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/294



only possible in the service of others and not by withdrawing from men. Mohammedan mysticism has always resulted in two evils, as Major Durie Osborn points out: " It has dug a deep gulf be tween those who can know God and those who must wander in darkness, feeding upon the husks of rites and ceremonies. It has affirmed with em phasis, that only by a complete renunciation of the world is it possible to attain the true end of man’s existence. Thus all the best and truest natures the men who might have put a soul in the decaying Church of Islam have been cut off from their proper task to wander about in deserts and solitary places, or expend their lives in idle and profitless passivity disguised under the title of spiritual con templation/ (zikr) But this has only been part of the evil. The logical result of Pantheism is the destruction of the moral law. If God be all in all, and man’s apparent individuality a delusion of the perceptive faculty, there exists no will which can act, no conscience which can reprove and applaud. . . . Thousands of reckless and profligate spirits have entered the orders of the dervishes to enjoy the license thereby obtained. Their af fectation of piety is simply a cloak for the practice of sensuality; their emancipation from the ritual of Islam involves a liberation also from its moral re straints. And thus a movement, animated at its outset by a high and lofty purpose, has degenerated into a fruitful source of ill. The stream which