Category: Biographies
=Transcriber’s Note:= The author’s transliteration of Arabic words into English is inconsistent, and often wrong in its usage of the ʾ and ʿ characters. They have been left as printed (except where such marks were missing entirely, in which case they have been supplied correct...
=Transcriber’s Note:= The author’s transliteration of Arabic words into English is inconsistent, and often wrong in its usage of the ʾ and ʿ characters. They have been left as p...
2. Part 2The Arabic language had become dominant everywhere. Its vocabulary had leavened the whole lump of languages in the Near East. Every race with which the Arabs came in contact was...
3. Part 3Among Ghazali’s celebrated contemporaries, men of literary fame, we may mention Abiwardi (d. 1113), the poet; Ibn Al-Khayyat, who was born at Damascus in 1058 and died in Persia...
4. Part 4In Al-Ghazali’s autobiography we have a glimpse of how he himself conceived the growth of a child in wisdom and stature. “The first sense revealed to man,” he says, “is touch, b...
5. Part 5“The palace of the great king contains large buildings, pillars of gold and silver, and treasures of precious stones. The Caliph leaves his palace but once every year, viz., at...
6. Part 6That 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...
7. Part 7Al-Ghazali describes the method and effects of this practice in a passage which Macdonald has summarized as follows: “Let the worshipper reduce his heart to a state in which the...
8. Part 8We are indebted to the Rev. Dwight M. Donaldson of Mashad, Persia, for the interesting photographs of the ruins of Tus and of the supposed tomb of Al-Ghazali. The mosque is very...
9. Part 9“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 j...
10. Part 10Of all his writings none is celebrated more justly than his greatest work “The Revival of Religious Sciences” (_Ihya ʿulum id Din_). It is a veritable encyclopædia of Moslem tea...
11. Part 11Martensen defines Christian ethics as “the science of morals conditioned by Christianity.” But the three fundamental concepts of Christian ethics are all of them challenged by t...
12. Part 12“The states of ecstasy into which the Sufis fall vary according to the emotions which predominate in them—love, fear, desire, repentance, etc. These states, as we have mentioned...
13. Part 13In regard to the rise of Sufic teaching, its origin and character, Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje remarks: “The lamp which Allah had caused Mohammed to hold up to guide mankind with it...
14. Part 14But Al-Ghazali did not know God’s nearness through the Incarnation of Christ. The hoped-for Vision of God was always full of fear and dread of judgment. The _fear_ of God was th...
15. Part 15We add the following quotations which set forth the poverty, humility and homelessness of the Christ taken from Al-Ghazali’s “Precious Pearl”: “Consider Jesus Christ, for it is...
16. Part 16There seems a great difference between Al-Ghazali as dogmatic theologian, always compelled to agree with the Koran, and Al-Ghazali as the Mystic, when he begins to speculate and...
17. Part 17NORTH AFRICA EUROPE AND SPAIN AL-GHAZALI A. D. A. H. --------------------+-------------------+-----------------+------+------+ _Germany_— |Kingdoms of Castile|Al-Ghazali born. |...