Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights: A Parallel English-Arabic Text.

• Author: Griffel, Frank
• Position: Book Review

By DAVID BUCHMAN. Islamic Translation Series. Provo: BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xxx + 80 (in English) + 53 (in Arabic). $24.95.

Al-Ghazali's Mishkat al-anwar has often been considered his most enigmatic book. Regarded as one of his latest writings, it is also seen as the one most inspired by Sufism. In an interpretation of the Light Verse, Koran 24:35, al-Ghazali lays down how the text of the revelation provides guidance for the soul that seeks ascent to the highest level of human perfection. Al-Ghazali's distinction between the alam al-shahada and the alam al-malakut, and his conclusion that every verse in the Koran has, corresponding to the apparent meaning, an inner sense, opens the way to long and sometimes farfetched expositions about the inner meaning of Scripture, which have few parallels in al-Ghazali's other works. As if this were not enough, earlier Western scholars writing on the Mishkat were puzzled by a seeming contradiction in his oeuvre. In the third chapter of the book a muta, "one who is obeyed" appears and figures as the first creature below God. The muta has indeed very much the same function as the demiurge of Neoplatonist cosmology. This "Ghazali-problem," as W. H. T. Gairdner named it in 1914, prompted W. M. Watt to consider the corresponding part of the Mishkat a spurious work not written by al-Ghazali himself. Yet since then, our understanding of al-Ghazali's multifaceted styles of writing and of both his rejection as well as his incorporation of elements from falsafa and Isma ilism has increased considerably. But even if now there seems to be reconciliation for passages in al-Ghazali's work that earlier analysts deemed blatantly contradictory, the Mishkat still remains a book that challenges even the boldest understanding of al-Ghazali as a multi-layered writer.

David Buchman's new translation of the Mishkat, published in what appears will become one of the most respectable series of translations of Islamic texts, will surely draw renewed attention to this enigmatic book. Buchman, like many readers of the Mishkat, comes from Sufi studies and is only marginally concerned with the Mishkat's place in al-Ghazali's oeuvre. His account of al-Ghazali's life follows an often repeated Sufi reading of al-Ghazali's autobiography and has been challenged for more than fifty years now. According to this narrative, al-Ghazali was in his youth a bloodless mutakallim concerned entirely with the dry practice of...