Islamic Philosophy (Beginner's Guides) by Majid Fakhry

Author:Majid Fakhry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications (academic)
Published: 2009-01-31T21:00:00+00:00

However, for al-Ghazali humans occupy a pre-eminent position upon the ladder of creation; for God created them in His image and likeness and made them the epitome of the whole universe. That is why it has been said (in a Prophetic Tradition) that ‘only he who knows himself knows his Lord’. The analysis of human cognitive powers, called by al-Ghazali spiritual, shows that they begin with sense-experience and the imagination, then culminate in reason, with its two subdivisions, the intuitive and the deductive, called by him reflective. Above these powers, corresponding roughly to the philosophers’ teaching, the prophets, says al-Ghazali, attribute to humans a higher power, the ‘prophetic spirit’, which enables them to partake of the knowledge of the ‘unseen’ (al-ghayb), the canons of the Hereafter and other ‘divine cognitions’, which he does not specify.12 It follows that the highest human cognitions are God-given, called by al-Ghazali in al-Munqidh ‘a light which God Almighty casts in the heart, and this light is the key to all modes of cognition’.13 It is a form of revelation or inspiration which does not depend on carefully constructed arguments or proofs, but rather on ‘God’s vast mercy’.

In all the stages of knowledge mentioned above, the seers or knowers, according to al-Ghazali, perceive God through ‘a veil of light’, which conceals His reality as absolute Lord or Creator who transcends all modes of qualification or relation. The highest class of knowers, called by him ‘those who have arrived’ (wasilun), are alone able to understand that the world of the spheres (or the celestial world of Neoplatonic cosmology), as well as their movers (or the separate intelligences), are all subject to the Creator of the heavens and the earth. He is not perceived by them, as by inferior knowers, in His capacity as ‘the Obeyed One’ (muta‘), but rather as ‘a Being completely divested of all that the sight of those inferiors has perceived ...; namely, as entirely hallowed and transcending everything already described’.14

This epistemological or cognitive theory, couched in the metaphorical language of light, of which mystics have always been very fond, culminates in a condition called by al-Ghazali ‘extinction in unity’ or ‘extinction in extinction’. In that condition, the mystic is so totally absorbed by the object of his contemplation that he is no longer aware of himself or of his condition. To describe this condition in al-Munqidh, al-Ghazali is content to quote these romantic lines of the ‘Abbasid poet Ibn al-Mu‘tazz:

Then there was what there was, of which I have no recollection; Think well [of me], then, and ask not what happened.15

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