Field's preface measures Ghazzali by the Church of England. "Another point in which Ghazzali anticipates Bishop Butler is his representation of punishment as the natural working out of consequences," he writes, having already set him beside Browning's Blougram and Cardinal Newman. Then comes a judgment that belongs to the translator, not his author: Ghazzali "tries to rationalise the lurid threatenings of the Koran." Lurid is Field's word, and it shows where the introducer stands. The habit was shared. Whinfield's Masnavi, on the same shelf, invokes Butler three times to explain Rumi. For both translators the Analogy of Religion was the standard by which Persian theology was shown to be reasonable.
The Alchemy of Happiness — trans. Claud Field (1910)
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The little picture of the lion and the fort in the above passage is a small instance of another conspicuous trait in Ghazzali's mind—his turn for allegory. Emerson says, "Whoever thinks intently will find an image more or less luminous rise in his mind." In Ghazzali's writings many such images arise, some grotesque and some beautiful. His allegory of the soul as a fortress beleaguered by the "armies of Satan" is a striking anticipation of the Holy War of Bunyan. The greatest of all the Sufi poets, Jalaluddin Rumi, born a century after Ghazzali's death (A.D. 1207), has paid him the compliment of incorporating several of these allegories which occur in the Ihya into his own Masnavi. Such is the famous one of the Chinese and Greek artists, which runs as follows:
"Once upon a time the Chinese having challenged the Greeks to a trial of skill in painting, the Sultan summoned them both into edifices built for the purpose directly facing each other, and commanded them to show proof of their art. The painters of the two nations immediately applied themselves with diligence to their work. The Chinese sought and obtained of the king every day a great quantity of colours, but the Greeks not the least particle. Both worked in profound silence, until the Chinese, with a clangor of cymbals and of trumpets, announced the end of their labours. Immediately the king, with his courtiers, hastened to their temple, and there stood amazed at the wonderful splendour of the Chinese painting and the exquisite beauty of the colours. But meanwhile the Greeks, who had not sought to adorn the walls with paints, but laboured rather to erase every colour, drew aside the veil which concealed their work. Then, wonderful to tell, the manifold variety of the Chinese colours was seen still more delicately and beautifully reflected from the walls of the Grecian temple, as it stood illuminated by the rays of the midday sun."
This parable, of course, illustrates the favourite Sufi tenet that the heart must he kept pure and calm as an unspotted mirror. Similarly, the epilogue of the elephant in the dark (vide chap. II.) has been borrowed by Jalaluddin Rumi from Ghazzali.
Another characteristic of Ghazzali which appeals to the modern mind is the way in which he expounds the religious argument from probability much as Bishop Butler and Browning do (vide the end of Chapter IV. in the present book). Ghazzali might have said, with Blougram:
With me faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.
This combination of ecstatic assurance and scepticism is one of those antinomies of the human mind which annoy the rationalist and rejoice the mystic. Those in whom they coexist, like Ghazzali in the eleventh century and Cardinal Newman in the nineteenth, are a perpetual problem to understand and therefore perennially interesting:
He may believe, and yet, and yet,
How can he?
Another point in which Ghazzali anticipates Bishop Butler is his representation of punishment as the natural working out of consequences, and not an arbitrary infliction imposed ab extra. He tries to rationalise the lurid threatenings of the Koran.
In his own day Ghazzali was accused of having one doctrine for the multitude and one for himself and his intimate friends. Professor D. B. Macdonald, of Hartford, after going thoroughly into the matter, says, "If the charge of a secret doctrine is to be proved against Ghazzali it must be on other and better evidence than that which is now before us."
At any rate, Ghazzali has been accepted as an orthodox authority by the Muslims, among whom his title is Hujjat-el-Islam, "The Proof of Islam," and it has been said, "If all the books of Islam were destroyed it would be, but a slight loss if only the Ihya of Ghazzali were preserved." The great modern reformer of Islam in India, the late Sir Syud Ahmed, has had some portions of this enormous work printed separately for the purpose of familiarising the young Muslims at Aligarh with Ghazzali.