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/241

 Perfect Man in whom all the divine attributes are manifested, and a Suii tradition ascribes to him the saying, He that hath seen me hath seen Allah. In the Moslem scheme, however, the Logos doctrine oc cupies a subordinate place, as it obviously must when the whole duty of man is believed to consist in realizing the unity of God."

Neoplatouism gave them the doctrine of emana tion and ecstasy. The following version of the doctrine of the seventy thousand veils, as ex pounded to Canon Gairduer by a modern dervish, shows clear traces of Gnosticism. " Seventy Thousand Veils separate Allah, the One reality, from the world of matter and of sense. And every soul passes before his birth through these seventy thousand. The inner half of these are veils of light: the outer half, veils of darkness. For every one of the veils of light passed through, in this journey towards birth, the soul puts otT a divine quality; and for every one of the dark veils, it puts on an earthly quality. Thus the child is born weeping, for the soul knows its separation from Allah, the one Reality. And when the child cries in its sleep, it is because the soul remembers something of what it has lost. Otherwise, the passage through the veils has brought with it for get fulness (nisyan): and for this reason man is called insan. He is now, as it were, in prison in his body, separated by these thick curtains from "The Mystics of Islam."