“We witness that there is no entity besides Him, except what is originated from His action and proceeds from His justice, after the most beautiful and perfect and complete and just of ways. He is wise in His actions, just in His determinations; there is no analogy between His justice and the justice of creatures, since tyranny is conceivable in the case of a creature, when he deals with the property of some other than himself, but tyranny is not conceivable in the case of God. For He never encounters any property of some other than Himself so that His dealing with it might be tyranny. Everything besides Him, consisting of men and Jinn and Angels and Shaytans and the heavens and the earth and animals and plants and inanimate things and substance and attribute and things perceived and things felt, is an originated thing, which He created by His power before any other had created it, after it had not existed, and which He invented after that it had not been a thing, since He in eternity was an entity by Himself, and there was not along with Him any other than He. So He originated the creation thereafter, by way of manifestation of His power, and verification of that which had preceded of His Will, and of that which existed in eternity of His Word; not because He has any lack of it or need of it. And He is gracious in creating and in making for the first time and in imposing of duty—not of necessity—and He is generous in befitting; and well-doing and gracious helping belong to Him, since He is able to bring upon His creatures different kinds of punishment and to test them with different varieties of pains and ailments. And if He did that it would be justice on His part, and would not be a vile action or tyranny in Him. He rewardeth His believing creatures for their acts of obedience by a decision which is of generosity and of promise and not of right and of obligation, since no particular action towards any one is incumbent upon Him, and tyranny is inconceivable in Him, and no one possesses a right against Him. And His right to acts of obedience is binding upon the creatures because He has made it binding through the tongues of His prophets, not by reason alone. But He sent apostles and manifested their truth by plain miracles, and they brought His commands and forbiddings and promisings and threatenings. So, belief in them as to what they have brought is incumbent upon the creation.
“The second Word of Witnessing is witnessing that the apostolate belongs to the apostle, and that God sent the unlettered Qurayshite prophet, Mohammed, with his apostolate to the totality of Arabs and foreigners and Jinn and men. And He abrogated by his law the other Laws except so much of them as He confirmed; and made him excellent over the rest of the prophets and made him the Lord of Mankind and declared incomplete the Faith that consists in witnessing the Unity, which is saying, ‘There is no god except God,’ so long as there is not joined that of witnessing to the Apostle, which is saying ‘Mohammed is the Apostle of God.’ And He made obligatory upon the creation belief in Him, as to all which He narrated concerning the things of this world and the next. And then He would not accept the faith of a creature, so long as he did not believe in that which the Prophet narrated concerning things after death. The first of these is the question of Munkar and Nakir; these are two awful and terrible beings who will cause the creature to sit up in his grave, complete, both soul and body; and they will ask him, ‘Who is thy Lord, and what is thy religion (din), and who is thy Prophet?’ They are the two testers in the grave and their questioning is the first testing after death. And that he should believe in the punishment of the grave—that it is a Verity and that its judgment upon the body and the soul is just, according to what God wills. And that he should believe in the Balance—it with the two scales and the tongue, the magnitude of which is like unto the stages of the heavens and the earth. In it, deeds are weighed by the power of God Most High; and its weights in that day will be the weight of motes and mustard seeds, to show the exactitude of its justice. The leaves of the good deeds will be placed in a beautiful form in the scale of light; and then the Balance will be weighed down by them according to the measure of their degree with God, by the grace of God. And the leaves of evil deeds will be cast in a vile form into the scale of darkness, and the Balance will be light with them, through the justice of God. And that he should believe that the Bridge (as-Sirat) is a Verity; it is a bridge stretched over the back of Hell (Jahannam), sharper than a sword and finer than a hair. The feet of the unbelievers slip upon it, by the decree of God, and fall with them into the Fire. But the feet of believers stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass into the Abiding Abode. And that he should believe in the Tank (Hawdh), to which the people shall go down, the Tank of Mohammed from which the believers shall drink before entering the Garden and after passing the Bridge. Whoever drinks of it a single draught will never thirst again thereafter. Its breadth is a journey of a month; its water is whiter than milk and sweeter than honey; around it are ewers in numbers like the stars of heaven; into it flow two canals from Al-Kawthar (Koran 108). And that he should believe in the Reckoning and in the distinctions between men in it, him with whom it will go hard in the Reckoning and him to whom compassion will be shown therein, and him who enters the Garden without reckoning,—these are the honoured (muqarrab). God Most High will ask whomsoever He will of the prophets, concerning the carrying of His message, and whomsoever He will of the unbelievers, concerning the rejection of the messengers; and He will ask the innovators (Mubtadiʾs) concerning the Sunna; and the Moslems concerning works. And that he should believe that the attestors of God’s Unity (muwahhids) will be brought forth from the Fire, after vengeance has been taken on them, so that there will not remain in Hell an attestor of God’s Unity. And that he should believe in the intercession (shafaʾa) of the prophets, next of the learned (ʿulama), next of the martyrs, next of the rest of the believers—each according to his dignity and rank with God Most High. And he who remains of the believers, and has no intercessor, shall be brought forth of the grace of God, whose are Might and Majesty. So there shall not abide eternally in the Fire a single believer, but whoever has in his heart the weight of a single grain of faith shall be brought forth therefrom. And that he should confess the excellence of the Companions—May God be well pleased with them—and their rank; and that the most excellent of mankind, after the Prophet is Abu Bakr, next Umar, next Uthman, next Ali—May God be well pleased with them; And that he should think well of all the Companions and should praise them like as he praises God, whose are Might and Majesty, and His Apostles. All this is that which has been handed down in tradition from the Prophet and in narratives from the followers. He who confesses all this, relying upon it, is of the People of the Truth and the Company of the Sunna, and hath separated himself from the band of error and the sect of innovation (bidʾa). So we ask from God perfection of certainty and firm standing in the Faith (din) for us and for all Moslems through His compassion.—Lo! He is the Most Compassionate!—and may the blessing of God be upon our Lord Mohammed and upon every chosen creature.”
The above is Doctor Macdonald’s careful translation of what Al-Ghazali taught was involved when Moslems say: There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is Allah’s Apostle. Surely he gave this shortest of all creeds its full significance and value.
It is necessary, however, not only to see in it the faith of Al-Ghazali but his credulity as well, if we desire to understand the man and his times. Once his early scepticism was overcome, he was always and everywhere an orthodox Moslem, and therefore swallowed the Traditions and the Koran apparently without any philosophic doubt. He believed that Mohammed was the greatest of all the prophets, and that, so he says, “God has established Mohammed’s prophetic character by miracles, such as the splitting of the moon, and the praising of him by stones, the gushing out of water from between his fingers. One of the greatest miracles, proving his divine mission, is the Koran, for none of the Arabs were able to produce anything like it. Another sign of his prophetic character is his being able to foretell things which are to come to pass, such as his victorious entry into Mecca, the defeat of the Greeks and their subsequent victories.” (See the special chapter in the Ihya on this subject.)
He was a predestinarian in the fullest sense. In one place he writes: “When God Almighty let His hands pass over the back of Adam and gathered men into His two hands, He placed some of them in His right hand and the others in His left; then He opened both His hands before Adam, and Adam looked at them and saw them like imperceptible atoms. Then God said: ‘These are destined for Paradise and these are destined for hell-fire.’ He then asked them: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ And they replied: ‘Certainly, we testify that Thou art our Lord.’ God then asked Adam and the angels to be witnesses to the act; after this God replaced them into the loins of Adam. They were at that time purely spiritual beings without bodies. He then caused them to die, but gathered them and kept them in a receptacle near His throne. When the germ of a new being is placed in the womb of the mother, it remains there till its body is sufficiently developed; the soul in the same is then dead yet. When God Almighty breathes into the spirit, He restores to it its most precious part of which it had been deprived while preserved in the receptacle near the throne. This is the first death and the second life. Then God places man in this world till he has reached the term fixed for him.”
The great Mystic was also superstitious. Some of his books deal with magical formulæ taken from the Koran and the medicinal use of its text or of the names of God. One of the most celebrated magic squares used on amulets, etc., is called the “Square of Al-Ghazali” or Al-Buduh. It may interest in conclusion to give an account of this form of magic, approved by Al-Ghazali, because it is one of the things by which he is best known among the masses in the world of Islam.
In the older Arabic books on magic this formula plays a comparatively minor part; but after it was taken up by Al-Ghazali and cited in his Munkidh (pp. 46 and 50 of ed. of Cairo, 1303) as an inexplicable, but certain assistance in cases of difficult labour, it came to be universally known as “the three-fold talisman, or seal, or table of Al-Ghazali” (al-wakf, al-khatam, al-jadwal, al-muthallath lil-Ghazali) and finally has become the starting point for the whole “Science of Letters” (ʿIlm ul-huruf) (e. g., Cf. Al-Buni’s Shems ul Muʿarif, A. H. 622). Al-Ghazali is said to have developed the formula, under divine inspiration (ilham), from the combinations of letters which open Suras xix. and xlii. of the Koran, and which by themselves are also used as talismans.[55] Others trace the formula back to Adam, from whom it passed down to Al-Ghazali.[56]
For the popular mind Buduh has become a Jinn whose services can be secured by writing his name either in letters or numbers. The uses of the word are most varied to invoke both good and bad fortune. It is used against menorrhagia, against pains in the stomach, to render oneself invisible, against temporary impotence, etc. Lane’s Cairo magician also used it with his ink mirror (“Modern Egyptians,” chap. xii.). We find the same in magical treatises. It is also engraved upon jewels and metal plates or rings which are carried as permanent talismans, and it is inscribed at the beginning of books as a preservative. But by far the most common use is to ensure the arrival of letters and packages.[57] No letter from one pious Moslem to another is ever posted in the Near East without putting the figure 8642 in Arabic on the outside of the envelope where it is sealed. And one may see thousands of children in Egypt who have never heard of Al-Ghazali and cannot read the letters of his name wearing his magic square on lead or silver amulet to protect them from the hideous power of the Child-Witch (Um-as-Subyan). In the Azhar University men study his creed but in the villages they follow his credulity and to all the fellahin of Egypt Buduh has become a guardian Angel!
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