The Mystics of Islam

But in his Masnavī—a work so famous and venerated that it has been styled ‘The Koran of Persia’—we find him in a more sober mood expounding the Sūfī doctrines and justifying the ways of God to man. Here, though he is a convinced optimist and agrees with Ghazālī that this is the best of all possible worlds, he does not airily dismiss the problem of evil as something outside reality, but endeavours to show that evil, or what seems evil to us, is part of the divine order and harmony. I will quote some passages of his argument and leave my readers to judge how far it is successful or, at any rate, suggestive.

The Sūfīs, it will be remembered, conceive the universe as a projected and reflected image of God. The divine light, streaming forth in a series of emanations, falls at last upon the darkness of not-being, every atom of which reflects some attribute of Deity. For instance, the beautiful attributes of love and mercy are reflected in the form of heaven and the angels, while the terrible attributes of wrath and vengeance are reflected in the form of hell and the devils. Man reflects all the attributes, the terrible as well as the beautiful: he is an epitome of heaven and hell. Omar Khayyām alludes to this theory when he says:

Jalāluddīn, therefore, does in a sense make God the author of evil, but at the same time he makes evil intrinsically good in relation to God—for it is the reflexion of certain divine attributes which in themselves are absolutely good. So far as evil is really evil, it springs from not-being. The poet assigns a different value to this term in its relation to God and in its relation to man. In respect of God not-being is nothing, for God is real Being, but in man it is the principle of evil which constitutes half of human nature. In the one case it is a pure negation, in the other it is positively and actively pernicious. We need not quarrel with the poet for coming to grief in his logic. There are some occasions when intense moral feeling is worth any amount of accurate thinking.

It is evident that the doctrine of divine unity implies predestination. Where God is and naught beside Him, there can be no other agent than He, no act but His. “Thou didst not throw, when thou threwest, but God threw” (Kor. 8. 17). Compulsion is felt only by those who do not love. To know God is to love Him; and the gnostic may answer, like the dervish who was asked how he fared:

This is the Truth; but for the benefit of such as cannot bear it, Jalāluddīn vindicates the justice of God by asserting that men have the power to choose how they will act, although their freedom is subordinate to the divine will. Approaching the question, “Why does God ordain and create evil?” he points out that things are known through their opposites, and that the existence of evil is necessary for the manifestation of good.