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WorkAl-Ghazali

The Marvels of the Heart

The book of the *Revival* that asks what a heart is: a mirror to be polished, a kingdom with an army, a door the devil watches.

by Al-Ghazali121 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Original title
كتاب شرح عجائب القلب
Original language
Arabic

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Overview

Of the forty books of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn), the guide to Muslim life that al-Ghazālī began after he left Baghdad in 1095, this is the twenty-first. It opens the third of the work's four quarters, the ten books on the things that destroy a person. Before the Revival turns to the vices, and then to the virtues that save, it asks what is destroyed or saved. The answer is the heart: not the organ in the chest but a subtle spiritual substance connected with it, which is a person's real self, and for which soul, spirit and intellect are, in one of their senses, other names. The heart rules the body as a king rules an army. Predatory, animal, devilish and divine qualities live in it together, and a life is the contest among them. It knows things the way a mirror holds an image, and the mirror can be dulled by sin, turned away by appetite, or veiled by beliefs accepted unexamined since childhood. Knowledge reaches it in two ways, by learning through the senses and by inspiration from within, and the book sets the Sufis' way of polishing the heart beside the scholars' way of acquiring knowledge. Later sections map the doors through which the devil whispers into it. The best-known page tells of painters from China and Byzantium who competed before a king: the Byzantines covered their wall with colours, the Chinese only polished theirs, and when the curtain between the walls was raised, the polished wall showed the Byzantine painting more brightly than the original. The Persian poet Rūmī retold the contest in his Masnavi a century and a half after al-Ghazālī, with the two sides' roles reversed. Walter James Skellie translated the book into English as The Marvels of the Heart, printed in 2010.

Key concepts

How do heart, spirit, soul and intellect differ in this book?

Each of the four words has two senses. In one sense, the heart is the organ, the spirit a fine vapour that carries life through the body, the soul the source of anger and appetite, and intellect a kind of knowledge. In the other sense, all four name the same thing: the subtle, God-given self that knows and is held accountable. The book is about that second thing, whatever it is called.

What is knowledge “from God’s presence”?

It is knowledge that comes to the heart directly “from God’s presence”, without study or proof, the phrase taken from the Qurʾān’s description of a servant taught by God. The book does not claim it replaces learning. It says piety and purification open the way for it, and it points to true dreams and the prophets’ knowledge of the future as evidence that such knowledge is possible.

What are khawāṭir, the passing thoughts of the heart?

Khawāṭir are the thoughts that enter the heart moment by moment, whether new perceptions or recalled ideas. They matter because every action starts with one: a thought stirs desire, desire moves the will, the will moves the limbs. The book traces each thought to a source, an angel’s prompting towards good or the devil’s whisper towards evil, and asks the reader to examine them before acting.

What is remembrance of God, and what does it do?

Remembrance, dhikr, is keeping God present in the heart, often by repeating his name or words of praise. The book treats it as the devil’s opposite: because one thought displaces another, a heart filled with God leaves the whisperer no room. But it insists that remembrance is a medicine for a prepared patient. Spoken while desire still rules the heart, it does not reach deep enough to work.

What is the “greater struggle”?

The book cites the saying that believers return from the lesser struggle, warfare, to the greater struggle, the fight against the self. The self here means the appetite and anger within a person, which never stop pressing. The greater struggle is the daily work of bringing them under reason so that they serve the heart instead of ruling it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A King With an Unruly Army

Who is really in charge of a human life? The book pictures the heart as a ruler whose own troops can turn against it, and asks what makes them obey.

The heart in this book is not the organ in the chest but the knowing self, and the body is its frontier province. The senses are its scouts, imagination its messenger, memory its record-keeper. Within the same skin live a pig, a dog, a devil and a sage: appetite, aggression, cunning, and the drive to know. The pig is blamed not for its looks but for its greed. Anger and appetite can serve the heart, like a trained horse and hunting dog under a skilled rider, or overthrow it.

  • heart
  • human nature
  • moral psychology
  • anger
  • desire
  • embodiment
  • self-knowledge
  • intellect

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A Mirror Polished Clean

Can a person know things they were never taught? The book sets learning beside inner disclosure and asks what has to happen to the heart for the second to work.

Knowing, the book says, is a likeness of a thing appearing in the heart, as a form appears in a mirror. The mirror can be rusted by sin, turned the wrong way by appetite, or screened by beliefs held since childhood. Knowledge enters by two routes, like water filling a basin from outside streams or from a spring beneath it. Scholars dig channels; Sufis polish. Painters from Byzantium covered their wall with colours, the Chinese only polished theirs, and the polished wall showed the painting more brightly.

  • spiritual knowledge
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • inspiration
  • religious epistemology
  • religious knowledge
  • spiritual perception
  • sufism
  • purification of the heart
  • perception

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Whispers and What We Answer For

Is anyone to blame for the thoughts that cross their mind? The later sections map the devil's ways into the heart and sort the inner movements a person must answer for from those they need not.

Thoughts arrive in the heart all day, some prompted by an angel and some by the devil, and the devil enters through the doors desire leaves open. Remembering God displaces his whispers, but only when the desires that feed him are gone; a dog does not leave a table that still has meat on it. Not every thought is a sin. A passing thought and a spontaneous wish are forgiven; a chosen judgment and a firm resolve are not, and whoever abandons a sinful resolve for God's sake is credited with a good deed.

  • temptation
  • attention
  • remembrance
  • moral responsibility
  • intention
  • faith
  • piety
  • spiritual discipline
  • spiritual practice
  • prayer

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
121
distinct concepts
190
by passages held, corpus-wide
#468

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “desire” and “moral psychology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
desiremoral psychology9
desiretemptation7
desirereason5
heartmoral psychology5
moral psychologytemptation5
faithknowledge4
knowledgereason3
moral psychologyreason3
desireheart2
faithspiritual knowledge2
heartknowledge2
hearttemptation2
desirefaith1
faithheart1
faithmoral psychology1
faithtemptation1
heartreason1
heartspiritual knowledge1
knowledgemoral psychology1
reasonspiritual knowledge1
reasontemptation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Deliverance from Error (المنقذ من الضلال)

    An intellectual autobiography, written at Nishapur after his return to teaching in 1106; Claud Field's Confessions of Al Ghazzali first brought it into English in 1909.

     EN
  2. The Alchemy of Happiness (Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat)

    His major work in Persian, written around 1105 for readers without Arabic, and a shorter companion to the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

     EN
  3. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (تهافت الفلاسفة)

    The book by which he is known in philosophy, finished in Baghdad in January 1095, months before he gave up his chair there and left the city.

     AR
  4. The Just Balance (القسطاس المستقيم)

    One of several answers to the Ismāʿīlīs, this one cast as a dialogue on the road; his autobiography points readers to it instead of repeating its case.

     AR
  5. The Marvels of the Heart (كتاب شرح عجائب القلب) you are here AR
  6. The Niche of Lights (مشكاة الأنوار)

    Among his late works, and the one in which his thought comes closest to the mystics: three chapters on a single verse of the Qurʾān and a single saying of the Prophet.

     AR
  7. The Standard of Knowledge (معيار العلم في فن المنطق)

    Written after The Incoherence of the Philosophers to explain the philosophers' technical vocabulary to its readers, and to give jurists and theologians a test for their own arguments.

     AR
  8. مقاصد الفلاسفة

    A report before a refutation: Avicenna's system set out without a word of objection, then framed by a short preface and ending that point ahead to The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

     AR
  9. ميزان العمل

    The second half of a pair: having set a standard for knowing in The Standard of Knowledge, he set one here for acting, still in Baghdad, around 1095.

     AR
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