work of God, produced out of nothing by His will, guided by His will, ever dependent for existence on His will, and one day to pass away at His command. So al-Ghazzali joins science and revelation. Behind the order of nature lies the personal, omnipotent God who says; "Be!" and it is. The things of existence do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolution, but are produced directly by Him.

Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali's attitude toward the physical universe that deserves attention, but which is very difficult to grasp or express. Perhaps it may be stated thus: Existence has three modes; there is existence in the alam al-mulk, in the alam al jabarut, and in the alam al-malakut. The first is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses; it exists by the power (qudra) of God, one part proceeding from another in constant change. The alam al-malakut exists by God's eternal decree, without development, remaining in one state without addition or diminution. The alam al jabarut comes between these two; it seems externally to belong to the first, but in respect of the power of God which is from all eternity (al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the second. The soul (nafs) belongs to the alam al-malakut, is taken from it and returns to it. In sleep and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into contact with the world from which it is derived. This is what happens in dreams—"sleep is the brother of death," says al-Ghazzali; and thus, too, the saints and the prophets attain divine knowledge. Some angels belong to the world of malakut; some to that of jabarut, apparently those who have shown themselves

here as messengers of God. The things in the heavens, the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, etc., belong to the world of malakut. On the one hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and, on the other, these terms for them are not metaphors. Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the difficulty of Muslim eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects the right to allegorize—these things are real, actual; but he relegates them to this world of malakut. Again, the Qur'an, Islam, and Friday (the day of public worship) are personalities in the world of malakut and jabarut. So, too, the world of mulk must appear as a personality at the bar of these other worlds at the last day. It will come as an ugly old woman, but Friday as a beautiful young bride. This personal Qur'an belongs to the world of jabarut, but Islam to that of malakut.

But just as those three worlds are not thought of as separate in time, so they are not separate in space. They are not like the seven heavens and seven earths of Muslim literalists, which stand, story-fashion, one above the other. Rather they are, as expressed above, modes of existence, and might be compared to the speculations on another life in space of n dimensions, framed, from a very different starting-point and on a basis of pure physics, by Balfour Stewart and Tait in their "Unseen Universe." On another side they stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas, whether through neo-Platonism or more immediately. Sufiism at its best, and when stripped of the trappings of Muslim tradition and Qur'anic exegesis, has no reason to shrink from the investigation either of