Part 3

Among Ghazali’s celebrated contemporaries, men of literary fame, we may mention Abiwardi (d. 1113), the poet; Ibn Al-Khayyat, who was born at Damascus in 1058 and died in Persia in 1125; Al-Ghazi (b. 1049), who composed elegies and panegyrics at Nizamiyya College, was a college mate of Ghazali’s, and died in Khorasan; Al-Tarabalusi (b. 1080), a younger contemporary. But the most famous poet of all was Al-Hariri (1054-1122), whose “Assemblies” throw so much light on the manners and morals of this period. Among the men at the Nizamiyya University were Al-Khatîb (b. 1030), the great philologist; and Ibn Al-Arabi, born at Seville in 1076, who visited Bagdad to attend the teaching of Al-Ghazali. The greatest of all the Shafiʾite doctors, Al-Ruyani, was also a contemporary of Al-Ghazali. He taught at Nishapur and wrote the most voluminous book on jurisprudence in existence, called “The Sea of Doctrine.” In 1108, just as he had finished one of his lectures he was murdered by a fanatic of the Assassin sect, who were then holding the castle of Alamut in the mountains. We must also mention a schoolmate of Al-Ghazali, Al-Harrasi (1058-1110), who studied at Nishapur under the Imam Al-Haramain, was made his assistant, and then went to Bagdad, where he taught theology in the Nizamiyya University for the rest of his life. Nor must we forget Al-Baghawi, who wrote a famous commentary on the Koran, and other works of theology (1122); Al-Raghib Al-Ispahani, who died in 1108, and wrote a dictionary of the Koran, arranged in alphabetical order, called _Mufradat alfaz Al-Koran_, with quotations from the traditions and from the poets; he also wrote a treatise on morals, which Al-Ghazali always carried about with him (_Kitab ad-dharia_), and a commentary on the Koran. Among the early contemporaries of Al-Ghazali we must not forget to mention Ali bin ʾUthman Al-Jullabi Al-Hujwiri, the author of the oldest Persian treatise on Sufism extant. He was born in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and died in A. D. 1062, when Al-Ghazali was fourteen years old. Al-Hujwiri travelled far and wide through the Mohammedan Empire and his famous work _Kashf al-Mahjub_ anticipates much of the teaching of Al-Ghazali, who must have been familiar with this author. And to complete this already long list of celebrities, we may mention Al-Maidani of Nishapur, who died in 1124, having written a great work on Arabic proverbs; Al-Zamakhshari, born in 1074, who wrote a famous commentary on the Koran; Ibn Tumart, the noted philosopher of the West who attended Al-Ghazali’s lectures at Nizamiyya; and ash-Shahristani who wrote on the various religions and sects—the standard work among all Moslems to-day on comparative religion. The period was in many respects the golden age of Islamic literature, and it is high praise indeed that, in the judgment of Moslem and Christian, Al-Ghazali surpassed all his literary contemporaries, if not in style and eloquence, at least in the scope and character of his writings—still more by the enduring and outreaching influence of his life. The story of that life and the character of his message we will now attempt to sketch for the reader.

II

Birth and Education

“Ghazali is without doubt the most remarkable figure in all Islam. His doctrine is the expression of his own personality. He abandoned the attempt to understand this world. But the religious problem he comprehended much more profoundly than did the philosophers of his time. These were intellectual in their methods, like their Greek predecessors, and consequently regarded the doctrines of Religion as merely the products of the conception or fancy or even caprice of the lawgiver. According to them Religion was either blind obedience, or a kind of knowledge which contained truth of an inferior order.

“On the other hand Ghazali represents Religion as the experience of his inner Being. It is for him more than law and more than Doctrine; it is the Soul’s experience.”

—_“Philosophy in Islam,” T. J. DeBoer._

II

BIRTH AND EDUCATION

As already stated, Al-Ghazali was born and educated in Khorasan, Persia, and there also he spent the closing years of his life. Persia, as Huart expresses it, possessed “an intangible force, the Aryan genius, the powerful, imaginative, and creative mind of the great Indo-European family, the artistic, philosophic, and intellectual brain which, from the Abbasside period onward, so mightily affected Arab literature, enabling it to develop in every quarter of the Caliph’s realms, and to produce the enormous aggregate of works.” It was this Aryan genius which explains much of the powerful influence of Al-Ghazali upon Moslem thought, and the revival of that influence in our day when Islam is again facing disintegrating forces. At the time of Al-Ghazali, Persian influence was supreme. It pervaded everything. The Arabs had ceased to write. The realms of poetry, theology, and science, were dominated by those of Persian birth. All posts, administrative and legal, were held by men who were not Arabs, and yet the language they used was that of the Koran, and remained the sole literary language of the huge empire of the Caliphs. “All races, Persians, Syrians, Berbers from Maghrib, were melted and amalgamated in this mighty crucible.”

Al-Ghazali was a Persian by birth, an Aryan in his modes of thought, a Semite in his religion and he became a cosmopolitan by travel and education. His long residence in all the great centres of Islam of his day brought him into close touch with men of every school of thought and followers of all manners of religions and philosophies. When we remember this, we have the key to his enormous literary productiveness. His horizon stretched from Afghanistan to Spain, and from Kurdistan to Southern Arabia. What happened outside the _Dar ul Islam_ in infidel Europe was brought to the notice of all by the Crusades.

Men of learning had intercourse by correspondence with those of similar tastes in every part of the Moslem world. We have records of letters received by Al-Ghazali from Spain and Morocco as well as from Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Questions of jurisprudence, philosophy, and theology were referred by Sultans to celebrated authorities for reply. All this produced the cosmopolitan atmosphere we find in his works.

The poet Moore describes Al-Ghazali’s native land as

“... the delightful Province of the Sun, The first of Persian lands he shines upon, Where, all the loveliest children of his beam, Flowerets and fruits blush over every stream, And, fairest of all streams, the Murga roves Among Merou’s bright palaces and groves.”

[Illustration: The East Gate, Damascus.]

Khorasan, indeed, signifies “the land of the sun,” and was one of the four geographical divisions into which the ancient kingdom of the Sassanians was divided. They were named according to the cardinal points of the compass. After the Arab conquests the name was used both for a definite province and also in a looser sense for the whole eastern region of Persia. Even now the boundaries of the province are scarcely determined. The total area is about 150,000 square miles, and the present population not over 800,000. It was doubtless far more in Al-Ghazali’s day.

Towards the north and southwest Khorasan is mountainous. In the east the country is hilly, but between the mountain ranges there extend broad tracts of waste land. By far the most extensive of these saline wastes is the Dasht-i-Kabir, or Great Salt Desert of Khorasan. Throughout the province, and especially near Tus, the arid plains and the grassy valleys have been engaged in a perpetual struggle for the mastery. The shifting sands have already absorbed some towns and villages. There are scarcely any rivers, and the few streams are brackish and intermittent, losing themselves in the great salt desert. The salt brought down by the rivers is deposited in the marshes. The fierce summer heat dries these up until the winter floods occur again. This process being repeated for ages, in the course of time the whole stretch of soil over which the marsh extends has become incrusted with salt.

Travellers and students of climate seem to be agreed that the country offers unmistakable evidence of desiccation. Ruins of cities and villages are incredibly numerous and point to a larger population and better climate and irrigation in the days past. It would not be just to attribute the decay of Persia entirely to the devastations of war and the misrule of Islam.

“A comparison of the four provinces of Khorasan, Azerbaijan, Kirman, and Seyistan is instructive,” says Ellsworth Huntington.[17] Khorasan “has suffered from war more severely than has any other province of Persia. Its northern portion, where the rainfall is heaviest, and where the greatest amount of fighting has taken place, is to-day one of the most prosperous portions of Persia. It contains numerous ruins, but they are by no means such impressive features as are those farther south. The southern and drier part of the province is full of ruins, and has suffered great depopulation. Azerbaijan, which ... has suffered from war more than any province except Khorasan, is the most prosperous and thickly settled part of Persia. The relative abundance of its water supply renders its future hopeful. Seyistan has suffered from wars, but less severely than the two preceding provinces. Nevertheless, it has been depopulated to a far greater extent. Its extreme aridity renders recovery well-nigh impossible, except along the Helmund. Kirman lies so remote behind its barriers of desert and mountains that it has suffered from war much less than any of the three other provinces. Yet its ruined cities and its appearance of hopeless depopulation are almost as impressive as those of Seyistan. If war and misgovernment are the cause of the decay of Persia, it is remarkable that the two provinces which have suffered most from war, and not less from misgovernment, should now be the most prosperous and least depopulated; while the two which have suffered less from war and no more from misgovernment have been fearfully, and, it would seem, irreparably depopulated.”

The surface of the province of Khorasan to-day consists mainly of highlands, the saline deserts, and the fruitful well-watered upland valleys. In these fruitful regions rice, cotton, saffron, but especially melons and other fruits, are raised in profusion. Other products are manna, gum, asafœtida for export to India, and turquois. The chief manufactures have always been sabres, pottery, carpets, woolen and cotton goods.

The town of Mashad, the present capital of Khorasan, has supplanted the older city and district of Tus, which was an ancient capital. The ruins of this city lie fifteen miles to the northwest. As early as the tenth century we have references to the birthplace of Al-Ghazali. Thus Misʾar Muhalhil (about 941 A. D.) writes: “Tus is made up of the union of four towns, two of which are large and the other two of minor importance; its area is a square mile. It has beautiful monuments that date from the time of Islam, such as the house of Hamid, son of Kahtabah, the tomb of Ali, son of Musa, and that of Rashid in the environs (lit. gardens) of the town.” Istakhri (951 A. D.), writing ten years later, speaks of Tus as a dependency with four large towns or settlements. He says: “Taking Tus as a dependency of the province of Nishapur, its towns are Radkan, Tabaran, Bazdghur, and Naukan, in which (latter) is the tomb of Ali, son of Musa ar-Riza (may the peace of God be upon him), and the tomb of Haroun ar-Rashîd.... The tomb of Ar-Riza is about one-quarter of a _farsakh_ distant towards the village called Sanabadh.” The best summary of the history of Tus and description of its present condition is given by Professor A. V. Williams Jackson in his most interesting book, “From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam.” He tells us that the name of the town is as old as the half-legendary warrior Tusa of the Avesta, who gave battle against Turan. Alexander the Great passed through it in pursuit of Bessus, the slayer of the last Darius. During the Zoroastrian sway, the city of Tus shared with Nishapur the distinction of being the seat of a Nestorian Christian bishop. When the Arab conquest of Persia came Tus fell before the invaders and it became a great Moslem centre, famous especially as the home of the poet Firdausi, who was born there about 935 A. D. and died 1025 A. D.

Professor Jackson thus describes the present ruined condition of the city: “The crumbling walls of the dead city were once broad and lofty ramparts of clay and rubble, much like those already mentioned at Bustam and Rei, but they had become much flattened with the lapse of ages, although traces of their towers were still to be seen, while their outline showed the contour of the town, which must have formed a very irregular quadrilateral, following roughly the points of the compass.... The scene, as we saw it, presented a strange paradox of the destructive effects of the hand of man, and the eternal power of nature to rise and bloom again. The devastating inroads of the Ghuzz hordes and the Mongol armies, aided by earthquakes, had indeed laid mighty Tus in ruins: but its dust still contains the resurrection seed of flowers and grain, bringing life anew in the midst of death. Acres of barley and fields of thick clover spread their rich green on all sides, in contrast with stretches of arid waste that told only too well the story of ruin wrought in the past.” Professor Jackson goes on to say: “It is clear that the ruined site of Tus we have been examining, with the Rudbar and Rizan Gates, formed part of the borough of Tabaran, an important section of the town in Firdausi’s day, when the city covered a large area comprising several thickly populated centres, as we know from the Oriental geographers of the tenth century, or the period covering the better portion of the poet’s life. It was in Tabaran that Al-Ghazali was buried, and there he must have had his home during the closing years of his life.”[18]

Religious disputation must have been the very atmosphere of Tus. Christians were numerous and the Moslem _Shiahs_ were almost as strong as the orthodox. Some of their most celebrated writers and scholars, for example Abu Jaʾfar Muhammed, were born at Tus; and Ibn Abi Hatim, one of the earliest and most important critics of the science of Tradition, died at Tus in 939. In spite of its learned men, however, Tus did not have a high reputation, as we know from the following anecdote related of Ibn-Habbariyya. He was asked by an enemy of Nizam Al-Mulk to compose a satire on this ruler. “How can I attack a man to whose kindness I owe everything I see in my house?” asked the poet. However, on being pressed, he penned these lines:

“What wonder is it that Nizam Al-Mulk should rule, And that Fate should be on his side? Fortune is like the water-wheel Which raises water from the well— None but _oxen_ can turn it!”

When the vizier was informed of this attack upon him, he merely remarked that the poet had simply intended to allude to his origin—he came from Tus in Khorasan, and, according to a popular saying, all the men of Tus were oxen (one would say asses, nowadays).

“The people of Khorasan,” says Chenery, “were renowned for their stinginess, and it is not surprising that the inhabitants of the mother town were said to excel in it all the rest of the world. Witness the story, related in Saʾadi’s Gulistan, if I remember well, of the merchant of Merv, who would not allow his son to eat cheese, but made him rub his bread against the glass cover under which it was kept.”

To prove the stupidity of the Khorasanis to-day, Major P. M. Sykes[19] tells a story of three Persians who met and were all praising their own provinces. The Kermani said, “Kerman produces fruit of seven colours.” The Shirazi continued, “The waters of Ruknabad issue from the very rock.” But the poor Khorasani could only say, “From Khorasan come all the fools like myself.”

Yet Khorasan, in the words of Hujwiri, was that land “where the shadow of God’s favour rested,” as regards the teaching of the Mystics. He mentions nine leading Sufis who belong to Khorasan, and taught there before Al-Ghazali’s day, all of them distinguished for the “sublimity of their aspiration, the eloquence of their discourse, and the sagacity of their intelligence.” He then goes on to say: “It would be difficult to mention all the sheikhs of Khorasan. I have met three hundred in that province alone who had such mystical endowments that a single man of them would have been enough for the whole world. This is due to the fact that the sun of love and the fortune of the Sufi Path is in the ascendant in Khorasan.”[20]

In view of such statements it is clear that Al-Ghazali owed much to his environment as well as to his own genius. He did not originate mysticism, but used what his predecessors had already written on the subject. The very chapter headings of _Kashf al-Mahjub_ are the same as those found in Al-Ghazali’s books on mysticism.

According to Murtadha (who follows As-Subqi), Al-Ghazali’s full name was Abu Hamid Mohammed bin Mohammed bin Mohammed at-Tusi al-Ghazali, and he was born at Tus in the year of the Hegira 450 (A. D. 1058). In regard to his name, it is related that others before him had the peculiarity of the family name three times repeated. “Ibn-Kutaibah states that Abu’l-Bakhtari’s name was Wahb b. Wahb b. Wahb, the same name thrice in one continuation; and that similar to this among the names of the Persian kings was that of Bahram b. Bahram b. Bahram; among the Talibis (the descendants of Abu-Talib) that of Hasan b. Hasan b. Hasan, and among the Ghassan that of al-Harith the junior b. al-Harith and the senior b. al-Harith.”[21]

Concerning the spelling of his name, whether it should be spelled with two z’s or with one, there has been long and strong dispute. Professor Macdonald thinks the name should be spelt _Ghazzali_ and has given his arguments in a special essay.[22] This spelling is given by Ibn Khallikan in his biographical dictionary (d. A. D. 1282). But apparently, according to the authority of As-Samʾani, the name is derived from Ghazala, a village near Tus, and is not a professional noun, such as are common among patronymics. Abu Saʾd ʾAbd al-Karim As-Samʾani was born only two years after Al-Ghazali’s death, and wrote a famous book of patronymics in eight volumes. He was, therefore, an expert in names and genealogies, and we may well accept his authority for the spelling of the name of the great _imam_, who was his own countryman. The sheikhs of the Azhar University in Cairo _all_ follow this authority and write _Al-Ghazali_.[23]

Some say that there had already been two scholars in the family, one an elder Al-Ghazali, at whose tomb in the cemetery of Tus prayer was answered. This was a paternal uncle of Ghazali’s father. The other was a son of the same. The story is told, apparently on the authority of Ghazali himself, that at the time of his father’s death he committed his two boys, Mohammed and Ahmed, to the care of a trusted Sufi friend for their education. He himself seems to have had unfulfilled desires in regard to his own education and was determined that his boys should have a better opportunity. So he left in trust what money he had for the purpose with this friend, who proved faithful and taught and cared for them until the money was all gone. Then he advised them to go to a _madrasa_, where, according to Moslem custom, they would receive food for their need and shelter. Ghazali used to tell the story of this experience in after life, and would add the remark, “We became students for the sake of something else than God, but _He_ was unwilling that it should be for the sake of anything but Himself.” This instance doubtless throws light on the motives for his studies and his great diligence. At the outset he was in search rather of reputation and wealth through learning than of piety.[24]

Of Al-Ghazali’s home life at Tus, and of his own family life afterwards, we know next to nothing. His name Abu Hamid was doubtless given him much later, and would seem to indicate that he had a son of that name who probably died in infancy. We know that he married before he was twenty and that at least three daughters survived him. Of his younger brother, however, who died fifteen years after he did (1126), and was buried at Kazvin, we know the following: He succeeded Al-Ghazali in the professorial chair at the Nizamiyya School. Like him, he was a mystic and preached his views with great eloquence as well as with a prolific pen. We are told that he was a man of splendid appearance, and had the gift of healing. So fond was he of public preaching that he neglected his judicial studies. He wrote an abridgement of his brother’s great work, and also a celebrated treatise on mysticism called _Minhaj al-albab_ (Path for Hearts), in which he deals with the advantages of poverty, and advocates the wearing of a special garb by the dervishes. Another of his books was in defense of music, called _Bawariq al-ilma_; but this was considered frivolous by strict Moslems, although the Sufis used music to produce the state of ecstasy.

Of Al-Ghazali’s mother we know nothing beyond the fact that she survived her husband and lived to see both her sons famous at Bagdad, whither apparently she accompanied or followed them. An interesting story is told of how, when Abu Hamid was at the height of his fame at Bagdad, his brother Ahmed not merely failed to show him proper respect, but acted in such a manner as to discredit him in the eyes of the people. The full account is worth giving. “He had a brother called Ahmed, surnamed Jamal-ud-Din, or, as others say, Zain-ud-Din, who, notwithstanding the high rank which his brother held, would not take part with him in the prayers (_i. e._, would not recognize him as a man fitted to lead the public prayers), even while thousands of the commonalty and nobility arranged themselves in ranks behind him. So he complained to his mother what he experienced at his brother’s hands, (saying) that it almost led to people doubting him, seeing that his brother was celebrated for his good conduct and piety, and he asked his mother to order him (Ahmed) to treat him as other people did. He complained about this repeatedly, and pressed his demand. His mother urged him (Ahmed) time and again to agree to this, and he agreed on condition that he stand apart from the ranks. The Imam accepted this condition, and when one of the appointed times of prayer arrived, the Imam went to the Mosque, and the people followed him, till, when the Imam began the prayer, and the people began it after him, Jamal-ud-Din followed him in the prayer in the distance. And while they were praying Jamal-ud-Din suddenly interrupted him. So this trial was worse than the first; and when he was asked the reason (of his conduct) he replied that it was impossible for him to take as his pattern an Imam whose heart was full of blood, indicating by this expression the vileness of one who took a share in the work of worldly men of learning.”[25]