Deliverance from Error

the history of the mind of this remarkable man in his pursuit of truth. It might not inaptly bear the title “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.” In its intellectual subtlety it bears a certain resemblance to Newman’s Grammar of Assent, and in its almost Puritanical sense of the terrors of the world to come, it is akin to Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. It is also interesting as being one of the very few specimens of genuine Eastern autobiography.

After describing the difficulty with which he escaped from an almost Pyrrhonic Referring to Pyrrho of Elis; a school of extreme skepticism that suggests one should suspend judgment on all matters because nothing can be known for certain. scepticism, “not by systematic reasoning and accumulation of proofs, but by a flash of light which God sent into my soul,” he reviews the various sects whom he encountered in his search for truth.

I. The scholastic theologians Thinkers who use formal logic and traditional religious texts to defend their faith., who profess to follow reason and speculation.

II. The philosophers, who call themselves masters of Logic and Demonstration.

III. The Sufis Followers of the mystical branch of Islam who seek a direct, personal experience of the Divine., who claim an immediate intuition, and who perceive the real manifestation of truth as common men perceive material phenomena.

After mastering the first two systems and still finding the great problem unsolved, he was forced to pronounce philosophy incompetent, and to seek in some higher faculty than reason the solution of his doubts. The intuition or ecstasy (“wajd” original: "wajd"; a Sufi term describing a state of spiritual ecstasy or "finding" God through the heart rather than the mind.) of the Sufis was to him a sort