It is tempting, especially for members of so called revealed religions,
to consider conformity to external law as the highest proof of moral goodness.
Muslims, for instance, might think that observing the “five pillars”
and the rules of the Shari’ah make them true Muslims. Since God’s
will is identified with the laws, keeping them means being in harmony with God.
On the day of judgement all God needs to do is to check our external behaviour
against his list of prescriptions!
This way of looking on things is obviously wrong. One of the great theologians who pointed this out was Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali (A.D. 1058-1111). For simplicity’s sake I will call him Ghazali. His influence both inside and outside of Islam has been extensive: European scholars have called him the greatest Muslim after Muhammad; Muslim writers have given him the titles Hujjat al-Islam (which means “proof of Islam”) and Muhyi id-Din (“reviver of religion”).
Born in Tus in Iran and educated in Jorjan and Nishapur, he quickly gained the reputation of being a great scholar. In spite of his youth he composed learned treatises which are still classics in Muslim theology: “The Inconsistency of Philosophers ”, “Revival of Religious Sciences ” and “The Golden Mean in Belief”. In the year 1091 the Vizier Nizam al-Murk appointed him chief professor of the Nizamiyah College in Baghdad. Only thirty-three years old, he now occupied a top position in the Muslim academic world.
By all accounts it looked as if Ghazali’s career was made. Then one fine October day, four years later, came the crash. . . More than three hundred students had crowded into his lecture room, a record for the time. Prayers had been said. The audience had taken their seats. The shuffling of feet and hubbub of voices subsided. All eyes were fastened on the young and famous lecturer. Ghazali consulted his notes. He opened his mouth to speak, but not a sound came. . . Drops of sweat stood on his forehead. . . Suddenly he picked up his notes and walked out of the lecture room. Later, in an autobiographical account, he described the moment. “One day I had prepared myself to give a lecture to satisfy the desires of my students. But my tongue refused to utter a single word. I could not do a thing....” (1)
His breakdown was due to a deep inner conflict. Ghazali knew that from a human point of view he had made it. By using his mental skills in teaching and by conforming to conventional religion, he could strengthen his position all the time. With it wealth, social prestige and even political power would come his way. At the same time he realized that this is not the way God needs to be served. God looks at the heart. God was appalled, he felt, at his externalism and his unworthy motives. If he was to be true to the dictates of his own heart, he would need to give up his glorious career and seek God in a life of poverty and detachment. It was the life-or-death choice between conformity and real sanctity. “I deliberated on this for months, the options before me all the time. One day I would resolve to quit Baghdad; the next day I would abandon my resolution. I put one foot forward and drew the other back. In the morning I would feel a genuine longing to seek eternal life; by the evening a multiplicity of other desires would have reduced it to impotence.”
The final outcome was Ghazali’s breakdown. He left Baghdad and retired to solitude for eleven years. Only towards the end of his life did he take up lecturing again, this time in Nishapur. By then he had regained enough inner security to be able to undertake such an external responsibility without danger to his integrity.
Sufis like Ghazali believe that God is interested first and foremost in people’s hearts; not in their external behaviour as such. Though opinions may differ on what constitutes the essence of Sufi practice and belief, there can be no doubt about its universal search for deeper realities. The Sufi tries to dig deeper than organized religion; he studies hidden meanings, and commits himself to transcending truth. The difficulty in understanding what Sufis teach is often precisely their reluctance to express their fullest beliefs in words. Their deeper intuitions and understandings are only expressed to the closed circle of initiated students. (2) Sufis walk to God on the path of direct perception and religious experience. “The heart of the believer is between two of the fingers of the Merciful”, Ghazali would say.
I believe that Ghazali has expressed his approach to God best in a small mystical treatise entitled Mishkat al-Anwar, “The Niche for Lamps”. (3) The fifty-seven pages of the Arabic manuscript are not easy to decipher. Ghazali employs the academic language of his day, and writes in terse formulations. He says more than once that he does not wish to write more clearly, so as not to offend those who might not understand. It was only by carefully reading his tract again and again, and by putting together information dispersed through various chapters, that I could obtain a rather complete grasp of his teaching. To present it meaningfully to contemporary readers requires a good deal of “padding out” and dynamic translation. If Ghazali could speak to us today, he might, perhaps, talk to us in the following manner.
“Many people imagine Allah is far away. They believe we cannot see him because he reigns high in heaven as creator and judge. There are even atheists who claim Allah does not exist; simply because they do not observe him in nature or in their every-day surroundings. However, to a person with insight Allah is very close indeed. Such a person becomes aware of Allah’s immediate presence in everything that exists.
”We can see things with our-ordinary, physical eyes because of light. Actually, we do not see those things themselves, but we see the light that comes from the sun and that is reflected from those things. In fact, although the light is so common and obvious, and although it is really only the light that we see, we may be under the impression that light cannot be seen. The very intensity of light’s presence is the direct cause of its apparent invisibility.
“Now the same applies to our seeing on a deeper level. Everything that exists exists because of the light of being that comes from Allah. This light of existence we may call ‘Allah’s face’, or ‘the aspect of Allah’. (4) Since everything owes its being to Allah, in all things that do exist nothing exists except Allah and his face. (5) When we look at things on the level of reality and being, we are actually seeing ‘aspects of Allah’, ‘the face of Allah’.
‘But I’m not seeing Allah’, you may object. Remember what happens to physical seeing and light: we do not see light precisely because it is the means of seeing everything. In the same way, the reason why we fail to see Allah’s face is because it is so intensely present and all-pervasive.
Materialists will not rise to this kind of vision, of course. Philosophers will argue to Allah’s reality from the ‘signs’ they observe in creation. But people with a true spiritual insight become aware of Allah’s overwhelming closeness. Their spiritual eyes are opened and they suddenly perceive that all existence is exclusively Allah’s face. Nothing has substance or individuality that does not come from Allah. (6)
Just as everything is manifest to our ordinary eyes by means of light, so everything is manifest to our spiritual insight by means of Allah; for Allah is with everything every moment and by Allah does everything appear. And, just as in the case of ordinary light which is invisible on account of its intensity, so Allah’s obscureness to those who cannot see his presence results from his very obviousness. His elusiveness is due to the very radiance of his brightness. With some justification we can say that Allah hides himself from his own creation by his utter manifestness! Animals in the forest cannot see him, though human beings can. (7)
This ability to see Allah in everything is due to the extraordinary human privilege of having a ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. For this is like a spiritual eye. Without physical eyes sunlight could not be seen. In the same way, human beings would not be able to perceive Allah on a deeper level without the inner mind. It is because of this inner mind that a human person can be said to have been created after Allah’s image. (8) Since human intelligence judges everything according to the principle of truth, it is infallible when left to itself. (9) The mind is Allah’s balance scale on earth. (10) Reflecting Allah’s inner light it has a part that is absolutely clear and self-luminous. (11)
We could also put it in this way. The presence of Allah is engraved on the tablet of the human heart. A man’s or woman’s inner self carries the form, the image of Allah. It is as if Allah expressed himself in it; or, inversely, as if everything in the world is summed up in the human image, an image which Allah inscribed in his own handwriting: Thus we can say that a human person is the divine handwriting. This leads us to a very important conclusion. Whereas one can see Allah present in everything, as I have explained before, we can see Allah even more clearly in ourselves. We may truly say that only that person who knows himself or herself knows Allah. (12)
‘But doesn’t that mean that we ourselves are Allah to some extent?!’, you might say. Yes, it does. Some mystics have been deeply aware of this unity between themselves and ultimate reality. They have uttered statements that would seem incomprehensible to simple believers, such as: ‘I am the Real!’ ‘Glory be to Me. How great is My glory!’ ‘I am He whom I love and He whom I love is I; we are two spirits dwelling in the same body.’ Such visionaries, however, must not be taken in a very literal sense. They were so overwhelmed by seeing Allah in themselves that they could not express this better than by saying they felt like being Allah.(13)
So far Ghazali’s reconstructed little sermon: does it make sense? I think it does if we keep a few things in mind. Seeing God’s face in everything that exists may seem a tall claim. But, suppose for a moment “being” and God are synonymous. Suppose everything has God in as far as it “is”. Then everything that has being manifests God to us, to the extent that it is. It opens a whole new way of thinking. It gives us especially a new attitude towards ourselves; because instead of looking on God as the one who stands opposite us, we suddenly recognize him as the one who manifests himself in our own being!
Now Ghazali, being the great theologian he is, does not make the mistake of literally considering being to be identical with God. What he tells us is that “being” is God’s face. In everything that exists, God manifests something about himself because he is the one who gives it being and who supports it in being. In our own personality too, whatever we are tells us something about God. Having been made in God’s image, we human beings, more than other creatures, express in ourselves something about God. The more we know ourselves, the more we know about God.
This presence of God in everything was sought and sung by Sufis of all times. Ibn al-Arab) (1165-1240) expressed it daringly by the statement that “the existence of created things is nothing but the very essence of the existence of the creator”. (14) God’s existence flows, as it were, like the sea under its waves, through the fleeting forms of individual beings. God can therefore be seen in all the facets of our life: in what is drab or exciting; in what is normal or extraordinary; in everything that draws our attention. An ancient Sufi recital puts it in these words:
A light flickers in the grey of dusk-you are there.
A pagan performs a dreary ritual-you are there.
A reflex movement-you are there.
Not only in what the scribe writes, but in his smile -you are there.
In the charm of a beautiful lady, if not in her mind -you are there.
A question and answer: if not in them then in their interplay-you are there.
The elephant takes his lumbering paces-you are there.
Whenever there is agreement
or love
or being
or truth
or finality-you are there.
The oyster-fan rejects a pearl-you are there.In things chaotic,
out of tune in transition-you are there.
In touch, heartbeat, delight, silence, rest:
in whatever fits and does not fit-you are there.
In the glow, the spark, the fiery flame, the heat and the burning;
in what relaxes and excites- you are there! (15)
In making these observations Ghazali comes to a position similar to that of the ancient Taoist Masters and some Christian mystics. He too sees God the creator inside creatures rather than as their external cause. But Ghazali goes a step further, which will help us in our present discussion. For it is also God, as lawgiver and judge, who shines forth from our heart. The human mind, which is God’s balance scale on earth and the infallible assessor of truth, becomes a new, inner principle of morality, directly opposed to externalism and slavish conformity. We will see more about this in the next chapter.
Ghazali’s book, “The Niche for Lamps”, is based on a beautiful verse, the so-called Light Verse in the Koran (S. 24, 35), a text that has inspired Sufis throughout the centuries. We are like an oil lamp with God the flame within us. His light radiates from the centre outwards, transfusing the oil, shining through the glass container and illuminating the niche.
Allah is the light of heaven and earth. His light may be compared to a niche holding a lamp: the lamp is encased in glass, the glass shines like a twinkling star. Its sacred oil. . . is luminous though the fire itself does not touch it. Thus we see his radiance in layer upon layer.
1. A translation of this account, entitled al-Mungid min ad-dalûl (“The Deliverer from Error”) can be found in Anthology of Islamic Literature, ed. J. Kritzeck, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1964, pp. 182-92.
2. For an introduction on Sufism, see I. Shah, The Way of the Sufi, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1974; L. Bakhtiar, Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest, Thames and Hudson, London 1976; R.E. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, Idarah, Delhi 1981; Ibn Ata’illah, Sufi Aphorisms, Suhail, Lahore 1985.
3. I will follow the translation by W.H.T. Gairdner, Al-Ghazzali’s Mishkat al-Anwar, Kitab Bhavan, New Delhi 1981 (based on the Cairo edition of 1923).
4. The Arabic word Ghazali uses, wajh, means both “face” and “side”, “aspect”.
5. Ghazali, op. cit. (note 64) p. 59.
6. Ghazali, ibid. p. 63.
7. Ghazali, ibid. p. 66.
8. Muslim theologians derive this truth from a hadith, an oral tradition descending from Muhammad. Its real source, of course, is Genesis 1:27.
9. Ghazali, op. cit. p. 49.
10. Ghazali, op. cit. p. 60.
11. Ghazali, op. cit. p. 86.
12. Ghazali, op. cit. pp. 75-6.
13. Ghazali, op. cit. pp. 60-1.
14. Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. Gibb and J. Kramer, Brill, Leiden 1953, under tassawwuf, p. 580.
15. I. Shah, The Way of the Sufi, Penguin 1974, p. 268. I have modernized the translation.