But what to those who find? Ah! this
Nor tongue nor pen can show:
The love of Jesus—what it is
None but His loved ones know.
—Bernard of Clairvaux—almost a
contemporary (1091-1152).
IX
JESUS CHRIST IN AL-GHAZALI
Jesus Christ is the Touch-Stone of character, the Master of all spiritual leaders and the one supreme and infallible Judge who can pronounce an unerring verdict concerning the truth of any religious system or teaching. What place has Jesus in the teaching of the greatest of all Moslem theologians, what place had He in the heart of this great mystic, this seeker after God, who, whatever else he may have been, was utterly sincere in his search? Al-Ghazali, as a student of the Koran, must have noticed that in this book Christ occupies a high place; no fewer than three of the chapters of the Koran, namely, that of Amram’s Family (Surah III), that of The Table (Surah V), and that of Mary (Surah XIX), derive their names from references to Jesus Christ and His work. The very fact that Jesus Christ has a place in the literature of Islam, and is acknowledged by all Moslems as one of their greater prophets in itself therefore challenges comparison between Him and Mohammed. Did Al-Ghazali ever meet this challenge and in how far did he compare Mohammed with Christ? It is our purpose in this chapter to answer the question by collating all the important references in the Ihya and his other works and then to draw some conclusions both as to his sources and his opinions. The reader may judge for himself how far Al-Ghazali is a schoolmaster to lead Moslems to Christ.
We search in vain among all his works for a sketch of the life of Christ or of His teaching. Al-Ghazali doubtless had read and was probably well acquainted with the only popular work known which gives a connected account of the life of Jesus Christ according to Moslem sources, namely, Kitab qusus al Anbiya by Ibn Ibrahim Ath-Thaʾlabi, a doctor of theology of the Shafi School, who died in A. H. 427 (A. D. 1036). The fabulous character of this mass of traditions has been shown in a translation of the section which deals with Jesus Christ.[83] Al-Ghazali does not give altogether the same stories as are given by Ath-Thaʾlabi but gives a great number of other incidents and reported sayings, many of which resemble those found in the Gospels and others which are wholly apocryphal.
The question again arises where did Al-Ghazali gain this knowledge of the Gospel? Did he have access to a Persian or Arabic translation; or was all this material which we have collated, the result of hearsay, gathered from the lips of Christian monks and Jewish rabbis? It is perfectly clear that he was acquainted with Old Testament tradition even more than with that of the New Testament. There are scores of passages in which he refers to the teachings of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the lives of the Old Testament Prophets. We have already referred to translations of the Bible into Arabic before the time of Al-Ghazali in our first chapter. There is a tradition that “the People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and interpret it in Arabic to the followers of Islam.” Another tradition says that “Kaʾab the Rabbi brought a book to Omar the Caliph and said, ‘Here is the Torah, read it.’”[84] We learn from the Jewish Encyclopædia that “The fihrist of al-Nadim mentions an Ahmed ibn Abd Allah ibn Salam who translated the Bible into Arabic, at the time of Haroun ar-Rashîd, and that Fahr ud-Din ar-Razi mentions a translation of Habbakuk by the son of Rabban At-Tabari. Many of the Arabic Historians as At-Tabari, Masʾudi, Hamza, and Biruni cite passages and recount the early history of the Jews in a most circumstantial manner. Ibn Kutaibah, the historian (d. 889), says that he read the Bible; and he even made a collection of Biblical passages in a work which has been preserved by Ibn Jauzi of the twelfth century.” The first important Arabic translation is that of Saʾadia Gaon (892-942). The influence of this translation was in its way as great as that of Gaon’s philosophical work.