Reviews for The Niche of Lights/Mishkat Al-Anwar: A Parallel English-Arabic Text

The average rating for The Niche of Lights/Mishkat Al-Anwar: A Parallel English-Arabic Text based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-02 00:00:00 Michael fleming Quite fascinating key text by this great and problematic teacher and polemicist. I've so regularly encountered Al-Ghazali in the context of his critique of Ibn Sina and the other Neoplatonic and Peripatetic philosophers of the Muslim world that it was quite nice to see him present a positive vision of his own. Here we find that the cosmos is the interplay of varying degrees of light and darkness, with God as the source of all. Al-Ghazali presents a theory of the abnegation of the ego and the resultant beatific vision in terms that are entirely new to me - the non-existence of the self is, in his view, a reflection of the fact that nothing has within itself any capacity for perdurance or causation whatsoever. Instead, all sovereignty is given to Allah. His Occasionalist rejection of causation is not new to me, but it's interesting to see it framed in this rather lovely and evocative vision of a graded cosmos formed of the play of light from light, and presented in relationship to the phenomenon of epiphany. A lovely and worthy classic.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-04-19 00:00:00 Erik Stengler one of the most beautiful books i have ever read...Ghazali takes one verse of the quran and dives into its meaning...its absolutely magnificent...i hardly ever read a book twice, but this is one of those books, if u read it over and over again, each time you would learn something new...an excellent explanation of islamic spirituality/sufism...after reading this, for the first time ever, i understood the meaning of "nonexistance" in the sufi context...