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/308



towards each other/ A Sheikh was once asked, Who are the friends of the exalted and blessed God? He replied: The friends of God are those who are more compassionate to the friends of God themselves, than a father or a mother to their chil dren/ " * (Compare Psalm 103.)

There seems a great difference between Al-Gha zali as dogmatic theologian, always compelled to agree with the Koran, and Al-Ghazali as the Mys tic, when he begins to speculate and lift the veil. We are constantly reminded of the words of An selm in his great work on the existence of God: " I do not attempt, O Lord, to penetrate Thy depths, for I by no means think my intellect equal to them; but I long to understand in some degree Thy truth, which my heart believes and loves, for I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand"

Whenever Al-Ghazali speaks of God’s nearness to us and of the soul’s desire for human fellowship with the creator, he comes very close to the Chris tian idea of the Incarnation, and yet always stops short of it. In his " Alchemy of Happiness," for example, he mentions as the fourth cause of love to God the affinity that exists between man and his Maker, referring to the saying of the Prophet:

1 These last quotations are from the translation by Homes which was from the Turkish. There seem to be several editions of the "Alchemy of Happiness" and the text varies as well as the number of chapters.