Again he is full of doubts when he says: “Perhaps also Death is that state [he is speaking of a possible state of being which will bear the same relation to our present state as this does to the condition when asleep], according to a saying of the Prince of Prophets: ‘Men are asleep; when they die, they wake.’ Our present life in relation to the future is perhaps only a dream, and man, once dead, will see things in direct opposition to those now before his eyes.
“Such thoughts as these threatened to shake my reason, and I sought to find an escape from them. But how? In order to disentangle the knot of this difficulty, a proof was necessary. Now a proof must be based on primary assumptions, and it was precisely these of which I was in doubt. This unhappy state lasted about two months, during which I was not, it is true, explicitly or by profession, but morally and essentially a thoroughgoing sceptic.”
That Al-Ghazali was driven to scepticism must not surprise us. Schools of free thinkers had been established fifty years earlier at Bagdad and Busrah. Every Friday they gathered together. Some were rationalists, some downright materialists. Not only philosophers but poets were the leaders of these circles. Among them we must mention Abu’l ʾAla Al-Maʾarri, born in 973 A. D. This blind poet is said to have written a Koran in imitation of Mohammed, and when some one complained to him that although the book was well written it did not make the same impression as the true Koran, he replied: “Let it be read from the pulpit of the mosques for four hundred years and then you will all be delighted with it.” His quatrains rival those of Omar Al-Khayyam in their utter pessimism and rank infidelity from the orthodox Moslem standpoint. For example, he writes:
“Lo: there are many ways and many traps
And many guides and which of them is Lord?
For verily Mohammed has the sword
And he may have the truth—perhaps? perhaps?
Now this religion happens to prevail
Until by that one it is overthrown,—