalm or the seventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. That Al-Ghazali himself had a deep sense of sin, no one can doubt. He was not a Pharisee but an earnest seeker after God. He teaches clearly that all the prophets, including Mohammed, were sinners, although he nowhere mentions any sinfulness in Jesus Christ.

One of the most important passages is that in which he speaks of the benefit of asking pardon. It reads as follows: “Said Mohammed the Prophet (upon him be peace): ‘Verily, I ask forgiveness of God and repent towards Him every day seventy times.’” He said this, so says Al-Ghazali, although God had already testified, “We have forgiven thee, thy former and thy latter sins.” “Said the Prophet of God, ‘Truly a faintness comes over my heart until I ask God forgiveness every day one hundred times.’ And said the Prophet (on him be peace), ‘Whosoever says when he goes to sleep, “I ask forgiveness of the Great God, than whom there is no other, the living, and I repent of my sins three times,” God will forgive him his sins even though they were as the foam of the seas or its sands piled up, or as the numbers of the leaves on the trees or the days of the world.’ And said the Prophet of God (upon him be peace), ‘Whosoever says that word I will forgive his sins though he deserts the army.’” Al-Ghazali relates a story of one Hudhifa, who said, “I was accustomed to speak sharply to my wife, and I said, ‘O, Apostle of God, I am afraid lest my tongue should cause me to enter the fire,’ and then the Prophet of God (upon whom be peace) said, ‘Where art thou in asking for forgiveness compared with me, for I ask forgiveness of God every day one hundred times.’ And ʾAyesha said (may God give her His favour), concerning the Prophet, ‘He said to me, “If you have committed a sin ask forgiveness of God and repent to Him, for true repentance for a sin is turning away from it and asking forgiveness.”’ And the Apostle of God (upon whom be peace) was accustomed to say when he asked for forgiveness: ‘O God, forgive my sin and my ignorance and my excess in what I have done, and what Thou knowest better than I do. O God, forgive me my trifling and my earnestness, my mistakes and my wrong intentions and all that I have done. O God, forgive me that which I have committed in the past and that which I will commit in the future, and what I have hidden and what I have revealed and what Thou knowest better than I do, Thou who art the first and the last and Thou art the Almighty.’”[80] How different all this is from the present day superficial teaching about the sinlessness of Mohammed which is current in popular Islam.

Since Al-Ghazali tells this about Mohammed and _his_ need for forgiveness, he naturally deals with repentance in no superficial fashion but as one who has tasted the bitterness of remorse and has discovered his own inability to meet the demands of the Moral Law. His book on repentance has the following sections: (1) The reality of repentance. (2) The necessity for repentance. (3) True repentance expected by God. (4) Of what a man should repent, namely, the character of sin. (5) How small sins become great. (6) Perfect repentance, its conditions and its duration. (7) The degree of repentance. (8) How to become truly penitent.

One can only give a summary of his teaching. He rises far above the Koran. In fact in some cases his proof texts, when we consider the context, are a terrible indictment of the Prophet.[81]

He says the necessity of repentance always and for all men is evident because no one of the human race is free from sin. “For even though in some cases he is free from outward sin of his bodily members, he is not free from sin of the heart; though free from passion he is not free from the whisperings of Satan and forgetfulness of God, or of coming short of the knowledge of God and His attributes and His works.” All this is a failure of attainment and has its reasons; but if a man should forsake the causes of this forgetfulness and employ himself with the opposite virtues it would be a return to the right way; and the significance of repentance is the return. You cannot imagine that any one of us is free from this defect, for we only differ in degrees, but the root undoubtedly exists in us. Of course he ignores original sin, being a Moslem, but he makes a great deal of the effect that unrepented sin causes; but it enters deeper and deeper into the heart until the image of God on the mirror of the human soul is effaced.

Another illustration he uses is that of the heart as a goodly garment which has been dragged through filth and needs to be washed again with soap and water. “Using the heart in the exercise of our passions makes it filthy. We must therefore wash it in the water of tears and by the rubbing of repentance. It is for you to rub it clean and then God will accept it.” How near and yet how far from the teaching of David and Isaiah and St. Paul! Did Al-Ghazali ever hear some pious Jew quote Isaiah’s statement that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags”?

True repentance has a twofold result according to this Moslem theologian. Although he does not touch the deeper problem of how God can be just and justify the sinner, he teaches that the result of the forgiveness of our sins is that “we stand before God as though we had none,” and that “we attain a higher degree of righteousness.” The cross of Christ is the missing link in Al-Ghazali’s creed. He comes very close to Christianity and yet always misses the heart of its teaching. He is groping towards the light but does not grasp the hand of a friend or find a Redeemer. It is all a righteousness by works and an attainment of the knowledge of God by meditation without justification through an atonement.

Yet Al-Ghazali’s teaching on “the Practice of the Presence of God” is very much like that of Brother Lawrence in his celebrated Essay. In his “Beginner’s Guide to Religion and Morals” (Al Badayet) he writes: “Know, therefore, that your companion who never deserts you at home or abroad, when you are asleep or when you are awake, whether you are dead or alive, is your Lord and Master, your Creator and Preserver, and whensoever you remember Him He is sitting beside you. For God Himself hath said, ‘I am the close companion of those who remember me.’ And whenever your heart is contrite with sorrow because of your neglect of religion He is your companion who keeps close to you, for God hath said, ‘I am with those who are broken-hearted on my account.’ And if you only knew Him as you ought to know Him you would take Him as a companion and forsake all men for His sake. But as you are unable to do this at all times, I warn you that you set aside a certain time by night and by day for communion with your Creator that you may delight yourself in Him and that He may deliver you from evil.”[82] At times, especially when he speaks of the _veils_ that hide reality and God, we are reminded of the lines of Whitehead on “the Second Day of Creation”:

“I gaze aloof at the tissued roof Where time and space are the warp and woof, Which the King of Kings, like a curtain flings, O’er the dreadfulness of eternal things. But if I could see, as in truth they be, The glories that encircle me, I should lightly hold this tissued fold With its marvellous curtain of blue and gold; For soon the whole, like a parched scroll, Shall before my amazèd eyes unroll, And without a screen at one burst be seen The Presence in which I have always been.”

But Al-Ghazali did not know God’s nearness through the Incarnation of Christ. The hoped-for Vision of God was always full of fear and dread of judgment. The _fear_ of God was the beginning and end of wisdom. What he understood by the fear of God is clear from the following passage taken from the “Revival of Religious Sciences”: “By the fear of God I do not mean a fear like that of women when their eyes swim and their hearts beat at hearing some eloquent religious discourse, which they quickly forget and turn again to frivolity. That is no real fear at all. He who fears a thing flees from it, and he who hopes for a thing strives for it, and the only fear that will save thee is that fear that forbids sinning against God and instils obedience to Him. Beware of the shallow fear of women and fools, who, when they hear of the terrors of the Lord, say lightly, ‘We take refuge in God,’ and at the same time continue in the very sins which will destroy them. Satan laughs at such pious ejaculations. They are like a man who should meet a lion in a desert, while there is a fortress at no great distance away, and when he sees the ravenous beast, should stand exclaiming, ‘I take refuge in God.’ God will not protect thee from the terrors of His judgment unless thou really take refuge in Him.”

Included with his fear of God there was always a fear of death which can best be described as mediæval or early Moslem. Towards the close of his life he composed a short work on eschatology called “The Precious Pearl.” It is no less lurid in its terrible pictures of death and the judgment than some of his older works. In it he says: “When you watch a dead man and see that the saliva has run from his mouth, that his lips are contracted, his face black, the whites of his eyes showing, know that he is damned, and that the fact of his damnation in the other world has just been revealed to him. But if you see the dead with a smile on his lips, a serene countenance, his eyes half-closed, know that he has just received the good news of the happiness which awaits him in the other world....

“On the day of Judgment, when all men are gathered before the throne of God, their accounts are all cast up, and their good and evil deeds weighed. During all this time each man believes he is the only one with whom God is dealing. Though peradventure at the same moment God is taking account of countless multitudes whose number is known to Him only. Men do not see each other or hear each other speak.”

In summing up the character of the Mystic Claud Field says: “As St. Augustine found deliverance from doubt and error in his inward experience of God, and Descartes in self-consciousness, so Ghazali, unsatisfied with speculation and troubled by scepticism, surrenders himself to the will of God. Leaving others to demonstrate the existence of God from the external world, he finds God revealed in the depths of his own consciousness and the mystery of his own free will.... He is a unique and lonely figure in Islam, and has to this day been only partially understood. In the Middle Ages his fame was eclipsed by that of Averroes, whose commentary on Aristotle is alluded to by Dante, and was studied by Thomas Aquinas and the schoolman. Averroes’ system was rounded and complete, but Ghazali was one of those ‘whose reach exceeds their grasp’; he was always striking after something he had not attained, and stands in many respects nearer to modern mind than Averroes. Renan, though far from sympathizing with his religious earnestness, calls him ‘the most original mind among Arabian philosophers.’”

The disciple of Al-Ghazali is perhaps of all Moslems the nearest to the Gospel, and we may hope that when his works are carefully studied and compared with the teaching of Christianity many may find in him a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ. Educated Moslems of to-day may well heed the warning with which Al-Ghazali closes his “Confessions”: “The knowledge of which we speak is not derived from sources accessible to human diligence, and that is why progress in mere worldly knowledge renders the sinner more hardened in his revolt against God. True knowledge, on the contrary, inspires in him who is initiated in it more fear and more reverence, and raises a barrier of defense between him and sin. He may slip and stumble, it is true, as is inevitable with one encompassed by human infirmity, but these slips and stumbles will not weaken his faith. The true Moslem succumbs occasionally to temptation but he repents and will not persevere obstinately in the path of error. I pray God the Omnipotent to place us in the ranks of His chosen, among the number of those whom He directs in the path of safety, in whom He inspires fervour lest they forget Him; whom He cleanses from all defilement, that nothing may remain in them except Himself; yea of those whom He indwells completely, that they may adore none beside Him.”

Being a Moslem, Al-Ghazali was either too proud to search for the true historical facts of the Christian religion, or perhaps it would be more charitable to say that he had no adequate opportunity, in spite of his quotations and misquotations from the “Gospels.” Otherwise he could have found there what would have met his heart-hunger and satisfied his soul—the manifestation of God not in some intangible principle, but in a living person, in Jesus Christ, who “is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature. For by Him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; in Him are all things, and by Him all things consist.” (Colossians 1: 15-17.) Those who dwell in Christ and in whom He dwells are a part of His spiritual body. They are the branches of the living Vine. They are one in life and purpose, although they remain conscious evermore of their own individual existence; they are fitted progressively for a deeper communion with God. To such a conception the Sufi never attained. Al-Ghazali admits that no man has seen God at any time, but he failed to realize that “the Only Begotten, Who is in the bosom of the Father, hath declared Him.” The artificial glory of Mohammed in his case, as for centuries afterwards, hid the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Yet not altogether, as the next chapter will make clear.

IX

Jesus Christ in Al-Ghazali

Jesus, the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills my breast; But sweeter far Thy face to see, And in Thy presence rest.

Nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame, Nor can the memory find, A sweeter sound than Thy blest name, O Saviour of mankind!

O hope of every contrite heart! O joy of all the meek! To those who fall, how kind Thou art! How good to those who seek!

But what to those who find? Ah! this Nor tongue nor pen can show: The love of Jesus—what it is None but His loved ones know.

—_Bernard of Clairvaux—almost a contemporary (1091-1152)._

IX

JESUS CHRIST IN AL-GHAZALI

Jesus Christ is the Touch-Stone of character, the Master of all spiritual leaders and the one supreme and infallible Judge who can pronounce an unerring verdict concerning the truth of any religious system or teaching. What place has Jesus in the teaching of the greatest of all Moslem theologians, what place had He in the heart of this great mystic, this seeker after God, who, whatever else he may have been, was utterly sincere in his search? Al-Ghazali, as a student of the Koran, must have noticed that in this book Christ occupies a high place; no fewer than three of the chapters of the Koran, namely, that of Amram’s Family (Surah III), that of The Table (Surah V), and that of Mary (Surah XIX), derive their names from references to Jesus Christ and His work. The very fact that Jesus Christ has a place in the literature of Islam, and is acknowledged by all Moslems as one of their greater prophets in itself therefore challenges comparison between Him and Mohammed. Did Al-Ghazali ever meet this challenge and in how far did he compare Mohammed with Christ? It is our purpose in this chapter to answer the question by collating all the important references in the _Ihya_ and his other works and then to draw some conclusions both as to his sources and his opinions. The reader may judge for himself how far Al-Ghazali is a schoolmaster to lead Moslems to Christ.

We search in vain among all his works for a sketch of the life of Christ or of His teaching. Al-Ghazali doubtless had read and was probably well acquainted with the only popular work known which gives a connected account of the life of Jesus Christ according to Moslem sources, namely, _Kitab qusus al Anbiya_ by _Ibn Ibrahim Ath-Thaʾlabi_, a doctor of theology of the Shafi School, who died in A. H. 427 (A. D. 1036). The fabulous character of this mass of traditions has been shown in a translation of the section which deals with Jesus Christ.[83] Al-Ghazali does not give altogether the same stories as are given by Ath-Thaʾlabi but gives a great number of other incidents and reported sayings, many of which resemble those found in the Gospels and others which are wholly apocryphal.

The question again arises where did Al-Ghazali gain this knowledge of the Gospel? Did he have access to a Persian or Arabic translation; or was all this material which we have collated, the result of hearsay, gathered from the lips of Christian monks and Jewish rabbis? It is perfectly clear that he was acquainted with Old Testament tradition even more than with that of the New Testament. There are scores of passages in which he refers to the teachings of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the lives of the Old Testament Prophets. We have already referred to translations of the Bible into Arabic before the time of Al-Ghazali in our first chapter. There is a tradition that “the People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and interpret it in Arabic to the followers of Islam.” Another tradition says that “Kaʾab the Rabbi brought a book to Omar the Caliph and said, ‘Here is the Torah, read it.’”[84] We learn from the Jewish Encyclopædia that “The _fihrist_ of al-Nadim mentions an Ahmed ibn Abd Allah ibn Salam who translated the Bible into Arabic, at the time of Haroun ar-Rashîd, and that _Fahr ud-Din ar-Razi_ mentions a translation of Habbakuk by the son of _Rabban At-Tabari_. Many of the Arabic Historians as At-Tabari, Masʾudi, Hamza, and Biruni cite passages and recount the early history of the Jews in a most circumstantial manner. Ibn Kutaibah, the historian (d. 889), says that he read the Bible; and he even made a collection of Biblical passages in a work which has been preserved by Ibn Jauzi of the twelfth century.” The first important Arabic translation is that of Saʾadia Gaon (892-942). The influence of this translation was in its way as great as that of Gaon’s philosophical work.

A version of the Psalms was made by Hafiz al-Quti in the tenth century and from internal evidence we know that the author had been Christian. Another translation of the Old Testament in Arabic was made by the Jews in Cairo in the middle of the eleventh century. The translation of Saʾadia had become a standard work in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, by the end of the tenth century, and it was revised about A. D. 1070.[85] As regards Persian translations of the Bible we learn from the Jewish Encyclopædia that according to Maimonides, the Pentateuch was translated into Persian many hundred years previous to Mohammed. But this statement cannot be further substantiated. In regard to Arabic versions of the Gospels we have already given Dr. Kilgour’s statement.

Is it not probable that one or other of these versions of the Gospel was known to Al-Ghazali? Does he not himself state: “I have _read_ in the Gospel”? Not only does he reproduce the stories and sayings of Christ from the Gospels but in some cases, as the reader will see, the very words of the text. It is true that there is much apocryphal matter also of which the canonical Gospels know nothing. We are in ignorance and we must remain in ignorance whence Al-Ghazali derived this material; or did he invent it even as the men of his day invented stories about Mohammed?

In the _Ihya_ we find the following incidents, real and apocryphal, regarding the life of Christ on earth as a prophet and saint.[86] We begin with Al-Ghazali’s witness to His sinlessness: “It is said that the devil (may God curse him) appeared to Jesus and said, ‘Say there is no God but God.’ He replied: ‘The word is true but I will not repeat it after you.’” (Vol. III, p. 23.) Again: “It is related that when Jesus was born, the devils came to Satan and said: ‘All the idols have fallen on their faces.’ He said: ‘This has happened on your account.’ Then he flew until he reached the regions of the earth; there he found Jesus had been born and the angels were protecting him. So he returned to the devils and said to them: ‘Truly a Prophet was born yesterday. No woman has ever given birth before to a child when I was not present except in this case.’ And that is why men now despair of worshipping idols.” (Vol. III, p. 26.)