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The Niche for Lights/Introduction
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| Author's Preface | The Niche for Lights ~ Introduction written by Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī, translated by William Henry Temple Gairdner | Introduction I. Date, Object, and General Contents |
| 1924. |
The references in square brackets are to the pages of the Cairo Arabic edition, and to the present English translation.
THE MISHKÂT AL-ANWAR[1] is a work of extreme interest from the viewpoint of al-Ghazzâlî's[2] inner life and esoteric thought. The glimpses it gives of that life and thought are remarkably, perhaps uniquely, intimate. It begins where his autobiographical Al-Munqidh min al-Dalâl leaves off. Its esotericism excited the curiosity and even the suspicion of Muslim thinkers from the first, and we have deeply interesting allusions to it in Ibn Tufaill and Ibn Rushd,[4] the celebrated philosophers of Western Islam, who flourished within the century after al-Ghazzâlî's death in 1111 (A.H. 505)--a fact which, again, increases its importance and interest for us.
[1. The Mishkât al-Anwâr is numbered No. 34 in Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur (vol. i, p. 423). It was printed in Cairo (matba`at as Sidq, A. H. 1322), to which edition the references in the present work are made. There is another edition in a collection of five opuscules of Ghazzâlî under the title of the first of the five, Faisal al-Tafriqa.
2. The Algazal of the Schoolmen.
3. The Abubacer of the Schoolmen.
4. The Averroes of the Schoolmen.]
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