Page:A Moslem seeker after God - showing Islam at its best in the life and teaching of al-Ghazali, mystic and theologian of the eleventh century (IA moslemseekeraft00zwem).pdf/105

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Again he is full of doubts when he says: " Per haps also Death is that state [he is speaking of a possible state of being which will bear the same relation to our present state as this does to the con dition when asleep], according to a saying of the Prince of Prophets: Men are asleep; when they die, they wake/ Our present life in relation to the future is perhaps only a dream, and man, once dead, will see things in direct opposition to those now before his eyes.

" Such thoughts as these threatened to shake my reason, and I sought to find an escape from them. But how? In order to disentangle the knot of this difficulty, a proof was necessary. Now a proof must be based on primary assumptions, and it was precisely these of which I was in doubt. This un happy state lasted about two months, during which I was not, it is true, explicitly or by profession, but morally and essentially a thoroughgoing sceptic"

That Al-Ghazali was driven to scepticism must not surprise us. Schools of free thinkers had been established fifty years earlier at Bagdad and Bus rah. Every Friday they gathered together. Some were rationalists, some downright materialists. Not only philosophers but poets were the leaders of these circles. Among them we must mention Abu l Ala Al-Ma arri, born in 9T3 A. D. This blind poet is said to have written a Koran in imitation of Mohammed, and when some one complained to him that although the book was well written it did