Al-Ghazali Abstinence in Islam

Al-Ghazali Abstinence in Islam

For pious Muslims of the Sufi persuasion, abstinence is a necessary virtue for the conduct of spiritual exercises leading to union with God. They preached against all that which distracted from concentration on the worship of God. They looked upon excessive eating and copulation as the major media of distraction, a sort of ailment to be shunned and if too entrenched, a weakness to be overcome by rigorous exercises. Marriage was recommended only as a last resort for those whose sexual urges were too strong to contain. The Sufi perception tended to contradict the official Muslim conviction that marriage was necessary for the propagation of race and faith and accounted for much of the date that centered on the subject historically.

The author of this work, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), is generally regarded as the leading theologian and synthesizer of Sunni and Sufi perceptions of Islam. He is credited with enshrining the Ash'arite system in the main body of Islamic theology as the sole unchallenged creed of Islam. Professor Hitti refers to him as the "father of the church in Islam" and the final authority for Sunni, or Islamic orthodoxy.' In his religious experience first as an orthodox theologian then as a mystic, author and traveller, al-Ghazali came to embody all that Islam itself experienced in its multiple spiritual