THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE
ARTICLES OF FAITH
BEING
A
Translation with Notes
OF
The Kit?b
Qaw?‘id
al-Aq?’id
OF
Al-Ghazz?li’s
“Ihy?’
‘Ul?m
al-D?n”
By
NABIH AMIN FARIS
American University of
Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon
Book II
SH.
MUHAMMAD ASHRAF
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Lahore -
Pakistan.
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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE
ARTICLES OF FAITH
NABIH AMIN FARIS
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To
the
Memory of my father
AMIN FARIS
In Gratitude and Reverence
PREFACE
The Ihy?’‘Ul?m
al-D?n
of al-Ghazz?li
is divided into four quarters (sing. rub‘). The
first deals with the acts of worship (al-‘ib?’d?t),
the second with the usages of life (al-mu‘?mal?t),
the third with the destructive matters of life (al-muhlik?t),
and the fourth with the saving matters of life (al-munajjiy?t).
Each of these four quarters comprises ten
books (sing. kit?b).
The present work represents the second book in the first quarter. It deals with
the foundations of the articles
of faith and is, perhaps, the most important part of the first quarter.
The texts utilized in
the preparation of the present translation were the following:
The first is the text printed at Kafr al-Zagh?ri
in A.H. 1352 from
the older Cairo edition of A.H.
1289. It is referred
to in the notes as ‘C’. The second is
that contained in the text of al-Sayyid
al-Murtada al-Zab?di’s
commentary on the Ihy?’
, known
as the Ith?f
al-S?dah
al-Muttaqin
bi-Sharh Ihy?’ ‘Ul?m
al-D?n,
printed in ten volumes in Cairo A.H.
1311; it is
referred to
in the notes as SM
(text). The third is the text which is
reproduced in the
margin of the same Ith?f
al-S?dah;
it is referred to in the notes as
SM (margin). The fourth and, perhaps, the
most important is the text contained in a four volume manuscript at the Princeton
University Library (Philip K. Hitti,
Nabih Amin Faris, and
Butrus Abd-al-Malik, Descriptive Catalogue of
the Garrett
Collection of Arabic
Manuscripts
in the Princeton University Library, Princeton,
1938, No.1481). It probably
dates from the late fifteenth
century. This text, called ‘B’ in the notes,
corresponds to SM (text),
while ‘C’ corresponds
to SM (margin).
The first
book of the first
quarter, the well-known Kit?b
al-‘Ilm, was
published, under the title of The
Book of
Knowledge, by
Sh. Muhammad Ashraf of Lahore 1962. Once
again I am grateful to Sh.M.
Ashraf for his continued interest in seeing as
many of the
books of the Ihy?,
appear in English.
And once again I
wish to acknowledge my indebtedness
to the three Princeton
scholars: the late Edwin E.
Conklin, the late Harold H. Bender,
and Philip K. Hitti, and to
the American Philosophical Society for the
Promotion of Useful Knowledge in Philadelphia, without
whose imaginative help neither The
Book of
knowledge nor the present work would have
been done. May I also
express my thanks to my students:
Mr. Robert Hazo, Mr. John Dudley
Woodberry, and Major Angus M. Mundy who
read the manuscript and made several useful observations,
and to Dr. John H. Patton,
Professor of Religion,
Park College, Parksville, Mo., for his
careful examination of the
manuscript and his valuable suggestions.
Nabih Amin Faris
American
University of Beirut
October 31,
1962.
BOOK II
“In the Name of God the
Merciful, the Compassionate”.
The Foundations of
the Articles of Faith,
Containing Four Sections.
SECTION I
On the
Exposition of the Creed of the Orthodox Community
as
Embodied in
the Two
Words of the Shah?dah
which form One
of the
Pillars of Islam.
We say-and our trust
is in
God-praise be to God the
Creator, the Restorer, the Doer of whatever He
wills, He Whose throne is glorious
and Whose power, mighty, Who guides the elect to the
orthodox path and the right way, Who
grants them benefits once they
affirm His unity by guarding the articles of faith from the obscurities of
doubt and hesitation, Who leads them to imitate the way of His chosen Apostle and
to follow the example of his most honoured Companions by
directing their footsteps to the way of truth, Who
reveals Himself to them in His Essence and in His works by
His beautiful attributes which none perceive except he who inclines his ear in contemplation,
Who makes known to them that
He is one in His Essence without any associate, single (fard)
without any compeer, eternal (?amad)
without any opposite,
separate (munfarid) without
any like. He is one, ancient (qad?m)
with nothing preceding Him, eternal (azali)
without any beginning, abiding in
existence with none after Him, everlasting
(abadi) without
any end, subsisting without cessation, abiding without termination. He has not
ceased and He will not cease to be described by the epithets of majesty. At
the end of time He will not be
subject to dissolution and decay, but He is the first and
the last, the external and the internal, and He knows all.
1. Transcendence
(tanz?h).
We attest that He
is not a body possessing form, nor
a substance restricted and limited
: He
does not resemble other bodies either in
limitation or in accepting division. He is not a substance and substances
do not exist in
Him; He is not an accident and accidents do not
exist in Him. No, He
resembles no entity and no
entity resembles Him; nothing
is
like Him and He is not
like anything; measure does not bound Him and boundaries
do not contain Him; directions do not surround Him and neither the
earths nor the Heavens are on different
sides of Him. Truly, He is seated on
the throne after the manner in which
He said and in
the sense in which He willed-in a state
of
equilibrium removed from contact, fixity of location,
stability, envelopment, and change. The throne does not support Him, but the
throne and those who carry it are
supported by the grace of His power and are constrained by
His hand. He is above the
throne and above the Heavens and above everything to the limits of the earth with
an aboveness which does not
bring
Him nearer to the throne and the Heavens, just as
it does not make Him farther from the earth. No,
He is highly exalted above the throne
and the Heavens, just as He is highly exalted above the earth. Nevertheless,
He is near to every entity and is “nearer
to a creature
than his jugular vein”; (s?rah
L:15) and He witnesses everything since His nearness does not resemble the
nearness of bodies, just as His essence does not resemble the essence of
bodies. He does not exist in anything, just as nothing exists
in Him: He has too much exalted Himself that any place should contain Him,
just as He has too much sanctified Himself that time should
limit Him. No, He
was before He had created time and
place, and just as He was, He
now is. He is
distinct from His creatures through His attributes. There is
not in His essence any other
besides Him, nor in any
other besides Him, His
essence. He is far removed from change of state
or
of location. Events have no place
in Him and mishaps do not befall Him. No, He does
not cease, in the epithets of His Majesty, to be far removed from decay, and in
the attributes of
His perfection He has no
need of an increase in perfection. In His
essence His existence is known by reason;
His essence is seen with the eyes, a
blessing from Him and a grace to the righteous in the
life everlasting and a completion of bliss from Him through beholding His
gracious face.
2.
Life and Power. We witness that He is living,
powerful, almighty and all-subduing; inadequacy
and weakness befall Him not; slumber overtakes Him not nor sleep;
dissolution does not prevail over Him nor
death. He is Lord of the visible world and
the invisible, and of power
and might; His are dominion, subjugation, creation, and command; the Heavens
are rolled in His right hand and created things are subjugated in His hand. He
is separate in creating and inventing; He is alone in bringing into existence
and innovating. He created all creatures and their works, and decreed their
sustenance and their lives; nothing decreed
escapes His hand and the mutations of things are not beyond His power. The
things which He decreed can not be numbered and the things which He knows
have no end.
3. Knowledge. We
attest that He knows all things which can be known,
grasping all that happens from the limits of earth
to the highest heaven; not an atom's
weight in the earth or in Heaven is beyond His knowledge. Yes, He knows the
creeping of the black ant upon the solid rock in the darkest
night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in the
midst of the air. He knows the secrets and that which is more
shrouded in secrecy than secrets; He has knowledge of the suggestions of the
mind, of
the movements of the
thoughts, and of the concealed things of the inmost parts by a knowledge
which is ancient from eternity and by which He has not ceased to be described
through the ages, not by a knowledge
which renews itself and arises in His essence through experience.1
4.
Will. We attest that He is the willer of all things that are, the
ruler of all originated phenomena; there
does not come into the visible or invisible world anything meagre or plenteous,
small or great, good or evil, or any advantage or disadvantage,
belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or failure, increase
or decrease, obedience or disobedience, except by His
will. What He wills is and what He does not will is not; there is
not a glance of
the eye nor
a stray thought
of the heart that is not subject to
His will.
He is the Creator, the Restorer, the Doer of whatsoever
He wills. There is none that
rescinds His command,
none that supplements His decrees, none that
dissuades a servant from disobeying
Him, except by His
help and mercy, and none has power to obey
Him except by His will. Even though mankind, jinn,
angels, and devils were to unite to move the weight of a
single atom in the world or to render it still, without His will they would
fail. His will subsist in His
essence as one of
His attributes. He has not ceased to be described by it from
eternity, willing, in His infinity, the existence of things at their appointed
time which He has decreed. So they
come into existence at their appointed times even as He has willed in His
infinity without precedence of subsequence.
They come to
pass in accordance with His knowledge and will without
variation or
change. He does not direct things through arrangement of
thought and awaiting the passage of time, and therefore one thing does not
distract Him from another.
5.
Hearing and Sight. We attest that He is a hearer
and a see-er. He hears and sees and no audible
thing, however faint, is beyond His hearing, and no visible
thing, however minute, is hidden from His sight. Distance does not prevent His
hearing and darkness does not obstruct
His seeing. He sees without eyes and hears without ears; just as He perceives
without a brain, and
seizes without a hand, and creates without an instrument, since His attributes
do not resemble the attributes of created things, just
as His essence does not resemble the essence of created
things.
6.
Speech.
And we attest that He speaks, commanding, forbidding, promising, and
threatening, with a speech from eternity, ancient, and self-existing. Unlike
the speech of created things, it is not a
sound
which is caused through the passage of air or the friction of bodies; nor is it
a
letter which is enunciated through the movement of the lips and tongue. We also
attest that the Qur’?n, the Bible, the Gospel, and the Psalms
are His books revealed to His apostles; that the Qur’?n is repeated
by the tongue, written down in copies, and preserved in the heart, yet it is,
nevertheless ancient, subsisting in the essence of God, not subject to division
and separation through its transmission to the heart and (transcription on)
leaves.
We further attest that Moses heard the speech of God without sound and without
word, just as the righteous see the essence of God in
the
hereafter, without substance or accident.
And since He has these qualities, He is
living, knowing, willing, hearing, seeing and speaking through life, power,
knowledge, will, hearing, sight, and speech, not solely through
His essence.
7. Works. And we
attest that there is no entity besides Him, except what
originates by His action and proceeds from His justice, after the most
beautiful and perfect and complete and just of ways. We attest that He is wise
in His actions, just in His judgements; His justice is not comparable with that
of men, since tyranny is conceivable in the case of the latter when he deals
with the property of others than himself; but tyranny is
inconceivable in the case of God, for He does not
encounter
any property of another besides Himself, so that his dealing with it might be
tyrannous. Everything besides Him, men and jinn, angels and devils, Heaven and
earth, animals, plants, and inanimates, substance and accident, as
well
as things perceived and things felt, are
all
originated things which He created by His power from nothing and made from
nought, since He existed in eternity by Himself and
there was not along with Him any other. So He originated
creation thereafter as a manifestation of his power and a
realisation
of that which had preceded of His will and that which existed in
eternity
of His word, not because He had any need or necessity for it.
We also attest that He is
magnanimous
in creating and inventing and in imposing obligations(takl?f), not doing
it through necessity. We attest that He is gracious in
beneficence
and reform, though not through any need. Munificence and kindness, beneficence
and
grace are His, since He is able to bring
upon His creatures all manner of torture and to shower upon them all kinds of
pain and affliction. Even if He should do this, it would be justice on
His
part, it would not be vile, it would not be
tyrannous. He rewards His believing servants for their acts of obedience in the
spirit of generosity and encouragement rather than according to their merit and
desert. For He is under obligation to none and tyranny is
inconceivable
in Him. None possesses any claim against Him. His claim to obedience
is obligatory and binding upon all creatures [ir?dah] because He
made it obligatory upon them through the
words of
His prophets and not by reason
alone. But He sent His apostles and showed their veracity through explicit
miracles and they conveyed His commands and prohibitions as well as His
promises and threats. So it
became obligatory upon all creatures to believe in what they brought.
The Meaning of
the Second Word of the
Witness (al-shah?dah)
The second word of the
witness is that which
testifies that the apostleship belongs to the Apostle, and that God sent the
unlettered (ummi) Qurashite
Prophet Muhammad, as an apostle to all
the Arabs and the non-Arabs, to the jinn and men.
And by his law He abrogated the other laws, except
such of them as He confirmed. And He gave him precedence over all other
prophets and made Him Lord of mankind, and declared incomplete any profession
of faith which attests to unity, i.e. “There is no
god but Allah,” unless it is followed by the witness to
the Apostle, namely,“Muhammed is the Apostle of
AIlah,’’. And he made belief in him, in all the
things which he narrated concerning the affairs of this
world and the hereafter, obligatory upon all creation. And He will not accept
the belief of any creature
until he believes in that which the Prophet
narrated concerning the things after death, of which the first is the
question of Munkar and Nak?r.
These are two awful and terrible beings who will make the dead one sit up
in the grave, both soul and body; they will ask him about
the unity of God and
about the apostleship, saying, “Who
is the Lord, and what
is the religion, and
who is thy prophet?”2 They are the two inquisitors
of the grave and their questions comprise the first examination after death.
Again, man should believe that the punishment of the grave is real and that His judgment of the body and soul is just and in accordance with His will. And he should believe in the balance with the two scales and the tongue-the magnitude of which is like the stages of the Heavens and the earth; in it the deeds are weighed by the power of God, even to the weight of the mote and the mustard seed, in order to establish exact justice. The records of the good deeds will be placed in a good manner in the scale of light, and then the balance will be weighed down by them according to the measure of their favour in the sight of God and by His grace, while the records of the evil deeds will be cast in a vile manner in the scale of darkness, and they will be light in the balance through the justice of God. He should believe also that the bridge (al-?ir??) is real; it is a bridge stretched over Hell, sharper than the edge of the sword and finer than a hair. The feet of the unbelievers slip on it, according to the decree of God, and they fall into the Fire; but the feet of the believers stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass into everlasting life. And he should believe in the frequented tank (hawd) the tank of Muhammed, from which the believers will drink before entering Paradise and after (w?jib) crossing the bridge. Whoever drinks a single draught from it will never thirst again. Its width is the distance of one month’s journey; its waters are whiter than milk and sweeter than honey. Around it are ewers in number like the stars of heaven,3 and into it flow two canals from al-kawthar 4. And he, should believe in the judgment and the distinctions between men in it, that some will be closely questioned that some will be treated with leniency and that others will enter Paradise without questioning-these are God’s favourites (al-muqurrab?n). God will ask, whomsoever He will of the p