Some passages of the Qoran may perhaps be interpreted in such a way that we hear the subtler strings of religious emotion vibrating in them.  The chief impression that Mohammed’s Allah makes before the Hijrah is that of awful majesty, at which men tremble from afar; they fear His punishment, dare hardly be sure of His reward, and hope much from His mercy.  This impression is a lasting one; but, after the Hijrah, Allah is also heard quietly reasoning with His obedient servants, giving them advice and commands, which they have to follow in order to frustrate all resistance to His authority and to deserve His satisfaction.  He is always the Lord, the King of the world, who speaks to His humble servants.  But the lamp which Allah had caused Mohammed to hold up to guide mankind with its light, was raised higher and higher after the Prophet’s death, in order to shed its light over an ever increasing part of humanity.  This was not possible, however, without its reservoir being replenished with all the different kinds of oil that had from time immemorial given light to those different nations.  The oil of mysticism came from Christian circles, and its Neo-Platonic origin was quite unmistakable; Persia and India also contributed to it.  There were those who, by asceticism, by different methods of mortifying the flesh, liberated the spirit that it might rise and become united with the origin of all being; to such an extent, that with some the profession of faith was reduced to the blasphemous exclamation:  “I am Allah.”  Others tried to become free from the sphere of the material and the temporal by certain methods of thought, combined or not combined with asceticism.  Here the necessity of guidance was felt, and congregations came into existence, whose purpose it was to permit large groups of people under the leadership of their sheikhs, to participate simultaneously in the mystic union.  The influence which spread most widely was that of leaders like Ghazali, the Father of the later Mohammedan Church, who recommended moral purification of the soul as the only way by which men should come nearer to God.  His mysticism wished to avoid the danger of pantheism, to which so many others were led by their contemplations, and which so often engendered disregard of the revealed law, or even of morality.  Some wanted to pass over the gap between the Creator and the created along a bridge of contemplation; and so, driven by the fire of sublime passion, precipitate themselves towards the object of their love, in a kind of rapture, which poets compare with intoxication.  The evil world said that the impossibility to accomplish this heavenly union often induced those people to imitate it for the time being with the earthly means of wine and the indulgence in sensual love.

Characteristic of all these sorts of mysticism is their esoteric pride.  All those emotions are meant only for a small number of chosen ones.  Even Ghazali’s ethical mysticism is not for the multitude.  The development of Islam as a whole, from the Hijrah on, has always been greater in breadth than in depth; and, consequently, its pedagogics have remained defective.  Even some of the noblest minds in Islam restrict true religious life to an aristocracy, and accept the ignorance of the multitude as an irremediable evil.