The Koran
expounds the excellence of patience in more than seventy passages. The
Caliph Ali said, 'Patience bears the same relation to faith as the head
does to the body. He who has no head, has no body, and he who has no
patience has no faith.'"

Ghazzali's philosophy is the re-action of his intensely religious
personality against the naturalistic tendencies of men like Avicenna and
Averroes. They believed in the eternity of matter, and reduced God to a
bare First Cause. He also, though sympathising with the Sufis,
especially on the side of their asceticism, was opposed to Sufistic
Pantheism. He conceived God chiefly as an active Will, and not merely as
the Self existent.

While his contemporaries were busying themselves with metaphysical
theories concerning matter and creation, Ghazzali laid stress on
self-observation and self-knowledge ("He who knows himself, knows God").
As St. Augustine found deliverance from doubt and error in his inward
experience of God, and Descartes in self-consciousness, so Ghazzali,
unsatisfied with speculation and troubled by scepticism, surrenders
himself to the will of God. Leaving others to demonstrate the existence
of God from the external world, he finds God revealed in the depths of
his own consciousness and the mystery of his own free will.

He fared as innovators in religion and philosophy always do, and was
looked upon during his lifetime as a heretic. He admits himself that his
"Destruction of the philosophers" was written to expose their mutual
contradictions. But he has no mere Mephistophelic pleasure in
destruction; he pulls down in order to erect. He is not a mere sceptic
on the one hand, nor a bigoted theologian on the other, and his verdict
on the Mutazilite heretics of his day is especially mild. Acute thinker
though he was, in him will and feeling predominated over thought. He
rejected the dogmatic and philosophic systems of his contemporaries as
mere jejune skeletons of reality, and devoted the close of his life to
study of the traditions and the Koran.

Like Augustine, he finds in God-derived self-consciousness the
starting-point for the thought, and like him emphasizes the fundamental
significance of the will. He sees everywhere the Divine Will at work in
what philosophers call natural causes. He seeks the truth, but seeks it
with a certain consciousness of possessing it already within himself.

He is a unique and lonely figure in Islam, and has to this day been on