Al-Ghazali’s Lost Gate to God

<div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Y1y-otvyUnw?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div><p>There is a saying that runs through the whole tradition of Sufism like a vein of gold through rock.</p><blockquote><p>Man arafa nafsahu faqad arafa Rabbahu.</p><p>He who knows himself knows his Lord.</p></blockquote><p><em>Hadith attributed to the Prophet</em></p><p>It appears in Ibn Arabi, in Nasafi, in Suhrawardi, in nearly every master who came after the eleventh century. It is sometimes attributed to the Prophet, sometimes to Ali, sometimes left unattributed. The chains of transmission are debated. The saying itself is treated as functionally true regardless.</p><p>Of all the masters who took it up, no one built a more complete architecture on it than Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. His book the <em>Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em>, the <em>Alchemy of Happiness</em>, opens with this hadith and proceeds, in its first chapter, to draw out from it what amounts to a complete map of the human interior. Four constituents make up the path: the knowledge of self, the knowledge of God, the knowledge of this world as it really is, and the knowledge of the next world as it really is. The first three are commentaries on the first. And the first is built on the hadith.</p><p>This is the essay he wrote for ordinary readers. He had already written the <em>Ihya Ulum al-Din</em>, the great forty-book <em>Revival of the Religious Sciences</em>, in Arabic. The <em>Kimiya</em> is the Persian abridgement he made of his own work for people who would never sit in a madrasa. He stripped it down to what could be said plainly. And what he chose to put at the very front, before anything else, was this one question: do you know what you actually are.</p><p>The answer, he says, is almost certainly no.</p><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><div><hr></div><p>It is worth pausing on who is making this claim.</p><p>Ghazali was, by the standards of his own time, the most accomplished theologian alive. He held the chair at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the most prestigious teaching position in the Sunni world. Students came from every province to hear him. Kings consulted him. He had refuted the philosophers in one book and the Ismaili Batinis in another.</p><p>And in the middle of all this, he had a kind of collapse. He wrote about it himself in <em>al-Munqidh min al-Dalal</em>, <em>The Deliverer from Error</em>, a short and unsparing account of what happened to him. He realized, he says, that everything he taught was certain to him in his head but had not touched his heart. He could not speak. He could not eat.</p><blockquote><p>My tongue would not move when I tried to lecture.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Munqidh min al-Dalal</em></p><p>The physicians told him this was a sickness of the soul and could not be cured by them. He left his post, gave away his money, and walked into eleven years of obscurity. When he came back, he wrote the <em>Ihya</em>. The <em>Kimiya</em> is what he distilled from it for ordinary readers. The first chapter is the one he was trying to spare them from learning the way he learned it.</p><div><hr></div><p>Ghazali begins with a kind of grim joke at the reader’s expense.</p><p>You say, “I know myself.” He asks what you mean. If you mean your outward shape, your body, your face, your limbs, then your self-knowledge ends at the surface.</p><blockquote><p>Such knowledge can never be a key to the knowledge of God.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>If you mean the rougher inward facts, that when you are hungry you eat and when you are angry you attack someone, you have not gone any further.</p><blockquote><p>The beasts are thy partners in this.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>Eating and fighting are not the soul. They are what the soul has in common with every animal in the field.</p><p>Real self-knowledge, Ghazali says, consists in knowing the following: what you are in yourself, where you have come from, where you are going, why you have come to tarry here awhile, and in what your real happiness and misery consist.</p><p>Five questions. Not psychological questions. Metaphysical ones. They concern the kind of creature you are and the journey you are on.</p><p>He goes on to describe a hierarchy. Some of your attributes are those of animals. Some are those of devils. Some are those of angels. The work of self-knowledge is to discover which of these are accidental, which are essential, and which one you actually are. The occupation of animals is eating, sleeping, and fighting. If you are an animal, busy yourself in these things. Devils are busy in mischief, guile, and deceit. If you belong among them, do their work. Angels contemplate the beauty of God and are free from animal qualities. If you are of angelic nature, then strive toward your origin.</p><p>The point is sharper than it first appears. Ghazali is not saying you are a mix of these three and your task is to balance them. He is saying that you are essentially one of them, that the others are present in you accidentally, and that until you find out which is essential and which is accidental, you cannot know where your happiness lies. Your happiness depends on the kind of thing you actually are. And the kind of thing you actually are is not what the appetites are telling you.</p><div><hr></div><p>Then comes the central distinction. The first step to self-knowledge, Ghazali says, is to know that you are composed of an outward shape, called the body, and an inward entity called the heart, or soul. And when he says heart, he is careful to define it.</p><blockquote><p>By heart I do not mean the piece of flesh situated in the left of our bodies, but that which uses all the other faculties as its instruments and servants. In truth it does not belong to the visible world, but to the invisible, and has come into this world as a traveller visits a foreign country for the sake of merchandise, and will presently return to its native land.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>This is the hinge of the whole chapter. The heart he is speaking of is not the muscle in your chest. It is not even what we ordinarily call the inner life, the stream of feelings and thoughts. The heart, for Ghazali, is the thing that <em>uses</em> the faculties. It is what is doing the using when you think, when you feel, when you choose. It is the user of the instrument, not the instrument itself.</p><p>And this heart is not from here. It is a traveller. It has come into this world the way a merchant goes into a foreign country, to conduct a particular kind of business, and then it leaves.</p><blockquote><p>It is the knowledge of this entity and its attributes which is the key to the knowledge of God.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>If you do not know there is a traveller inside you, you cannot know what the journey is for. And if you confuse the traveller with the country he has come into, you will think the country is your home. You will spend your life decorating it, defending it, mourning it when it changes. You will never realize you were always passing through.</p><div><hr></div><p>So how do the faculties fit into this? Ghazali, in one of his most striking passages, lays out the structure as a kingdom.</p><blockquote><p>For the carrying on of this spiritual warfare by which the knowledge of oneself and of God is to be obtained, the body may be figured as a kingdom, the soul as its king, and the different senses and faculties as constituting an army. Reason may be called the vizier, or prime minister, passion the revenue collector, and anger the police officer.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The image is well chosen. The king is the heart. The vizier is reason, <em>aql</em>, which counsels the king and helps him govern. Passion is the revenue collector, going out to gather what the kingdom needs: food, comfort, what sustains the body. Anger is the police officer, defending the kingdom against threats and enforcing order.</p><p>In a well-run kingdom, this works. The king listens to the vizier. The vizier directs the revenue collector and the police, each to their proper task. Passion brings in what is needed. Anger pushes back what is harmful. The king governs from above. Everything serves the purpose for which the kingdom exists.</p><p>But Ghazali writes:</p><blockquote><p>Under the guise of collecting revenue, passion is continually prone to plunder on its own account, while resentment is always inclined to harshness and extreme severity.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The revenue collector starts pocketing the revenue. The police officer starts breaking heads for no reason. They have to be kept in due subordination to the king, <em>but not killed or expelled, as they have their own proper functions to fulfill.</em></p><p>This is critical. Ghazali is not preaching the killing of the appetites. He is not telling you to extinguish anger or starve out desire. He is saying these are the army of the kingdom and the kingdom cannot function without them. The mistake is not that they exist. The mistake is that they govern.</p><blockquote><p>But if passion and resentment master reason, the ruin of the soul infallibly ensues. A soul which allows its lower faculties to dominate the higher is as one who should hand over an angel to the power of a dog.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>When the police officer rules the king, the kingdom collapses. When the revenue collector decides policy, the kingdom is sacked from within. The same is true of you. When anger speaks and the heart listens, you are an angel handed over to a dog. When appetite speaks and the heart listens, you are a king dethroned in his own house.</p><div><hr></div><p>Notice what this means for the question of who you are.</p><p>Most of what you experience as your self — your thoughts, your reactions, your wants, your refusals — is not the king at all. It is the army. The voice that says “I am hungry” is the revenue collector reporting in. The voice that says “I am furious” is the police officer at the door. These voices speak in the first person. They say <em>I</em>. And almost always, when they speak, the king hears them as if they were himself.</p><p>Ghazali’s diagnosis of the human condition is that we have confused our servants for ourselves. The appetites speak in the king’s voice and the king accepts the voice as his own. The anger flares up and the king says, “I am angry,” as if the anger were the king. But the anger is the police officer. The hunger is the revenue collector. The king is the one who hears them.</p><p>Self-knowledge begins exactly here. It begins the moment you notice that the thing speaking is not necessarily you. It begins when the king realizes there is a vizier in the room, and a revenue collector, and a police officer, and that he himself has been silent for years while they argued among themselves and called their argument <em>him</em>.</p><div><hr></div><p>The aim of moral discipline, Ghazali writes:</p><blockquote><p>The aim of moral discipline is to purify the heart from the rust of passion and resentment, till, like a clear mirror, it reflects the light of God.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The mirror is the second great image of the chapter. Ghazali keeps coming back to it. The heart is a mirror. The faculties, when disordered, are rust.</p><blockquote><p>Every human being has in the depths of his consciousness heard the question “Am I not your Lord?” and answered “Yes” to it. But some hearts are like mirrors so befouled with rust and dirt that they give no clear reflections, while those of the prophets and saints, though they are men of like passions with us, are extremely sensitive to all divine impressions.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The mirror image carries the whole transformation in it. The heart was made for reflection. It does not generate light. It receives light and gives it back. What it gives back depends entirely on its condition. A clean mirror reflects clearly. A tarnished mirror reflects nothing or reflects badly.</p><p>The polishing of the mirror is what Ghazali calls alchemy. The base metal is the heart covered in rust. The gold is the heart polished enough to reflect what it was made to reflect. And what it was made to reflect is not the world. The world is what falls on the unpolished side. What the polished side reflects is the One who set the whole arrangement in motion.</p><p>This is why, for Ghazali, the disciplines exist. Prayer, dhikr, the curbing of appetite, the watching of one’s anger, the night vigil, the fast. None of these have any value in themselves. They are abrasives. They are the work the polisher does on the mirror. The polisher does not put light into the mirror. He removes what was preventing the light from being given back.</p><p>So when the tradition speaks of <em>mujahada</em>, of striving, it does not mean acquiring something the heart did not have. It means removing something the heart had acquired that did not belong to it. The dust, the rust, the small accumulated wrongs, the habits of letting the police officer rule the king. Take those off and the mirror does what it was made to do.</p><blockquote><p>Those who strive in Our way, verily We will guide them to the right paths.</p></blockquote><p><em>Qur’an 29:69, quoted by al-Ghazali</em></p><div><hr></div><p>Here Ghazali makes a move that distinguishes him from the more austere ascetic traditions. He does not call for the killing of the body or the silencing of the faculties. He calls for their correct ordering. The body is the steed of the soul. The steed has to be fed. The steed has to be cared for. But the steed is not the rider. The rider does not exist to feed the steed. The steed exists to carry the rider.</p><blockquote><p>The body, so to speak, is simply the riding animal of the soul and perishes while the soul endures. The soul should take care of the body, just as a pilgrim on his way to Mecca takes care of his camel; but if the pilgrim spends his whole time in feeding and adorning his camel, the caravan will leave him behind, and he will perish in the desert.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The image is gentle and exact. The pilgrim has somewhere to go. The camel is what carries him. He must keep the camel alive. He must feed it, water it, watch its hooves. But he cannot let the care of the camel become the journey. The journey is to Mecca. The camel is the means. When the pilgrim mistakes the means for the end, he stops moving. He grooms the camel forever. The caravan moves on without him, and he is left in the desert, well-supplied and going nowhere.</p><p>This is the condition Ghazali sees in his contemporaries and, frankly, in most people in most times. Endless preoccupation with the camel. Endless adjustment of its saddle, polishing of its bridle, weighing of its feed. Meanwhile the pilgrim — who is the heart, who is the king, who is the traveller — has forgotten he was ever going anywhere.</p><p>Further on in the <em>Kimiya</em>, Ghazali asks what would actually be required to restore the proper order. He gives a short list. The first is <em>muraqaba</em>, watching, the habit of being aware of what the faculties are doing. The second is <em>muhasaba</em>, accounting, the habit of taking stock of what has been done at the end of each day. The third is <em>mujahada</em>, striving, the active resistance to the lower faculties when they push past their boundaries. The fourth is <em>dhikr</em>, remembrance, the steady turning of attention back toward what has been forgotten.</p><p>None of these is a spectacular practice. There is no ecstasy in them. They are small, repeated, daily. The king watches the army. The king takes account of the army. The king pushes back when the army oversteps. The king keeps returning his attention to the kingdom he was given to govern. This is what polishing actually looks like. It does not feel like alchemy from the inside. It feels like quiet, repetitive attention. The alchemy is what those small acts do over years.</p><div><hr></div><p>There is one more piece to the chapter, and it is the one most easily missed.</p><p>Ghazali distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge of self. There is the kind that comes from learning, from books, from instruction. And there is the kind that comes from polishing. He does not despise the first. He wrote his whole <em>Ihya</em> to teach the first. But he is clear that the first alone does not transform anyone.</p><blockquote><p>Just as iron, by sufficient polishing, can be made into a mirror, so any mind by due discipline can be rendered receptive of such impressions.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>The knowledge that transforms is the knowledge that arrives when the heart has been polished enough to receive it. It is not earned by argument. It is uncovered by removing what was in the way.</p><blockquote><p>Exact philosophical knowledge of the spirit comes as the result of self-discipline and perseverance in the path.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Ghazali, Kimiya-yi Sa’adat</em></p><p>You do not need to understand the soul to begin polishing it. You need to begin polishing it. The understanding follows from the work.</p><p>This is why Ghazali, after a lifetime of argument, walked away from his post and spent eleven years polishing. He had reached the end of what the intellect could give. The mirror needed work no theology could do for it. He went to Damascus, to Jerusalem, into long retreat. When he came back, he wrote what he had found.</p><p>And what he found, when he stripped it down to its first chapter for ordinary readers, was this. You do not know who you are. What you take to be yourself is not yourself. The faculties speak in your voice but they are not you. The heart, which is the actual you, is buried under their noise. The work is to quiet them, to put them back in their proper place, to restore the king to his throne and the army to its post. When that is done, the mirror clears. And when the mirror clears, what was always being reflected becomes visible.</p><blockquote><p>He who knows himself knows his Lord.</p></blockquote><p><em>Hadith attributed to the Prophet</em></p><p>The saying does not promise that introspection will give you God. It promises that when you finally see what you actually are, you will see what set you in motion. The two knowledges arrive together. You cannot have one without the other. The self that knows itself is not the self that was speaking in your voice all those years. It is the one that was listening. The one that was travelling. The one that came as a merchant into a foreign country, did its business, and is now, slowly, beginning to remember the way home.</p><div><hr></div><p><em>Passages from</em> Kimiya-yi Sa’adat <em>by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, translated by Claud Field (1910), Chapter I, “The Knowledge of Self.” The autobiographical line is from</em> al-Munqidh min al-Dalal <em>(The Deliverer from Error), translated by W. Montgomery Watt.</em></p><div><hr></div><p><em>If this essay was useful, share it with someone walking the path. New translations and essays from the Sufi tradition arrive here weekly.</em></p><p><em>James Fleming for Spiritualrelief.</em></p><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> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/al-ghazalis-lost-gate-to-god" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/9WoDwdh / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>