Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/212

 known by a background of darkness, which darkness is itself only the absence of light: or, as being proceeds by successive emanations from the First Cause, and becomes weaker or less real in each emanation as it recedes further from the great Reality, it incidentally becomes more perceptible as it becomes less real. Thus evil, which is merely the negation of the moral beauty of the Reality, appears in the latest emanation as the unreal background which is the inevitable result of a projection of the emanation from the First Cause, who is entirely good, into a world of phenomena. Evil is therefore not real, it is merely the result, the inevitable result, of the mingling of reality with unreality. In fact, this is implied in the doctrine that all other than God is unreal.

(iii.) The aim of the soul is union with God. This doctrine of tawhid, as we have seen, received early expression in Muslim mystic theology. Dr. Nicholson is of opinion that "the Sufi conception of the passing away (fana) of individual self in universal being is certainly . . . of Indian origin. Its first great exponent was the Persian mystic Bāyazīd of Bistām, who may have received it of his teacher, Abū 'Alī of Sind (Scinde.") (Nicholson: Mystics of Islam, p. 17.) But this is only one particular way of presenting a doctrine which has a much wider range and is present in all mystical teaching, including that of the neo-Platonists. In the highest sense it is the basis of Sufi ethics, for the summum bonum is defined as the