Spiritual Education in Islamic Tradition: Revisiting Ghazali’s “Deliverance”

Abstract

Any religion has three aspects: moral–ritual orders, metaphysical–cosmological beliefs, and the feelings that are the foundations of “religious experience”; focusing on any of these particular aspects results in a different approach toward the concept of “religion” and “religious education.” This study will examine Ghazali’s version of Sufism as a significant way of spirituality in Islam. He thought that mystical vision was the sublime ideal of Islam and education. But he redefined the other two aspects in line with achieving religious experience. Thus, he achieved a special interpretation of spiritual education that could be called negative education.