of mysticism and dogma have long been matter of common knowledge and a
brief sketch of them will therefore suffice. If not essential to our
purpose within the limits of this book, they are none the less
necessary to complete our treatment of the subject.

By mysticism we understand the expression of religious emotion, as
contrasted with efforts to attain righteousness by full obedience to
the ethical doctrine of duties, and also in contrast to the
hair-splitting of dogmatic speculation: mysticism strove to reach
immediate emotional unity with the Godhead. No trace of any such
tendency was to be found in the Qoran: it entered Islam as a complete
novelty, and the affinities which enabled it to gain a footing have
been difficult to trace.

Muhammedan mysticism is certainly not exclusively Christian: its
origins, like those of Christian mysticism, are to be found in the
pantheistic writings of the Neoplatonist school of Dionysius the
Areopagite: but Islam apparently derived its mysticism from Christian
sources. In it originated the idea, with all its capacity for
development, of the mystical love of God: to this was added the theory
and practice of asceticism which was especially developed by
Christianity, and, in later times, the influence of Indian philosophy,
which is unmistakable. Such are the fundamental elements of this
tendency. When the idea of the Nirwana, the Arab _fan[=a]_, is
attained, Muhammedanism proper comes to an end. But orthodoxy controls
the divergent elements: it opposes any open avowal of the logical
conclusion, which would identify "God" and the "ego," but in practice
this group of ideas, pantheistic in all but name, has been received
and given a place side by side with the strict monotheism of the Qoran
and with the dogmatic theology. Any form of mysticism which is pushed