It is remarkable that while he founded a cloister for Sufis at Tus and taught and governed there himself during the closing years of his life, he left no established order behind him. Professor Macdonald thinks that in his time the movement towards continuous corporations and brotherhoods had not yet begun. But this is a mistake, for in the Kashf-al-Mahjub (A. H. 456) we already find a list of the various schools of Dervishes and their peculiar methods of devotion. Al-Ghazali’s teaching, however, is popular among all the Dervish orders of to-day.
A special study has been made of one of Al-Ghazali’s esoteric works on mysticism entitled Mishkat al-Anwar, by Canon W. H. T. Gairdner, in which he answers the critics of this work, and shows conclusively that whatever may have been Al-Ghazali’s method he was sincere. We borrow from this interesting and scholarly paper two paragraphs to illustrate the method of Al-Ghazali:
“In expounding the tradition of the Seventy Thousand Veils with which Allah had veiled Himself from the vision of man, Ghazali finds opportunity to graduate various religions and sects according as they are more, or less, thickly veiled from the light; i. e., according as they more or less nearly approximate to Absolute Truth (al-Haqq—the Real—Allah). The veils which veil the various religions and sects from the Divine Light are conceived of as twofold in character, light veils and dark veils, and the principle of graduation is according as the followers of these religions and sects are veiled (a) by dark veils, (b) by dark and light mixed, or (c) by light veils only. The recital closes with a short passage which tells us that the Attainers (al-wasilun) have had the Sufi doctrine of kashf in its most explicit and striking form.
“(a) Those veiled by pure darkness, called here the mulhida, are those who deny the existence of Allah and of a Last Day. They have two main divisions, those who have inquired for a cause to account for the world and have made Nature that cause; and those who have made no such inquiry. The former are clearly the Naturists or dahriya who were the very abomination of desolation to Ghazali. It is curious that nothing further is said of their evil conduct, and it is entirely characteristic of mediæval thought that the deepest damnation is thus reserved for false opinion, rather than for evil life. Evil doers form the second division (which, however, is not definitely said to be higher than the first), composed of those who are too greedy and selfish so much as to look for a cause, or in fact to think of anything except their vile selves. These we might style the Egotists; they are ranged in ascending order into (1) seekers of sensual pleasure, (2) seekers of dominion, (3) money-grubbers, (4) lovers of vain-glory. In the first he has the ordinary sensual herd in view, as well as the philosophers of sensualism; their veils are the veils of the bestial attributes, while those of the second are the ferocious ones (sabaʾiya). The denotation of the latter class is quaintly given as Arabs, some Kurds and very numerous Fools. The third and fourth subdivisions do not call for comment.
“Mounting from these regions of unmitigated darkness we come to (b), those veiled by light and darkness mixed. Ghazali’s idea of the dark veils in general may be gathered from a comparison of this and the previous section. In this section the dark veils are shown to be the false conceptions of deity, which the human mind is deluded into making by the gross and limited elements in its own constitution, namely (in ascending order) by the Senses, the Phantasy or Imagination and the Discursive Reason. The dark veils of the previous section were the unmitigated egotism and materialism which employed these faculties for self and the world alone, without a thought of deity. The light veils, accordingly, are the true but partial intuitions whereby man rises to the idea of deity, or to a something at least higher than himself. These intuitions are no more than partial, because they fix upon some one aspect or attribute of deity,—majesty, beauty, and so forth,—and believing it to be all in all proceed to deify all majestic, beautiful, etc., things. Thus they half reveal, half conceal, Allah, and so are literally veils of light.”[78]
Does not this remind us of St. Paul’s words: “Now we see through (in) a glass darkly but then face to face, etc.”? Did Al-Ghazali borrow from the Gospel here also?
It has been pointed out by Margoliouth and others that Mohammedan Sufism is largely based on Christian teaching. This is especially true in the case of Abu Talib, Al-Ghazali’s favourite writer on this subject. “Sometimes the matter is taken over bodily; thus the Parable of the Sower is told by the earliest Sufi writer. Abu Talib takes over the dialogue in the Gospel eschatology between the Saviour and those who are taunted with having seen Him hungry and refused Him food; only for the questioner he substitutes Allah, and for ‘the least of these’ his Moslem brother. Not a few of the Beatitudes are taken over sometimes with the name of their author. Commonplaces which are found in Christian homiletic works reappear with little or no alteration in the Sufi sermons. In the Acts of Thomas, the Apostle, when employed by a king to build a palace, spends the money in charity to the poor. Presently the king’s brother dies, and finds that a wonderful palace has been built for the king in Paradise with the Alms which Thomas bestowed in his name. This story reappears in the doctrine of Abu Talib that when a poor man takes charity from the wealthy, he is thereby building him a house in Paradise.”[79]
Not only in Qut-ul-Qulub, the famous book of Abu Talib, but in all Al-Ghazali’s works we have numerous quotations and references to the Gospels apocryphal or genuine, as we shall see later.
Al-Ghazali prescribed forms for morning and evening prayer which do not differ greatly from the prayers recommended in Christian manuals of devotion. His teaching on prayer is an effort to spiritualize the ceremony, and in this he follows the teaching of the older Sufis. Absorption in God during prayer was their ideal. To avoid distraction men were advised to pray towards a blank wall, lest any architectural ornament might distract their attention. Others boasted that they could attain to absorption under any circumstances. “There were saints who when they started their salat told their women-folk that they might chatter as much as they liked and even beat drums; they were too much absorbed in prayer to hear, however loud the noise. When one of them was saying his salat in the Mosque of Basrah a column fell, bringing down with it an erection of four storeys; he continued praying, and when after he had finished the people congratulated him on his escape, he asked, what from? Great names were quoted for the practice of praying hastily, and so shortening the time taken by the devotion as to give Satan no chance of distracting the thoughts.”
Al-Ghazali, however, believed in reverence and emphasized outward and inward preparation for this act of devotion. “Prayer,” says he, “is a nearness to God and a gift which we present to the King of kings even as one who comes from a distant village brings it before the ruler. And your gift is accepted of God and will be returned to you on the great day of judgment, so that you are responsible to present it as beautiful as possible.” He quotes with approval a saying of Mohammed: “True prayer is to make one’s self meek and humble,” and adds that the presence of the heart is the soul of true prayer and that absent-mindedness destroys all its value.