Abstract

Self-training and purification is a preliminary step for the exaltation of
the soul and human salvation. Self scourges and moral knaveries are
considered as the most important obstacles to mystical paths. The Desert
Fathers consider fighting against the self scourges as a necessary prelude
to the beginning of spiritual transition and covering mystical stages.
Muslim mystics too, highly emphasize the purification of self and
avoiding moral knaveries.
This article is to study the scourges of self from the viewpoint of the
Desert fathers and Muslim mystics in the early centuries of their
teaching formation. The procedure of the study is comparative and
descriptive –analytic. Identifying the self medically and
psychoanalytically, the Desert fathers and Muslim mystics have
recognized and enumerated scourges whose methods of confrontation
are, to a large extent, similar. Both schools have advised controlling
gluttony and gormandism, starvation and hunger, avoiding
voluptuousness and worldliness, chastity, piety and asceticism, avoiding
garrulity and voracity, silence, controlling wrath, jealousy and
ambitiousness, humility and reverence.

Keywords

• Self Scourges
• The ways of Fighting against the Self Scourges
• The Desert Fathers
• The Muslim Mystics
• Ghazzāli’s Thoughts. *