<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png" width="1280" height="720" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!o9T-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64e065e1-c688-4735-b08c-9ec03c738f49_1280x720.png"></a></figure></div><div><hr></div><p>A piece of music you were not even attending to opens something in the chest. The throat tightens. The eyes sting before anything has been decided. You could not say what the feeling is about, only that it is large and old and arrived from somewhere underneath the part of you that chooses. Most people have had the experience and almost no one can explain it, and that inability to explain it is, for al-Ghazali, the most interesting thing about it.</p><p>His account is in the <em>Alchemy of Happiness</em>, in the chapter on music and dancing, and it opens with an image precise enough to build everything else on:</p><blockquote><p>The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Read that carefully, because it overturns the obvious explanation. The music does not put the fire into the person. The fire is already in the stone. Strike a flint and the spark that jumps was latent in it the whole time, waiting for the right hard contact to call it out. The melody is the steel. What it draws out of you was in you before the song started, sleeping in the rock, and the song is only what finally struck it.</p><p>This belongs, after all, in a book named for an alchemy, and al-Ghazali defined that alchemy plainly:</p><blockquote><p>The spiritual alchemy which operates this change in him, like that which transmutes base metals into gold, is not easily discovered, nor to be found in the house of every old woman.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The base metal is the heart as it stands, heavy and earthbound. The gold is the heart that has remembered what it is. Music is one of the rare strikes that can begin the change, which is why a chapter on song and dancing sits inside a book on transmutation, and why the fire it raises is handled with such care.</p><p>That care is not decorative. The same fire that purifies one heart can overwhelm the one who holds it, and before the chapter is done al-Ghazali will show us men carried out of themselves by it, one running through a field until his feet bled, another dropping dead at a single cry. We will come to them. First, what the fire is.</p><div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Vefhrxb2_fQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div><h2></h2><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><h2>An echo of somewhere</h2><p>So if the fire was already there, what is it? Here is the most esoteric sentence in the chapter:</p><blockquote><p>These harmonies are echoes of that higher world of beauty which we call the world of spirits; they remind man of his relationship to that world, and produce in him an emotion so deep and strange that he himself is powerless to explain it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The key word is <em>remind</em>. The emotion is not new. It is recognition. On this reading the soul came from somewhere before it came here, a world he calls the world of spirits, and it has not entirely forgotten it. Earthly harmony is an echo of a harmony heard there, and when the echo reaches the buried memory, the memory answers. That is why the feeling is too big for its apparent cause. A few notes from a stranger should not be able to undo a grown person, and they would not, if the notes were the whole of it. They are not the whole of it. They are a key cut to fit a lock the person forgot they were carrying.</p><p>This is why the emotion is strange as well as deep. It is the strangeness of a memory older than the self that holds it, surfacing without context, recognized without being placed.</p><h2>The descent</h2><p>Al-Ghazali had laid the ground for this earlier in the same book, where he described where the soul comes from. Of the spirit itself he says plainly that it came down:</p><blockquote><p>It is for the acquirement of this knowledge that the spirit of man has descended into this world of water and clay.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>A thing that descended has somewhere it descended from, and the whole logic of the music chapter rests on that prior sentence. If the soul is native to a world of beauty and is here only as a traveller in water and clay, then a pure enough beauty reaching it here will ring against the memory of there, the way a few words of a mother tongue will stop a traveller in a foreign street who did not know how homesick he was until he heard them. Music is that handful of words in the mother tongue. The soul straightens at a grammar it knew before it was born into this country, and the ache that follows is the traveller’s ache, sharp precisely because the home is real and was once known.</p><h2>The flame leans where the heart already leaned</h2><p>Now comes the turn that makes the whole subject dangerous, and al-Ghazali makes it without raising his voice:</p><blockquote><p>The effect of music and dancing is deeper in proportion as the natures on which they act are simple and prone to emotion; they fan into a flame whatever love is already dormant in the heart, whether it be earthly and sensual, or divine and spiritual.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Music fans whatever is already there. It is an amplifier, not a compass. It does not choose the direction of the love it intensifies; it only makes the love larger, and the love was pointed somewhere before the music arrived. He draws the consequence out without flinching:</p><blockquote><p>Music and dancing do not put into the heart what is not there already, but only fan into a flame dormant emotions. Therefore if a man has in his heart that love to God which the law enjoins, it is perfectly lawful, nay, laudable in him to take part in exercises which promote it. On the other hand, if his heart is full of sensual desires, music and dancing will only increase them, and are therefore unlawful for him.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>So the same evening of sound does opposite work on two people sitting side by side, and neither can tell from the heat alone which way he is being carried. The fire is identical. The fuel is not. And the pleasure itself settles nothing, since a heart that comes only for the enjoyment is doing a thing that is, in his word, merely indifferent, no more forbidden and no more holy than the rest of the day.</p><p>There is a further edge in his phrasing, that the effect runs deeper on natures simple and prone to emotion. It reads as a faint compliment to the unsophisticated, and it is also a warning to the sophisticated. A heart armored in cleverness, practiced at holding everything at the distance of analysis, is harder to strike. The flint is there, but the steel glances off a surface kept deliberately smooth against being moved. Such a person can sit through a hundred assemblies and conclude, at most, that the music was well performed. The capacity to be undone by beauty is not a weakness the strong have outgrown. It is an opening the guarded have sealed, and sealing it shuts the same window the whole path is trying to keep clear.</p><h2>The furnace</h2><p>When the heart the music finds is already turned toward God, al-Ghazali describes what the fire then does to it, and the image is again an alchemist’s:</p><blockquote><p>Such is that of [those] who by this means stir up in themselves greater love towards God, and, by means of music, often obtain spiritual visions and ecstasies, their heart becoming in this condition as clean as silver in the flame of a furnace, and attaining a degree of purity which could never be attained by any amount of mere outward austerities. The Sufi then becomes so keenly aware of his relationship to the spiritual world that he loses all consciousness of this world, and often falls down senseless.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>This is the claim that makes music more than an aid to feeling. The fire it raises is a furnace, and the heart held in it comes out cleaned in a way that years of dry discipline could not manage. Fasting and vigil scrub the surface from outside. Music reaches the metal and burns the impurity out from within. The price of that purity is the loss of the world: at the height of it the Sufi stops registering the room he is sitting in and goes down where he stands.</p><h2>Real ecstasy and the performance of it</h2><p>Because the fire feels like proof, and because falling senseless looks like attainment, ecstasy becomes the easiest thing in the spiritual life to counterfeit, and al-Ghazali is blunt about the counterfeit:</p><blockquote><p>Other features of these mystic dances are the bodily contortions and tearing of clothes with which they are sometimes accompanied. If these are the result of genuine ecstatic conditions there is nothing to be said against them, but if they are self-conscious and deliberate on the part of those who wish to appear “adepts,” then they are merely acts of hypocrisy. In any case the more perfect adept is he who controls himself till he is absolutely obliged to give vent to his feelings.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The test he names is involuntariness. The genuine state arrives unbidden and overpowers a person who was trying to hold still; the counterfeit is reached for. The real adept spends his effort resisting the state until resistance fails. The false one spends his effort manufacturing it. The temptation to the second is strong because the reward is real, since the one who visibly breaks is taken for the furthest along, and to be taken for the furthest along is a sweetness the self will work hard to taste.</p><p>He fixes the point with a story that does not end where you expect. A young disciple of Junaid, hearing the singing begin in an assembly, could not hold himself and shrieked aloud, and Junaid corrected him sharply, telling him that if he did it again he should leave his company. The youth learned the discipline of restraint. And then:</p><blockquote><p>After this the youth used to restrain himself on such occasions, but at last one day his emotions were so powerfully stirred that, after long and forcible repression of them, he uttered a shriek and died.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The discipline of restraint was not a way of feeling less. It was a way of refusing to spend the state in display, holding it until it was past holding, and when it finally broke the restraint it took the boy’s life with it. That is the distance al-Ghazali is drawing between the cry that is performed and the cry that is true.</p><h2>The test of the three days</h2><p>This is why the tradition put a gate in front of the dance, and did not hand the practice to whoever wanted it:</p><blockquote><p>It is not, however, lawful for the aspirant to Sufism to take part in this mystical dancing without the permission of his “Pir,” or spiritual director.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>And the way one director administered that gate is the whole teaching in miniature. When a disciple of the Sheikh Abu’l Qasim Girgani asked leave to take part in the dance, the Sheikh set him a condition:</p><blockquote><p>Keep a strict fast for three days; then let them cook for you tempting dishes; if then, you still prefer the “dance,” you may take part in it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Three days of hunger sharpen the body’s appetite to its loudest. If, with rich food set before a starved body, the man still reaches for the dance over the dish, his hunger for the state is coming from above the appetite and not from inside it. If the food wins, then what he called a longing for ecstasy was the body in disguise. The fire fans whatever is dormant, and a heart still full of appetite has no business near a practice that will magnify exactly that, which is why al-Ghazali says the disciple whose heart is not yet purged should be kept from the dance, since it will do him more harm than good.</p><h2>Turning the love song</h2><p>Most of the verses sung in these assemblies were not religious at all. They were love poems written for human beloveds, full of longing and reproach and wine, and the Sufi took them and turned them upward. Al-Ghazali sets out the whole code of the turning:</p><blockquote><p>When in such poetry mention is made of separation from or union with the beloved, the Sufi, who is an adept in the love of God, applies such expressions to separation from or union with Him. Similarly, “dark locks” are taken to signify the darkness of unbelief; “the brightness of the face,” the light of faith, and “drunkenness” the Sufi’s ecstasy.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The wine of the love poem becomes the ecstasy, and the drunkenness is the state itself. And the verse he quotes to seal it carries the deepest point in the chapter about why music does this work that argument cannot:</p><blockquote><p>Thou may’st measure out thousands of measures of wine, / But, till thou drink it, no joy is thine.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>You can pour the wine forever and stay sober. Knowing about the state is not the state. Al-Ghazali presses it home:</p><blockquote><p>A man may converse much and write volumes concerning love, faith, piety, and so forth, and blacken paper to any extent, but till he himself possesses these attributes all this will do him no good.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>This is the whole case for music over instruction. The lecture hands you the measures of wine. The music makes you drink. But the turning has one hard rule. The listener may apply a verse to God only where it is true of God:</p><blockquote><p>The Sufi hearer, however, is in danger of blasphemy if he applies some of the verses which he hears to God. For instance, if he hears such a verse as “Thou art changed from thy former inclination,” he must not apply it to God, who cannot change, but to himself and his own variations of mood.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>And the image he reaches for to settle it is the one that runs under the entire book:</p><blockquote><p>God is like the sun, which is always shining, but sometimes for us His light is eclipsed by some object which intervenes between us and Him.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The sun does not dim. Something passes in front of it. So when the song’s beloved seems to have grown cold, what has happened is that the listener has let something drift between himself and a light that never moved. The love song, heard rightly, becomes a diagnostic of his own veils, and the ecstasy is the moment one of those veils thins and the constant light reaches him as though for the first time.</p><h2>The same fire, struck everywhere</h2><p>Al-Ghazali reaches past the human case to drive the point home, and the example he picks is startling:</p><blockquote><p>Even camels are sometimes so powerfully affected by the Arab-songs of their drivers that they will run rapidly, bearing heavy burdens, till they fall down in a state of exhaustion.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>A beast of burden, no theology in it, driven past its own exhaustion by a man’s song in the dark. If sound can reach down into an animal and move it against the body’s own limit, then the susceptibility is not a refinement of the cultivated heart but something built into the creature. And he turns the observation into a rebuke of the people who sneer at the Sufis for swaying and weeping in their assemblies:</p><blockquote><p>Those who find fault with the Sufis for being powerfully affected, even to ecstasy, by these and similar verses, are merely shallow and uncharitable.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The scoffer who feels nothing assumes there is nothing to feel. Al-Ghazali’s reply is that the deadness belongs to the scoffer, not to the music. The camel felt it.</p><h2>Not the descent of God</h2><p>Some were carried so far by the fire that it killed them, and al-Ghazali keeps one such case, because of the error it tempts people into:</p><blockquote><p>Such was the case with Sheikh Abu’l Hassan Nuri, who, on hearing a certain verse, fell into an ecstatic condition, and, coming into a field full of stalks of newly cut sugar-cane, ran about till his feet were wounded and bleeding, and not long afterwards, expired.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>When a man is taken that far out of himself, onlookers reach for the largest possible explanation, that God has entered into him. Al-Ghazali refuses it, and the figure he refuses it with is the one his whole book is built on:</p><blockquote><p>In such cases some have supposed that there occurs an actual descent of Deity into humanity, but this would be as great a mistake as that of one who, having for the first time seen his reflection in a mirror, should suppose that, somehow or other, he had become incorporated with the mirror, or that the red and white hues which the mirror reflects were qualities inherent in it.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The ecstatic has not become God. He has become a clean mirror, and what blazes in him is a reflection, not a possession. To mistake the reflected light for a property of the glass is the beginner’s error of a man seeing himself in a mirror for the first time and thinking he has climbed inside it. The whole danger of ecstasy is folded into that correction. The fire is real, the vision is real, and the moment the one who holds it believes the light is his own, he has misread the mirror for the sun.</p><p>The states themselves are not uniform. As al-Ghazali notes, they vary with whatever the heart was already carrying:</p><blockquote><p>The states of ecstasy into which the Sufis fall vary according to the emotions which predominate in them: love, fear, desire, repentance.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>The fire is one. What it lights depends on what was laid in the grate.</p><h2>The assembly</h2><p>Al-Ghazali ends the chapter not on the soloist undone by the music but on the room around him, and the etiquette he prescribes is the quiet heart of the whole teaching:</p><blockquote><p>In holding these assemblies, regard must be had to time and place, and that no spectators come from unworthy motives. Those who participate in them should sit in silence, not looking at one another, but keeping their heads bent, as at prayer, and concentrating their minds on God. Each should watch for whatever may be revealed to his own heart, and not make any movements from mere self-conscious impulse.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>Heads bent, eyes off one another, each man watching his own heart and not the performance of his neighbour’s: this is the structure built to keep the counterfeit out. You cannot show off to a room that is not looking at you. And then the last instruction turns the whole thing from solitude into solidarity:</p><blockquote><p>But if any one of them stands up in a state of genuine ecstasy all the rest should stand up with him, and if any one’s turban falls off the others should also lay their turbans down.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claud Field, 1909</em></p><p>When the fire takes one of them and lifts him to his feet, the others rise too, so that the one who was overcome is not left standing alone and exposed, marked out as the spiritual one while the rest sit watching. If his turban falls, every turban comes off. The assembly closes around the man the music struck and makes his disarray its own, so that genuine ecstasy costs nothing in self-display and the counterfeit has nothing left to gain. The fire was a flint’s fire, struck from the hidden stone of the heart by an echo of the world it came from. The room exists to let that fire be real without letting it be seen.</p><div><hr></div><h3>Sources and references</h3><ul><li><p>al-Ghazali, <em>The Alchemy of Happiness</em> (Kimiya-yi Sa’adat), Chapter V, Concerning Music and Dancing as Aids to the Religious Life, trans. Claud Field, 1909. Public domain, quoted throughout. The flint and the hidden fire; the harmonies as echoes of the world of spirits; the soul’s descent; music as the amplifier of dormant love; the heart cleansed like silver in a furnace; the wine and drunkenness of the love-verse and the line on those who only blacken paper; the camel and the Arab-songs; the sun that never dims; Abu’l Hassan Nuri and the mirror that is not its reflection; the deaths of the disciples of Junaid and Nuri; and the closing etiquette of the assembly, where all rise together and lay down their turbans.</p></li><li><p>al-Ghazali, <em>Kitab Adab al-Samaʿ wa’l-Wajd</em> (On the Conduct of Listening and Ecstasy), Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din, Book 18, the fuller Arabic treatment that this chapter abridges.</p></li><li><p>For the enacted form, the <em>samaʿ</em> ceremony of the Mevlevi order founded in the wake of Rumi.</p></li></ul><div><hr></div>
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