Sufi Wisdom: More El-Ghazali

As militant Islam does its level best to discredit the religion, it's important to remember that there are other voices within the faith. Every Saturday, therefore, we spend some time with the Sufis' "crazy wisdom." This entry is political, however, so I've moved it to Sunday.

Last week's feature from the 12th-century scholar and Sufi El-Ghazali (a.k.a. al-Ghazali) led into a major essay on Islam by our Cairo correspondent, Tarek Heggy. The triumph of El-Ghazali's thought over that of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), he said, set the stage for despotism and the growth of intolerance in the Islamic world.

Today, we go back to El-Ghazali, via a story from khamush.com and an accompanying discussion of his philosophy:

"A human being is not a human being while his tendencies include self-indulgence, covetousness, temper and attacking other people.

A student must reduce to the minimum the fixing of his attention upon customary things like his people and his environment, for attention-capacity is limited.

The pupil must regard his teacher like a doctor who knows the cure of the patient. He will serve his teacher. Sufis teach in unexpected ways. An experienced physician prescribes certain treatments correctly. Yet the outside observer might be quite amazed at what he is saying and doing; he will fail to see the necessity or the relevance of the procedure being followed.

This is why it is unlikely that the pupil will be able to ask the right questions at the right time. But the teacher knows what and when a person can understand."

This is a common description of the Sufi method, and it's an approach taken by many systems of religious mysticism. Idries Shah has commented on this before, including the associated piftfalls.

The difficulties intensify when one takes these approaches into wider venues, without the original checks and balances. Elevated into a template for societal conduct generally, given the added temptations of force, and lacking the controls and traditions present in the Sufi way, El-Ghazali's approach to knowledge invites - and has produced - disaster. That said, there are worthwhile elements in his work. I commend this commentary in particular to the blogosphere:

"Ghazali's way of thought attempted to bring to a wider audience than the comparatively small Sufi one a final distinction between belief and obsession. He stressed the role of upbringing in the inculcation of religious beliefs, and invited his readers to observe the mechanism involved. He insisted upon pointing out that those who are learned my be, and often are, stupid as well, and can be bigoted, obsessed. He affirms that, in addition to having information and being able to reproduce it, there is such a thing as knowledge, which happens to be a higher form of human thought.

The habit of confusing opinion with knowledge, a habit which is to be met with every day at the current time, Ghazali regards as an epidemic disease."

How often do we see that in the blogosphere? More to the point, what's the proper cure? And if you think you know, then before you share it with us in the Comments section I'll add one more question... belief vs. knowledge: how do you tell which is which?