A Moslem seeker after God : $b showing Islam at its best in the life and teaching of al-Ghazali, mystic and theologian of the eleventh centuryZwemer, Samuel Marinus
Philosophy
A Moslem seeker after God : $b showing Islam at its best in the life and teaching of al-Ghazali, mystic and theologian of the eleventh century
Zwemer, Samuel Marinus
Ghazzali, 1058-1111
“We witness that He is a Willer of the things that are, a
Director of the things that happen; there does not come
about in the world seen or unseen, little or much, small or
great, good or evil, advantage or disadvantage, faith or
unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or loss, increase or
diminution, obedience or rebellion, except by His will. What
He wills is, and what He wills not is not. Not a glance of one
who looks, or a slip of one who thinks is outside of His will;
He is the creator, the Bringer back, the Doer of that which
He wills. There is no opponent of His command and no repeater
of His destiny and no refuge for a creature from disobeying
Him, except by His help and His mercy, and no strength to a
creature to obey Him except by His will. Even though mankind
and the _Jinn_ and the Angels and the _Shaytans_ were to unite
to remove a single grain in the world or to bring it to rest
without His will, they would be too weak for that. His will
subsists in His essence as one of His qualities; He hath not
ceased to be described through it as a Willer, in His infinity
of the existence of things at their appointed times which He
hath decreed. So they come into existence at their appointed
times even as He has willed in His infinity without precedence
or sequence. They happen according to the agreement of His
knowledge and His will, without exchange or change in planning
of things, nor with arranging of thoughts or awaiting of time,
and therefore one thing does not distract Him from another.
“And we witness that He is a Hearer and a Seer. He hears and
sees and no audible thing is distant from His hearing, and no
visible thing is far from His seeing, however fine it may be.
Distance does not curtain off His hearing and darkness does not
dull His seeing; He sees without eyeball or eyelid, and hears
without earholes or ears, just as He knows without a brain and
seizes without a limb and creates without an instrument, since
His qualities do not resemble that quality of created things,
just as His essence does not resemble the essences of created
things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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