/lit/ - Literature

>>18482243

RC Zaehner has a whole chapter in his book "Hindu and Muslim Mysticism" that is called "Vedanta in Muslim Dress" in which he talks about various Muslim thinkers whose positions are like Advaita Vedanta, names in addition to al-Ghazali that he identifies are Abu Yazid of Bistam (Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī), al-Ḥallāj and Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr

on page 167 of the book, in the chapter on al-Ghazali, RC Zaehner in speaking about al-Ghazlis most esoteric work "Mishkat al-Anwar" writes

>Now in the Mishkat he says that the type of mystical experience enjoyed by Abu Yazid and Hallaj is called 'tawhid in the language of truth'. Tawhid in the context is probably meant to mean no more than the 'affirmation of the divine unity', but in the Fadail al-Anam, which is a commentary in Persian on the Mishkat, he reveals at last the 'secret doctrine' of tawhid. Here he argues that two things can never become one: for either both exist, in which case they are not identical; or one exists and the other does not, in which case again there is no identity; or they both do not exist, and in that case there is no identity either. So 'perfect tawhid means that nothing exists except the One'. Here at last Ghazali forgets to worry about the orthodoxy he usually chooses to parade, and declares himself a non-dualist of whom Sankara himself might have been proud. Atman is Brahman, and Brahman is atman; the soul is God, and God is the soul. This is his 'secret doctrine' and his 'reality of realities'. Yet the fana he speaks of is the first fand of Junayd, the destruction of bashariyya, of all the human qualities that bind the soul to a body, all its mental, emotional, and sensitive apparatus. The terms ittihad and hulul, which imply an original duality, are thus seen as not being extreme enough, and the metaphors Ghazali uses in the Kimiya and elsewhere like the comparison of God and the soul to the sun and its rays, are mere approximations to the full monistic truth.