He is perfect goodness and perfect beauty, the supreme object of love.

He is perfect goodness and perfect beauty, the supreme object of love.[^2] He is the light of lights, the eternal wisdom, the creative truth, but above all, He is the eternal will. To the philosophers God is primarily thought or intelligence, but to al-Ghazālī He is primarily a will which is the cause of creation. “The First Principle,” he says, “is an omnipotent and willing agent.

He does what He wills and ordains as He likes, and He creates the similar and dissimilar things alike, whenever and in whatever manner He wills”[^3] So Ultimate Reality is essentially will. The entire choir of the heavens and the furniture of the earth are the direct work of God, produced out of sheer nothingness simply through His terrific “Be.”[^4] God has created the universe through His will, sustains it through His will, and one day will let pass away by His will.

According to philosophers, God wills the world because He thinks of it. According to al-Ghazālī, “God has cognizance of the world because He wills it and in His willing it.”[^5]HHHH Like the philosophers, al-Ghazālī also emphasizes the transcendent aspect of God. He is exalted beyond the limitations of space and time, for He is the creator of space and time.

He was before time and space, but He is also immanent in this spatio-temporal order, His eternal wisdom and supreme beauty manifests themselves through the wonders and glory of His creation. His eternal will is an action throughout the universe; it is in the swing of the sun and the moon and in the alternation of day and night. Everywhere around is the touch and working of God.[^6] Al-Ghazālī’s God is not the Absolute of the philosophers, who is bleak and cold, but a personal God, a living God.

He desires inter-course with His creatures and makes it possible for them to enter into fellowship with Him through prayer and contemplation and, above all, through the gift of mystical gnosis. 3. Soul The difference between al-Ghazālī and the philosophers with regard to the nature of the soul is not very well marked.

He only insists, like Kant,[^7] that the philosophers through their rational arguments cannot give any conclusive proof for the spirituality, substantiality, unity, immortality, etc., of the human soul. His attack on the philosophers on this issue is as incisive and analytic as that of Kant but probably more violent.