A Moslem seeker after God

by Samuel Marinus Zwemer

“At last I left Bagdad, giving up all my fortune. Only, as lands and property in Irak can afford an endowment for pious purposes, I obtained a legal authorization to preserve as much as was necessary for my support and that of my children; for there is surely nothing more lawful in the world than that a learned man should provide sufficient to support his family. I then betook myself to Syria, where I remained for two years, which I devoted to retirement, meditation, and devout exercises. I only thought of self-improvement and discipline and of purification of the heart by prayer in going through the forms of devotion which the Sufis had taught me. I used to live a solitary life in the Mosque of Damascus, and was in the habit of spending my days on the minaret after closing the door behind me” (pp. 45-46).

When Al-Ghazali determined to abandon the world and set out as a pilgrim he was only following the custom of his time. Not only religious men but adventurers found in travel relief and recreation. The pious did it, as they asserted, in imitation of Jesus, the Messiah, whose name is often interpreted as meaning “one who travels constantly.” And the worldly-minded often donned the garb of religious fakirs to satisfy their desire for adventure and their ambition to see distant lands.

Because of facilities for travel by post and caravan routes, this period seemed one of wanderlust second to none. A scholar was not satisfied unless he had seen the world of Islam. Of At-Tabrizi (A. D. 1030-1100), one of the contemporaries of Al-Ghazali, who was also professor at the Nizamiyya School, we read that when he desired to go on a journey for literary purposes “he had no money wherewith to hire a horse, so he put his book into a sack and started to walk the long journey from Persia to Syria. The sweat on his back oozed through the material of his sack and stained the precious manuscript, which was long preserved and shown to visitors in one of the libraries of Bagdad.” The Persian poet Saʾadi was left an orphan at an early age, went to Bagdad to attend the Nizamiyya University course, made the Mecca pilgrimage several times over, acted, out of charity, as a water-carrier in the markets of Jerusalem and the Syrian towns, was taken prisoner by the Franks, and forced to work with Jews at cleaning out the moats of Tripoli in Syria; he was ransomed by an Aleppan, who gave him his daughter in marriage. He himself mentions his visits to Kashgar in Turkestan, to Abyssinia, and Asia Minor. He even travelled about India, passing through Afghanistan on his way.

Interior of the Great Mosque at Damascus. In the center the Mihrab showing the direction of prayer and to the right the Great Pulpit.

We have a picture of such a dervish (a dishonest one, however) in Hamadhani’s forty-second Maqamat: “So I started wandering, as though I was the Messiah, and I journeyed over Khorasan, its deserted and populous parts, to Kirman, Sijistan, Jilan, Tabaristan, Oman, to Sind and Hind, to Nubia and Egypt, Yemen, Hijaz, Mecca and al Taʾif. I roamed over deserts and wastes, seeking warmth and the fire and taking shelter with the ass, till both my cheeks were blackened. And thus I collected of anecdotes and fables, witticisms and traditions, poems of the humorists, the diversions of the frivolous, the fabrications of the lovesick, the saws of the pseudo-philosophers, the tricks of the conjurors, the artifices of the artful, the rare sayings of convivial companions, the fraud of the astrologers, the finesse of quacks, the deception of the effeminate, the guile of the cheats, the devilry of the fiends, such that the legal decisions of al-Shaʿabi, the memory of al-Dabbi and the learning of al-Kalbi would have fallen short of. And I solicited gifts and asked for presents. I had recourse to influence and I begged. I eulogized and satirized, till I acquired much property, got possession of Indian swords and Yemen blades, fine coats of mail of Sabur and leathern shields of Thibet, spears of al-Khatt and javelins of Barbary, excellent fleet horses with short coats, Armenian mules, and Mirris asses, silk brocades of Rum and woolen stuffs of Sus.”[36]

To the honest traveller, like Al-Ghazali, however, it was not so easy a life. Not only were there the hardships of travel and its loneliness, but the asceticism of the beggar and the wayfarer. “And to such a pass did we come,” says Hariri, “through assailing fortune and prostrating need,—that we were shod with soreness, and fed on choking, and filled our bellies with ache, and wrapped our entrails upon hunger, and anointed our eyes with watching, and made pits our home, and deemed thorns a smooth bed, and came to forget our saddles, and thought destroying death to be sweet and the ordained day to be tardy.”

We may believe that so keen an observer as Al-Ghazali carried his “Baedeker” with him on his travels. He was doubtless acquainted with the chief geographical works of that period, some of which contained maps and even illustrations. The most important work was that by Abu ʾAbdallah al-Maqdisi, who spent a great part of his life travelling all over the Moslem empire, with the possible exception of India and Spain. His book was entitled: “The Best Classification for the Knowledge of Climates.” It was written in A. D. 985. Another work of a contemporary of Al-Ghazali, Abu ʾUbaid al-Bakri of Cordova, was a general geography of all the roads and provinces of the Moslem world.

Although we have no details of Al-Ghazali’s wanderings we can at least follow him on his journeys and learn something of the places he visited and their condition in his day. The course of his travels seems to have been from Bagdad to Damascus, a journey of nearly five hundred miles, from Damascus to Jerusalem and Hebron, thence on to the birthplace of the Prophet at Mecca and his tomb at Medina and back over a thousand miles more of caravan travel.