Observations placeholder
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness - 13 Adversity and illness as a means of ‘opening the door’
Identifier
018779
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness - 13 Adversity as a means of ‘opening the door’
….. if a man ceases to take any interest in worldly matters, conceives a distaste for common pleasures, and appears sunk in depression:
The doctor will say, “This is a case of melancholy, and requires such and such a prescription.”
The physicist will say, “This is a dryness of the brain caused by hot weather and cannot be relieved till the air becomes moist.”
The astrologer will attribute it to some particular conjunction or opposition of planets.
“Thus far their wisdom reaches,” says the Koran.
The doctor, physicist, and astrologer are doubtless right each in his particular branch of knowledge, but they do not see that illness is, so to speak, a cord of love by which God draws to Himself the saints concerning whom He has said, “I was sick and ye visited Me not.”
Illness itself is one of those forms of experience by which man arrives at the knowledge of God, as He says by the mouth of His Prophet,
“Sicknesses themselves are My servants, and are attached to My chosen.”