Before entering upon a consideration of the development of the theology of Islam, it will be well to mark clearly the three principles which run continuously through that development, which conditioned it for evil and for good and which are still working in it. In dealing with jurisprudence and with the theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly how false is the current idea that Islam has ceased to grow and has no hope of future development. The organism of Islam, like every other organism, has periods of rest when it appears to have reached a cul de sac and to have outlived its life. But after these periods come others of renewed quickening and its vital energy pours itself forth again alter et idem. In the state, we saw how the old realms passed into decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take their places. The despotism by the grace of God of formal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of insurrection and revolution, and the People of Muhammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from time to time, its unquenchable vitality.

In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than through the masses; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take biographical form wherever our knowledge renders that possible.

But whether we have men or naked movements, the begetters of which are names to us or less, three threads are woven distinctly through the web of Muslim religious thought. There is tradition (naql); there is reason (aql); and there is the unveiling of the mystic (kashf). They were in the tissue of Muhammad’s brain and they have been in his church since he died. Now one would be most prominent, now another, according to the thinker of the time; but all were present to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi; reason has become a scholastic handmaid of theology except among the modern Indian Mu‘tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no more accept as Muslims than a Trinitarian of the Westminster confession would give the name of Christian to a Unitarian of the left wing; the inner light of the mystic has assumed many forms, running from plainest pantheism to mere devout ecstasy. But in the church of Muhammad they are all working still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zealots, persecutions and counter-persecutions, has attained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity. Two of the principles we have met already in the students of hadith and of speculative law. The Hanbalites maintained in theology their devotion to tradition; they fought for centuries all independent thinking which sought to rise above what the fathers had told; they fought even scholastic theology of the strictest type and would be content with nothing but the rehearsal of the old dogmas in the old forms; they fought, too, the mystical life in all its phases. On the other hand, Abu Hanifa was tinged with rationalism and speculation in theology as in law, and his followers have walked in his path. Even the mystical light has been touched in our view of the theory of the state. It has flourished most among the Shi‘ites, who are driven to seek and to find an inner meaning under the plain word of the Qur’an, and whose devotion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission has kept alive the thought of a continuous speaking of God to mankind and of an exalting of mankind into the presence of God. It is for the student, then, to watch and hold fast these three guiding threads.

The development of Muslim theology, like that of jurisprudence, could not begin till after the death of Muhammad. So long as he lived and received infallible revelations in solution of all questions of faith or usage that might come up, it is obvious that no system of theology could be formed or even thought of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even show him setting his face against all discussions of dogma and repeating again and again, in answer to metaphysical and theological questions, the crude anthropomorphisms of the Qur’an. But these questions and answers are probably forgeries of the later traditional school, shadows of future warfare thrown back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, in the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad’s death, the Muslims were too much occupied with the propagation of their faith to think what that faith exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning spirit in this direction was aroused comparatively late and remained for some time on what might be called a private basis. Individual men had their individual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and when they did were vague and hard to define in their positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names, dates, influences and doctrines are all seen through a haze, and nothing more than an approximation to an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed down of the early questionings and disputings of certain ahl-al-ahwa, “people of wandering desires,” a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty and sceptical Arabs; of how they compared Scripture with Scripture and got up theological debates, splitting points and defining issues, to great scandal and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded pious. These were not yet heretics; they were the first investigators and systematizers.

Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their existence can be tolerably conditioned through the historical facts and philosophical necessities of the time. The one is that of the Murji’ites, and the other of the Qadarites. A Murji’ite is literally “one who defers or postpones,” in this case postpones judgment until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judgment. They arose as a sect during and out of the civil war between the Shi‘ites, the Kharijites and the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Muslims, and most of them claimed that they were the only true Muslims and that the others were unbelievers. This was especially the attitude of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites toward the Umayyads; to them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed and slaughtered the true saints of God. The Murji’ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which they could still support the Umayyads without homologating all their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they held, were de facto the rulers of the Muslim state; fealty had been sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God and the apostleship of the Prophet. Thus, they were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism (shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or condemnation of any sins they might have committed. Sins less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in revolt against them and in breaking the oath of fealty.

Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji’ites, and it was the origin also of the theory of the accomplished fact in the state, of which we have had to take account several times. Thus, between the fanatical venerators of the canon law, to whom all the Khalifas, after the first four, were an abomination, and the purely worldly lawyers of the court party, there came a group of pious theologians who taught that the good of the Muslim community required obedience to the ruler of the time, even though his personal unworthiness were plain. As a consequence, success can legitimate anything in the Muslim state.

But with the passing away of the situation which gave rise to Murji’ism, it itself changed from politics to theology. As a political party it had opposed the political puritanism of the Kharijites; it now came to oppose the uncompromising spirit in which these damned all who differed from them even in details and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God over their opponents. It is true that this came natural to Islam. The earlier Muslims seem in general to have been oppressed by a singularly gloomy fatalism. To use modern theological language, they labored under a terrible consciousness of sin. They viewed the world as an evil temptress, seducing men from heavenly things. Their lives were hedged about with sins, great and little, and each deserved the eternal wrath of God. The recollection of their latter end they kept ever before them and the terrors that it would bring, for they felt that no amount of faith in God and His Prophet could save them in the judgment to come. The roots of this run far back. Before the time of Muhammad and at his time there were among the Arab tribes, scattered here and there, many men who felt a profound dissatisfaction with heathenism, its doctrines and religious rites. The conception of God and the burden of life pressed heavily upon them. They saw men pass away and descend into the grave, and they asked whither they had gone and what had become of them. The thought of this fleeting, transitory life and of the ocean of darkness and mystery that lies around it, drove them away to seek truth in solitude and the deserts. They were called Hanifs—the word is of very doubtful derivation—and Muhammad himself, in the early part of his career, reckoned himself one of them. But we have evidence from heathen Arab poetry that these Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Christian monks, and that the term hanif was used as a synonym for rahib, monk.

And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from these solitary hermits, scattered here and there throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry we feel how strong was the impression made on the Arab mind by the gaunt, weird men with their endless watchings and night prayers. Again and again there is allusion to the lamp of the hermit shining through the darkness, and we have pictures of the caravan or of the solitary traveller on the night journey cheered and guided by its glimmer. These Christian hermits and the long deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten tribes—judged and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold—that lie throughout the Syrian waste and along the caravan routes were the two things that most stirred the imagination of Muhammad and went to form his faith. To Muhammad, and to the Semite always, the whole of life was but a long procession from the great deep to the great deep again. Where are the kings and rulers of the earth? Where are the peoples that were mighty in their day? The hand of God smote them and they are not. There is naught real in the world but God. From Him we are, and unto Him we return. There is nothing for man but to fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes sport of them that trust it.

Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end. To this the later Murji’ites opposed a doctrine of Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they declared, saved, and Faith alone. If the sinner believed in God and His Prophet he would not remain in the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held that the sinner who died unrepentant would remain therein eternally, even though he had confessed Islam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they considered, could not be a believer in the true sense. This is still the Ibadite position, and from it developed one of the most important controversies of Islam as to the precise nature of faith. Some extreme Murji’ites held that faith (iman) was a confession in the heart, private intercourse with God, as opposed to Islam, public confession with the lips. Thus, one could be a believer (mu’min), and outwardly confess Judaism or Christianity; to be a professed Muslim was not necessary. This is like the doctrine of the Imamites, called taqiya, that it is allowable in time of stress to dissemble one’s religious views; and it is worth noticing that Jahm ibn Safwan (killed, 131?), one of these extreme Murji’ites, was a Persian proselyte in rebellion against the Arab rule, and of the loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians were no more Muslims than the Anabaptists of Munster had a claim to be Christians. The other wing of the Murji’ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who held that faith (iman) is acknowledgment with the tongue as well as the heart and that works are a necessary supplement. This is little different from the orthodox position which grew up, that persuasion, confession, and works made up faith. When Murji’ism dropped out of existence as a sect it left as its contribution to Islam a distinction between great and little sins (kabiras, saghiras), and the position that even great sins, if not involving polytheism (shirk), would not exclude the believer forever from the Garden.

The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin in a philosophical necessity of the human mind. A perception of the contradiction between man’s consciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and the absolute rule and predestination of God, on the other, is the usual beginning of the thinking life, both in individuals and in races. It was so in Islam. In theology as in law, Muhammad had been an opportunist pure and simple. On the one hand, his Allah is the absolute Semitic despot who guides aright and leads astray, who seals up the hearts of men and opens them again, who is mighty over all. On the other hand, men are exhorted to repentance, and punishment is threatened against them if they remain hardened in their unbelief. All these phases of a wandering and intensely subjective mind, which lived only in the perception of the moment, appear in the Qur’an. Muhammad was a poet rather than a theologian; just as he was a prophet rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the Muslims paused in their career of conquest and began to think at all, they thought of this. Naturally, so long as they were fighting in the Path of God, it was the conception of God’s absolute sovereignty which most appealed to them; by it their fates were fixed, and they charged without fear the ranks of the unbelievers. In these earliest times, the fatalistic passages bore most stress and the others were explained away. This helped, at least, to bring it about that the party which in time came to profess the freedom of man’s will, began and ended as an heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never lose sight of the fact that the eventual victory in Islam of the absolute doctrine of God’s eternal decree was the victory of the more fundamental of Muhammad’s conflicting conceptions. The other had been much more a campaigning expedient.

This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have been conditioning, derived its name from their position that a man possessed qadar, or power, over his actions. One of the first of them was a certain Ma‘bad al-Juhani, who paid for his heresy with his life in A.H. 80. Historians tell that he with Ata ibn Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to the celebrated ascetic, al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110), and said, “O Abu Sa‘id, those kings shed the blood of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say that their works are by the decree of God.” To this al-Hasan replied, “The enemies of God lie.” The story is only important as showing how the times and their changes were widening men’s thoughts. Very soon, now, we come from these drifting tendencies to a formal sect with a formal secession and a fixed name. The Murji’ites and the Qadarites melt from the scene, some of their tenets pass into orthodox Islam; some into the new sect.

The story of its founding again connects with the outstanding figure of al-Hasan al-Basri. He seems to have been the chief centre of the religious life and movements of his time; his pupils appear and his influence shows itself in all the later schools. Someone came to him as he sat among his pupils and asked what his view was between the conflicting Murji’ites and Wa‘idites, the first holding that the committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an unbeliever, was to be accepted as a Muslim and his case left in the hands of God; the other laying more stress upon the threats (wa‘id) in the Book of God and teaching that the committer of a great sin could not be a believer, that he had, ipso facto, abandoned the true faith, must go into the Fire and abide there. Before the master could reply, one of his pupils—some say Amr ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 144), others, Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131)—broke in with the assertion of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither a believer nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle which sat round the master, went to another part of the mosque and began to develop his view to those who gathered round him. The name believer (mu’min), he taught, was a term of praise, and an evil-doer was not worthy of praise, and could not have that name applied to him. But he was not an unbeliever, either, for he assented to the faith. If he, then, died unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire—for there are only two divisions in the next world, heaven and hell—but his torments would be mitigated on account of his faith. The position to which orthodox Islam eventually came was that a believer could commit a great sin. If he did so, and died unrepentant, he went to hell; but after a time would be permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell became for believers a sort of purgatory. On this secession, al-Hasan only said “I‘tazala anna”—He has seceded from us. So the new party was called the Mu‘tazila, the Secession. That, at least, is the story, which may be taken for what it is worth. The fixed facts are the rise at the beginning of the second century after the Hijra of a tolerably definite school of dissenters from the traditional ideas, and their application of reason to the dogmas of the Qur’an.

We have noted already the influence of Christianity on Muhammad through the hermits of the desert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and that asceticism grew and developed into quietism and thence into mysticism. The last step was still in the future, but already at this time there were wandering monks who imitated their Christian brethren in the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were thence called Sufis, from suf, wool. It was not long before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of the three great threads was definitely woven into the fabric of Muslim thought. But that was not the limit of Christian influence. Those anchorites in their caves and huts had little training in the theology of the schools; the dogmas of their faith were of a practical simplicity. But in the development of the Murji’ites and Qadarites it is impossible to mistake the workings of the dialectic refinements of Greek theology as developed in the Byzantine and Syrian schools. It is worth notice, too, that, while the political heresies of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites held sway mostly in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, these more religious heresies seem to have arisen in Syria first and especially at Damascus, the seat of the Umayyads.

The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was in many ways a return to pre-Muslim times and to an easy enjoyment of worldly things; it was a rejection of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and name. The fear of the wrath of God had small part with the most of them; sometimes it appeared in the form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Further, as Muslim governments always have done, they sought aid in their task of governing from their non-Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius, the father of Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer under them and that after his death, this John of Damascus himself, the last great doctor of the Greek Church and the man under whose hands its theology assumed final form, became wazir and held that post until he withdrew from the world and turned to the contemplative life. In his writings and in those of his pupil, Theodoras Abucara (d. A.D. 826), there are polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form of discussions between Christians and Muslims. These represent, there can be little doubt, a characteristic of the time. The close agreement of Murji’ite and Qadarite ideas with those formulated and defended by John of Damascus and by the Greek Church generally can only be so explained. The Murji’ite rejection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the Qadarite doctrine of free-will and responsibility, are to be explained in the same way as we have already explained the presence of sentences in the Muslim fiqh which seem to be taken bodily from the Roman codes. In this case, also, we are not to think of the Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek fathers, but as picking up ideas from them in practical intercourse and controversy. The very form of the tract of John of Damascus is significant, “When the Saracen says to you such and such, then you will reply....” This, as a whole, is a subject which calls for investigation, but so far it is clear that the influence of Greek theology on Islam can hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding fact of the enormous emphasis laid by both on the doctrine of the nature of God and His attributes is enough. It may even be conjectured that the harsher views developed by western Muslims, and especially by the theologians of Spain, were due, on the other hand, to Augustinian and Roman influence. It is, to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholastic theology, in the exact sense, but gave almost all its energy to canon law.

But there were other influences to come. With the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abbasids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to the basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story of the founding of Baghdad there, in 145, we have already heard. We have seen, too, that the victory of the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the Arabs by the Persians. GrÆcia capta and the rest came true here; the battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand were avenged; Persian ideas and Persian religion began slowly to work on the faith of Muhammad. At the court of the earliest Abbasids it was fashionable to affect a little free thought. People were becoming enlightened and played with philosophy and science. Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, ManichÆism, the old heathenism of Harran, Judaism, Christianity—all were in the air and making themselves felt. So long as the adherents and teachers of these took them in a purely academic way, were good subjects and made no trouble, the earlier Abbasids encouraged their efforts, gathered in the scientific harvest, paid well for translations, instruments, and investigations, and generally posed as patrons of progress.

But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn tightly. The victory of the Abbasids had raised high hopes among the Persian nationalists. They had thought that they were rallying to the overthrow of the Arabs, and found, when all was done, that they had got only another Arab dynasty. So revolts had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously enough, they were of a marked religious character. They were an expression of religious sects, Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, ManichÆan, and parties with prophetic leaders of their own; all are swept together by Muslim writers as Zindiqs, probably literally, “initiates,” originally ManichÆans, thereafter, practically non-Muslims concealing their unbelief. For when not in open revolt they must needs profess Islam. In 167, we find al-Mahdi, who was also, it is true, much more strict than his father, al-Mansur, appointing a grand inquisitor to deal with such heretics. Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself with crushing actual rebellion; and Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, and heathen of Harran were tolerated so long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek science and philosophy.

That they did willingly, and so, through three intermediaries, science came to the Arabs. There was a heathen Syrian source with its centre at Harran, of which we know comparatively little. There was a Christian Syrian source working from the multitudinous monasteries scattered over the country. There was a Persian source by which natural science, and medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the fifth century A.D. an academy of medicine and philosophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzistan. One of the directors of this institution was summoned, in 148, to prescribe for al-Mansur, and from that time on it furnished court physicians to the Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocrates reached the Muslim peoples.

The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate was the golden age of Muslim science, the period of growth and development for the People of Muhammad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease with the close of that period, but the Khalifate ceased to aid in carrying the torch. Thereafter, learning was protected and fostered by individual rulers here and there, and individual investigators and scholars still went on their own quiet paths. But free intellectual life among the people was checked, and such learning as still generally flourished fell more and more between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal methods and systems, its subtle deductions and endless ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew away attention from the facts of nature. The oriental brain studied itself and its own workings to the point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to the certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy and orthodoxy proved alike sterile.

We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu‘tazilites. These served themselves heirs upon the Qadarites and denied that God predestined the actions of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and external vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God’s qadar, but it was unthinkable that man should be punished for actions not in his control. The freedom of the will is an a priori certainty, and man possesses qadar over his own actions. This was the position of Wasil ibn Ata, of whom we have already heard. But to it he added a second doctrine, the origin of which is obscure, although suggestive of discussions with Greek theologians. The Qur’an describes God as willing, knowing, decreeing, etc.—strictly as the Willing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One, etc.—and the orthodox hold that such expressions could only mean that God possesses as Qualities (sifat) Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc. To this Wasil raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities would be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the Mu‘tazilites always called themselves the People of Unity and Justice (Ahl-at-tawhid wal‘adl); the Unity being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in that they opposed God’s qadar over men and held that He must do for the creature that which was best for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there can be no necessity upon God, even to do justice; He is absolutely free, and what He does man must accept. It flatly opposes the position held by the Mu‘tazilites in general, that good and evil can be perceived and distinguished by the intellect (aql). Good and evil have their nature by God’s will, and man can learn to know them only by God’s teachings and commands. Thus, except through revelation, there can be neither theology nor ethics.

The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl Muhammad al-Allaf (d. circa 226), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil. At his hands the doctrine of God’s qualities assumed a more definite form. Wasil had reduced God to a vague unity, a kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl taught that the qualities were not in His essence, and thus separable from it, thinkable apart from it, but that they were His essence. Thus, God was omnipotent by His omnipotence, but it was His essence and not in His essence. He was omniscient by His omniscience and it was His essence. Further, he held that these qualities must be either negations or relations. Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that would mean that there was in God the complexity of subject and predicate, being and quality; and God is absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians regard as a close approximation to the Christian Trinity; for them, the persons of the Trinity have always been personified qualities, and such seems really to have been the view of John of Damascus. Further, God’s Will, according to Abu Hudhayl, as expressed in His Creative Word, did not necessarily exist in a subject (fi mahall, in subiecto). When God said, “Be!” creatively, there was no subject. Again, he endeavored—and in this he was followed by most of the Mu‘tazilites—to cut down the number of God’s attributes. His will, he said, was a form of His knowledge; He knew that there was good in an action, and that knowledge was His will.

His position on the qadar question was peculiar. With regard to this world, he was a Qadarite; but in the next world, both in heaven and in hell, he thought that all changes were by divine necessity. Otherwise, that is, if men were free, there would be obligation to observe a law (taklif); but there is no such obligation in the other world. Thus, whatever happened there happened by God’s decree. Further, he taught that, eventually, nothing would happen there; that there would be no changes, but only an endless stillness in which those in heaven had all its joys and those in hell all its pains. This is a close approximation to the view of Jahm ibn Safwan, who held that after the judgment both heaven and hell would pass away and God remain alone as He was in the beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl seems to have been led by two considerations, both significant for the drift of the Mu‘tazilites. First, there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic touched with utilitarianism. Thus, from their position that man could come by the light of his reason to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew the conclusion that it was man’s duty so to attain, and that God would damn eternally every man who did not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out strikingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at present, were serving no useful purpose because they had no inhabitants; therefore, at present, they did not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hudhayl. What has a beginning must have an end. So he explained the end as the ceasing of all changes. Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from Greek philosophy. The Qur’an teaches that the world has been created in time; Aristotle, that it is from eternity and to eternity. The creation, Abu Hudhayl applied to changes; before that, the world was, but in eternal rest. Hereafter, all changes will cease; rest will again enter and endure to all eternity. We shall see how largely this doctrine was advanced and developed by his successors.

But there were further complications in the doctrine of man’s actions and into some of these we must enter, on account of their later importance. Not everything that comes from the action of a man is by his action. God has a creative part in it, apparently as regards the effects. Especially, knowledge in the mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but from God. The idea seems to be that the teacher may teach, but that the being taught in the pupil is a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished motions in the mind, which he held were not altogether due to the man, and external motions which were. There is given, too, to a man at the time of his performing an action an ability to perform the action, which is a special accident in him apart from any mere soundness of health or limb.

In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God’s working through man. Another of his positions had a similar basis and was a curious combination of historical criticism and mysticism, a combination which we shall find later in al-Ghazzali, a much greater man. The evidence of tradition for things dealing with the Unseen World (al-ghayb) he rejected. Twenty witnesses might hand on the tradition in question, but it was not to be received unless among them there was one, at least, of the People of Paradise. At all times, he taught, there were in the world these Friends of God (awliya Allah, sing. wali), who were protected against all greater sins and could not lie. It is the word of these that is the basis for belief, and the tradition is merely a statement of what they have said. This shows clearly how far the doctrine of the ecstatic life and of knowledge gained through direct intercourse between the believer and God had already advanced.

But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of daring and absolutely free-minded speculators. They were applying to the ideas of the Qur’an the keen solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they obtained were of the most fantastically original character. Thrown into the wide sea and utter freedom of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the bursting point and, more than even a German metaphysician, they had lost touch of the ground of ordinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate truth, wielding as their weapons definitions and syllogisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad in the Qur’an gave scope enough of strange ideas from which to start, or which had to be explained away. Their belief in the powers of the science of logic was unfailing, and, armed with Aristotle’s “Analytics,” they felt sure that certainty was within their reach. It was at the court and under the protection of al-Ma’mun that they especially flourished, and some account of the leading spirits among them will be necessary before we describe how they reached their utmost pride of power and how they fell.

An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later historians of having made use, to a high degree, of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He was one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they; he read the books of the philosophers and mingled their teachings with the doctrines of the Mu‘tazilites. He taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do nothing to a creature, either in this world or in the next, that was not for the creature’s good and in accordance with strict justice. It was not only that God would not do it; He had not the power to do anything evil. Evidently the personality of God was fast vanishing behind an absolute law of right. To this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine that God could do anything; He could forgive whom He willed, and punish whom He willed. Further, he taught that God’s willing a thing meant only that He did it in accordance with His knowledge; and when He willed the action of a creature that meant only that He commanded it. This is evidently to evade phrases in the Qur’an. Man, again, he taught, was spirit (ruh), and the body (badan) was only an instrument. But this spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the body like the essential oil in a rose, or butter in milk. In a universe determined by strict law, man alone was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the air, and by his action the stone went up; but when the force of his throw was exhausted it came again under law and fell. If he had only asked himself how it came to fall, strange things might have happened. But he, and all his fellows, were only playing with words like counters. Further, he taught that God had created all created things at once, but that He kept them in concealment until it was time for them to enter on the stage of visible being and do their part. All things that ever will exist are thus existing now, but, in a sense, in retentis. This seems to be another attempt to solve the problem of creation in time, and it had important consequences. Further, the Qur’an was no miracle (mu‘jiz) to him. The only miraculous elements in it are the narratives about the Unseen World, and past things and things to come, and the fact that God deprived the Arabs of the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a high Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad. We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd as they are. The Muslim writers on theological history have classified him rightly as more of a physicist than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness for playing with metaphysical paradoxes which often goes with it.

Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu‘tamir. His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid and tawallud, begetting and deriving. It is the transmission of a single action through a series of objects; the agent meant to affect the first object only; the effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What relation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a complex of causes acting together and across one another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is worth giving at this point. God creates in the man the will to move his hand; He creates the movement of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All is by God’s direct creation at the time. Further, could God punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of the faith? Bishr’s reply on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid saying frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His answer on the second was that God could have made a different and much better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He was not bound to make a better world—in this Bishr separates from the other Mu‘tazilites—He was only bound to give man free-will and, then, either revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.

With Ma‘mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was a union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the divine nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma‘mar was evidently on the road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on the existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God’s Will. Nor could He be described as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (jisms) only were created by God, and by “substances” he seems to mean matter as a whole; all changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from its nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms; or of free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no part in these things. He has given the material and has nothing to do with the coming and going of separate bodies; such are simple changes, forms of existence, and proceed from the matter itself. Man is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man and his body is but a cover. This true man can only know and will; the body perceives and does.

The last of this group whose views we need consider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very dubious morals; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun ar-Rashid, but highly favored by al-Ma’mun, in whose Khalifate he died, A.H. 213. He held that actions produced through tawallud had no agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be produced by tawallud through speculation, and is, therefore, an action without an agent, and required even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magians will be turned into dust in the next world and will not enter either Paradise or Hell; the same will be the fate of cattle and children. That any one of the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is excusable. That all knowledge is a priori. That the only action which men possess is will; everything besides that is a production without a producer. That the world is the act of God by His nature, i.e., it is an act which His nature compels Him to produce; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with Him. It may be doubted how far Thumama was a professional theologian and how far he was a free-thinking, easy-living man of letters.

In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of Aristotle can be clearly traced. With Aristotle had come to them the idea of the world as law, an eternal construction subsisting and developing on fixed principles. This conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly at strife with Muhammad’s conception of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence, the crudities and devices by which they strove to make good their footing on strange ground and keep a right to the name of Muslim, while changing the essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind.

It remains now only to touch upon one or two points common to all the Mu‘tazilites. First, the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on texts of the Qur’an and on tradition, that some believers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the other world; this was the highest delight held out to them. But the Mu‘tazilites perceived that vision involved a directing of the eyes on the part of the seer and position on the part of the seen. God must, therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they were compelled to reject the agreement and the traditions in question and to explain away the passages in the Qur’an. Similarly, in Qur’an vii. 52, we read that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne. This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and feet and eyes, the Mu‘tazilites had to explain away in a more or less cumbrous fashion.

With one other detail of this class we must deal at greater length. It was destined to be the vital point of the whole Mu‘tazilite controversy and the test by which theologians were tried and had their places assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the Mu‘tazilites. There had grown up very early in the Muslim community an unbounded reverence and awe in the presence of the Qur’an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant, the Prophet; the words, with few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelligible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may have been brought forward later from the Qur’an itself, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damascus, has again played a formative part. So, in correspondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncreated and eternal Word of God; to the earthly manifestation in Jesus corresponds the Qur’an, the Word of God which we read and recite. The one is not the same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh were removed from us and the spiritual world revealed.

That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind of transfusion of ideas from Christianity and not as a result of controversy or dialectic about the teachings of the Qur’an. We find the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological subjects. “Our fathers have told us; it is the faith received from the Companions;” was their argument from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas used to cut off all discussions with “Bila kayfa” (Believe without asking how); and he held strongly that the Qur’an was uncreated. The same word kalam which we have found applied to the Word of God—both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifestation in the Qur’an—was used by them most confusingly for “disputation;” “he disputed” was takallam and “one who disputed” was mutakallim. All that was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see the origin of what became later the technical terms for scholastic theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all “talking about” the sacred mysteries.

This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in the Qur’an and tradition and to draw consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which shows how far this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on the lafz (utterance) of the Qur’an; was it created or uncreated? He said readily that the Qur’an was uncreated and was obstinately silent as to the utterance of it by men. At last, persistent questioning drove him to an outburst. “The Qur’an is the Word of God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created and inquisition (imtihan) is an innovation (bid‘a).” But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated. Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur’an in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of men and the writing of it by men’s hands—all between the boards, as they said—was uncreated. Others were coming to deny absolutely the existence of the eternal Logos and that this revealed Qur’an was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bukhari, while holding tenaciously that the Qur’an was uncreated, refused to make any statement as to its utterance by men. There was nothing said about that in Qur’an or tradition.

The second form of opposition was to any upholding of their belief by arguments, except of the simplest and most apparent. That was an invasion by reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith (naql). When the pious were eventually driven to dialectic weapons, their arguments show that these were snatched up to defend already occupied positions. They ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur’an itself, the Qur’an is called “knowledge from God.” It is, then, inseparable from God’s quality of knowledge. But that is eternal and uncreated; therefore, so too, the Qur’an. Again, God created everything by the word, “Be.” But this word cannot have been created, otherwise a created word would be a creator. Therefore, God’s word is uncreated. Again, there stands in the Qur’an (vii, 52), “Are not the creation and the command His?” The command here is evidently different from the creation, i.e., not created. Further, God’s command creates; therefore it cannot be created. But it is God’s word in command. It will be noticed here how completely God’s word is hypostatized. This appears still more strongly in the following argument. God said to Moses, (Qur. vii, 141), “I have chosen thee over mankind with my apostolate and my word.” God, therefore, has a word. But, again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses Moses with this word (kallama-llahu Musa taklima, evidently regarded as meaning that God’s word addressed Moses) and said, “Lo, I am thy Lord.” This argument is supposed to put the opponent in a dilemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being so addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and is, therefore, unbelief; or he holds that the kalam which so addresses Moses is a created thing. Then, a created thing asserts that it is Moses’ Lord. Therefore, God’s kalam with which He addresses the prophets, or which addresses the prophets, is eternal, uncreated.

But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, opposition to it was not slow in appearing, and that on different sides. Literary vanity, national pride, and philosophical scruples all made themselves felt. Even in Muhammad’s lifetime, according to the legend of the poet Labid and the verses which he put up in challenge on the Ka‘ba, the Qur’an had taken rank as inimitable poetry. At all points it was the Word of God and perfect in every detail. But, among the Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one thing on which each was more jealous and vain than another, it was skill in working with words. The superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they might endure, though often with a bad grace; but Muhammad as a rival and unapproachable literary artist they could not away with. So we find satire of the weaknesses of the Qur’an appearing here and there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and balance it against other products of the Arab genius. The rival productions of Musaylima, the False Prophet, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a treatise in defence of the metaphors of the Qur’an. Among the Persians this was still more the case. To them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also an Arab; and while they accepted his mission, accepting his books in a literary way was too much for them. As a prophet, he was a man; as a literary artist, he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may have felt; so, certainly, others felt later. The poet Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a companion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubious orthodoxy, used to amuse himself by comparing poems by himself and others with passages in the Qur’an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn al-Muqaffa (killed about 140), the translator of “Kalila and Dimna” and many other books into Arabic, and a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an imitation of the Qur’an.

Added to all this came the influence of the Mu‘tazilite theologians. They had a double ground for their opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine and perfect book limited them too much in their intellectual freedom. They were willing to respect and use the Qur’an, but not to accept its ipsissima verba. Regarded as the production of Muhammad under divine influence, it could have a human and a divine side, and things which needed to be dropped or changed in it could be ascribed to the human side. But that was not possible with a miraculous book come down from heaven. In a word, they were meeting the difficulty which has been met by Christianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The least they could do was to deny that the Qur’an was uncreated.

But they had a still more vital, if not more important, philosophical base of objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God’s qualities (sifat) and tried to limit them in every way. These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hypostatized into separate persons like those in the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near that danger really lay in the case of God’s kalam. In orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos.

The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting as showing that the Qur’an, even then, was given as a probative miracle (mu‘jiz) because it deprived all men of power (i‘jaz) to imitate it. That is, its Æsthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr ibn al Mu‘tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of the Mu‘tazilites, went still further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who held the eternity of the Qur’an; they had taken unto themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men were quite capable of producing a work even finer than the Qur’an in point of style. But the force of this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality with which he denounced his opponents in general as unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like those in circulation with us about those who hold that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that upon this point of salvability the Mu‘tazilites were even narrower than the orthodox.

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CHAPTER II

Such for long was the situation between the Mu‘tazilites and their orthodox opponents. From time to time the Mu‘tazilites received more or less protection and state favor; at other times, they had to seek safety in hiding. Popular favor they seem never to have enjoyed. As the Umayyads grew weak, they became more stiff in their orthodoxy; but with the Abbasids, and especially with al-Mansur, thought was again free. As has been shown above, encouragement of science and research was part of the plan of that great man, and he easily saw that the intellectual hope of the future was with these theological and philosophical questioners. So their work went slowly on, with a break under Harun ar-Rashid, a magnificent but highly orthodox monarch, who understood no trifling with things of the faith. It is an interesting but useless question whether Islam could ever have been broadened and developed to the point of enduring in its midst free speculation and research. As the case stands in history, it has known periods of intellectual life, but only under the protection of isolated princes here and there. It has had Augustan ages; it has never had great popular yearnings after wider knowledge. Its intellectual leaders have lived and studied and lectured at courts; they have not gone down and taught the masses of the people. To that the democracy of Islam has never come. Hampered by scholastic snobbishness, it has never learned that the abiding victories of science are won in the village school.

But most unfortunately for the Mu‘tazilites and for Islam, a Khalifa arose who had a relish for theological discussions and a high opinion of his own infallibility. This was al-Ma’mun. It did not matter that he ranged himself on the progressive side; his fatal error was that he invoked the authority of the state in matters of the intellectual and religious life. Thus, by enabling the conservative party to pose as martyrs, he brought the prejudices and passions of the populace still more against the new movement. He was that most dangerous of all beings, a doctrinaire despot. He had ideas and tried to make other people live up to them. Al-Mansur, though a bloody tyrant, had been a great statesman and had known how to bend people and things quietly to his will. He had sketched the firm outlines of a policy for the Abbasids, but had been cautious how he proclaimed his programme to the world. The world would come to him in time, and he could afford to wait and work in the dark. He knew, above all, that no people would submit to be school-mastered into the way in which they should go. Al-Ma’mun, for all his genius, was at heart a school-master. He was an enlightened patron of an enlightened Islam. Those who preferred to dwell in the darkness of the obscurant, he first scolded and then punished. Discussions in theology and comparative religion were his hobby. That some such interchange of letters between Muslims and Christians as that which crystallized in the Epistle of al-Kindi took place at his court seems certain. Bishr al-Marisi, who had lived in hiding in ar-Rashid’s time on account of his heretical views, disputed, in 209, before al-Ma’mun on the nature of the Qur’an. He founded at Baghdad an academy with library, laboratories, and observatory. All the weight of his influence was thrown on the side of the Mu‘tazilites. It appeared as though he were determined to pull his people up by force from their superstition and ignorance.

At last, he took the final and fatal step. In 202 a decree appeared proclaiming the doctrine of the creation of the Qur’an as the only truth, and as binding upon all Muslims. At the same time, as an evident sop to the Persian nationalists and the Alids, Ali was proclaimed the best of creatures after Muhammad. The Alids, it should be remembered, had close points of contact with the Mu‘tazilites. Such a theological decree as this was a new thing in Islam; never before had the individual consciousness been threatened by a word from the throne. The Mu‘tazilites through it practically became a state church under erastian control. But the system of Islam never granted to the Imam, or leader of the Muslim people, any position but that of a protector and representative. Its theology could only be formed, as we have seen in the case of its law, by the agreement of the whole community. The question then naturally was what effect such a new thing as this decree could have except to exasperate the orthodox and the masses. Practically, there was no other effect. Things went on as before. All that it meant was that one very prominent Muslim had stated his opinion and thrown in his lot with heretics.

For six years this continued, and then a method was devised of bringing the will of the Khalifa home upon the people. In 217 a distinguished Mu‘tazilite, Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was appointed chief qadi, and in 218 the decree was renewed. But this time it was accompanied by what we would call a test-act, and an inquisition (mihna) was instituted. The letter of directions for the conduct of this matter, written by al-Ma’mun to his lieutenant at Baghdad, is decisive as to the character of the man and the nature of the movement. It is full of railings against the common people who know not the law and are accursed. They are too stupid to understand philosophy or argument. It is the duty of the Khalifa to guide them and especially to show them the distinction between God and His book. He who holds otherwise than the Khalifa is either too blind or too lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other thing. Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their views. If they hold that the Qur’an is uncreated, they have abandoned tawhid, the doctrine of God’s Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim land. Also, the qadis must apply the same test to all the witnesses in cases before them. If these do not hold that the Qur’an is created, they cannot be legal witnesses. Other letters followed; the Mihna was extended through the Abbasid empire and applied to other doctrines, e.g., that of free-will and of the vision of God. The Khalifa also commanded that the death penalty for unbelief (kufr) should be inflicted on those who refused to take the test. They were to be regarded as idolaters and polytheists. The death of al-Ma’mun in the same year relieved the pressure. It is true that the Mihna was continued by his successor, al-Mu‘tasim, and by his successor, al-Wathiq, but without energy; it was more a handy political weapon than anything else. In 234, the second year of al-Mutawakkil, it was abolished and the Qur’an decreed uncreated. At the same time the Alids and all Persian nationalism came under a ban. Practically, the status quo ante was restored and Mu‘tazilism was again left a struggling heresy. The Arab party and the pure faith of Muhammad had reasserted themselves.

In this long conflict, the most prominent figure was certainly that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He was the trust and strength of the orthodox; that he stood fast through imprisonment and scourging defeated the plans of the Mu‘tazilites. In dealing with the development of law, we have seen what his legal position was. The same held in theology. Scholastic theology (kalam) was his abomination. Those who disputed over doctrines he cast out. That their dogmatic position was the same as his made no difference. For him, theological truth could not be reached by reasoning (aql); tradition (naql) from the fathers (as-salaf) was the only ground on which the dubious words of the Qur’an could be explained. So, in his long examinations before the officials of al-Ma‘mun and al-Mu‘tasim, he contented himself with repeating either the words of the Qur’an which for him were proofs or such traditions as he accepted. Any approach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected. When they argued before him, he kept silence.

What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this incident? for it was nothing more. The Mu‘tazilites dropped back into their former position, but under changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace was further from them than ever. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the masses; and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed the honor of the Word of God. For his persecutors there was nothing but hatred. And after he had passed away, the conflict was taken up with still fiercer bitterness by the school of law founded by his pupils. They continued to maintain his principles of Qur’an and tradition long after the Mu‘tazilites themselves had practically vanished from the scene, and all that was left for them to contend against was the modified system of scholastic theology which is now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these reactionary Hanbalites we shall have to deal later.

The Mu‘tazilites, on their side, having seen the shipwreck of their hopes and the growing storm of popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their scholastic studies. They became more and more theologians affecting a narrower circle, and less and less educators of the world at large. Their system became more metaphysical and their conclusions more unintelligible to the plain man. The fate which has fallen on all continued efforts of the Muslim mind was coming upon them. Beggarly speculations and barren hypotheses, combats of words over names, sapped them of life and reality. What the ill-fated friendship of al-Ma’mun had begun was carried on and out by the closed circle of Muslim thought. They separated into schools, one at al-Basra and another at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially developed was the old question, What is a thing (shay)? They defined a thing, practically, as a concept that could be known and of which something could be said. Existence (wujud) did not matter. It was only a quality which could be there or not. With it, the thing was an entity (mawjud); without it, a non-entity (ma‘dum), but still a thing with all equipment of substance (jawhar) and accident (arad), genus and species. The bearing of this was especially upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God’s adding a single quality, things entered the sphere of existence and were for us. Here, then, is evidently an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At al-Basra the relation of God to His qualities was especially discussed, and there it came to be pretty nearly a family dispute between al-Jubba‘i (d. 303) and his son Abu Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that God has qualities, existent, eternal, added to His essence; thus, He knows, for example, by such a quality of knowledge. The students of Greek philosophy and the Shi‘ites denied this and said that God knew by His essence. We have seen already Mu‘tazilite views as to this point. Abu Hudhayl held that these qualities were God’s essence and not in it. Thus, He knew by a quality of knowledge, but that quality was His essence. Al-Jubba‘i contented himself with safeguarding this statement. God knew in accordance with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a state (hal) which required that He should be a knower. The orthodox had said the first; his son, Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know an essence and know it under different conditions. The conditions varied but the essence remained. These conditions are not thinkable by themselves, for we know them only in connection with the essence. These are states; they are different from the essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba‘i opposed to this a doctrine that these states were really subjective in the mind of the perceiver, either generalizations or relationships existing mentally but not externally. This controversy spun itself out at great length through centuries. It eventually resolved itself into the fundamental metaphysical inquiry, What is a thing? A powerful school came to a conclusion that would have delighted the soul of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Things are four, they said, entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As we have seen above, al-Jubba‘i denied the reality of both states and relationships. Orthodox Islam has been of a divided opinion.

But all this time, other movements had been in progress, some of which were to be of larger future importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In 255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a Mu‘tazilite he was really a man of letters, free in life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned in the writings of the philosophers and rather inclined to the doctrines of the Tabi‘iyun, deistic naturalists. His confession of faith was of the utmost simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God had neither body nor form, could not be seen with the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not capable of philosophical reflection, but held that Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more should be required of him. Here we have evidently in part a reaction from the subtilties of controversy, and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough to give even the unsettled a chance to remain in the Muslim Church. Something of the same kind we shall find, later, in the case of Ibn Rushd. Finally, we have probably to see in his remark that the Qur’an was a body, turned at one time into a man and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on the great controversy of his time.

Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers proper, the students of the wisdom of the Greeks. He represents the stand-point of the educated man of the time, and was no specialist in anything but a general scepticism. In the first generation of the philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense, stands conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philosopher of the Arabs. The name belongs to him of right, for he is almost the only example of a student of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert. But he was hardly a philosopher in any independent sense. His rÔle was translating, and during the reigns of al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim a multitude of translations and original works de omni scibili came from his hands; the names of 265 of these have come down to us. In the orthodox reaction under al-Mutawakkil he fared ill; his library was confiscated but afterward restored. He died about 260, and with him dies the brief, golden century of eager acquisition, and the scholastic period enters in philosophy as in theology.

That the glory was departing from Baghdad and the Khalifate is shown by the second important name in philosophy. It is that of al-Farabi, who was born at Farab in Turkestan, lived and worked in the brilliant circle which gathered round Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid, at his court at Aleppo. In music, in science, in philology, and in philosophy, he was alike master. Aristotle was his passion, and his Arabic contemporaries and successors united in calling him the second teacher, on account of his success in unknotting the tangles of the Greek system. It was in truth a tangled system which came to him, and a tangled system which he left. The Muslim philosophers began, in their innocence, with the following positions: The Qur’an is truth and philosophy is truth; but truth can only be one; therefore, the Qur’an and philosophy must agree. Philosophy they accepted in whole-hearted faith, as it came to them from the Greeks through Egypt and Syria. They took it, not as a mass of more or less contradictory speculation, but as a form of truth. They, in fact, never lost a certain theological attitude. Under such conditions, then, Plato came to them; but it was mostly Plato as interpreted by Porphyrius, that is, as neo-Platonism. Aristotle, too, came to them in the guise of the later Peripatetic schools. But in Aristotle, especially, there entered a perfect knot of entanglement and confusion. During the reign of al-Mu‘tasim, a Christian of Emessa in the Lebanon—the history in details is obscure—translated parts of the “Enneads” of Plotinus into Arabic and entitled his work “The Theology of Aristotle.” A more unlucky bit of literary mischief and one more far-reaching in its consequences has never been. The Muslims took it all as solemnly as they took the text of the Qur’an. These two great masters, Plato and Aristotle, they said, had expounded the truth, which is one. Therefore, there must be some way of bringing them into agreement. So generations of toilers labored valiantly with the welter of translations and pseudographs to get out of them and into them the one truth. The more pious added the third element of the Qur’an, and it must remain a marvel and a magnificent testimonial to their skill and patience that they got even so far as they did and that the whole movement did not end in simple lunacy. That al-Farabi should have been so incisive a writer, so wide a thinker and student; that Ibn Sina should have been so keen and clear a scientist and logician; that Ibn Rushd should have known—really known—and commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that the human brain, after all, is a sane brain and has the power of unconsciously rejecting and throwing out nonsense and falsehood.

But it is not wonderful that, dealing with such materials and contradictions, they developed a tendency to mysticism. There were many things which they felt compelled to hold which could only be defended and rationalized in that cloudy air and slanting light. Especially, no one but a mystic could bring together the emanations of Plotinus, the ideas of Plato, the spheres of Aristotle and the seven-storied heaven of Muhammad. With this matter of mysticism we shall have to deal immediately. Of al-Farabi it is enough to say that he was one of the most patient of the laborers at that impossible problem. It seems never to have occurred to him, or to any of the others, that the first and great imperative was to verify his references and sources. The oriental, like the mediÆval scholastic, tests minutely the form of his syllogism, but takes little thought whether his premises state facts or not. With a scrupulous scepticism in deduction, he combines a childlike acceptance on tradition or on the narrowest of inductions.

But there are other and more ominous signs in al-Farabi of the scholastic decline. There appears first in him that tendency toward the writing of encyclopÆdic compends, which always means superficiality and the commonplace. Al-Farabi himself could not be accused of either, but that he thus claimed all knowledge for his portion showed the risk of the premature circle and the small gain. Another is mysticism. He is a neo-Platonist, more exactly a Plotinian; although he himself would not have recognized this title. He held, as we have seen, that he was simply retelling the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. But he was also a devout Muslim. He seems to have taken in earnest all the bizarre details of Muslim cosmography and eschatology; the Pen, the Tablet, the Throne, the Angels in all their ranks and functions mingle picturesquely with the system of Plotinus, his ??, his ????, his ????, his receptive and active intellects. But to make tenable this position he had to take the great leap of the mystic. Unto us these things are impossible; with God, i.e., on another plane of existence, they are the simplest realities. If the veil were taken from our eyes we would see them. This has always been the refuge of the devout Muslim who has tampered with science. We shall look for it more in detail when we come to al-Ghazzali, who has put it into classical form.

Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and a clericalist. His conception of the model state is a strange compound of the republic of Plato and Shi‘ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of course, in the theocratic idea of the Muslim state; but his city, which is to take in all mankind, a Holy Roman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once, a community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later influence than that of the mother city of Islam, al-Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence is that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya, near Tunis. The Hamdanids were Shi‘ites and Sayf ad-Dawla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed peace and protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas.

This brings us again to the great mystery of Muslim history. What was the truth of the Fatimid movement? Was the family of the Prophet the fosterer of science from the earliest times? What degree of contact had they with the Mu‘tazilites? With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law? That they were themselves the actual beginners of everything—and everything has been claimed for them—we may put down to legend. But one thing does stand fast. Just as al-Ma’mun combined the establishment of a great university at Baghdad with a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo erected a great hall of science and threw all their influence and authority into the spreading and extending of knowledge. This institution seems to have been a combination of free public library and university, and was probably the gateway connecting between the inner circle of initiated Fatimid leaders and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already seen how unhappy were the external effects of the Shi‘ite, and especially of the Fatimid, propaganda on the Muslim world. But from time to time we become aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and philosophical labor and investigation accompanying that propaganda, and striving after knowledge and truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which we can know only through its occasional outbursts. Some of these are given above; others will follow. The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and dogmatic statements and explanations are not in place. It may be that it was only a natural drawing together on the part of all the different forces and movements that were under a ban and had to live in secrecy and stillness. It may be that the students of the new sciences passed over, simply through their studies and political despair—as has often happened in our day—into different degrees of nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate searching for, and dependence on, some absolute guide, an infallible Imam. It may be that we have read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid movement; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate it into self-rule; that they saw—these unknown devotees of science and truth—no other way of breaking down the barriers of Islam and setting free the spirits of men. A wild hypothesis! But in face of the real mystery no hypothesis can seem wild.

Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fatimids is the association known as the Sincere Brethren (Ikhwan as-safa). It existed at al-Basra in the middle of the fourth century of the Hijra during the breathing space which the free intellectual life enjoyed after the capture of Baghdad by the Buwayhids in 334. It will be remembered how that Persian dynasty was Shi‘ite by creed and how it, for the time, completely clipped the claws of the orthodox and Sunnite Abbasid Khalifas. The only thing, thereafter, which heretics and philosophers had to fear was the enmity of the populace, but that seems to have been great enough. The Hanbalite mob of Baghdad had grown to be a thing of terror. It was, then, an educational campaign on which this new philosophy had to enter. Their programme was by means of clubs, propagating themselves and spreading over the country from al-Basra and Baghdad, to reach all educated people and introduce among them gradually a complete change in their religious and scientific ideas. Their teaching was the same combination of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism with Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu‘tazilite theology, that we have already known. Only there was added to it a Pythagorean reverence for numbers, and everything, besides, was treated in an eminently superficial and popularized manner. Our knowledge of the Fraternity and its objects is based on its publication, “The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren” (Rasa’il ikhwan as-safa) and upon scanty historical notices. The Epistles are fifty or fifty-one in number and cover the field of human knowledge as then conceived. They form, in fact, an Arabic EncyclopÉdie. The founders of the Fraternity, and authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most ten. We have no certain knowledge that the Fraternity ever took even its first step and spread to Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the development did not pass. The division of members into four—learners, teachers, guides, and drawers near to God in supernatural vision—and the plan of regular meetings of each circle for study and mutual edification remained in its paper form. The society was half a secret one and lacked, apparently, vitality and energy. There was among its founders no man of weight and character. So it passed away and has left only these Epistles which have come down to us in numerous MSS., showing how eagerly they have been read and copied and how much influence they at least must have exercised. That influence must have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intellectual life, yet it carried with it in a still higher degree the defects we have already noticed in al-Farabi. To them must be added the most simple skimming of all real philosophical problems and a treatment of nature and natural science which had lost all connection with facts.

It has been suggested, and the suggestion seems luminous and fertile, that this Fraternity was simply a part of the great Fatimid propaganda which, as we know, honey-combed the ground everywhere under the Sunnite Abbasids. Descriptions which have reached us of the methods followed by the leaders of the Fraternity agree exactly with those of the missionaries of the Isma‘ilians. They raised difficulties and suggested serious questionings; hinted at possible answers but did not give them; referred to a source where all questions would be answered. Again, their catch-words and fixed phrases are the same as those afterward used by the Assassins, and we have traces of these Epistles forming a part of the sacred library of the Assassins. It is to be remembered that the Assassins were not simply robber bands who struck terror by their methods. Both the western and the eastern branches were devoted to science, and it may be that in their mountain fortresses there was the most absolute devotion to true learning that then existed. When the Mongols captured Alamut, they found it rich in MSS. and in instruments and apparatus of every kind. It is then possible that the elevated eclecticism of the Ikhwan as-safa was the real doctrine of the Fatimids, the Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses; certainly, wherever we can test them there is the most singular agreement. It is a mechanical and Æsthetic pantheism, a glorification of Pythagoreanism, with its music and numbers; idealistic to the last degree; a worship and pursuit of a conception of a harmony and beauty in all the universe, to find which is to find and know the Creator Himself. It is thus far removed from materialism and atheism, but could easily be misrepresented as both. This, it is true, is a very different explanation from the one given in our first Part; it can only be put along-side of that and left there. The one expresses the practical effect of the Isma‘ilians in Islam; the other what may have been their ideal. However we judge them, we must always remember that somewhere in their teaching, at its best, there was a strange attraction for thinking and troubled men. Nasir ibn Khusraw, a Persian Faust, found peace at Cairo between 437 and 444 in recognizing the divine Imamship of al-Mustansir, and after a life of persecution died in that faith as a hermit in the mountains of Badakhshan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Hani, who died in 362, similarly accepted al-Mu‘izz as his spiritual chief and guide.

Another eclectic sect, but on a very different principle, was that of the Karramites, founded by Abu Abd Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its teachings had the honor to be accepted and protected by no less a man than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna (388-421), Mahmud the Idol-breaker, the first invader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi, Ibn Sina and many another. But that, to which we will return, belongs to a later date and, probably, to a modified form of Ibn Karram’s teaching. For himself, he was an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to the story, a man of no education. He lost himself in theological subtleties which he seems to have failed to understand. However, out of them all he put together a book which he called “The Punishment of the Grave,” which spread widely in Khurasan. It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest anthropomorphism. Thus, for him, God actually sat upon the throne, was in a place, had direction and so could move from one point to another. He had a body with flesh, blood, and limbs; He could be embraced by those who were purified to the requisite point. It was a literal acceptance of the material expressions of the Qur’an along with a consideration of how they could be so, and an explanation by comparison with men—all opposed to the principle bila kayfa. So, apparently, we must understand the curious fact that he was also a Murji’ite and held faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue. All men, except professed apostates, are believers, he said, because of that primal covenant, taken by God with the seed of Adam, when He asked, “Am I not your Lord?” (Alastu bi-rabbikum) and they, brought forth from Adam’s loins for the purpose, made answer, “Yea, verily, in this covenant we remain until we formally cast it off.” This, of course, involved taking God’s qualities in the most literal sense. So, if we are to see in the Mu‘tazilites scholastic commentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a metaphor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its external meaning. He was part of the great stream of conservative reaction, in which we find also such a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of Ahmad’s sense and reverence kept him by the safe proviso “without considering how and without comparison.” All Ahmad’s later followers were not so wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram inclined to the Kharijites.

Before we return to al-Jubba‘i and the fate of the Mu‘tazilites, it remains to trace more precisely the thread of mysticism, that kashf, revelation, which we have already mentioned several times. Its fundamental fact is that it had two sides, an ascetic and a speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in result, and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic has been assigned, in good and in bad faith, as an adherent of both.

It is to the form of mysticism which sprang from asceticism that we must first turn. Attention has been given above to the wandering monks and hermits, the sa’ihs (wanderers) and rahibs who caught Muhammad’s attention and respect. We have seen, too, how Muslim imitators began in their turn to wander through the land, clad in the coarse woollen robes which gave them the name of Sufis, and living upon the alms of the pious. How early these appeared in any number and as a fixed profession is uncertain, but we find stories in circulation of meetings between such mendicant friars and al-Hasan al-Basri himself. Women, too, were among them, and it is possible that to their influence a development of devotional love-poetry was due. At least, many verses of this kind are ascribed to a certain Rabi‘a, an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme other-worldliness, who died in 135. Many other women had part in the contemplative life. Among them may be mentioned, to show its grasp and spread, A’isha, daughter of Ja‘far as-Sadiq, who died in 145; Fatima of Naysabur, who died in 223, and the Lady Nafisa, a contemporary and rival in learning with ash-Shafi‘i and the marvel of her time in piety and the ascetic life. Her grave is one of the most venerated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders are still worked and prayer is always answered. She was a descendant of al-Hasan, the martyred ex-Khalifa, and an example of how the fated family of the Prophet was an early school for women saints. Even in the Heathenism we have traces of female penitents and hermits, and the tragedy of Ali and his sons and descendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving service and religious enthusiasm with which women are dowered.

All these stood and stand in Islam on exactly the same footing as men. The distinction in Roman Christendom that a woman cannot be a priest there falls away, for in Islam is neither priest nor layman. They lived either as solitaries or in conventual life exactly as did the men. They were called by the same terms in feminine form; they were Sufiyas beside the Sufis; Zahidas (ascetics) beside the Zahids; Waliyas (friends of God) beside the Walis; Abidas (devotees) beside the Abids. They worked wonders (karamat, closely akin to the ?a??sata of 1 Cor. xii, 9) by the divine grace, and still, as we have seen, at their own graves such are granted through them to the faithful, and their intercession (shafa‘a) is invoked. Their religious exercises were the same; they held dhikrs and women darwishes yet dance to singing and music in order to bring on fits of ecstasy. To state the case generally, whatever is said hereafter of mysticism and its workings among men must be taken as applying to women also.

To return: one of the earliest male devotees of whom we have distinct note is Ibrahim ibn Adham. He was a wanderer of royal blood, drifted from Balkh in Afghanistan to al-Basra and to Mecca. He died in 161. Contempt for the learning of lawyers and for external forms appears in him; obedience to God, contemplation of death, death to the world formed his teaching. Another, Da’ud ibn Nusayr, who died in 165, was wont to say, “Flee men as thou fleest a lion. Fast from the world and let the breaking of thy fast be when thou diest.” Another, al-Fudayl ibn Iyad of Khurasan, who died in 187, was a robber converted by a heavenly voice; he cast aside the world, and his utterances show that he lapsed into the passivity of quietism.

Reference has already been made in the chapter on jurisprudence to the development of asceticism which came with the accession of the Abbasids. The disappointed hopes of the old believers found an outlet in the contemplative life. They withdrew from the world and would have nothing to do with its rulers; their wealth and everything connected with them they regarded as unclean. Ahmad ibn Hanbal in his later life had to use all his obstinacy and ingenuity to keep free of the court and its contamination. Another was this al-Fudayl. Stories—chronologically impossible—are told how he rebuked Harun ar-Rashid for his luxury and tyranny and denounced to his face his manner of life. With such an attitude to those round him he could have had little joy in his devotion. So it was said, “When al-Fudayl died, sadness was removed from the world.”

But soon the recoil came. Under the spur of such exercises and thoughts, the ecstatic oriental temperament began to revel in expressions borrowed from human love and earthly wine. Such we find by Ma‘ruf of al-Karkh, a district of Baghdad, who died in 200, and whose tomb, saved by popular reverence, is one of the few ancient sites in modern Baghdad; and by his greater disciple, Sari as-Saqati, who died in 257. To this last is ascribed, but dubiously, the first use of the word tawhid to signify the union of the soul with God. The figure that the heart is a mirror to image back God and that it is darkened by the things of the body appears in Abu Sulayman of Damascus, who died in 215. A more celebrated ascetic, who died in 227, Bishr al-Hafi (bare-foot), speaks of God directly as the Beloved (habib). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi was a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and died in 243. The only thing in him to which Ahmad could take exception was that he made use of kalam in refuting the Mu‘tazilites; even this suspicion against him he is said to have abandoned. Sari and Bishr, too, were close friends of Ahmad’s. Dhu-n-Nun, the Egyptian Sufi, who died in 245, is in more dubious repute. He is said to have been the first to formulate the doctrine of ecstatic states (hals, maqamas); but if he went no further than this, his orthodoxy, in the broad sense, should be above suspicion. Islam has now come to accept these as right and fitting. Perhaps the greatest name in early Sufiism is that of al-Junayd (d. 297); on it no shadow of heresy has ever fallen. He was a master in theology and law, reverenced as one of the greatest of the early doctors. Questions of tawhid he is said to have discussed before his pupils with shut doors. But this was probably tawhid in the theological and not in the mystical sense—against the Mu‘tazilites and not on the union of the soul with God. Yet he, too, knew the ecstatic life and fell fainting at verses which struck into his soul. Ash-Shibli (d. 334) was one of his disciples, but seems to have given himself more completely to the ascetic and contemplative life. In verses by him we find the vocabulary of the amorous intercourse with God fully developed. The last of this group to be mentioned here shall be Abu Talib al-Makki, who died in 386. It is his distinction to have furnished a text-book of Sufiism that is in use to this day. He wrote and spoke openly on tawhid, now in the Sufi sense, and got into trouble as a heretic, but his memory has been restored to orthodoxy by the general agreement of Islam. When, in 488, al-Ghazzali set himself to seek light in Sufiism, among the treatises he studied were the books of four of those mentioned above, Abu Talib, al-Muhasibi, al-Junayd, and ash-Shibli.

In the case of these and all the others already spoken of there was nothing but a very simple and natural development such as could easily be paralleled in Europe. The earliest Muslims were burdened, as we have seen, with the fear of the terrors of an avenging God. The world was evil and fleeting; the only abiding good was in the other world; so their religion became an ascetic other-worldliness. They fled into the wilderness from the wrath to come. Wandering, either solitary or in companies, was the special sign of the true Sufi. The young men gave themselves over to the guidance of the older men; little circles of disciples gathered round a venerated Shaykh; fraternities began to form. So we find it in the case of al-Junayd, so in that of Sari as-Saqati. Next would come a monastery, rather a rest-house; for only in the winter and for rest did they remain fixed in a place for any time. Of such a monastery there is a trace at Damascus in 150 and in Khurasan about 200. Then, just as in Europe, begging friars organized themselves. In faith they were rather conservative than anything else; touched with a religious passivism which easily developed into quietism. Their ecstasies went little beyond those, for instance, of Thomas À Kempis, though struck with a warmer oriental fervor.

The points on which the doctors of Islam took exception to these earlier Sufis are strikingly different from what we would expect. They concern the practical life far more than theological speculation. As was natural in the case of professional devotees, a constantly prayerful attitude began to assume importance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the five daily prayers, the salawat. This development was in all probability aided by the existence in Syria of the Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted the duty of prayer above all other religious obligations. These, also, abandoned property and obligations and wandered as poor brethren over the country. They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic Greek monks who eventually led to the controversy concerning the uncreated light manifested at the transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine to the Eastern Church. Considering these points, it can hardly be doubted that there was some historical connection and relation here, not only with earlier but also with later Sufiism. There is a striking resemblance between the Sufis seeking by patient introspection to see the actual light of God’s presence in their hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting solitarily in their cells and seeking the divine light of Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels.

But our immediate point is the matter of constant, free prayer. In the Qur’an (xxxiii, 41) the believers are exhorted to “remember (dhikr) God often;” this command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative depreciation of the five canonical prayers. Their meetings for the purpose, much like our own prayer-meetings, still more like the “class-meetings” of the early Methodists, as opposed to stated public worship, were called dhikrs. These services were fiercely attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived and are the darwish functions which tourists still go to see at Constantinople and Cairo. But the more private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each in his house repeating his Qur’anic litanies through the night, until to the passer-by it sounded like the humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-gutters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to have fallen before ridicule and accusations of heresy.

Another point against the earlier Sufis was their abuse of the principle of tawakkul, dependence upon God. They gave up their trades and professions; they even gave up the asking for alms. Their ideal was to be absolutely at God’s disposal, utterly cast upon His direct sustenance (rizq). No anxiety for their daily bread was permitted to them; they must go through the world separated from it and its needs and looking up to God. Only one who can do this is properly an acknowledger of God’s unity, a true Muwahhid. To such, God would assuredly open the door of help; they were at His gate; and the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His help used to come.

To this it may be imagined that the more sober, even among Sufis, made vehement objection. It fell under two heads. One was that of kasb, the gaining of daily bread by labor. The examples of the husbandman who casts his seed into the ground and then depends upon God, of the merchant who travels with his wares in similar trust, were held up against the wandering but useless monk. As always, traditions were forged on both sides. Said a man—apparently in a spirit of prophecy—one day to the Prophet, “Shall I let my camel run free and trust in God?” Replied the Prophet, or someone for him with a good imitation of his humorous common-sense, “Tie up your camel and trust in God.” The other head was the use of remedies in sickness. The whole controversy parallels strikingly the “mental science” and “Christian science” of the present day. Medicine, it was held, destroyed tawakkul. In the fourth century in Persia this insanity ran high and many books were written for it and against it. The author of one on the first side was consulted in an obstinate case of headache. “Put my book under your pillow,” he said, “and trust in God.” On both these points the usage of the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth of the Sufi position. They had notoriously earned their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had possessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the most barbaric and multifarious remedies. So the agreement of Islam eventually righted itself, though the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained for centuries a thing of delight for theologians. In the end only the wildest fanatics held by absolute tawakkul.

But all this time the second form of Sufiism had been slowly forcing its way. It was essentially speculative and theological rather than ascetic and devotional. When it gained the upper hand, zahid (ascetic) was no longer a convertible term with Sufi. We pass over the boundary between Thomas À Kempis and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of this movement cannot be hard to find in the light of what has preceded. They lie partly in the neo-Platonism which is the foundation of the philosophy of Islam. Probably it did not come to the Sufis along the same channels by which it reached al-Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics and, perhaps, especially through the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and his asserted teacher, Stephen bar Sudaili with his Syriac “Book of Hierotheos.” We need not here consider whether the Monophysite heresy is to be reckoned in as one of the results of the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying forms of it meant the frank deifying of a man and thus raised the possibility of the equal deifying of any other man and of all men. But there is no certainty that these views had an influence in Islam. It is enough that from A.D. 533 we find the Pseudo-Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the ultra Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with the whole mystical movement in Christendom. According to it, all is akin in nature to the Absolute, and all this life below is only a reflection of the glories of the upper sphere, where God is. Through the sacraments and a hierarchy of angels man is led back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to a knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the atonement fade out of view. The incarnation is but an example of how the divine and the human can join. All is an emanation or an emission of grace from God; and the yearnings of man are back to his source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and travailing nature are striving to return to their origin. When this conception had seized the Oriental Church; when it had passed into Islam and dominated its emotional and religious life; when through the translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius by Scotus Erigena in 850, it had begun the long contest of idealism in Europe, the dead school of Plotinus had won the field, and its influence ruled from the Oxus to the Atlantic.

But the roots of Sufiism struck also in another direction. We have already seen an early tendency to regard Ali and, later, members of his house as incarnations of divinity. In the East, where God comes near to man, the conception of God in man is not difficult. The Semitic prophet through whom God speaks easily slips over into a divine being in whom God exists and may be worshipped. But if with one, why not with another? May it not be possible by purifying exercises to reach this unity? If one is a Son of God, may not all become that if they but take the means? The half-understood pantheism which always lurks behind oriental fervors claims its due. From his wild whirling dance, the darwish, stung to cataleptic ecstasy by the throbbing of the drums and the lilting chant, sinks back into the unconsciousness of the divine oneness. He has passed temporarily from this scene of multiplicity into the sea of God’s unity and, at death, if he but persevere, he will reach that haven where he fain would be and will abide there forever. Here, we have not to do with calm philosophers rearing their systems in labored speculations, but with men, often untaught, seeking the salvation of their souls earnestly and with tears.

One of the earliest of the pantheistic school was Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 261). He was of Persian parentage, and his father had been a follower of Zarathustra. As an ascetic he was of the highest repute; he was also an author of eminence on Sufiism (al-Ghazzali used his books) and he joined to his devout learning and self-mortification clear miraculous gifts. But equally clear was his pantheistic drift and his name has come down linked to the saying, “Beneath my cloak there is naught else than God.” It is worth noticing that certain other of his sayings show that, even in his time, there were Sufi saints who boasted that they had reached such perfection and such miraculous powers that the ordinary moral and ceremonial law no longer applied to them. The antinomianism which haunted the later Sufiism and darwishdom had already appeared.

But the greatest name of all among these early pantheists was that of al-Hallaj (the cotton carder), a pupil of al-Junayd, who was put to death with great cruelty in 309. It is almost impossible to reach any certain conclusion as to his real views and aims. In spite of what seem to be utterances of the crassest pantheism, such as, “I am the Truth,” there have not been wanting many in later Islam who have reverenced his memory as that of a saint and martyr. To Sufis and darwishes of his time and to this day he has been and is a patron saint. In his life and death he represents for them the spirit of revolt against dogmatic scholasticism and formalism. Further, even such a great doctor of the Muslim Church as al-Ghazzali defended him and, though lamenting some incautious phrases, upheld his orthodoxy. At his trial itself before the theologians of Baghdad, one of them refused to sign the fatwa declaring him an unbeliever; he was not clear, he said, as to the case. And it is true that such records as we have of the time suggest that his condemnation was forced by the government as a matter of state policy. He was a Persian of Magian origin, and evidently an advanced mystic of the speculative type. He carried the theory to its legitimate conclusion, and proclaimed the result publicly. He dabbled in scholastic theology; had evident Mu‘tazilite leanings; wrote on alchemy and things esoteric. But with this mystical enthusiasm there seem to have united in him other and more dangerous traits. The stories which have reached us show him of a character fond of excitement and change, surrounding himself with devoted adherents and striving by miracle-working of a commonplace kind to add to his following. His popularity among the people of Baghdad and their reverence for him rose to a perilous degree. He may have had plans of his own as a Persian nationalist; he may have had part in one of the Shi‘ite conspiracies; he may have been nothing but a rather weak-headed devotee, carried off his feet by a sudden tide of public excitement, the greatest trial and danger that a saint has to meet. But the times were not such then in Baghdad that the government could take any risks. Al-Muqtadir was Khalifa and in his weak hands the Khalifate was slipping to ruin. The Fatimids were supreme in North Africa; the Qarmatians held Syria and Arabia, and were threatening Baghdad itself. In eight years they were to take Mecca. Persia was seething with false prophets and nationalists of every shade. Thirteen years later Ibn ash-Shalmaghani was put to death in Baghdad on similar grounds; in his case, Shi‘ite conspiracy against the state was still more clearly involved. We can only conclude in the words of Ibn Khallikan (d. 681), “The history of al-Hallaj is long to relate; his fate is well known; and God knoweth all secret things.” With him we must leave, for the present, consideration of the Sufi development and return to the Mu‘tazilites and to the people tiring of their dry subtilties.

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CHAPTER III

As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at first refused to enter upon any discussion of sacred things. Malik ibn Anas used to say, “God’s istiwa (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known; how it is done is unknown; it must be believed; questions about it are an innovation (bid‘a).” But such a position could not be held for any length of time. The world cannot be cut in two and half assigned to faith and half to reason. So, as time went on, there arose on the orthodox side men who, little by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith that was in them. They thus came to use kalam in order to meet the kalam of the Mu‘tazilites; they became mutakallims, and the scholastic theology of Islam was founded. It is the history of this transfer of method which we have now to consider.

Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. It was at first a gradual, unconscious drift, and people did not recognize its existence. Afterward, when they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human mind to ascribe broad movements to single men asserted itself and the whole was put under the name of al-Ash‘ari. It is true that with him, in a sense, the change suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it had already been long in progress. As we have seen, al-Junayd discussed the unity of God, but it was behind closed doors. Ash-Shafi‘i held that there should be a certain number of men trained thus to defend and purify the faith, but that it would be a great evil if their arguments should become known to the mass of the people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected, and rightly, of defending his faith with argument, and thereby incurred Ahmad’s displeasure. Another contemporary of Ahmad’s, al-Karabisi (d. 345), incurred the same displeasure, and the list might easily be extended. But the most significant fact of all is that the movement came to the surface and showed itself openly at the same time in the most widely separated lands of Islam. In Mesopotamia there was al-Ash‘ari, who died after 320; in Egypt there was at-Tahawi, who died in 331; in Samarqand there was al-Mataridi, who died in 333. Of these at-Tahawi is now little more than a name; al-Mataridi’s star has paled before that of al-Ash‘ari; al-Ash‘ari has come in popular view to be the solitary hero before whom the Mu‘tazilite system went down. It will perhaps be sufficient if we take his life and experiences as our guide in this period of change; the others must have followed very much in the same path.

He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year in which al-Kindi died and Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished from the sight of men. He came into a world full of intellectual ferment; Alids of different camps were active in their claim to be possessors of an infallible Imam; Zaydites and Qarmatians were in revolt; the decree of 234 that the Qur’an was uncreated had had little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu‘tazilites; in 261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu Yazid, died. Al-Ash‘ari himself was of the best blood of the desert and of a highly orthodox family which had borne a distinguished part in Muslim history. Through some accident he came in early youth into the care of al-Jubba‘i, the Mu‘tazilite, who, according to one story, had married al-Ash‘ari’s mother; was brought up by him and remained a stanch Mu‘tazilite, writing and speaking on that side, till he was forty years old.

Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted the pulpit of the mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, “He who knows me, knows me; and he who knows me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of so and so. I have maintained the creation of the Qur’an and that God will not be seen in the world to come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu‘tazilite and turn to opposition to them.” It was a voice full of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of the Mu‘tazilites had publicly passed and that, hereafter, they would be met with their own weapons. What led to this change of mind is strictly unknown; only legends have reached us. One, full of psychological truth, runs that one Ramadan, the fasting month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger, the Prophet appeared to him three times in his sleep, and commanded him to turn from his vain kalam and seek certainty in the traditions and the Qur’an. If he would but give himself to that study, God would make clear the difficulties and enable him to solve all the puzzles. He did so, and his mind seemed to be opened; the old contradictions and absurdities had fled, and he cursed the Mu‘tazilites and all their works.

It can easily be seen that in some such way as this the blood of the race may have led him back to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert, whose word must be accepted as its own proof. The gossips of the time told strange tales of rich relatives and family pressure; we can leave these aside. When he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met his old teacher, al-Jubba‘i, in public discussions again and again till the old man withdrew. One of these discussions legend has handed down in varying forms. None of them may be exactly true, but they are significant of the change of attitude. He came to al-Jubba‘i and said, “Suppose the case of three brothers; one being God-fearing, another godless and a third dies as a child. What of them in the world to come?” Al-Jubba‘i replied, “The first will be rewarded in Paradise; the second punished in Hell, and the third will be neither rewarded nor punished.” Al-Ash‘ari continued, “But if the third said, ‘Lord, Thou mightest have granted me life, and then I would have been pious and entered Paradise like my brother,’ what then?” Al-Jubba‘i replied, “God would say, ‘I knew that if thou wert granted life thou wouldst be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell.’” Then al-Ash‘ari drew his noose, “But what if the second said, ‘Lord, why didst Thou not make me die as a child? Then had I escaped Hell.’” Al-Jubba‘i was silenced, and Al-Ash‘ari went away in triumph. Three years after his pupil had left him the old man died. The tellers of this story regard it as disproving the Mu‘tazilite doctrine of “the best”—al-aslah—namely, that God is constrained to do that which may be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He chooses.

But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites, which held that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms of human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash‘ari’s position, a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and usage (sunna) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early church (salaf).

The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities (sifat aqliya) of God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech: but explained away the Qur’anic anthropomorphisms of God’s face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Baghdad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented himself with the position that the anthropomorphisms were to be taken, bila kayfa wala tashbih, without asking how and without drawing any comparison. The first phrase is directed against the Mu‘tazilites, who inquired persistently into the nature and possibility of such things in God; the second, against the anthropomorphists (mushabbihs, comparers; mujassims, corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Karramites, who said that these things in God were like the corresponding things in men. At all stages, however, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument.

The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash‘arite. Both are in the Appendix of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On the vexed question, “What is a thing?” he anticipated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and theoretical, and those later ones also who did not follow him, regarded, as we have seen, existence (wujud) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing (mawjud). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of “existence”; then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became existent. But al-Ash‘ari and his followers held that existence was the “self” (ayn) of the entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the whole, Appendix of Creeds.

On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took up a mediating position. The old orthodox position was absolutely fatalistic; the Mu‘tazilites, following their principle of Justice, gave to man an initiative power. Al-Ash‘ari struck a middle path. Man cannot create anything; God is the only creator. Nor does man’s power produce any effect on his actions at all. God creates in His creature power (qudra) and choice (ikhtiyar). Then He creates in him his action corresponding to the power and choice thus created. So the action of the creature is created by God as to initiative and as to production; but it is acquired by the creature. By acquisition (kasb) is meant that it corresponds to the creature’s power and choice, previously created in him, without his having had the slightest effect on the action. He was only the locus or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash‘ari is supposed to have accounted for free-will and entailed responsibility upon men. It may be doubted whether the second point occupied him much. It was open to his God to do good or evil as He chose; the Justice of the Mu‘tazilites was left behind. He may have intended only to explain the consciousness of freedom, as some have done more recently. The closeness with which al-Ash‘ari in this comes to the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz and to the Kantian conception of existence shows how high a rank he must take as an original thinker. His abandoning of the Mu‘tazilites was due to no mere wave of sentiment but to a perception that their speculations were on too narrow a basis and of a too barren scholastic type. He died after 320 with a curse on them and their methods as his last words.

A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi. The creed of an-Nasafi in the Appendix of Creeds, pp. 308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who was more than suspected of Mu‘tazilite and Murji’ite leanings. Muslim theologians usually reckon up some thirteen points of difference between al-Mataridi and al-Ash‘ari and admit that seven of these are not much more than combats of words. Those which occur in an-Nasafi’s creed are marked with a star.

We are now in a position to finish shortly with the Mu‘tazilites. Their work, as a constructive force, is done. From this time on there is kalam among the orthodox, and the term mutakallim denotes nothing but a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or another. And so, like any other organ which has done its part and for the existence of which there is no longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped into the background. They had still, sometimes, to suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there were men who continued to call themselves Mu‘tazilites; but their heresies came to be heresies of the schools and not burning questions in the eyes of the masses. We need now draw attention to only a few incidents and figures in this dying movement. The Muslim historians lay much stress on the orthodox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381-422, and narrate how he persecuted the Mu‘tazilites, Shi‘ites and other heretics and compelled them, under oath, to conform.

But there are several difficulties in the way of this persecution, which make it probable that it was more nominal than otherwise. Al-Qadir was bitterly orthodox; he had written a treatise on theology and compelled his unhappy courtiers to listen to a public reading of it every week. But he enjoyed, outside of his palace, next to no power. He was in the control of the Shi‘ite Buwayhids, who, as we have seen, ruled Baghdad and the Khalifate from 320 to 447. These dubious persecutions are said to have fallen in 408 and 420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain visited Baghdad about 390 and has left us a record of the state of religious things there. He found in session what may perhaps best be described as a Parliament of Religions. It seems to have been a free debate between Muslims of all sects, orthodox and heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews and Christians—unbelievers of every kind. Each party had a spokesman, and at the beginning of the proceedings the rule was rehearsed that no one might appeal to the sacred books of his creed but might only adduce arguments founded upon reason. The pious Spanish Muslim went to two meetings but did not peril his soul by any further visits. In his narrative we recognize the horror with which the orthodox of Spain viewed such proceedings—Spain, Muslim and Christian, has always favored the straitest sect; but when such a thing was permitted in Baghdad, religious liberty there at least must have been tolerably broad. Possibly it was sittings of the Ikhwan as-safa upon which this scandalized Spaniard stumbled. He himself speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims.

But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi‘ite authority in Baghdad gave all the miscellaneous heretics a chance for life, it was different in the growing dominions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic monarch had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the Karramites, the most literal-minded of all the Muslim sects. In consequence, all forms of Mu‘tazilism and all kinds of mutakallims were an abomination to him, and it was a very real persecution which they met at his hands. That al-Qadir, his spiritual suzerain, urged him on is very probable; it is also possible that respect for the growing power of Mahmud may have protected al-Qadir to some extent from the Buwayhids. In 420 Mahmud took from them Ispahan and held there a grand inquisition on Shi‘ites and heretics of all kinds.

To proceed with the Mu‘tazilites; when we come to al-Ghazzali and his times we shall find that they have ceased to be a crying danger to the faith. Though their views might, that doctor held, be erroneous in some respects, they were not to be considered as damnable. Again, in 538, there died az-Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often called the last of the Mu‘tazilites. He was not that by any means, but his heresies were either mild or were regarded mildly. A single point will show this. His commentary on the Qur’an, the Kashshaf, was revised and expurgated in the orthodox interest by al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in that form is now the most popular and respected of all expositions. The Kashshaf itself, in its original, unmodified form, has been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn Rushd, the Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is combating the arguments of the mutakallims, makes little difference between the Mu‘tazilites and the others. They are only, to him, another variety of scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea, perhaps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek in such matters. Since then, and into quite modern times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians called Mu‘tazilites by themselves or others. Practically, they have been scholastics of eccentric views. Finally, the use of this name for themselves by the present-day broad school Muslims of India is absolutely unhistorical and highly misleading.

We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological consequences of the preceding theology.

Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy which has to be met so much as simple unbelief, more or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the earlier period are now dividing in two directions, one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and the other toward doubt in the largest sense, passing over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists. Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi and of the Ikhwan as-safa. The teachings of the latter pass on to the Isma‘ilians who developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power, scattered from Persia to Syria. These were otherwise called Assassins; otherwise Batinites in the narrower sense—in the broader that term meant only those who found under the letter of the Qur’an a hidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta‘limites or claimers of a ta‘lim, a secret teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the “Sincere Brethren” was transmuted through ambition and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period, too, fall some well-known names of dubious and more than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni (d. 440) even at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep his footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He was certainly the first scientific student of India and Indica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose attainments and results show that our so-called modern methods are as old as genius. On religion, he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weakness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who went his own way without treading on the religious toes of other people.

His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopÆdist of his age, and his scientific work, and especially that in medicine, went further than anything else to put the Muslim East and mediÆval Europe in the strait waistcoat from which the first has not yet emerged and the second only shook itself free in the seventeenth century. He was a student of Aristotle and a mystic, as all Muslim students of Aristotle have been. How far his mysticism enabled him to square the Qur’an with his philosophy is not clear; such men seldom said exactly what they meant and all that they thought. He was also a diligent student and reader of the Qur’an and faithful in his public religious duties. Yet the Muslim world asserts that he left behind him a testamentary tractate (wasiya) defending dissimulation as to the religion of the country in which we might be; that it was not wrong for the philosopher to go through religious rites which for him had no meaning. He, too, is significant for his time, and, if our interest were philosophy, would call for lengthened treatment. As it is, he marks for us the accomplished separation between students of theology and students of philosophy.

An equally well known and by us much better loved name is that of Umar al-Khayyam, who died later, about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with Ibn Sina. He, too, was a bon vivant, but of a deeper, more melancholy strain. His wine meant more than friendly cups; it was a way of escape from the world and its burden. His science, too, went deeper. He was not a gatherer and arranger of the wisdom of the past; his reformed calendar is more perfect than that which we even now use. His faith is a riddle to us, as it was to his comrades. But it was because he had no certain truth to proclaim that Umar did not speak out clearly. His last words were almost those of Rabelais, “I go to meet the great Perhaps.” Anecdotage connects his name with that of al-Ghazzali. Neither had escaped the pall of universal scepticism which must have descended upon their time. But al-Ghazzali, by God’s grace, as he himself reverently says, was enabled to escape. Umar died under it.

A very different man was Abu-l-Ala al-Ma‘arri, the blind poet and singer of intellectual freedom. In Arabic literature there is no other voice like his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters; no philosopher nor theologian nor scientist, though at one time he seems to have come in contact with a circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same; and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to keep his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own way, undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great thoughts and flung out a sÆva indignatio on hypocrisy and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But Abu-l-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suffering humanity and his confidence in the light of reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the town of his birth, Ma‘arrat an-Nu‘man, in northern Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered to live out his long life of eighty-six years.

We can now return to the development of scholastic theology in the orthodox church at the hands of the followers of al-Ash‘ari. They had to fight their way against many and most differing opponents. At the one extreme were the dwindling Mu‘tazilites, passing slowly into comparatively innocuous heretics, and the growing party of unbelievers, philosophical and otherwise, open and secret. At the other extreme was the mob of Hanbalites, belonging to the only legal school which laid theological burdens on its adherents. The theologians, in this case, certainly varied as to the weight of their own anathemas against all kalam, but were at one in that they carried the bulk of the multitude with them and could enforce their conclusions with the cudgels of rioters. In the midst were the rival orthodox (pace the Hanbalites) developers of kalam, among whom the Mataridites probably held the most important place. Thus, the Ash‘arite school was the nursling as well as the child of controversy.

It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least in tradition, with the final form of that system, should be that of a controversialist. But this man, Abu Bakr al-Baqilani the Qadi, was more than a mere controversialist. It is his glory to have contributed most important elements to and put into fixed form what is, perhaps, the most fantastic and daring metaphysical scheme, and almost certainly the most thorough theological scheme, ever thought out. On the one hand, the Lucretian atoms raining down through the empty void, the self-developing monads of Leibnitz, pre-established harmony and all, the Kantian “things in themselves” are lame and impotent in their consistency beside the parallel Ash‘arite doctrines; and, on the other, not even the rigors of Calvin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can compete with the unflinching exactitude of the Muslim conclusions.

First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash‘arites was that of Kant, to fix the relation of knowledge to the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani defined knowledge (ilm) as cognition (ma‘rifa) of a thing as it is in itself. But in reaching that “thing in itself” they were much more thorough than Kant. Only two of the Aristotelian categories survived their attack, substance and quality. The others, quantity, place, time and the rest, were only relationships (i‘tibars) existing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and not things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could not exist in either of the two things which it brought together; for example, in the cause or the effect. It must be in a third thing. But to bring this third thing and the first two together, other relationships would be needed and other things for these relationships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in an infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aristotle the position that such an infinite series backward (tasalsul) is inadmissible. Relationships, then, had no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective non-entities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter was now impossible for them. All the categories had gone except substance and quality; and among them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the possibility of suffering the impress of form. A possibility is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a subjectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the active form and all causes must also go. They, too, are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting character of appearances drove them to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a quality planted in the nature of a thing; that the idea “nature” did not exist. Then this drove them further. Substances exist only with qualities, i.e., accidents. These qualities may be positive or they may be negative; the ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence, the substances themselves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as quality is fleeting, has only a moment’s duration.

But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So atomists they became, and, as always, after their own fashion. Their atoms are not of space only, but also of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental and physical, of the world in place and time, is a multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but has extension neither in space nor time. They have simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may be permitted, are equally unextended and have also absolute void—of time—between them. Just as space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in a succession of untouching moments and leaps across the void from one to the other with the jerk of the hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and can exist only in connection with change. The monads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature in themselves, no possibility of development along certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again are not, all change and action in the world are produced by their entering into existence and dropping out again, not by any change in themselves.

But this most simple view of the world left its holders in precisely the same difficulty, only in a far higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was compelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to bring his monads into orderly relations with one another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell back upon God and found in His will the ground of all things.

We here pass from their ontology to their theology, and as they were thorough-going metaphysicians, so now they are thorough-going theologians. Being was all in the one case; now it is God that is all. In truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism which destroys the possibility of a philosophy in order to drive men back to God and His revelations and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact of the universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his ecstasy, “Huwa-l-haqq,” he does not mean, “He is the Truth,” in our Western sense of Verity, or our New Testament sense of “The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” but simply, “He is the Fact”—the one Reality.

To return: from their ontology they derived an argument for the necessity of a God. That their monads came so and not otherwise must have a cause; without it there could be no harmony or connection between them. And this cause must be one with no cause behind it; otherwise we would have the endless chain. This cause, then, they found in the absolutely free will of God, working without any matter beside it and unaffected by any laws or necessities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the motion and change of the world. These, in our sense, do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved, that really means that God has annihilated—or permitted to drop out of existence, by not continuing to uphold, as another view held—the atoms making up that thing in its original position, and has created them again and again along the line over which it moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and effect. A man writes with a pen and a piece of paper. God creates in his mind the will to write; at the same moment he gives him the power to write and brings about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen and the appearance on the paper. No one of these is the cause of the other. God has brought about by creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite combination to produce these appearances. Thus we see that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the presence, in the mind of the man, of this choice created there by God. This may not seem to us to be very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as anything else in their world. Further, it will be observed how completely this annihilates the machinery of the universe. There is no such thing as law, and the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordinary operations of nature are on the same level. The world and the things in it could have been quite different. The only limitation upon God is that He cannot produce a contradiction. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time. There is no such thing as a secondary cause; when there is the appearance of such, it is only illusional. God is producing it as well as the ultimate appearance of effect. There is no nature belonging to things. Fire does not burn and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance a being burned when the fire touches it and a being cut when the knife approaches it.

In this scheme there are certainly grave difficulties, philosophical and ethical. It establishes a relationship between God and the atoms; but we have already seen that relationships are subjective illusions. That, however, was in the case of the things of the world, perceived by the senses—contingent being, as they would put it. It does not hold of necessary being. God possesses a quality called Difference from originated things (al-mukhalafa lil-hawadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free cause; and the existence of a free cause they were compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of nature and no certainty, or nexus, as to causes and effects; if there is no regular development in the life, mental, moral, and physical of a man—only a series of isolated moments; how can there be any responsibility, any moral claim or duty? This difficulty seems to have been recognized more clearly than the philosophical one. It was met formally by the assertion of a certain order and regularity in the will of God. He sees to it that a man’s life is a unity, and, for details, that the will to eat and the action always coincide. But such an answer must have been felt to be inadequate and to involve grave moral dangers for the common mind. Therefore, as we have seen, the study of kalam was hedged about with difficulties and restrictions. Theologians recognized its trap-falls and doubts, even for themselves, and lamented that they were compelled by their profession to study it. The public discussion of its questions was regarded as a breach of professional etiquette. Theologians and philosophers alike strove to keep these deeper mysteries hidden from the multitude. The gap between the highly educated and the great mass—that fundamental error and greatest danger in Muslim society—comes here again to view. Further, even among theologians, there was some difference in degree of insight, and books and phrases could be read by different men in very different ways. To one, they would suggest ordinary, Qur’anic doctrines; another would see under and behind them a trail of metaphysical consequences bristling with blasphemous possibilities. Thus, Muslim science has been always of the school; it has never learned the vitalizing and disinfecting value of the fresh air of the market-place. This applies to philosophers even more than to theologians. The crowning accusation which Ibn Rushd, the great Aristotelian commentator, brought against al-Ghazzali was that he discussed such subtilties in popular books.

This, then, was the system which seems to have reached tolerably complete form at the hands of al-Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the completion of the system there went by no means its universal or even wide-spread acceptance in the Muslim world. That of al-Mataridi held its own for long, and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is used largely in the Turkish schools. In the fifth century it was considered remarkable that Abu Dharr (d. 434), a theologian of Herat, should be an Ash‘arite rather than, apparently, a Mataridite. It was not till al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash‘arite system came to the orthodox hegemony in the East, and it was only as the result of the work of Ibn Tumart, the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it conquered the West. For long its path was darkened by suspicion and persecution. This came almost entirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu‘tazilites had no force behind them, and while the views of deists and materialists were steadily making way in secret, their public efforts appeared only in very occasional disputes between theologians and philosophers. As we have seen, Muslim philosophy has always practised an economy of teaching.

The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head toward the close of the reign of Tughril Beg, the first Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen, the Saljuqs had taken Merv and Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril Beg had entered Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite domination of the Buwayhids who had so long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a theologically unschooled Turk, should be captured by the simplicity and concreteness of the Hanbalite doctrines.

Added to this political factor there was a theological movement at work which was deeply hostile to the Ash‘arites as they had developed. An important point in the method of al-Ash‘ari himself, and, after him, of his followers, was to put forth a creed, expressed in the old-fashioned terms and containing the old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at all possible, and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpretation which was, naturally, accessible to the professional student only. Accordingly what had at first seemed a weapon against the Mu‘tazilites came to be viewed with more and more suspicion by the holders to the old, unquestioning orthodoxy. The duty also of religious investigation and speculation (nazr) came to have more and more stress laid upon it. The bila kayfa dropped into the background. A Muslim must have a reason for the faith that was in him, they said; otherwise, he was no true Muslim, was in fact an unbeliever. Of course, they limited carefully the extent to which he should go. For the ordinary man a series of very simple proofs would be prepared; the student, on the other hand, when carefully led, could work his way through the system sketched above. All this, naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition.

It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school of law (fiqh) developed into a school of kalam and applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its new victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theologian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of his vituperative style coupled him, in popular proverb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant of the Umayyads in al-Iraq. “The sword of al-Hajjaj and the tongue of Ibn Hazm,” they said. But for all his violence of language and real weight of character and brain, he made little way for his views in his lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after his death before they came into any prominence. The theologians and lawyers around him in the West were devoted to the study of fiqh in the narrowest and most technical sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their predecessors and neglected the great original sources of the Qur’an and the traditions. The immediate study of tradition (hadith) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he absolutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred texts his own views. So the whole system of the canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, naturally, did not like it. Analogy (qiyas), their principal instrument, he swept away. It had no place either in law or theology. Even on the principle of agreement (ijma) he threw a shadow of doubt.

But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm’s originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite principles when applied there should have led him to anthropomorphism (tajsim). The literal meaning of the Qur’an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination only less than the speculative arguments with which the Ash‘arites tried to avoid it. His own method was purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted in his dictionary until he found some other meaning for “hand” or “foot,” or whatever the stumbling-block might be.

But the most original point in his system is his doctrine of the names of God, and his basing of that doctrine upon God’s qualities. The Ash‘arites, he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave inconsistency in saying that God was different in nature, qualities, and actions from all created things, and yet that the human qualities could be predicated of God, and that men could reason about God’s nature. He accepted the doctrine of God’s difference (mukhalafa) on highly logical, but, for us, rather startling grounds. The Qur’an applies to Him the words, “The Most Merciful of those that show mercy,” but God, evidently, is not merciful. He tortures children with all manner of painful diseases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot be predicated of God. What then does the Qur’an mean by those words? Simply that they—arhamu-r-rahimin—are one of God’s names, applied to Him by Himself and that we have no right to take them as descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to use them to throw light on God’s nature. They form one of the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna) of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradition. Similarly, we may call God the Living One (al hayy), because He has given us that as one of His names, not because of any reasoning on our part. Do we not say that His life is different from that of all other living beings? These names then, are limited to ninety-nine and no more should be formed, however full of praise such might be for God, or however directly based on His actions. He has called Himself al-Wahib, the Giver, and so we may use that term of Him. But He has not called Himself al-Wahhab the Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of Him, though it is one of praise. Of course, you may describe His action and say that He is the guider of His saints. But you must not make from that a name, and call Him simply the Guider. Further, if we regard these names as expressing qualities in God, we involve multiplicity in God’s nature; there is the quality and the thing qualified. Here we are back at the old Mu‘tazilite difficulty and it is intelligible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with the Mu‘tazilites than with the Ash‘arites. The one party were Muslims and sinned in ignorance—invincible ignorance, a Roman Catholic would call it; the others were unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from the way. The Mu‘tazilites had tried to limit the qualities as much as possible. At the best they had said that they were God’s essence and not in His essence. Al-Ash‘ari and his school had fairly revelled in qualities and had mapped out the nature of God with the detail—and daring—of a phrenological chart.

Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the will of God only. God has willed that this should be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he concedes, is always saying what does not agree with the truth. But, still, God may pronounce that one lie is a sin, and one not. Muslim ethics, it is true, have never branded lying as sinful in itself.

For the Shi‘ites and their doctrine of an infallible Imam, Ibn Hazm cannot find strong enough expressions of contempt.

In Ibn Hazm’s time, and he praises God for it, there were but few Ash‘arites in the West. Theology generally did not find many students. So things went on till long after his death. To this fiery controversialist the worst blow of all would have been if he could have known that the men who were at last to bring his system, in part and for a time, into public acceptance and repute, were also to complete the conquest of Islam for the Ash‘arite school. That was still far in the future, and we must return to the persecution.

The accounts of the persecution which set in are singularly conflicting. Some assign it to Hanbalite influence; others tell of a Mu‘tazilite wazir of Tughril Beg. That the traditionalist party was the main force in it seems certain. In all probability, however, all the other anti-Ash‘arite sects, from the Mu‘tazilites on, took their own parts. The Ash‘arite party represented a via media and would be set upon with zest by all the extremes. They were solemnly cursed from the pulpits and, what added peculiar insult to it, the Rafidites, an extreme Kharijite sect, were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the greatest theologian of the time, fled to the Hijaz and gained the title of Imam of the two Harams (Imam al-Haramayn), by living for four years between Mecca and al-Madina. Al-Qushayri, the author of a celebrated treatise on Sufiism, was thrown into prison. The Ash‘arite doctors generally were scattered to the winds. Only with the death of Tughril Beg in 455 did the cloud pass. His successor, Alp-Arslan, and especially the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk, favored the Ash‘arites. In 459 the latter founded the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad to be a defence of Ash‘arite doctrines. This may fairly be regarded as the turning-point of the whole controversy. The Hanbalite mob of Baghdad still continued to make itself felt, but its excesses were promptly suppressed. In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there by the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended Ash‘arite lectures.

It is needless to spend more time over the other theologians who were links in the chain between al-Ash‘ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their views wavered, this way and that, only the rationalizing tendency became stronger and stronger. There was danger that the orthodox system would fossilize and lose touch with life as that of the Mu‘tazilites had done. It is true that Sufiism still held its ground. All theologians practically were touched by it in its simpler form; and the cause of the higher Sufiism of ecstasy, wonders by saints (karamat) and communion of the individual soul with God had been eloquently and effectively urged by al-Qushayri (d. 465) in his Risala. But in spite of the labors of so many men of high ability, the religious outlook was growing ever darker. Keen observers recognized that some change was bound to come. That it might be an inflowing of new life by a new al-Ash‘ari was their prayer. It is more than dubious whether even the keenest mind of the time could have recognized what form the new life must take. They had not the perspective and could only feel a vague need. But from what has gone before it will be plain that Islam had again to assimilate to itself something from without or perish. Such had been its manner of progress up till now. New opinions had arisen; had become heresies; conflict had followed; part of the new thought had been absorbed into the orthodox church; part had been rejected; through it all the life of the church had gone on in fuller and richer measure, being always, in spite of everything, the main stream; the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out of sight. So it had been with Murji’ism; so with Mu‘tazilism. With the orthodox, tradition (naql) still stood fast, but reason (aql) had taken a place beside it. Kalam, in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become fairly a part of their system. What was to be the new element, and who was to be its champion?

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CHAPTER IV

With the time came the man. He was al-Ghazzali, the greatest, certainly the most sympathetic figure in the history of Islam, and the only teacher of the after generations ever put by a Muslim on a level with the four great Imams. The equal of Augustine in philosophical and theological importance, by his side the Aristotelian philosophers of Islam, Ibn Rushd and all the rest, seem beggarly compilers and scholiasts. Only al-Farabi, and that in virtue of his mysticism, approaches him. In his own person he took up the life of his time on all its sides and with it all its problems. He lived through them all and drew his theology from his experience. Systems and classifications, words and arguments about words, he swept away; the facts of life as he had known them in his own soul he grasped. When his work was done the revelation of the mystic (kashf) was not only a full part but the basal part in the structure of Muslim theology. That basis, in spite, or rather on account of the work of the mutakallims had previously been lacking. Such a scepticism as their atomic system had practically amounted to, could disprove much but could prove little. If all the categories but substance and quality are mere subjectivities, existing in the mind only, what can we know of things? An ultra-rational basis had to be found and it was found in the ecstasy of the Sufis. But al-Ghazzali brought another element into fuller and more effective working. With him passes away the old-fashioned kalam, a thing of shreds and patches, scraps of metaphysics and logic snatched up for a moment of need, without grasp of the full sweep of philosophy, and incapable, in the long run, of meeting it. Even its atomic system is a philosophy of amateurs, with all their fantastic one-sidedness, their vigor and rigor. But al-Ghazzali was no amateur. His knowledge and grasp of the problems and objects of philosophy were truer and more vital than in any other Muslim up to his time—perhaps after it, too. Islam has not fully understood him any more than Christendom fully understood Augustine, but until long after him the horizon of Muslims was wider and their air clearer for his work. Then came a new scholasticism, reigning to this day.

So much by way of preface. We must now give some account of the life and experiences, the ideas and sensations, of this great leader and reformer. For his life and his work were one. Everything that he thought and wrote came with the weight and reality of personal experience. He recognized this connection himself, and has left us a book—the Munqidh min ad-dalal, “Rescuer from Error”—almost unique in Islam, which, in the form of an apology for the faith, is really an Apologia pro vita sua. This book is our main source for what follows.

Al-Ghazzali was born at Tus in 450. He lost his father when young and was educated and brought up by a trusted Sufi friend. He early turned to the study of theology and canon law, but, as he himself confesses, it was only because they promised wealth and reputation. Very early he broke away from taqlid, simple acceptance of religious truth on authority, and he began to investigate theological differences before he was twenty. His studies were of the broadest, embracing canon law, theology, dialectic, science, philosophy, logic and the doctrines and practices of the Sufis. It was a Sufi atmosphere in which he moved, but their religious fervors do not seem to have laid hold of him. Pride in his own intellectual powers, ambition and contempt for others of less ability mastered him. The latter part of his life as a student was spent at Naysabur as pupil and assistant of the Imam al-Haramayn. Through the Imam he stood in the apostolic succession of Ash‘arite teachers, being the fourth from al-Ash‘ari himself. There he remained till the death of the Imam in 478, when he went out to seek his fortune and found it with the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk. By him al-Ghazzali was appointed, in 484, to teach in the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad. There he had the greatest success as a teacher and consulting lawyer, and his worldly hopes seemed safe. But suddenly he was struck down by a mysterious disease. His speech became hampered; his appetite and digestion failed. His physicians gave him up; his malady, they said, was mental and could only be mentally treated. His only hope lay in peace of mind. Then he suddenly quitted Baghdad, in 488, ostensibly on pilgrimage to Mecca. This flight, for it was so in effect, of al-Ghazzali was unintelligible to the theologians of the time; since that time it has marked the greatest epoch in the church of Islam after the return of al-Ash‘ari.

That it should be unintelligible was natural. No cause could be seen on the surface, except some possible political complications; the cause in reality lay in al-Ghazzali’s mind and conscience. He was wandering in the labyrinth of his time. From his youth he had been a sceptical, ambitious student, playing with religious influences yet unaffected by them. But the hollowness of his life was ever present with him and pressing upon him. Like some with us, he sought to be converted and could not bring it to pass. His religious beliefs gradually gave way and fell from him, piece by piece.

At last, the strain became too great and at the court of Nizam al-Mulk he touched for two months the depths of absolute scepticism. He doubted the evidence of the senses; he could see plainly that they often deceived. No eye could perceive the movement of a shadow, but still the shadow moved; a gold piece would cover any star, but a star was a world larger than the earth. He doubted even the primary ideas of the mind. Is ten more than three? Can a thing be and not be? Perhaps; he could not tell. His senses deceived him, why not his mind? May there not be something behind the mind and transcending it, which would show the falsity of its convictions even as the mind showed the falsity of the information given by the senses? May not the dreams of the Sufis be true, and their revelations in ecstasy the only real guides? When we awake in death, may it not be into a true but different existence? All this—perhaps. And so he wandered for two months. He saw clearly that no reasoning could help him here; he had no ideas on which he could depend, from which he could begin. But the mercy of God is great; He sends His light to whom He wills, a light that flows in, and is given by no reasoning. By it al-Ghazzali was saved; he regained the power to think, and the task which he now set before him was to use this power to guide himself to truth.

When he looked around, he saw that those who gave themselves to the search for truth might be divided into four groups. There were the scholastic theologians, who were much like the theologians of all times and faiths. Second, there were the Ta‘limites, who held that to reach truth one must have an infallible living teacher, and that there was such a teacher. Third, there were the followers of philosophy, basing on logical and rational proofs. Fourth, there were the Sufis, who held that they, the chosen of God, could reach knowledge of Him directly in ecstasy. With all these he had, of course, been acquainted to a greater or less degree; but now he settled down to examine them one by one, and find which would lead him to a certainty to which he could hold, whatever might come. He felt that he could not go back to the unconscious faith of his childhood; that nothing could restore. All his mental being must be made over before he could find rest. He began with scholastic theology, but found no help there. 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-Ash‘ari to meet the Mu‘tazilites; it had done that victoriously, but could do no more. They could hold the faith against heretics, expose their inconsistencies; against the sceptic they availed 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. After study of them and their methods it became clear to al-Ghazzali that the remedy for his ailment was not in scholastic theology.

Then he turned to philosophy. He had seen already that the weakness of the theologians lay in their not having made a sufficient study of primary ideas and the laws of thought. Three years he gave up to this. He was at Baghdad at the time, teaching law and writing legal treatises, and probably the three years extended from the beginning of 484 to the beginning of 487. Two years he gave, without a teacher, to the study of the writings of the different schools of philosophy, and almost another to meditating and working over his results. He felt that he was the first Muslim doctor to do this with the requisite thoroughness. And it is noteworthy that at this stage he seems to have again felt himself to be a Muslim, and in an enemy’s country when he was studying philosophy. He speaks of the necessity of understanding what is to be refuted; but this may be only a confusion between his attitude when writing after 500, and his attitude when investigating and seeking truth, fifteen years earlier. He divides the followers of philosophy in his time into three: Materialists, Deists (Tabi‘is, i.e. Naturalists), and Theists. The materialists reject a creator; the world exists from all eternity; the animal comes from the egg and the egg from the animal. The wonder of creation compels the deists to admit a creator, but the creature is a machine, has a certain poise (i‘tidal) in itself which keeps it running; its thought is a part of its nature and ends with death. They thus reject a future life, though admitting God and His attributes.

He deals at much greater length with the teachings of those whom he calls theists, but through all his statements of their views his tone is not that of a seeker but that of a partisan; he turns his own experiences into a warning to others, and makes of their record a little guide to apologetics. Aristotle he regards as the final master of the Greek school; his doctrines are best represented for Arabic readers in the books of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi; the works of their predecessors on this subject are a mass of confusion. Part of these doctrines must be stamped as unbelief, part as heresy, and part as theologically indifferent. He then divides the philosophical sciences into six, mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics, political economy, ethics; and discusses these in detail, showing what must be rejected, what is indifferent, what dangers arise from each to him who studies or to him who rejects without study.

Throughout, he is very cautious to mark nothing as unbelief that is not really so; to admit always those truths of mathematics, logic, and physics that cannot intellectually be rejected; and only to warn against an attitude of intellectualism and a belief that mathematicians, with their success in their own department, are to be followed in other departments, or that all subjects are susceptible of the exactness and certainty of a syllogism in logic. The damnable errors of the theists are almost entirely in their metaphysical views. Three of their propositions mark them as unbelievers. First, they reject the resurrection of the body and physical punishment hereafter; the punishments of the next world will be spiritual only. That there will be spiritual punishments, al-Ghazzali admits, but there will be physical as well. Second, they hold that God knows universals only, not particulars. Third, they hold that the world exists from all eternity and to all eternity. When they reject the attributes of God and hold that He knows by His essence and not by something added to His essence, they are only heretics and not unbelievers. In physics he accepts the constitution of the world as developed and explained by them; only all is to be regarded as entirely submitted to God, incapable of self-movement, a tool of which the Creator makes use. Finally, he considers that their system of ethics is derived from the Sufis. At all times there have been such saints, retired from the world—God has never left himself without a witness; and from their ecstasies and revelations our knowledge of the human heart, for good and for evil, is derived.

Thus in philosophy he found little light. It did not correspond entirely to his needs, for reason cannot answer all questions nor unveil all the enigmas of life. He would probably have admitted that he had learned much in his philosophical studies—so at least we may gather from his tone; he never speaks disrespectfully of philosophy and science in their sphere; his continual exhortation is that he who would understand them and refute them must first study them; that to do otherwise, to abuse what we do not know, brings only contempt on ourselves and on the cause which we champion. But with his temperament he could not found his religion on intellect. As a lawyer he could split hairs and define issues; but once the religious instinct was aroused, nothing could satisfy him but what he eventually found. And so, two possibilities and two only were before him, though one was hardly a real possibility, if we consider his training and mental powers. He might fall back on authority. It could not be the authority of his childish faith, “Our fathers have told us,” he himself confesses, could never again have weight with him. But it might be some claimer of authority in a new form, some infallible teacher with a doctrine which he could accept for the authority behind it. As the Church of Rome from time to time gathers into its fold men of keen intellect who seek rest in submission, and the world marvels, so it might have been with him. Or again, he might turn directly to God and to personal intercourse with Him; he might seek to know Him and to be taught of Him without any intermediary, in a word to enter on the path of the mystic.

He came next to examine the doctrine of the Ta‘limites. They, a somewhat outlying wing of the Fatimid propaganda, had come at this time into alarming prominence. In 483 Hasan ibn as-Sabbah had seized Alamut and entered on open rebellion. The sect of the Assassins was applying its principles. But the poison of their teaching was also spreading among the people. The principle of authority in religion, that only by an infallible teacher could truth be reached and that such an infallible teacher existed if he could only be found, was in the air. For himself, al-Ghazzali found the Ta‘limites and their teaching eminently unsatisfactory: They had a lesson which they went over parrot-fashion, but beyond it they were in dense ignorance. The trained theologian and scholar had no patience with their slackness and shallowness of thought. He labored long, as ash-Shahrastani later confesses that he, too, did, to penetrate their mystery and learn something from them; but beyond the accustomed formulÆ there was nothing to be found. He even admitted their contention of the necessity of a living, infallible teacher, to see what would follow—but nothing followed. “You admit the necessity of an Imam,” they would say. “It is your business now to seek him; we have nothing to do with it.” But though neither al-Ghazzali nor ash-Shahrastani, who died 43 (lunar) years after him, could be satisfied with the Ta‘limites, many others were. The conflict was hot, and al-Ghazzali himself wrote several books against them.

The other possibility, the path of the mystic, now lay straight before him. In the Munqidh he tells us how, when he had made an end of the Ta‘limites, he began to study the books of the Sufis, without any suggestion that he had had a previous acquaintance with them and their practices. But probably this means nothing more than it does when he speaks in a similar way of studying the scholastic theologians; namely, that he now took up the study in earnest and with a new and definite purpose. He therefore read carefully the works of al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the fragments of al-Junayd, ash-Shibli, and Abu Yazid al-Bistami. He had also the benefit of oral teaching; but it became plain to him that only through ecstasy and the complete transformation of the moral being could he really understand Sufiism. He saw that it consisted in feelings more than in knowledge, that he must be initiated as a Sufi himself; live their life and practise their exercises, to attain his goal.

On the way upon which he had gone up to this time, he had gained three fixed points of faith. He now believed firmly in God, in prophecy, and in the last judgment. He had also gained the belief that only by detaching himself from this world, its life, enjoyments, honors, and turning to God could he be saved in the world to come. He looked on his present life, his writing and his teaching, and saw of how little value it was in the face of the great fact of heaven and hell. All he did now was for the sake of vainglory and had in it no consecration to the service of God. He felt on the edge of an abyss. The world held him back; his fears urged him away. He was in the throes of a conversion wrought by terror; his religion, now and always, in common with all Islam, was other-worldly. So he remained in conflict with himself for six months from the middle of 488. Finally, his health broke down under the strain. In his feebleness and overthrow he took refuge with God, as a man at the end of his resources. God heard him and enabled him to make the needed sacrifices. He abandoned all and wandered forth from Baghdad as a Sufi. He had put his brilliant present and brilliant future absolutely behind him; had given up everything for the peace of his soul. This date, the end of 488, was the great era in his life; but it marked an era, too, in the history of Islam. Since al-Ash‘ari went back to the faith of his fathers in 300, and cursed the Mu‘tazilites and all their works, there had been no such epoch as this flight of al-Ghazzali. It meant that the reign of mere scholasticism was over; that another element was to work openly in the future Church of Islam, the element of the mystical life in God, of the attainment of truth by the soul in direct vision.

He went to Syria and gave himself up for two years to the religious exercises of the Sufis. Then he went on pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem; then to the tomb of Abraham at Hebron; finally to Mecca and al-Madina. With this religious duty his life of strict retirement ended. It is evident that he now felt that he was again within the fold of Islam. In spite of his former resolution to retire from the world, he was drawn back. The prayers of his children and his own aspirations broke in upon him, and though he resolved again and again to return to the contemplative life, and did often actually do so, yet events, family affairs, and the anxieties of life, kept continually disturbing him.

This went on, he tells us, for almost ten years, and in that time there were revealed to him things that could not be reckoned and the discussion of which could not be exhausted. He learned that the Sufis were on the true and only path to the knowledge of God; that neither intelligence nor wisdom nor science could change or improve their doctrine or their ethics. The light in which they walk is essentially the same as the light of prophecy; Muhammad was a Sufi when on his way to be a prophet. There is none other light to light any man in this world. A complete purifying of the heart from all but God is their Path; a seeking to plunge the heart completely in the thought of God, is its beginning, and its end is complete passing away in God. This last is only its end in relation to what can be entered upon and grasped by a voluntary effort; in truth, it is only the first step in the Path, the vestibule to the contemplative life. Revelations (mukashafas, unveilings) came to the disciples from the very beginning; while awake they see angels and souls of prophets, hear their voices and gain from them guidance. Then their State (hal, a Sufi technicality for a state of ecstasy) passes from the beholding of forms to stages where language fails and any attempt to express what is experienced must involve some error. They reach a nearness to God which some have fancied to be a hulul, fusion of being, others an ittihad, identification, and others a wusul, union; but these are all erroneous ways of indicating the thing. Al-Ghazzali notes one of his books in which he has explained wherein the error lies. But the thing itself is the true basis of all faith and the beginning of prophecy; the karamat of the saints lead to the miracles of the prophets. By this means the possibility and the existence of prophecy can be proved, and then the life itself of Muhammad proves that he was a prophet. Al-Ghazzali goes on to deal with the nature of prophecy, and how the life of Muhammad shows the truth of his mission; but enough has been given to indicate his attitude and the stage at which he had himself arrived.

During this ten years he had returned to his native country and to his children, but had not undertaken public duty as a teacher. Now that was forced upon him. The century was drawing to a close. Everywhere there was evident a slackening of religious fervor and faith. A mere external compliance with the rules of Islam was observed, men even openly defended such a course. He adduces as an example of this the Wasiya of Ibn Sina. The students of philosophy went their way, and their conduct shook the minds of the people; false Sufis abounded, who taught antinomianism; the lives of many theologians excited scandal; the Ta‘limites were still spreading. A religious leader to turn the current was absolutely needed, and his friends looked to al-Ghazzali to take up that duty; some distinguished saints had dreams of his success; God had promised a reformer every hundred years and the time was up. Finally, the Sultan laid a command upon him to go and teach in the academy at Naysabur, and he was forced to consent. His departure for Naysabur fell at the end of 499, exactly eleven years after his flight from Baghdad. But he did not teach there long. Before the end of his life we find him back at Tus, his native place, living in retirement among his disciples, in a Madrasa or academy for students and a Khanqah or monastery for Sufis.

There he settled down to study and contemplation. We have already seen what theological position he had reached. Philosophy had been tried and found wanting. In a book of his called Tahafut, or “Destruction,” he had smitten the philosophers hip and thigh; he had turned, as in earlier times al-Ash‘ari, their own weapons against them, and had shown that with their premises and methods no certainty could be reached. In that book he goes to the extreme of intellectual scepticism, and, seven hundred years before Hume, he cuts the bond of causality with the edge of his dialectic and proclaims that we can know nothing of cause or effect, but simply that one thing follows another. He combats their proof of the eternity of the world, and exposes their assertion that God is its creator. He demonstrates that they cannot prove the existence of the creator or that that creator is one; that they cannot prove that He is incorporeal, or that the world has any creator or cause at all; that they cannot prove the nature of God or that the human soul is a spiritual essence. When he has finished there is no intellectual basis left for life; he stands beside the Greek sceptics and beside Hume. We are thrown back on revelation, that given immediately by God to the individual soul or that given through prophets. All our real knowledge is derived from these sources. So it was natural that in the latter part of his life he should turn to the traditions of the Prophet. The science of tradition must certainly have formed part of his early studies, as of those of all Muslim theologians, but he had not specialized in it; his bent had lain in quite other directions. His master, the Imam al-Haramayn, had been no student of tradition; among his many works is not one dealing with that subject. Now he saw that the truth and the knowledge of the truth lay there, and he gave himself, with all the energy of his nature, to the new pursuit.

The end of his wanderings came at Tus, in 505. There he died while seeking truth in the traditions of Muhammad, as al-Ash‘ari, his predecessor, had done. The stamp of his personality is ineffaceably impressed on Islam. The people of his time reverenced him as a saint and wonder-worker. He himself never claimed to work karamat and always spoke modestly of the light which he had reached in ecstasy. After his death legends early began to gather round him, and the current biographies of him are untrustworthy to a degree. It says much for the solidity of his work that he did not pass into a misty figure of popular superstition. But that work remained and remains among his disciples and in his books. We must now attempt to estimate its bearing and scope.

For him, as for the mutakallims in general, the fundamental thing in the world and the starting-point of all speculation is will. The philosophers in their intellectualism might picture God as thought—thought thinking itself and evolving all things thereby. Their source was Plotinus; that of the Muslims was the terrific “Be!” of creation. But how can we know this will of God if we are simply part of what it has produced? In answering this, al-Ghazzali and his followers have diverged from the rest of Islam, but not into heresy. Their view is admitted to be a possible interpretation of Qur’anic passages, if not that commonly held. The soul of man, al-Ghazzali taught, is essentially different from the rest of the created things. We read in the Qur’an (xv, 29; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of His spirit (ruh). This is compared with the rays of the sun reaching a thing on the earth and warming it. In virtue of this, the soul of man is different from everything else in the world. It is a spiritual substance (jawhar ruhani), has no corporeality, and is not subject to dimension, position or locality. It is not in the body or outside of the body; to apply such categories to it is as absurd as to speak of the knowledge or ignorance of a stone. Though created, it is not shaped; it belongs to the spiritual world and not to this world of sensible things. It contains some spark of the divine and it is restless till it rests again in that primal fire; but, again, it is recorded in tradition that the Prophet said, “God Most High created Adam in His own form (sura).” Al-Ghazzali takes that to mean that there is a likeness between the spirit of man and God in essence, quality, and actions. Further, the spirit of man rules the body as God rules the world. Man’s body is a microcosm beside the macrocosm of this world, and they correspond, part by part. Is, then, God simply the anima mundi? No, because He is the creator of all by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His will. Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin, and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. “He who knows his own soul, knows his Lord,” said another tradition.

This view of the nature of the soul is essential to the Sufi position and is probably borrowed from it. But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if the view be pushed any further. It tends (1) to destroy the important Muslim dogma of God’s Difference (mukhalafa) from all created things, and (2) to maintain that the souls of men are partakers of the divine nature and will return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali labored to safeguard both dangers, but they were there and showed themselves in time. Just as the Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophers reached the position that the universe with all its spheres was God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic position that God was the world. Before the atomic scholastics the same danger also lay. It is part of the irony of the history of Muslim theology that the very emphasis on the transcendental unity should lead thus to pantheism. Al-Ghazzali’s endeavor was to strike the via media. The Hegelian Trinity might have appealed to him.

To return, his views on science, as we have already seen, were the same as those of the contemporary students of natural philosophy. Their teachings he accepted, and, so far, he can be compared to a theologian of the present day, who accepts evolution and explains it to suit himself. His world was framed on what is commonly called the Ptolemaic system. He was no flat-earth man like the present Ulama of Islam; God had “spread out the earth like a carpet,” but that did not hinder him from regarding it as a globe. Around it revolve the spheres of the seven planets and that of the fixed stars; Alphonso the Wise had not yet added the crystalline sphere and the primum mobile. All that astronomers and mathematicians teach us of the laws under which these bodies move is to be accepted. Their theory of eclipses and of other phenomena of the heavens is true, whatever the ignorant and superstitious may clamor. Yet it is to be remembered that the most important facts and laws have been divinely revealed. As the weightiest truths of medicine are to be traced back to the teaching of the prophets, so there are conjunctions in the heavens which occur only once in a thousand years and which man can yet calculate because God has taught him their laws. And all this structure of the heavens and the earth is the direct work of God, produced out of nothing by His will, guided by His will, ever dependent for existence on His will, and one day to pass away at His command. So al-Ghazzali joins science and revelation. Behind the order of nature lies the personal, omnipotent God who says, “Be!” and it is. The things of existence do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolution, but are produced directly by Him.

Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali’s attitude toward the physical universe that deserves attention, but which is very difficult to grasp or express. Perhaps it may be stated thus: Existence has three modes; there is existence in the alam al-mulk, in the alam al-jabarut, and in the alam al-malakut. The first is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses; it exists by the power (qudra) of God, one part proceeding from another in constant change. The alam al-malakut exists by God’s eternal decree, without development, remaining in one state without addition or diminution. The alam al-jabarut comes between these two; it seems externally to belong to the first, but in respect of the power of God which is from all eternity (al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the second. The soul (nafs) belongs to the alam al-malakut, is taken from it and returns to it. In sleep and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into contact with the world from which it is derived. This is what happens in dreams—“sleep is the brother of death,” says al-Ghazzali; and thus, too, the saints and the prophets attain divine knowledge. Some angels belong to the world of malakut; some to that of jabarut, apparently those who have shown themselves here as messengers of God. The things in the heavens, the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, etc., belong to the world of malakut. On the one hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and, on the other, these terms for them are not metaphors. Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the difficulty of Muslim eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects the right to allegorize—these things are real, actual; but he relegates them to this world of malakut. Again, the Qur’an, Islam, and Friday (the day of public worship) are personalities in the world of malakut and jabarut. So, too, the world of mulk must appear as a personality at the bar of these other worlds at the last day. It will come as an ugly old woman, but Friday as a beautiful young bride. This personal Qur’an belongs to the world of jabarut, but Islam to that of malakut.

But just as those three worlds are not thought of as separate in time, so they are not separate in space. They are not like the seven heavens and seven earths of Muslim literalists, which stand, story-fashion, one above the other. Rather they are, as expressed above, modes of existence, and might be compared to the speculations on another life in space of n dimensions, framed, from a very different starting-point and on a basis of pure physics, by Balfour Stewart and Tait in their “Unseen Universe.” On another side they stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas, whether through neo-Platonism or more immediately. Sufiism at its best, and when stripped of the trappings of Muslim tradition and Qur’anic exegesis, has no reason to shrink from the investigation either of the physicist or of the metaphysician. And so it is not strange to find that all Muslim thinkers have been tinged with mysticism to a greater or less degree, though they may not all have embraced formal Sufiism and accepted its vocabulary and system. This is true of al-Farabi, who was avowedly a Sufi; true also of Ibn Sina, who, though nominally an Aristotelian, was essentially a neo-Platonist, and admitted the possibility of intercourse with superior beings and with the Active Intellect, of miracles and revelations; true even of Ibn Rushd, who does not venture to deny the immediate knowledge of the Sufi saints, but only argues that experience of it is not sufficiently general to be made a basis for theological science.

In ethics, as we have already seen, the position of al-Ghazzali is a simple one. All our laws and theories upon the subject, the analysis of the qualities of the mind, good and bad, the tracing of hidden defects to their causes—all these things we owe to the saints of God to whom God Himself has revealed them. Of these there have been many at all times and in all countries, and without them and their labors and the light which God has vouchsafed to them, we could never know ourselves. Here, as everywhere, comes out al-Ghazzali’s fundamental position that the ultimate source of all knowledge is revelation from God. It may be major revelation, through accredited prophets who come forward as teachers, divinely sent and supported by miracles and by the evident truth of their message appealing to the human heart, or it may be minor revelation—subsidiary and explanatory—through the vast body of saints of different grades, to whom God has granted immediate knowledge of Himself. Where the saints leave off, the prophets begin; and, apart from such teaching, man, even in physical science, would be groping in the dark.

This position becomes still more prominent in his philosophical system. His agnostic attitude toward the results of pure thought has been already sketched. It is essentially the same as that taken up by Mansel in his Bampton lectures on “The Limits of Religious Thought.” Mansel, a pupil and continuator of Hamilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton’s doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to theology, maintaining that we cannot know or think of the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative and finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no positive knowledge of the attributes of God. This, though disguised by the methods and language of scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali’s attitude in the Tahafut. Mansel’s opponents said that he was like a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing off his seat. Al-Ghazzali, for the support of his seat, went back to revelation, either major, in the books sent down to the prophets, or minor, in the personal revelations of God’s saints. Further, it was not only in the Muslim schools that this attitude toward philosophy prevailed. Yehuda Halevi (d. A.D. 1145; al-Ghazzali, d. 1111) also maintains in his Kusari the insufficiency of philosophy in the highest questions of life, and bases religious truth on the incontrovertible historical facts of revelation. And Maimonides (d. A.D. 1204) in his Moreh Nebuchim takes essentially the same position.

Of his views on dogmatic theology little need be said. Among modern theologians he stands nearest to Ritschl. Like Ritschl, he rejects metaphysics and opposes the influence of any philosophical system on his theology. The basis must be religious phenomena, simply accepted and correlated. Like Ritschl, too, he was emphatically ethical in his attitude; he lays stress on the value for us of a doctrine or a piece of knowledge. Our source of religious knowledge is revelation, and beyond a certain point we must not inquire as to the how and why of that knowledge. To do so would be to enter metaphysics and the danger-zone where we lose touch with vital realities and begin to use mere words. On one point he goes beyond Ritschl, and, on another, Ritschl goes beyond him. In his devotion to the facts of the religious consciousness Ritschl did not go so far as to become a mystic, indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious indignation; al-Ghazzali did become a mystic. But, on the other hand, Ritschl refused absolutely to enter upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes—all that was mere metaphysics and heathenism; al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself, and his only advance was to keep the doctrine on a strictly Qur’anic basis. So it stands written; not, so man is compelled by the nature of things to think.

His work and influence in Islam may be summed up briefly as follows: First, he led men back from scholastic labors upon theological dogmas to living contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the traditions. What happened in Europe when the yoke of mediÆval scholasticism was broken, what is happening with us now, happened in Islam under his leadership. He could be a scholastic with scholastics, but to state and develop theological doctrine on a Scriptural basis was emphatically his method. We should now call him a Biblical theologian.

Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he reintroduced the element of fear. In the Munqidh and elsewhere he lays stress on the need of such a striking of terror into the minds of the people. His was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching; no time for optimism either as to this world or the next. The horrors of hell must be kept before men; he had felt them himself. We have seen how other-worldly was his own attitude, and how the fear of the Fire had been the supreme motive in his conversion; and so he treated others.

Third, it was by his influence that Sufiism attained a firm and assured position in the Church of Islam.

Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical theology within the range of the ordinary mind. Before his time they had been surrounded, more or less, with mystery. The language used was strange; its vocabulary and terms of art had to be specially learned. No mere reader of the Arabic of the street or the mosque or the school could understand at once a philosophical tractate. Greek ideas and expressions, passing through a Syriac version into Arabic, had strained to the uttermost the resources of even that most flexible tongue. A long training had been thought necessary before the elaborate and formal method of argumentation could be followed. All this al-Ghazzali changed, or at least tried to change. His Tahafut is not addressed to scholars only; he seeks with it a wider circle of readers, and contends that the views, the arguments, and the fallacies of the philosophers should be perfectly intelligible to the general public.

Of these four phases of al-Ghazzali’s work, the first and the third are undoubtedly the most important. He made his mark by leading Islam back to its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a place in its system to the emotional religious life. But it will have been noticed that in none of the four phases was he a pioneer. He was not a scholar who struck out a new path, but a man of intense personality who entered on a path already blazed and made it the common highway. We have here his character. Other men may have been keener logicians, more learned theologians, more gifted saints; but he, through his personal experiences, had attained so overpowering a sense of the divine realities that the force of his character—once combative and restless, now narrowed and intense—swept all before it, and the Church of Islam entered on a new era of its existence.

So much space it has been necessary to give to this great man. Islam has never outgrown him, has never fully understood him. In the renaissance of Islam which is now rising to view his time will come and the new life will proceed from a renewed study of his works.

From this time on, the Ash‘arites may be fairly regarded as the dominant school so far as the East is concerned. Saladin (d. 589) did much to aid in the establishment of this hegemony. He was a devout Muslim with the taste of an amateur for theological literature. Anecdotes tell how he had a special little catechism composed, and used himself to instruct his children in it. He founded theological academies in Egypt at Alexandria and Cairo, the first there except the Fatimid Hall of Science. One of the few blots on his name is the execution of the pantheistic Sufi, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, at Aleppo in 587. Meanwhile, in the farther East, Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (d. 606) was writing his great commentary on the Qur’an, the Mafatih al-Ghayb, “The Keys of the Unseen,” and carrying on the work of al-Ghazzali. The title of his commentary itself shows the dash of mysticism in his teaching, and he was in correspondence with Ibn Arabi, the arch-Sufi of the time. He studied philosophy, too, commented on works of Ibn Sina, and fought the philosophers on their own ground as al-Ghazzali had done. Kalam and philosophy are now, in the eyes of the theologians, a true philosophy and a false. Philosophy has taken the place of Mu‘tazilism and the other heresies. The enemies of the faith are outside its pale, and the scholasticizing of philosophy goes on steadily. According to some, a new stage was marked by al-Baydawi (d. 685), who confused inextricably philosophy and kalam, but the newness can have been comparative only. A century later al-Iji (d. 756) writes a book, al-Mawaqif, on kalam, half of which is given to metaphysics and the other half to dogmatics. At-Taftazani is another name worthy of mention. He died in 791, after a laborious life as a controversialist and commentator. When we reach Ibn Khaldun (d. 808), the first philosophical historian and the greatest until the nineteenth century of our era, we find that kalam has fallen again from its high estate. It has become a scholastic discipline, useful only to repel the attacks of heretics and unbelievers; and of heretics, says Ibn Khaldun, there are now none left. Reason, he goes on, cannot grasp the nature of God; cannot weigh His unity nor measure His qualities. God is unknowable and we must accept what we are told about Him by His prophets. Such was the result of the destruction of philosophy in Islam.

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CHAPTER V

We have now anticipated one of the strangest and most characteristic figures and movements in the history of Islam. The preceding account, except as relates to Ibn Khaldun, has told of the triumphs of the Ash‘arites in the East only. In the West the movement was slower, and to it we must now turn. The Maghrib—the Occident, as the Arabs called all North Africa beyond Egypt—had been slow from the first to take on the Muslim impress. The invading army had fought its way painfully through, but the Berber tribes remained only half subdued and one-tenth Islamized. Egypt was conquered in A.H. 20, and Samarqand had been reached in 56; but it was not till 74 that the Muslims were at Carthage. And even then and for long after there arose insurrection after insurrection, and the national spirit of the Berbers remained unbroken. Broadly, but correctly, Islam in North Africa for more than three centuries was a failure. The tribal constitutions of the Berbers were unaffected by the conception of the Khalifate and their primitive religious aspirations by the Faith of Muhammad. Not till the possibility came to them to construct Muslim states out of their own tribes did their opposition begin to weaken. And then it was rather political Islam that had weakened. When the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 356 and moved the seat of their empire from al-Mahdiya to the newly founded Cairo, Islam assumed a new meaning for North Africa. The Fatimid empire there quickly melted away, and in its place arose several independent states, Berber in blood though claiming Arab descent and bearing Arab names. Islam no longer meant foreign oppression, and it began at last to make its way. Again, in the preceding period of insurrection the Berber leaders had frequently appeared in the guise and with the claim of prophets, men miraculously gifted and with a message from God. These wild tribesmen, with all their fanaticism for their own tribal liberties, have always been peculiarly accessible to the genius which claims its mission from heaven. So they had taken up the Fatimid cause and worshipped Ubayd Allah the Mahdi. And so they continued thereafter, and still continue to be swayed by saints, darwishes, and prophets of all degrees of insanity and cunning. The latest case in point is that of the Shaykh as-Sanusi, with whom we have already dealt. As time went on, there came a change in these prophet-led risings and saint-founded states. They gradually slipped over from being frankly anti-Muhammadan, if also close imitations of Muhammad’s life and methods, to being equally frankly Muslim. The theology of Islam easily afforded them the necessary point of connection. All that the prophet of the day need do was to claim the position of the Mahdi, that Guided One, who according to the traditions of Muhammad was to come before the last day, when the earth shall be filled with violence, and to fill it again with righteousness. It was easy for each new Mahdi to select from the vast and contradictory mass of traditions in Muslim eschatology those which best fitted his person and his time. To the story and the doctrine of one of these we now come.

At the beginning of the sixth century a certain Berber student of theology, Ibn Tumart by name, travelled in the East in search of knowledge. An early and persistent western tradition asserts that he was a favorite pupil of al-Ghazzali’s, and was marked out by him as showing the signs of a future founder of empire. This may be taken for what it is worth. What is certain is that Ibn Tumart went back to the Maghrib and there brought about the triumph of a doctrine which was derived, if modified, from that of the Ash‘arites. Previously all kalam had been under a cloud in the West. Theological studies had been closely limited to fiqh, or canon law, and that of the narrowed school of Malik ibn Anas. Even the Qur’an and the collections of traditions had come to be neglected in favor of systematized law-books. The revolt of Ibn Hazm against this had apparently accomplished little. It had been too one-sided and negative, and had lacked the weight of personality behind it. Ibn Hazm had assailed the views of others with a wealth of vituperative language. But he had been a controversialist only. There is a story, tolerably well authenticated, that the books of al-Ghazzali were solemnly condemned by the Qadis of Cordova, and burnt in public. Yet, against that is to be set that all the Spanish theologians did not approve of this violence.

Ibn Tumart started in life as a reformer of the corruptions of his day, and seems to have slipped from that into the belief that he had been appointed by God as the great reformer for all time. As happens with reformers, from exhortation it came to force; from preaching at the abuses of the government to rebellion against the government. That government, the Murabit, went down before Ibn Tumart and his successors, and the pontifical rule of the Muwahhids, the asserters of God’s tawhid or unity, rose in its place. The doctrine which he preached bears evident marks of the influence of al-Ghazzali and of Ibn Hazm. Tawhid, for him, meant a complete spiritualizing of the conception of God. Opposed to tawhid, he set tajsim, the assigning to God of a jism or body having bulk. Thus, when the theologians of the West took the anthropomorphic passages of the Qur’an literally, he applied to them the method of ta’wil, or interpretation, which he had learned in the East, and explained away these stumbling-blocks. Ibn Hazm, it will be remembered, resorted to grammatical and lexicographical devices to attain the same end, and had regarded ta’wil with abhorrence. To Ibn Tumart, then, this tajsim was flat unbelief and, as Mahdi, it was his duty to oppose it by force of arms, to lead a jihad against its maintainers. Further, with Ibn Hazm, he agreed in rejecting taqlid. There was only one truth, and it was man’s duty to find it for himself by going to the original sources. This is the genuine Zahirite doctrine which utterly rejects all comity with the four other legal rites; but Ibn Tumart, as Mahdi, added another element. It is based on a very simple Imamite philosophy of history. There has always been an Imam in the world, a divinely appointed leader, guarded by isma, protection against error. The first four Khalifas were of such divine appointment; thereafter came usurpers and oppressors. Theirs was the reign of wickedness and lies in the earth. Now he, the Mahdi, was come of the blood of the Prophet and bearing plainly all the necessary, accrediting signs to overcome these tyrants and anti-Christs. He thus was an Imamite, but stood quite apart from the welter of conflicting Shi‘ite sects—the Seveners, Twelvers, Zaydites and the rest—as far as do the present Sharifs of Morocco with their Alid-Sunnite position. The Mahdi, it is to be remembered, is awaited by Sunnites as by Shi‘ites, and is guarded against error as much as an Imam, since he partakes of the general isma which in divine things belongs to prophets. Such a leader, then, could claim from the people absolute obedience and credence. His word must be for them the source of truth. There was, therefore, no longer any need of analogy (qiyas) as a source, and we accordingly find that Ibn Tumart rejected it in all but legal matters and there surrounded it with restrictions. Analogical argument in things theological was forbidden.

But where he absolutely parted company from the Ash‘arites was with regard to the qualities of God. In that, too, he followed the view of Ibn Hazm sketched above. We must take the Qur’anic expressions as names and not as indicating attributes to us. It is true that his creed shows signs of a philosophical width lacking in Ibn Hazm. Like the Mu‘tazilites, e.g. Abu Hudhayl, he defines largely by negations. God is not this; is not affected by that. It is even phrased so as to be capable of a pantheistic explanation, and we find that Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on it. But it may be doubted whether Ibn Tumart was himself a pantheist. All phases of Islam, as we have seen, ran toward that; and here there is only a little indiscretion in the wording. But it may easily have been that he had besides, like the Fatimids, a secret teaching or exposition of those simpler declarations which were intended for the mass of the people. Among his successors distinct traces of such a thing appear; both Aristotelian philosophers and advanced Sufis are connected with the Muwahhid movement. That, however, belongs to the sequel.

The success of Ibn Tumart, if halting at first, was eventually complete. As a simple lawyer who felt called upon to protest—as, indeed, are all good Muslims in virtue of a tradition from Muhammad—against the abuses of the time, he accomplished comparatively little. As Mahdi, he and his supporter and successor, Abd al-Mu’min, swept the country. For his movement was not merely Imamite and Muslim, but an expression as well of Berber nationalism. Here was a man, sprung from their midst, of their own stock and tongue, who, as Prophet of God, called them to arms. They obeyed his call, worshipped him and fought for him. He translated the Qur’an for them into Berber; the call to prayers was given in Berber; functionaries of the church had to know Berber; his own theological writings circulated in Berber as well as in Arabic. As Persia took Islam and moulded it to suit herself, so now did the Berber tribes. And a strange jumble they made of it. With them, the Zahirite system of canon law, rejected by all other Muslim peoples, enjoyed its one brief period of power and glory. Shi‘ite legends and superstitions mingled with philosophical free thought. The book of mystery, al-Jafr, written by Ali, and containing the history of the world to the end of time, was said to have passed from the custody of al-Ghazzali at his death to the hands of the Mahdi and was by him committed to his successors. If only in view of the syncretism practised by both, it was fitting that al-Ghazzali and Ibn Tumart should be brought closely together. Yet it is hard to explain the persistence with which the great Ash‘arite is made the teacher and guide of the semi-Zahirite. There must have been something, now obscure to us, in their respective systems which suggested to contemporaries such intimate connection.

The rule of the Muwahhids lasted until 667, nearly one hundred years, and involved in its circle of influence many weighty personalities. With some of these we will now deal shortly.

It has been told above how narrow in general were the intellectual interests of the West. Canon law, poetry, history, geography were eagerly pursued, but little of original value was produced. Originality and the breaking of ground in new fields were under a ban. Subtilty of thought and luxury of life took their place. Above all, and naturally, this applied to philosophy. And so it comes that the first philosophic name in the Muslim West is that of Abu Bakr ibn Bajja, for mediÆval Europe Avenpace, who died comparatively young in 533. For him, as for all, and still more in the West than in the East, the problem of the philosopher was how to gain and maintain a tenable position in a world composed mostly of the philosophically ignorant and the religiously fanatical. This problem had two sides, internal and external. The inner and the nobler one was how such a mind could in its loneliness rise to its highest level and purify itself to the point of knowing things as they really are and so reach that eternal life in which the individual spirit loses itself in the Active Intellect (???? p???t????, al-aql al-fa‘‘al) which is above all and behind all. The other, and baser, was how to so present his views and adapt his life that the life and the views might be possible in a Muslim community.

Ibn Bajja was a close disciple of al-Farabi, who is to be regarded as the spiritual father of the later Arabic philosophy; Ibn Sina practically falls out. In logic, physics, and metaphysics he followed al-Farabi closely. But we can see how the times have moved and the philosophies with them. The essential differences have appeared and Ibn Bajja can no longer, with a good conscience, appear as a pious Muslim. The Sufi strain also is much weaker. The greatest joy and the closest truth are to be found in thought, and not in the sensuous ecstasies of the mystic. The intellect is the highest element in man’s being, but is only immortal as it joins itself to the one Active Intellect, which is all that is left of God. Here we have the beginning of the doctrine which, later, under the name of Averroism and pampsychism ran like wild-fire through the schools of Europe. Further, only by the constant exercise of its own functions can the intellect of man be thus raised. He must live rationally at all points; be able to give a reason for every action. This may compel him to live in solitude; the world is so irrational and will not suffer reason. Or some of the disciples of reason may draw together and form a community where they may live the calm life of nature and of the pursuit of knowledge and self-development. So they will be at one with nature and the eternal, and far removed from the frenzied life of the multitude with its lower aims and conceptions. It is easy to see how the iron of a fight against overwhelming odds had entered this soul. Only the friendship of some of the Murabit princes saved him; but he died in the end, says a story, by poison.

With the next names we find ourselves at a Muwahhid court, and there the atmosphere has changed. It is evident that, whatever might be the temper of the people, the chiefs of the Muwahhids viewed philosophy with no disfavor. Their problem, as in the case of the Fatimids, seems rather to have been how much the people might be taught with safety. Their solution of the problem—here we proceed on conjecture, but the basis is tolerably sound—was that the bulk of the people should be taught nothing but the literal sense of the Qur’an, metaphors, anthropomorphisms and all; that the educated lay public, which had already some inkling of the facts, should be assured that there was really no difference between philosophy and theology—that they were two phases of one truth; and that the philosophers should have a free hand to go on their own way, always provided that their speculations did not spread beyond their own circle and agitate the minds of the commonalty. It was a beautiful scheme, but like all systems of obscurantism it did not work. On the one hand, the people refused to be blindfolded, and, on the other, philosophy died out of inanition.

In accordance with this, we find the Muwahhid chiefs installing the Zahirite fiqh as the official system and sternly stopping all speculative discussing either of canon law or of theology. “The Word so stands written; take it or the sword,” is the significant utterance which has come to us from Abu Ya‘qub (reg. 558-580), son of Abd al-Mu’min. The same continued under his son Abu Yusuf al-Mansur (reg. 580-595), who added a not very carefully concealed contempt for the Mahdiship of Ibn Tumart. All such things were ridiculous in his philosophic eyes.

Under these men and in adjustment with their system lived and worked Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, the last of the great Aristotelians. Ibn Tufayl was wazir and physician to Abu Ya‘qub and died a year after him, in 531. His was a calm, contemplative life, secluded in princely libraries. But his objects were the same as those of Ibn Bajja. He has evidently no hope that the great body of the people can ever be brought to the truth. A religion, sensuous and sensual alike, is needed to restrain the wild beast in man, and the masses should be left to the guidance of that religion. For a philosopher to seek to teach them better is to expose himself to peril and them to the loss of that little which they have. But in his methods, on the other hand, Ibn Tufayl is essentially at one with al-Ghazzali. He is a mystic who seeks in Sufi exercises, in the constant purifying of mind and body and in the unwearying search for the one unity in the individual multiplicity around him, to find a way to lose his self in that eternal and one spirit which for him is the divine. So at last he comes to ecstasy and reaches those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. The only difference between him and al-Ghazzali is that al-Ghazzali was a theologian and saw in his ecstasy Allah upon His throne and around Him the things of the heavens, as set forth in the Qur’an, while Ibn Tufayl was a philosopher, of neo-Platonic + Aristotelian stamp, and saw in his ecstasy the Active Intellect and Its chain of causes reaching down to man and back to Itself.

The book by which his name has lived, and which has had strange haps, is the romance of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, “The Living One, Son of the Waking One.” In it he conceives two islands, the one inhabited and the other not. On the inhabited island we have conventional people living conventional lives, and restrained by a conventional religion of rewards and punishments. Two men there, Salaman and Asal, have raised themselves to a higher level of self-rule. Salaman adapts himself externally to the popular religion and rules the people; Asal, seeking to perfect himself still further in solitude, goes to the other island. But there he finds a man, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, who has lived alone from infancy and has gradually, by the innate and uncorrupted powers of the mind, developed himself to the highest philosophic level and reached the Vision of the Divine. He has passed through all the stages of knowledge until the universe lies clear before him, and now he finds that his philosophy thus reached, without prophet or revelation, and the purified religion of Asal are one and the same. The story told by Asal of the people of the other island sitting in darkness stirs his soul and he goes forth to them as a missionary. But he soon learns that the method of Muhammad was the true one for the great masses, and that only by sensuous allegory and concrete things could they be reached and held. He retires to his island again to live the solitary life.

The bearing of this on the system of the Muwahhids cannot be mistaken. If it is a criticism of the finality of historical revelation, it is also a defence of the attitude of the Muwahhids toward both people and philosophers. By the favor of Abu Ya‘qub, Ibn Tufayl had practically been able to live on an island and develop himself by study. So, too, Abu Ya‘qub might stand for the enlightened but practical Salaman. Yet the meaning evidently is that between them they failed and must fail. There could only be a solitary philosopher here and there, and happy for him if he found a princely patron. The people which knew not the truth were accursed. Perhaps, rather, they were children and had to be humored and guided as such in an endless childhood.

It is evident that such a solitary possessor of truth had two courses open to him. He could either busy himself in his studies and exercises, as had done Ibn Bajja and Ibn Tufayl, or he could boldly enter public life and trust to his dialectic ingenuity and resource—perhaps, also, to his plasticity of conscience—to carry him past all whispers of heresy and unbelief. The latter course was chosen by Ibn Rushd. He was born at Cordova, in 520, of a family of jurists and there studied law. From his legal studies only a book on the law of inheritance has reached us, and it, though frequently commented on, has never been printed. In 548 he was presented to Abu Ya‘qub by Ibn Tufayl and encouraged by him in the study of philosophy. In it his greatest work was done. In spite of the shreds and patches of neo-Platonism which clung to him, he was the greatest mediÆval commentator on Aristotle. It is only part of the eternal puzzle of the Muslim mind that the utility of Greek for a student of Aristotle seems never to have struck him. Thereafter he acted as judge in different places in Spain and was court physician for a short time in 578 to Abu Ya‘qub. In 575 he had written his tractates, to which we shall come immediately, mediating between philosophy and theology. Toward the end of his life he was condemned by Abu Yusuf al-Mansur for heresy and banished from Cordova. This was in all likelihood a truckling on the part of al-Mansur to the religious prejudices of the people of Spain, who were probably of stiffer orthodoxy than the Berbers. He was in Spain, at Cordova, at the time, and was engaged in carrying on a religious war with the Christians. On his return to Morocco the decree of exile was recalled and Ibn Rushd restored to favor. We find him again at the court in Morocco, and he died there in 595.

This is not the place to enter upon Ibn Rushd’s philosophical system. He was a thorough-going Aristotelian, as he knew Aristotle. That was probably much better than any of his predecessors; but even he had not got clear from the fatal influence of Plotinus. Above all, he is essentially a theologian just as much as they. In Aristotle there had been given what was to all intents a philosophical revelation. Only in the knowledge and acceptance of it could truth and life be found. And some must reach it; one at least there must always be. If a thing is not seen by someone it has existed in vain; which is impossible. If someone at least does not know the truth, it also has existed in vain, which is still more impossible. That is Ibn Rushd’s way of saying that the esse is the percipi and that there must be a perceiver. And he has unlimited faith in his means of reaching that Truth—only by such capitalization can we express his theologic attitude. The logic of Aristotle is infallible and can break through to the supreme good itself. Ecstasy and contemplation play no part with him; there he separates from Ibn Tufayl. Such intercourse with the Active Intellect may exist; but it is too rare to be taken into account. Obviously, Ibn Rushd himself, who to himself was the percipient of truth for his age, had never reached that perception. Solitary meditation he cannot away with; for him the market-place and contact with men; there he parts with Ibn Bajja. In truth, he is nearer to the life in life of Ibn Sina, and that, perhaps, explains his constant attacks on the Persian bon vivant.

All his predecessors he joys in correcting, but his especial bÊte noire is al-Ghazzali. With him it is war on life or death. He has two good causes. One is al-Ghazzali’s “Destruction of the Philosophers;” of it, Ibn Rushd, in his turn, writes a “Destruction.” This is a clever, incisive criticism, luminous with logical exactitude, yet missing al-Ghazzali’s vital earnestness and incapable of reaching his originality. But al-Ghazzali had not only attacked the philosophers; he had also spread the knowledge of their teachings and reasonings, and had said that there was nothing esoteric and impossible of grasp in them for the ordinary mind. He had thus assailed the fundamental principles of the Muwahhid system. Against this, Ibn Rushd wrote the tractates spoken of above. They were evidently addressed to the educated laity; not to the ignorant multitude, but to those who had already read such books as those of al-Ghazzali and been affected by them, yet had not studied philosophy at first hand. That they were not intended for such special students is evident from the elaborate care that is taken in them to conceal, or, if that were not possible, to put a good face upon obnoxious doctrines. Thus, his philosophy left no place in reality for a system of rewards and punishments or even for any individual existence of the soul after death, for a creation of the material world, or for a providence in the direct working of the supreme being on earth. But all these points are involved or glossed over in these tractates.

Further, it is plain that their object was to bring about a reform of religion in itself, and also of the attitude of theologians to students of philosophy. In them he sums up his own position under four heads: First, that philosophy agrees with religion and that religion recommends philosophy. Here, he is fighting for his life. Religion is true, a revelation from God; and philosophy is true, the results reached by the human mind; these two truths cannot contradict each other. Again, men are frequently exhorted in the Qur’an to reflect, to consider, to speculate about things; that means the use of the intelligence, which follows certain laws, long ago traced and worked out by the ancients. We must, therefore, study their works and proceed further on the same course ourselves, i.e., we must study philosophy.

Second, there are two things in religion, literal meaning and interpretation. If we find anything in the Qur’an which seems externally to contradict the results of philosophy, we may be quite sure that there is something under the surface. We must look for some possible interpretation of the passage, some inner meaning; and we shall certainly find it.

Third, the literal meaning is the duty of the multitude, and interpretation the duty of scholars. Those who are not capable of philosophical reasoning must hold the literal truth of the different statements in the Qur’an. The imagery must be believed by them exactly as it stands, except where it is absolutely evident that we have only an image. On the other hand, philosophers must be given the liberty of interpreting as they choose. If they find it necessary, from some philosophical necessity, to adopt an allegorical interpretation of any passage or to find in it a metaphor, that liberty must be open to them. There must be no laying down of dogmas by the church as to what may be interpreted and what may not. In Ibn Rushd’s opinion, the orthodox theologians sometimes interpreted when they should have kept by the letter, and sometimes took literally passages in which they should have found imagery. He did not accuse them of heresy for this, and they should grant him the same liberty.

Fourth, those who know are not to be allowed to communicate interpretations to the multitude. So Ali said, “Speak to the people of that which they understand; would ye that they give the lie to God and His messenger?” Ibn Rushd considered that belief was reached by three different classes of people in three different ways. The many believe because of rhetorical syllogisms (khitabiya), i.e., those whose premises consist of the statements of a religious teacher (maqbulat), or are presumptions (maznunat). Others believe because of controversial syllogisms (jadliya), which are based on principles (mashhurat) or admissions (musallamat). All these premises belong to the class of propositions which are not absolutely certain. The third class, and by far the smaller, consists of the people of demonstration (burhan). Their belief is based upon syllogisms composed of propositions which are certain. These consist of axioms (awwaliyat) and five other classes of certainties. Each of these three classes of people has to be treated in the way that suits its mental character. It is wrong to put demonstration or controversy before those who can understand only rhetorical reasoning. It destroys their faith and gives them nothing to take its place. The case is similar with those who can only reach controversial reasoning but cannot attain unto demonstration. Thus Ibn Rushd would have the faith of the multitude carefully screened from all contact with the teachings of philosophers. Such books should not be allowed to go into general circulation, and if necessary, the civil authorities should step in to prevent it. If these principles were accepted and followed, a return might be looked for of the golden age of Islam, when there was no theological controversy and men believed sincerely and earnestly.

On this last paragraph it is worth noticing that its threefold distinction is “conveyed” by Ibn Rushd from a little book belonging to al-Ghazzali’s later life, after he had turned to the study of tradition, Iljam al-Awamm an ilm al-kalam, “The reining in of the commonalty from the science of kalam.”

Such was, practically, the end of the Muslim Aristotelians. Some flickers of philosophic study doubtless remained. So we find a certain Abu-l-Hajjaj ibn Tumlus (d. 620) writing on Aristotle’s “Analytics,” and the tractates of Ibn Rushd described above were copied at Almeria in 724. But the fate of all Muslim speculation fell, and this school went out in Sufiism. It was not Ibn Rushd that triumphed but Ibn Tufayl, and that side of Ibn Tufayl which was akin to al-Ghazzali. From this point on, the thinkers and writers of Islam become mystics more and more overwhelmingly. Dogmatic theology itself falls behind, and of philosophical disciplines only formal logic and a metaphysics of the straitest scholastic type are left. Philosophy becomes the handmaid of theology, and a very mechanical handmaid at that. It is only in the schools of the Sufis that we find real development and promise of life. The future lay with them, however dubious it may seem to us that a future in such charge must be.

The greatest Sufi in the Arabic-speaking world was undoubtedly Muhyi ad-Din ibn Arabi. He was born in Murcia in 560, studied hadith and fiqh at Seville, and in 598 set out to travel in the East. He wandered through the Hijaz, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and died at Damascus in 638, leaving behind him an enormous mass of writings, at least 150 of which have come down to us. Why he left Spain is unknown; it is plain that he was under the influence of the Muwahhid movement. He was a Zahirite in law; rejected analogy, opinion, and taqlid, but admitted agreement. His attachment to the opinions of Ibn Hazm especially was very strong. He edited some of that scholar’s works, and was only prevented by his objections to taqlid from being a formal Hazmite. But with all that literalness in fiqh, his mysticism in theology was of the most rampant and luxurious description. Between the two sides, it is true, there existed a connection of a kind. He had no need for analogy or opinion or for any of the workings of the vain human intelligence so long as the divine light was flooding his soul and he saw the things of the heavens with plain vision. So his books are a strange jumble of theosophy and metaphysical paradoxes, all much like the theosophy of our own day. He evidently took the system of the mutakallims and played with it by means of formal logic and a lively imagination. To what extent he was sincere in his claim of heavenly illuminings and mysterious powers it would be hard to say. The oriental mystic has little difficulty in deceiving himself. His opinions—so far as we can know them—may be briefly sketched as follows: The being of all things is God: there is nothing except Him. All things are an essential unity; every part of the world is the whole world. So man is a unity in essence but a multiplicity in individuals. His anthropology was an advance upon that of al-Ghazzali toward a more unflinching pantheism. He has the same view that the soul of man is a spiritual substance different from everything else and proceeding from God. But he obliterates the difference of God and makes souls practically emanations. At death these return into God who sent them forth. All religions to Ibn Arabi were practically indifferent; in them all the divine was working and was worshipped. Yet Islam is the more advantageous and Sufiism is its true philosophy. Further, man has no free-will; he is constrained by the will of God, which is really all that exists. Nor is there any real difference between good and evil; the essential unity of all things makes such a division impossible.

The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we need deal—and, perhaps, absolutely the last—is Abd al-Haqq ibn Sab‘in. He was as much a mystic as Ibn Arabi, but was apparently more deeply read in philosophy and did not cast his conceptions in so theological and Qur’anic a mould. He, too, was born in Murcia about 613, and must very early have founded a school of his own, gathered disciples round him and established a wide reputation. High skill in alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to him, which probably means that he claimed to be a wali, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers. He is accused of posing as a prophet, although in orthodox Islam Muhammad is the last and the seal of the prophets. But against this, it may be said that he had no need of the actual title, “prophet”; many mystics held—heretically, it is true—that the wali stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He had evidently besides this a more solid reputation in philosophy, as is shown by his correspondence with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250 A.D.). The story is told on the Muslim side only, but has vraisemblance and seems to be tolerably authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed certain questions in philosophy—on the eternity of the world, the nature of the soul, the number and nature of the categories, etc.—to different Muslim princes, begging that they would submit them to their learned men. So the questions came to ar-Rashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to Ibn Sab‘in as a scholar whose reputation had reached even the Sicilian court. Ar-Rashid passed them on; Ibn Sab‘in accepted the commission with a smile—this is the Muslim account—and triumphantly and contemptuously expounded the difficulties of the Christian monarch and student. In his replies he certainly displays a very complete and exact knowledge of the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic systems, and is far less a blind follower of Aristotle than is Ibn Rushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most unpleasant, and we discover in the end that all this is a mere preliminary discipline, leading in itself to agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing but vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision of the Sufi can certainty and peace be found. So we have again the circle through which al-Ghazzali went. As distinguished from Ibn Rushd, the prophet, with Ibn Sab‘in, takes higher rank than the sage. Beyond the current division of the soul into the vegetative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two others, derived from the reasonable, the soul of wisdom and the soul of prophecy. The first of these is the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the prophet; and the last is the highest. Of the reasonable soul upward, he predicates immortality.

His position otherwise must have been practically the same as that of Ibn Arabi. Like him he was a Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. “God is the reality of existing things,” he taught, and it is evident that he belonged to the school of pantheism in which God is all, and separate things are emanations from him. In life we have flashes of recognition of the heavenly realities, but only at death—which is our true birth—do we reach union with the eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intellect.

Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold these views in public so long as the Muwahhids were strong enough to protect him. But their empire was rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had passed. An attack on him at Tunis, where the Hafsids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643, and there he took refuge at—of all places—Mecca. The refuge seems to have been secure. He lived there more than twenty years amid a circle of disciples, among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about 667. There is a poorly authenticated story that he died by suicide. The man himself, with so many of his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For all his haughty pride of learning, it is noted of him that his first disciples were from among the poor. His contemporaries described him as “a Sufi after the manner of the philosophers.” The last vestige of the Muwahhid empire passed away in the year of his death.

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CHAPTER VI

Our sources now begin to grow more and more scanty, and we must hasten over long intervals of time and pass with little connection from one name to another. Preliminary investigations are also to a great extent lacking, and it is possible that the centuries which we shall merely touch may have witnessed developments only less important than those with which we have already dealt. But that is not probable; for when, after a long silence, the curtain rises again for us in the twelfth Muslim century, we shall find at work only those elements and conditions whose inception and growth we have now set forth.

One name in our rapid flight deserves mention, at least. It is that of Umar ibn al-Farid, the greatest poet that Arabic mysticism has produced. He was born at Cairo in 586, lived for a time at Mecca, and died at Cairo in 632. He led no new movement or advance, but the East still cherishes his memory and his poems.

We have already noticed (p. 177) the beginnings of darwish Fraternities and the founding of monasteries or khanqahs. During the period over which we have just passed, these received a great and enduring impetus. The older ascetics and walis gathered round them groups of personal followers and their pupils carried on their names. But it was long, apparently, before definite corporations were founded of fixed purpose to perpetuate the memory of their masters. One of the earliest of these seems to have been the fraternity of Qadirite darwishes, founded by Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, who died in 561 at Baghdad, where pilgrimage is still made to his shrine. So, too, the Rifa‘ite Fraternity was founded at Baghdad by Ahmad ar-Rifa‘a in 576. Another is that of the Shadhilites, named after their founder, ash-Shadhili, who died in 656. Again another is that of the Badawites, whose founder was Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675); his shrine at Tanta in Lower Egypt is still one of the most popular places of pilgrimage. Again, the order of the Naqshbandite darwishes was founded by Muhammad an-Naqshbandi, who died in 791. Among the Turks by far the most popular religious order is that of the Mawlawites, founded by the great Persian mystical poet, Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi (d. 672), whose Mesnevi is read over all Islam. These and very many others, especially of later date, are still in existence. Others, once founded, have again become extinct. Thus, Ibn Sab‘in, though he was surrounded by disciples who for a time after his death carried on the order of Sab‘inites, does not seem now to have any to do him honor. The same holds of a certain Adi al-Hakkari who founded a cloister near Mawsil and died about 558. It is significant that al-Ghazzali, though he founded a cloister for Sufis at Tus and taught and governed there himself, left no order behind him. Apparently in his time the movement toward continuous corporations had not yet begun. It is true that there are at present in existence darwish Fraternities which claim to be descended from the celebrated ascetics and walis, Ibrahim ibn Adham (d. 161), Sari as-Saqati (d. 257) and Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 261), but it may be gravely doubted whether they can show any sound pedigree. The legend of Shaykh Ilwan, who is said to have founded the first order in 49, may be safely rejected. It is significant that the Awlad Ilwan, sons of Ilwan, as his followers are called, form a sect of the Rifa‘ites. Further, just as the Sufis have claimed for themselves all the early pious Muslims, and especially the ten to whom Muhammad made specific promise of Paradise (al-ashara al-mubashshara), so these Fraternities are ascribed in their origin to, and put under the guardianship of the first Khalifas, and, in Egypt at least, a direct descendant of Abu Bakr holds authority over all their orders.

In these orders all are darwishes, but only those gifted by God with miraculous powers are walis. Those of them who are begging friars are faqirs. They stand under an elaborate hierarchy grading in dignity and holiness from the Qutb, or Axis, who wanders, often invisible and always unknown to the world, through the lands performing the duties of his office, and who has a favorite station on the roof of the Ka‘ba, through his naqibs or assistants, down to the lowest faqir. But the members of these orders are not exclusively faqirs. All classes are enrolled as, in a sense, lay adherents. Certain trades affect certain fraternities; in Egypt, for example, the fishermen are almost all Qadirites and walk in procession on their festival day, carrying colored nets as their banners. Much the same thing held, and holds, of the monastic orders of Europe, but the Muslim does not wait till he is dying to put on the weeds of Ahmad al-Badawi or ash-Shadhili. Finally, reference may be made again to the last and most important of all these orders, the militant Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.

We have now returned to the period of al-Iji and at-Taftazani, when philosophy definitely descended from the throne and became the servant and defender of theology. From this time on, the two independent forces at work are the unveiling of the mystic (kashf) and tradition (naql). The only place for reason (aql) now is to prove the possibility of a given doctrine. That done, its actual truth is proven by tradition. These two then, kashf and naql, hold the field, and the history of Muslim theology from this point to the present day is the history of their conflicts. The mystics are accused of heresy by the traditionalists. The traditionalists are accused by the mystics of formalism, hypocrisy, and, above all, of flat inability to argue logically. Both accusations are certainly true. No fine fence on personality can conceal the fact that Muslim mysticism is simple pantheism of the Plotinian type, the individuals are emanations from the One. On the other hand, the formalism of the traditionalists can hardly be exaggerated. They pass over almost entirely into canon lawyers, meriting richly the fine sarcasm of al-Ghazzali, who asked the faqihs of his day what possible value for the next world could lie in a study of the Qur’anic law of inheritance or the like. Tradition (hadith), in the exact sense of the sayings and doings of Muhammad, falls into the background, and fiqh, the systems built upon it by the generations of lawyers, from the four masters down, takes its place. Again, the accusation of illogical reasoning is also thoroughly sound. The habit of unending subdivision deprived the minds of the canonists of all breadth of scope, and their devotion to the principle of acceptance on authority (taqlid) weakened their feeling for argument. It is true, further, that the mystics, such as they were, had heired all the philosophy left in Islam, and were thus become the representatives of the intellectual life. They had so much of an advantage over their more orthodox opponents. But the intellectual life with them, as with the earlier philosophers, remained of a too subjective character. The fatal study of the self, and the self only—that tramping along the high a priori road—and neglect of the objective study of the outside world which ruined their forerunners, was their ruin as well. Outbursts of intellectual energy and revolt we may meet with again and again; there will be few signs of that science which seeks facts patiently in the laboratory, the observatory, and the dissecting-room.

Curiously enough, there fall closely together at this time the death dates of two men of the most opposite schools. The one was Ibn Taymiya, the anthropomorphist free lance, who died in 728, and the other was Abd ar-Razzaq, the pantheistic Sufi, who died in 730. Abd ar-Razzaq of Samarqand and Kashan was a close student and follower of Ibn Arabi. He commented on his books and defended his orthodoxy. In fact, so closely had Ibn Arabi come to be identified with the Sufi position as a whole that a defence of him was a favorite form in which to cast a defence of Sufiism generally. But Abd ar-Razzaq did not follow his master absolutely. On the freedom of the will especially he left him. For Ibn Arabi, the doctrine of the oneness of all things had involved fatalism. Whatever happens is determined by the nature of things, that is, by the nature of God. So the individuals are bound by the whole. Abd ar-Razzaq turned this round. His pantheism was of the same type as that of Ibn Arabi; God, for him, was all. But there is freedom of the divine nature, he went on. It must therefore exist in man also, for he is an emanation from the divine. His every act, it is true, is predetermined, in time, in form, and in place. But his act is brought about by certain causes, themselves predetermined. These are what we would call natural laws in things, natural abilities, aptitudes, etc., in the agent; finally, free choice itself. And that free choice is in man because he is of and from God. Further, it is evident that Abd ar-Razzaq’s anxiety is to preserve a basis for morals. Among the predetermining causes he reckons the divine commands, warnings, proofs in the Qur’an. The guidance of religion finds thus its place and the prophets their work. But what of the existence of evil and the necessity of restraint in a world that has emanated from the divine? This problem he faces bravely. Our world must be the best of all possible worlds; otherwise God would have made it better. Difference, then, among men and things belongs to its essence and necessity. Next, justice must consist in accepting these different things and adapting them to their situations. To try to make all things and men alike would be to leave some out of existence altogether. That would be a great injustice. Here, again, religion enters. Its object is to rectify this difference in qualities and gifts. Men are not responsible for these, but they are responsible if they do not labor to correct them. In the hereafter all will be reabsorbed into the divine being and taste such bliss as the rank of each deserves. For those who need it there will be a period of purgatorial chastisement, but that will not be eternal, in sha Allah.

Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Razzaq divides men into classes according to their insight into divine things. The first is of men of the world, who are ruled by the flesh (nafs) and who live careless of all religion. The second is of men of reason (aql). They through the reason contemplate God, but see only His external attributes. The third is of men of the spirit (ruh) who, in ecstasy, see God face to face in His very essence, which is the substrate of all creation.

In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Razzaq follows, of course, the neo-Platonic model and shows great ingenuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic phrases and ideas of the Qur’an. Like all Muslim thinkers he displays an anxiety to square with his philosophy the terms dear to the multitude.

To Ibn Taymiya all this was the very abomination of desolation itself. He had no use for mystics, philosophers, Ash‘arite theologians, or, in fact, for anyone except himself. A contemporary described him as a man most able and learned in many sciences, but with a screw loose. However it may have been about the last point, there can be no question that he was the reviver for his time and the transmitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite tradition, and that his work rendered possible the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was the champion of the religion of the multitude as opposed to that of the educated few with which we have been dealing so long. This popular theology had been going steadily upon its way and producing its regular riots and disputings. It is related of a certain Ash‘arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d. 620), that, in Damascus, he never dared to pass by a certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the normal salutation of the Peace to a Hanbalite theologian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that he did not regard Fakhr ad-Din as a Muslim. When people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a theological jest and replied, “That man believes in ‘Speech in the Mind’ (kalam nafsi, hadith fi-n-nafs), so I returned his salutation mentally.” The point is a hit at the Ash‘arites, who contended that thought was a kind of speech without letters or sounds, and that God’s quality of Speech could therefore be without letters or sounds.

But even the simple orthodoxy of the populace had not remained unchanged. It had received a vast accretion of the most multifarious superstitions. The cult of saints, alive and dead, of holy sites, trees, garments, and the observance of all manner of days and seasons had been developing parallel to the advance of Sufiism among the educated. The walis were untiring in the recital of the karamat which God had worked for them, and the populace drank in the wonders greedily. The metaphysical and theological side they left untouched. “This is a holy man,” they said, “who can work miracles; we must fear and serve him.” And so they would do without much thought whether his morality might not be antinomian and his theology pantheistic. To abate this and other evils and bring back the faith of the fathers was the task which Ibn Taymiya took up.

He was born near Damascus in 661 and educated as a Hanbalite. His family had been Hanbalite for generations, and he himself taught in that school and was reckoned as the greatest Hanbalite of his time. His position, too, was practically that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, modified by the necessities imposed by new controversaries. Thus he was an anthropomorphist, but of what exact shade is obscure. He was accused of teaching that God was above His throne, could be pointed at, and that He descended from His seat as a man might, i.e., that He was in space. But he certainly distinguished himself from the crasser materialists. He refused to be classed as the adherent of any school or of any system save that of Muhammad and the agreement of the fathers. He claimed for himself the rights of a mujtahid and went back to first sources and principles in everything. His self-confidence was extreme, and he smote down with proud words the Rightly Guided Khalifas, Umar and Ali, themselves. His bases were Qur’an, tradition from the Prophet and from the Companions and analogy. Agreement, in the broad sense of the agreement of the Muslim people, he rejected. If he had accepted it he would have been forced to accept innumerable superstitions, beliefs, and practices—especially the whole doctrine of the walis and their wonders—for their basis was agreement. The agreement of the Companions he did accept, while convicting them right and left of error as individuals.

His life was filled up with persecutions and misfortune. He was a popular idol, and inquiries for his judgment on theological and canonical questions kept pouring in upon him. If there was no inquiry, and he felt that a situation called for an expression of opinion from him, he did not hesitate to send it out with all formality. It is true that it is the duty of every Muslim, so far as he can, to do away or at least to denounce any illegality or unorthodox view or practice which he may observe. This duty evidently weighed heavily on Ibn Taymiya, and there was fear at one time at the Mamluk court lest he might go the way of Ibn Tumart. In one of these utterances he defined the doctrine of God’s qualities as Ibn Hazm had done, and joined thereto denunciations of the Ash‘arite kalam and of the Qur’anic exegesis of the mutakallims as a whole. They were nothing but the heirs and scholars of philosophers, idolaters, Magians, etc.; and yet they dared to go beyond the Prophet and his heirs and Companions. The consequence of this fatwa or legal opinion was that he was silenced for a time as a teacher. On another occasion he gave out a fatwa on divorce, pronouncing tahlil illegal. Tahlil is a device by which an awkward section in the canon law is evaded. If a man divorces his wife three times, or pronounces a threefold divorce formula, he cannot remarry her until she has been married to another man, has cohabited with him and been divorced by him. Muslim ideas of sexual purity are essentially different from ours, and the custom has grown up, when a man has thus divorced his wife in hasty anger, of employing another to marry her on pledge of divorcing her again next day. Sometimes the man so employed refuses to carry out his contract; such refusal is a frequent motif in oriental tales. To avoid this, the husband not infrequently employs one of his slaves and then presents him to his former wife the next day. A slave can legally marry a free woman, but when he becomes her property the marriage is ipso facto annulled, because a slave cannot be the husband of his mistress or a slave woman the wife of her master. It is to Ibn Taymiya’s credit that he was one of the few to lift up their voices against this abomination. His independence is shown at its best.

But it was with the Sufis that he had his worst conflicts, and at their hands he suffered most. In many points his career is parallel to that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Sufi movement taking the place that was played by Mu‘tazilism in the life of the earlier saint. One great difference, it may be remarked, was that al-Ma’mun urged the persecution of Ibn Hanbal, while an-Nasir, the great Mamluk Sultan (reg. 693, 698-708, 709-741), supported Ibn Taymiya as far as he possibly could. The beginning of the Sufi controversy was characteristic. Ibn Taymiya heard that a certain an-Nasr al-Manbiji (d. 719?), a reputed follower of Ibn Arabi and of Ibn Sab‘in, had reached a position of influence in Cairo. That was enough to make Ibn Taymiya address an epistle to him, intended to turn him from his heresies. It is needless to give in detail the position and content of the epistle. He wrote as a strong monotheist of the old-fashioned type and exposed and assailed unmercifully the doctrine of Unity (ittihad) of the mystics. Al-Manbiji retorted with countercharges of heresy, and, as he had behind him all the Sufis of Egypt—as great an army as the Christian monks and ascetics or earlier Egypt and much like to them—Ibn Taymiya had to pay for his eagerness for a fight with long and painful imprisonment at Cairo, Alexandria and Damascus. Here it is evident that he had lost touch with the drift of popular, and especially Egyptian, feeling.

But his fearlessness was like that of Ibn Hanbal himself, and in 726 he gave out a fatwa which ran still straighter in the teeth of the beliefs of the people and which sent him to a prison which he never left alive. It had long been a custom in Islam to make pious pilgrimage to the graves of saints and prophets and there to do reverence to their memory and to ask their aid. It was part of that cult of saints which had so overspread and overcome the earlier simplicity of Islam. The most outstanding case in point was, and is, the pilgrimage to the tomb of Muhammad at al-Madina, which has come to be a more or less essential part of the Hajj to the Ka‘ba itself. Against all this Ibn Taymiya lifted a voice of emphatic protest. These shrines were in great part false, and when they were genuine the visitation of them was an idolatrous imitation of heathen practices. Equally idolatrous was all invoking of saints or prophets, including Muhammad himself; to God alone should prayer be directed. The clamor raised by this fatwa was tremendous. This was no doctrine of the schools which he had touched, but a bit of concrete religiosity which appealed to everyone. His public life practically ended, and the practices which he had denounced abide to this day. It is a bitter satire on his position that when he died in 726 the populace paid to his relics all these signs of superstitious reverence against which he had protested. He became a saint, malgrÉ lui. His work had been to keep alive the Hanbalite doctrine and pass it on unchanged to modern times. He did not destroy philosophy: it was dead of itself before he came. Nor Sufiism: it is still very much alive. Nor kalam: it still continues in the form to which it had crystallized by his time. But he and his disciples made possible the Wahhabites and the monotheistic revival of our day. The faith of Muhammad himself was not to perish entirely from the earth.

It would now be possible to pass at once to the Wahhabite movement in the latter part of the twelfth century of the Hijra. All the elements for the explanation of it and of the modern situation are in our hands. But there is one figure which stands out so clearly in an otherwise most obscure picture and is so significant for the time, that some account must be taken of it. It is that of ash-Sha‘rani, theologian, canonist, and mystic. He was a Cairene and died in 973. The rule of Egypt had passed half a century before to the Ottoman Turks, and they governed by means of a Turkish Pasha. The condition of the people, as we find it sketched by ash-Sha‘rani, was a most unhappy one. They were bent down, and especially the peasantry, under a load of taxation. The Turks found it advisable, too, to cultivate the friendship of the canon lawyers and professional theologians in order to maintain their hold upon the people. These canonists, in consequence, were rapidly becoming an official class with official privileges. Further, the process, the beginnings of which we have already seen, by which religious science was narrowed to fiqh, had gone still further. Practically, the two classes of theologians left were the canonists and the mystics. And the mystics had fallen far from their pride of power under the Mamluks. They now were of the poor of the land, a kind of Essenes over against the Pharisees of the schools.

Such, at least, is the picture of his time which ash-Sha‘rani gives. How far it is exact must remain uncertain. For, of the many puzzling personalities in Islam, ash-Sha‘rani is perhaps for us the most unintelligible. He combined the most abject superstitions of a superstitious age and country with lofty ethical indignation; social humility of the most extreme with an intellectual pride and arrogance rarely paralleled, a keen and original grasp of the canon law of the four schools with an utter submission of the intellect to the inbreathings of the divine from without; a power of discreet silence as to the inconvenient with an open-mouthed vehemence in other things. He was a devoted follower of Ibn Arabi and defended his memory against the accusation of heresy. Yet his position is singularly different from that of Ibn Arabi, and a doubt cannot but rise as to either his knowledge, his intelligence, or his honesty. Practically where he differs from the ordinary Muslim is in his extension of the doctrine of saints. As to the Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna), he follows Ibn Hazm. So, too, as to God’s qualities, he follows the older school and would prefer to leave them unconsidered. But he is, otherwise and in general, a sound Ash‘arite, e.g., on the doctrine of predestination, and of man’s part in his works (iktisab). There is in him no sign of the Plotinian pantheism of Ibn Arabi. The doctrine of God’s difference (mukhalafa) he taught, and that He created the world by His will and not by any emanation of energy.

But truth for him is not to be reached by speculation and argument: its only basis is through the unveiling of the inner eye which brings us to the immediate Vision of the Divine. Those who have reached that Vision, guide and teach those who cannot or have not. Upon that Vision all systems are built, and reason can only serve the visionary as a defence against the gainsayer or against his own too wild thoughts. Naturally, with such a starting-point as this the supernatural side of things (al-ghayb) receives strong emphasis. The Jinn and the angels are most intense realities. Ash-Sha‘rani met them in familiar converse. He met, too, al-Khadir, the undying pilgrim saint who wanders through the lands, succoring and guiding. The details of these interviews are given with the greatest exactness. A Jinni in the form of a dog ran into his house on such a day by such a door, with a piece of European paper in his mouth—this is a touch of genius—on which certain theological questions were written. The Jinni wished ash-Sha‘rani’s opinion as to them. Such was the origin of one of his books, and another sprang from a similarly exactly described talk with al-Khadir. Yet he was content also with smaller mercies and reckons as a karama that he was enabled to read through a certain book for some time at the rate of two and a half times daily. To all this it would be possible of course to say flatly that he lied. But such a judgment applied to an oriental is somewhat crude, and the knot of the mystic’s mind in any land is not to be so easily cut. Further, the doctrine of the walis is developed by him at length. They possess a certain illumination (ilham), which is, however, different from the inspiration (wahy) of the prophets. So, too, they never reach the grade of the prophets, or a nearness to God where the requirements of a revealed law fall away from them, i.e., they must always walk according to the law of a prophet. They are all guided by God, whatever their particular Rule (tariqa) may be, but the Rule of al-Junayd (p. 176) is the best because it is in most essential agreement with the Law (shari‘a) of Islam. Their karamat are true and are a consequence of their devout labors, for these are in agreement with the Qur’an and the Sunna. The order of nature will not be broken for anyone who has not achieved more than is usual in religious knowledge and exercises. All walis stand under a regular hierarchy headed by the Qutb; yet above him in holiness stand the Companions of the Prophet. This marks a very moderate position. Many Sufis had contended that the walis stood higher than even the prophets, not to speak of their Companions.

It will be seen that his position is essentially a mediating one. He wishes to show that the beliefs of the mystics and of the mutakallims are really one although they are reached by different paths. In fiqh he made a similar attempt. The Sufis had always looked down on those theologians who were canonists pure and simple. A study of canon law was a necessity, they thought; but as a propÆdeutic only. The canonists who went no further never reached religion at all. Especially they held that no Sufi should join himself to any of the four contending schools. Their controversies were upon insignificant details which had nothing to do with the life in God. But could it not be shown that their differences were not actual—one view being true and the other false—but were capable of being reduced to a unity? This was the problem that ash-Sha‘rani attacked. These differing opinions, he held, are adapted to different classes of men. Some men of greater gifts and endurance can follow the hardest of these opinions, while the easier are to be recognized as concessions (rukhsa) from God to the weakness of others. Each man may follow freely the view which appeals to him; God has appointed it for him.

Ash-Sha‘rani was one of the last original thinkers in Islam: for a thinker he was despite his dealings with the Jinn and al-Khadir. Egypt keeps his memory. A mosque in Cairo bears his name, as does also a division of the Badawite darwishes. In modern times his books have been frequently reprinted, and his influence is one of the ferments in the new Islam.

We must now pass over about two hundred years and come to the latter part of the twelfth century of the Hijra, a period nearly coinciding with the end of the eighteenth of our era. There these two movements come again to light. Wahhabism, the historical origin of which we have already seen (p. 60), is a branch of the school of Ibn Taymiya. Manuscripts of the works of Ibn Taymiya copied by the hand of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab exist in Europe. So the Wahhabites refused to accept as binding the decisions of the four orthodox sects of canon law. Agreement as a source they also reject. The whole People of Muhammad can err and has erred. Only the agreement of the Companions has binding force for them. It is, therefore, the duty and right of every man to draw his own doctrine from the Qur’an and the traditions; the systems of the schools should have no weight with him. Again, they take the anthropomorphisms of the Qur’an in their literal sense. God has a hand, God settles Himself on His throne; so it must be held “without inquiring how and without comparison.” They profess to be the only true Muslims, applying to themselves the term Muwahhids and calling all others Mushriks, assigners of companions to God. Again, like Ibn Taymiya, they reject the intercession of walis with God. It is allowable to ask of God for the sake of a saint but not to pray to the saint. This applies also to Muhammad. Pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, the presenting of offerings there, all acts of reverence, they also forbid. No regard should be paid even to the tomb of the Prophet at al-Madina. All such ceremonies are idolatrous. Whenever possible the Wahhabites destroy and level the shrines of saints.

Over other details, such as the prohibition of the use of tobacco, we need not spend time. Wahhabism as a political force is gone. It has, however, left the Sanusi revolt as its direct descendant and what may be the outcome of that Brotherhood we have no means of guessing. It has also left a general revival and reformation throughout the Church of Islam, much parallel, as has been remarked, to the counter-reformation which followed the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

The second movement is the revival of the influence of al-Ghazzali. That influence never became absolutely extinct and it seems to have remained especially strong in al-Yaman. In that corner of the Muslim world generations of Sufis lived comparatively undisturbed, and it was the Sayyid Murtada, a native of Zabid in Tihama, who by his great commentary on the Ihya of al-Ghazzali practically founded the modern study of that book. There have been two editions of this commentary in ten quarto volumes and many of the Ihya itself and of other works by al-Ghazzali. Whether his readers understand him fully or not, there can be no question of the wide influence which he is now exercising. At Mecca, for example, the orthodox theological teaching is practically Ghazzalian and the controversy throughout all Arabia is whether Ibn Taymiya and al-Ghazzali can be called Shaykhs of Islam. The Wahhabites hold that anyone who thus honors al-Ghazzali is an unbeliever, and the Meccans retort the same of the followers of Ibn Taymiya.

These two tendencies then—that back to the simple monotheism of Muhammad and that to an agnostic mysticism—are the hopeful signs in modern Islam. There are many other drifts in which there is no such hope. Simple materialism under European, mostly French, influence is one. A seeking of salvation in the study of canon law is another. Canon law is still the field to which an enormous proportion of Muslim theologians turn. Again, there are various forms of frankly pantheistic mysticism. That is especially the case among Persians and Turks. For the body of the people, religion is still overburdened, as in Ibn Taymiya’s days, with a mass of superstition. Lives of walis containing the wildest and most blasphemous stories abound and are eagerly read. The books of ash-Sha‘rani are especially rich in such hagiology. It is difficult for us to realize that stories like the most extravagant in the Thousand and One Nights are the simplest possibilities to the masses of Islam. The canon lawyers, still, in their discussions, take account of the existence of Jinn, and no theologian would dare to doubt that Solomon sealed them up in brass bottles. Of philosophy, in the free and large sense, there is no trace. Ibn Rushd’s reply to al-Ghazzali’s “Destruction of the Philosophers” has been printed, but only as a pendant to that work. In it, too, Ibn Rushd carefully covers his great heresies. His tractates on the study of kalam, spoken of above, have also been reprinted at Cairo from the European edition. But these tractates are arranged to give no clew to his real philosophy. The Arabic Aristotelianism has perished utterly from the Muslim lands. Of the modern Indian Mu‘tazilism no account need be taken here. It is derived from Europe and is ordinary Christian Unitarianism, connecting with Muhammad instead of with Jesus.

From the above sketch some necessary conditions are clear, which must be fulfilled if there is to be a chance for a future development in Islam. Education must be widely extended. The proportion of trained minds must be greatly increased and the barrier between them and the commonalty removed. The economy of teaching has failed; it has destroyed the doctrine which it sought to protect. Again, the slavery of the disciple to the master must cease. It must always be possible for the student, in defiance of taqlid, to go back to first principles or to the primary facts and to disregard what the great Imams and Mujtahids have taught. So much of health there was in the Zahirite system.

Third, these primary facts must include the facts of natural science. The student, emancipated from the control of the schools, must turn from the study of himself to an examination of the great world. And that examination must not be cosmological but biological; it must not lose itself in the infinities but find itself in concrete realities. It must experiment and test rather than build lofty hypotheses.

But can the oriental mind thus deny itself? The English educational experiment in Egypt may go far to answer that question.

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