The Alchemy of Happiness

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Ghazzali 2 SIME journal (majalla.org)CONTENTSPREFACEINTRODUCTIONI. THE KNOWLEDGE OF SELFII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GODIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THIS WORLDIV. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEXT WORLDV. CONCERNING MUSIC AND DANCING AS AIDS TO THE RELIGIOUS LIFEVI. CONCERNING SELF-EXAMINATION AND THE RECOLLECTION OF GODVII. MARRIAGE AS A HELP OR HINDRANCE TO THE RELIGIOUS LIFEVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD
Ghazzali 3 SIME journal (majalla.org)from Kimiya'e SaadatTHE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESSby Imam Al-GhazzaliTRANSLATED BY CLAUD FIELD ©1910Notes in […] are editorial notes that were not in the original copy of this work.PREFACERenan, whose easy-going mind was the exact antithesis to the intense earnestness ofGhazzali, called him "the most original mind among Arabian philosophers." (1)Notwithstanding this, his fame as a philosopher has been greatly overshadowed byAvicenna, his predecessor, and Averroes, his successor and opponent. It is a significantfact that the Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes five columns to each of the others andonly a column and a half to Ghazzali. Yet it is doubtful whether it is as a philosopher thathe would have wished to be chiefly remembered. Several of his works, it is true, arepolemics against the philosophers, especially his Tehafot-al-falasifa, or "Destruction ofthe Philosophers," and, as Solomon Munk says in his Melanges de philosophic Juive etArabe, Ghazzali dealt "a fatal blow" to Arabian philosophy in the East, from which itnever recovered, though it revived for a while in Spain and culminated in Averroes.Philosopher and sceptic as he was by nature, Ghazzali's chief work was that of atheologian, moralist, and mystic, though his mysticism was strongly balanced bycommon sense. He had, as he tells us in his Confessions, experienced "conversion"; Godhad arrested him "on the edge of the fire," and thenceforth what Browning says of theFrench poet, Rene Gentilhomme, was true of him:Human praises scareRather than soothe ears all a-tingle yetWith tones few hear and live, and none forget.In the same work he tells us that one of his besetting weaknesses had been the craving forapplause, and in Ihya-ul-ulum ("Revival of the Religious Sciences") he devotes a longchapter to the dangers involved in a love of notoriety and the cure for it.After his conversion he retired into religious seclusion for eleven years at Damascus (acorner of the mosque there still bears his name - "The Ghazzali Corner") and Jerusalem,where he gave himself up to intense and prolonged meditation. But he was too noble acharacter to concentrate himself entirely on his own soul and its eternal prospects. Therequests of his children - and other family affairs of which we have no exact information- caused him to return home. Besides this, the continued progress of the Ismailians(connected with the famous Assassins), the spread of irreligious doctrines and theincreasing religious indifference of the masses not only filled Ghazzali and his Sufifriends with profound grief, but determined them to stem the evil with the whole force oftheir philosophy, the ardour of vital conviction, and the authority of noble example.
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