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/281

 slem Christ."

all this material which we have collated, the result of hearsay, gathered from the lips of Christian monks and Jewish rabbis? It is perfectly clear that he was acquainted with Old Testament tradition even more than with that of the New Testament. There are scores of passages in which he refers to the teachings of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the lives of the Old Testament Prophets. We have already referred to translations of the Bible into Arabic before the time of Al-Ghazali in our first chapter. There is a tradition that " the People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and in terpret it in Arabic to the followers of Islam." Another tradition says that " Ka ab the Rabbi brought a book to Omar the Caliph and said, Here is the Torah, read it. " We learn from the Jew ish Encyclopaedia that "The fihrist of al-Nadim mentions an Ahmed ibn Abd Allah ibn Salam who translated the Bible into Arabic, at the time of Haroun ar-Rashid, and that Fahr ud-Din ar-Rasi mentions a translation of Habbakuk by the son of Rabban At-Tabari. Many of the Arabic His torians as At-Tabari, Mas udi, Hamza, and Biruni cite passages and recount the early history of the Jews in a most circumstantial manner. Ibn Ku taibah, the historian (d. 889), says that he read the Bible; and he even made a collection of Biblical passages in a work which has been preserved by Ibn Jauzi of the twelfth century." The first im

1 Goldziher, in " Z. D. M. G.," XXXII, 344.