Throughout the centuries pantheistic and animistic forms of mysticism have found many adherents among the Mohammedans; but the infallible Agreement has persisted in calling that heresy.  Ethical mysticism, since Ghazali, has been fully recognized; and, with law and dogma, it forms the sacred trio of sciences of Islam, to the study of which the Arabic humanistic arts serve as preparatory instruments.  All other sciences, however useful and necessary, are of this world and have no value for the world to come.  The unfaithful appreciate and study them as well as do the Mohammedans; but, on Mohammedan soil they must be coloured with a Mohammedan hue, and their results may never clash with the three religious sciences.  Physics, astronomy, and philosophy have often found it difficult to observe this restriction, and therefore they used to be at least slightly suspected in pious circles.

Mysticism did not only owe to Ijma’ its place in the sacred trio, but it succeeded, better than dogmatics, in confirming its right with words of Allah and His Prophet.  In Islam mysticism and allegory are allied in the usual way; for the illuminati the words had quite a different meaning than for common, every-day people.  So the Qoran was made to speak the language of mysticism; and mystic commentaries of the Holy Book exist, which, with total disregard for philological and historical objections, explain the verses of the Revelation as expressions of the profoundest soul experiences.  Clear utterances in this spirit were put into the Prophet’s mouth; and, like the canonists, the leaders on the mystic Way to God boasted of a spiritual genealogy which went back to Mohammed.  Thus the Prophet is said to have declared void all knowledge and fulfillment of the law which lacks mystic experience.

Of course only “true” mysticism is justified by Ijma’ and confirmed by the evidence of Qoran and Sunnah; but, about the bounds between “true” and “false” or heretical mysticism, there exists in a large measure the well-known diversity of opinion allowed by God’s grace.  The ethical mysticism of al-Ghazali is generally recognized as orthodox; and the possibility of attaining to a higher spiritual sphere by means of methodic asceticism and contemplation is doubted by few.  The following opinion has come to prevail in wide circles:  the Law offers the bread of life to all the faithful, the dogmatics are the arsenal from which the weapons must be taken to defend the treasures of religion against unbelief and heresy, but mysticism shows the earthly pilgrim the way to Heaven.

It was a much lower need that assured the cult of saints a place in the doctrine and practice of Islam.  As strange as is Mohammed’s transformation from an ordinary son of man, which he wanted to be, into the incarnation of Divine Light, as the later biographers represent him, it is still more astounding that the intercession of saints should have become indispensable to the community of Mohammed, who, according to Tradition,