luxuries of the table at Bagdad: “We found ourselves among a company who
were passing their time amid bunches of myrtle twigs, and bouquets of
roses, broached wine vats and the sound of the flute and the lute. We
approached them and they advanced to receive us. Then we clave to a table
whose vessels were filled, whose gardens were in flower, and whose dishes
were arranged in rows with viands of various hues; opposite a dish of
something intensely black was something exceedingly white, and against
something very red was arranged something very yellow.” And in another
place: “I was in Bagdad in a famine year, and so I approached a company,
united like the Pleiades, in order to ask something of them. Now there
was among them a youth with a lisp in his tongue and a space between his
front teeth. He asked: ‘What is thy affair?’ I replied: ‘Two conditions
in which a man prospers not: that of a beggar harassed by hunger, and
that of an exile to whom return is impossible.’ The boy then said: ‘Which
of the two breaches dost thou wish stopped first?’ I answered: ‘Hunger,
for it has become extreme with me.’ He said: ‘What sayest thou to a white
cake on a clean table, picked herbs with very sour vinegar, fine date
wine with pungent mustard, roast meat ranged on a skewer with a little
salt, placed now before thee by one who will not put thee off with a
promise nor torture thee with delay, and who will afterwards follow it up
with golden goblets of the juice of grape? Is that preferable to thee,
or a large company, full cups, variety of dessert, spread carpets,
brilliant lights, and a skilful minstrel with the eye and neck of a
gazelle?’”
From all this we can imagine what Al-Ghazali enjoyed when he went to dine
with the Nizam Al-Mulk or other men of wealth and there was _no_ famine
in Bagdad!
The Nizamiyya College which Al-Ghazali attended and in which he was one
of the leading lecturers at two periods of his life, was built on the
eastern river bank of the Tigris, near the Bridge of Boats and close to
the wharf and the large market-place. The college was founded in A. D.
1065, being especially established for the teaching of Shafiʾite law.
Close to the college was another college called the Bahaiyah and the
hospital Maristan Tutushi.
The traveller, Ibn Jubayr, attended prayers in the Nizamiyya on the first
Friday after his arrival in Bagdad, in the year 581 (A. D. 1185), and he
describes it as the most splendid of the thirty and odd colleges which
then adorned the City of East Bagdad.... Ibn Jubayr further reports that
in his day the endowments derived from domains and rents belonging to
the college amply sufficed both to pay the stipends of professors and
to keep the building in good order, besides supplying an extra fund for
the sustenance of poor scholars. The _Suk_, or market of the Nizamiyya,
was one of the great thoroughfares of this quarter, and it is described
as lying adjacent to the “_Mashraʾah_” or wharf, which proves that the
college must have stood near the Tigris bank.[32] ... Writing a dozen
years later than Ibn Batuta, Hamd-Allah, the Persian historian, briefly
alludes to the Nizamiyya, which he calls “the mother of the Madrasahs”
in Bagdad. This proves that down to the middle of the fourteenth century
A. D. the college was still standing, though at the present time all
vestiges of it have disappeared, as indeed appears already to have been
the case in the middle of the last century, for Niebuhr found no traces
of the Nizamiyya to describe in his painstaking account of the ruins in
the city of Caliphs, as these still existed in the time of his visit.
It was here, at the Nizamiyya School, that Al-Ghazali first embarked
on his career as an independent teacher. His lectures drew crowds. He
gave _fatwas_, or legal opinions, on matters of the law,[33] he wrote
books, he preached in the mosque, and was a leader of the people. Then
suddenly in the midst of all this prosperity a great change came over
him. He seemed to be attacked by a mysterious disease. His speech became
hampered, his appetite failed, and his physicians said the malady was due
to mental unrest. He suddenly left Bagdad in the month of Dhu-l-Qada,
488, appointed his brother Ahmed to teach in his place, and abandoned
all his property, except so much as was necessary for his own support and
that of his children.
This sudden retirement from active life and academic honour was
unintelligible to the theologians of his days. They looked upon it as
a calamity for Islam. Some interpreted it as fear of the Government, a
flight from responsibility, but the real reason of his renunciation he
himself tells us in his “Confessions.” This book reveals the story of his
spiritual experiences from his youth up to his fiftieth year.
He says: “Know then, my brother (may God direct you in the right
way), that the diversity in beliefs and religions, and the variety of
doctrines and sects which divide men, are like a deep ocean strewn with
shipwrecks, from which very few escape safe and sound. Each sect, it is
true, believes itself in possession of the truth and of salvation; ‘each
party,’ as the Koran saith, ‘rejoices in its own creed’; but as the chief
of apostles, whose word is always truthful, has told us, ‘My people will
be divided into more than seventy sects of whom only one will be saved.’
This prediction, like all others of the Prophet, must be fulfilled.
“From the period of adolescence, that is to say, previous to reaching
my twentieth year to the present time when I have passed my fiftieth, I
have ventured into this vast ocean; I have interrogated the beliefs of
each sect and scrutinized the mysteries of each doctrine, in order to
disentangle truth from error and orthodoxy from heresy. I have never met
one who maintained the hidden meaning of the Koran without investigating
the nature of his belief, nor a partisan of its exterior sense without
inquiring into the results of his doctrine. There is no philosopher whose
system I have not fathomed, nor theologian the intricacies of whose
doctrine I have not followed out.
“Sufism has no secrets into which I have not penetrated; the devout
adorer of Deity has revealed to me the aim of his austerities; the
atheist has not been able to conceal from me the real reason of his
unbelief. The thirst for knowledge was innate in me from my early age;
it was like a second nature implanted by God, without any will on my
part. No sooner had I emerged from boyhood than I had already broken the
fetters of tradition and freed myself from hereditary beliefs.
“Having noticed how easily the children of Christians become Christians,
and the children of Moslems embrace Islam, and remembering also the
traditional saying ascribed to the Prophet: ‘Every child has in him the
germ of Islam, then his parents make him Jew, Christian, or Zoroastrian,’
I was moved by a keen desire to learn what was this innate disposition
in the child, the nature of the accidental beliefs imposed on him by the
authority of his parents and his masters, and finally the unreasoned
convictions which he derives from their instructions.”
Again he is full of doubts when he says: “Perhaps also Death is that
state [he is speaking of a possible state of being which will bear the
same relation to our present state as this does to the condition when
asleep], according to a saying of the Prince of Prophets: ‘Men are
asleep; when they die, they wake.’ Our present life in relation to the
future is perhaps only a dream, and man, once dead, will see things in
direct opposition to those now before his eyes.
“Such thoughts as these threatened to shake my reason, and I sought to
find an escape from them. But how? In order to disentangle the knot of
this difficulty, a proof was necessary. Now a proof must be based on
primary assumptions, and it was precisely these of which I was in doubt.
This unhappy state lasted about two months, during which I was not, it
is true, explicitly or by profession, _but morally and essentially a
thoroughgoing sceptic_.”
That Al-Ghazali was driven to scepticism must not surprise us. Schools
of free thinkers had been established fifty years earlier at Bagdad and
Busrah. Every Friday they gathered together. Some were rationalists, some
downright materialists. Not only philosophers but poets were the leaders
of these circles. Among them we must mention Abu’l ʾAla Al-Maʾarri, born
in 973 A. D. This blind poet is said to have written a Koran in imitation
of Mohammed, and when some one complained to him that although the book
was well written it did not make the same impression as the true Koran,
he replied: “Let it be read from the pulpit of the mosques for four
hundred years and then you will all be delighted with it.” His quatrains
rival those of Omar Al-Khayyam in their utter pessimism and rank
infidelity from the orthodox Moslem standpoint. For example, he writes:
“Lo: there are many ways and many traps
And many guides and which of them is Lord?
For verily Mohammed has the sword
And he may have the truth—perhaps? _perhaps?_
Now _this_ religion happens to prevail
Until by _that_ one it is overthrown,—
Because men dare not live with men alone,
But always with another fairy-tale.
Religion is a charming girl, I say;
But over this poor threshold will not pass,
Because I can’t unveil her, and alas;
The bridal gift I can’t afford to pay.”
Nor could this poet have had much reverence for the religion of Islam
when he wrote:
“Where is the valiance of the folk who sing
These valiant stories of the world to come?
Which they describe, forsooth, as if it swung
In air and anchored with a yard of string.”
...
“Two merchantmen decided they would battle,
To prove at last who sold the finest wares;
And while Mohammed shrieked his call to prayers,
The true Messiah waved his wooden rattle.”
As in the nineteenth century for Christianity, so in the eleventh century
for Islam, the struggle between science and orthodoxy waged fiercely. The
rationalistic school of the Muʾtazilites still exercised great influence
while the literalists and the blind followers of traditional Islam were
often more distinguished for Pharisaism than piety.
We need only turn to the “Maqamat” of Al-Hamadhani to know what the
sceptic of that day thought of the public religious services.
“So I slipped away from my companions,” says his hero, “taking advantage
of the opportunity of joining in public prayers, and dreading, at the
same time, the loss of the caravan I was leaving. But I sought aid
against the difficulty of the desert through the blessing of prayer,
and, therefore, I went to the front row and stood up. The Imam went up
to the niche and recited the opening chapter of the Quran according to
the intonation of _Hamza_, in regard to using ‘_Madda_’ and ‘_Hamza_,’
while I experienced disquieting grief at the thought of missing the
caravan, and of separation from the mount. Then he followed up the Surat
Al-Fatiha with Surat Al-Waqʾia while I suffered the fire of impatience
and tasked myself severely. I was roasting and grilling on the live coal
of rage. But, from what I knew of the savage fanaticism of the people
of that place, if prayers were cut short of the final salutation, there
was no alternative but silence and endurance, or speech and the grave!
So I remained standing thus on the foot of necessity till the end of the
chapter. I had now despaired of the caravan and given up all hope of the
supplies and the mount. He next bent his back for the two prostrations
with such humility and emotion, the like of which I had never seen
before. Then he raised his hands and his head and said: ‘May God accept
the praise of him who praises Him,’ and remained standing till I doubted
not but that he had fallen asleep. Then he placed his right hand on the
ground, put his forehead on the earth and pressed his face thereto. I
raised my head to look for an opportunity to slip away, but I perceived
no opening in the rows, so I re-addressed myself to prayer until he
repeated the _Takbir_ for the sitting posture. Then he stood up for the
second prostration, recited the Suras of Al-Fatiha and Al-Qaria with an
intonation which occupied the duration of the Last Day and well-nigh
exhausted the spirits of the congregation. Now, when he had finished
his two prostrations and proceeded to wag his jaws to pronounce the
testimony to God’s unity, and to turn his face to the right and to the
left for the final salutation, I said: ‘Now God has made escape easy, and
deliverance is nigh’; but a man stood up and said: ‘Whosoever of you
loves the companions of the Moslem community let him lend me his ears for
a moment.’”—Such was the impression made by the formalities of orthodoxy!
Al-Ghazali found no help for his doubts among these scholastic
theologians nor has any Moslem since his day. Professor Macdonald tells
us why. “Grant the theologians their premises, and they could argue; deny
them, and there was no common ground on which to meet. Their science had
been founded by Al-Ashʾari to meet the Muʾtazilites; it had done that
victoriously, but could do no more. They could hold the faith against
heretics, expose their inconsistencies and weaknesses; but against the
sceptic they could do nothing. It is true that they had attempted to go
further back and meet the students of philosophy on their own ground, to
deal with substances and attributes and first principles generally; but
their efforts had been fruitless. They lacked the necessary knowledge of
the subject, had no scientific basis, and were constrained eventually to
fall back on authority.”[34]
“Nor did he find light in philosophy, although he thoroughly studied the
various systems of his day and refuted them. Religion is not merely of
the mind but of the heart; philosophy had its place but could satisfy
only the intellect and left the deepest longings of the soul unsatisfied.
Next he examined the teachings of the Taʾlimites, the contemporary
sect of the Ishmaelites founded by Hassan Ibn as Sabbah. Theirs was the
doctrine of an Imam or infallible spiritual guide and the sect found
large following. But Al-Ghazali, so far from being attracted by them,
wrote several books against them.”[35] No other path remained open for
the perplexed and sceptical seeker after God than the way of the mystics.
It was a return to the early teaching he received at Tus and Nishapur and
to the atmosphere of his native land which was for centuries steeped in
mysticism. Of this period of his life he was wont to say:
“When I wished to plunge into following the people and to drink of their
drink, I looked at my soul and I saw how much it was curtained in, so
I retired into solitude and busied myself with religious exercises for
forty days, and there was doled to me of knowledge I had not had purer
and finer than what I had known. Then I looked upon it, and lo, in it
was a legal element. So I returned to solitude and busied myself with
religious exercises for forty days, and there was doled to me other
knowledge, purer and finer than what had befallen me at first, and I
rejoiced in it. Then I looked upon it, and lo, in it was a speculative
element. So I returned to solitude a third time for forty days, and
there was doled to me other knowledge that is known (_i. e._, not simply
perceived, felt), and I did not attain to the people of the inward
sciences. So I know that writing on a surface from which something has
been erased is not like writing on a surface in its first purity and
cleanness, and I never separated myself from speculation except in a few
things.”
Who can read this and doubt his utter sincerity in the search for God and
for Truth?
He tells the rest of the story in his “Confessions”: “I saw that Sufism
consists in experiences rather than in definitions, and that what I was
lacking belonged to the domain, not of instruction but of ecstasy and
initiation.
“The researches to which I had devoted myself, the path which I had
traversed in studying religious and speculative branches of knowledge,
had given me a firm faith in three things—God, inspiration, and the Last
Judgment. These three fundamental articles of belief were confirmed
in me, not merely by definite arguments, but by a chain of causes,
circumstances, and proofs which it is impossible to recount. I saw that
one can only hope for salvation by devotion and the conquest of one’s
passions, a procedure which presupposes renouncement and detachment
from this world of falsehood in order to turn towards eternity and
meditation on God. Finally, I saw that the only condition of success was
to sacrifice honours and riches and to sever the ties and attachments of
worldly life.
“Coming seriously to consider my state, I found myself bound down on all
sides by these trammels. Examining my actions, the most fair-seeming
of which were my lecturing and professorial occupations, I found to my
surprise that I was engrossed in several studies of little value, and
profitless as regards my salvation. I probed the motives of my teaching
and found that, in place of being sincerely consecrated to God, it was
only actuated by a vain desire of honour and reputation. I perceived
that I was on the edge of an abyss, and that without an immediate
conversion I should be doomed to eternal fire. In these reflections
I spent a long time. Still a prey to uncertainty, one day I decided
to leave Bagdad and to give up everything; the next day I gave up my
resolution. I advanced one step and immediately relapsed. In the morning
I was sincerely resolved only to occupy myself with the future life;
in the evening a crowd of carnal thoughts assailed and dispersed my
resolutions. On the one side the world kept me bound to my post in the
chains of covetousness, on the other side the voice of religion cried to
me: ‘Up, Up, thy life is nearing its end, and thou hast a long journey to
make. All thy pretended knowledge is nought but falsehood and fantasy.
If thou dost not think now of thy salvation, when wilt thou think of it?
If thou dost not break thy chains to-day, when wilt thou break them?’
Then my resolve was strengthened, I wished to give up all and flee; but
the Tempter returning to the attack said: ‘You are suffering from a
transitory feeling; don’t give way to it, for it will soon pass. If you
obey it, if you give up this fine position, this honourable post exempt
from trouble and rivalry, this seat of authority safe from attack you
will regret it later on without being able to recover it.’
“Thus I remained, torn asunder by the opposite forces of earthly passions
and religious aspirations, for about six months from the month Rajab of
the year A. D. 1096. At the close of them my will yielded and I gave
myself up to destiny. God caused an impediment to chain my tongue and
prevented me from lecturing. Vainly I desired, in the interest of my
pupils, to go on with my teaching, but my mouth became dumb.
“The enfeeblement of my physical powers was such that the doctors
despairing of saving me, said: ‘The mischief is in the heart, and has
communicated itself to the whole organism; there is no hope unless the
cause of his grievous sadness be arrested.’
“Finally, conscious of my weakness and the prostration of my soul, I
took refuge in God as a man at the end of himself and without resources.
‘He who hears the wretched when they cry’ (Koran, xxviii. 63) deigned to
hear me; He made easy to me the sacrifice of honours, wealth, and family”
(“The Confessions,” pp. 42-45).
That his _conversion_ did not mean ethically all that the word means
in the Christian sense is evident from what immediately follows. He
dissembled: “I gave out publicly that I intended to make the pilgrimage
to Mecca, while I secretly resolved to go to Syria, not wishing that the
Caliph (may God magnify him) or my friends should know my intention of
settling in that country. I made all kinds of clever excuses for leaving
Bagdad with the fixed intention of not returning thither. The Imams of
Irak criticized me with one accord. Not one of them would admit that this
sacrifice had a religious motive, because they considered my position
as the highest attainable in the religious community. ‘Behold how far
their knowledge goes’ (Koran, liii. 31). All kinds of explanations of
my conduct were forthcoming. Those who were outside the limits of Irak
attributed it to the fear with which the Government inspired me. Those
who were on the spot and saw how the authorities wished to detain me,
their displeasure at my resolution and my refusal of their request, said
to themselves, ‘It is a calamity which one can only impute to a fate
which has befallen the Faithful and Learning.’
“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.
[Illustration: 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]