We will use the relationship (1) to develop a critique of Imam Ghazzali's epistemology as embodied in Ihya. To begin with, we note that Ihya is by and large a study in personal psychology as it relates religious self-actualization to the one-directional flow of relationships from Tawhid to the the temporal world and to hereafter. The unification of knowledge is brought out in the understanding of Tawhid itself and the concommitant application to the world. The intensity of the relationship therefore depends upon the depth of Tawhidi understanding among individual persons. A truly moral society as externalized organization of human conduct is then possible and is premised on the primacy of perfecting individuals. We thereby sense a socio-psychological realization of morally perfecting individual beings. The moral society remains unattainable in the absence of this unique relationship between the individual and the whole.

However, in this state of limiting Tawhidi perfection in life, such persons are seen in Ihya to attain Fana', self-destruction similar to the concept of the Buddhistic Nirvana. The inquirer is then left with two questions relating to the temporal meaning of this concept of Fana', if this is to be the goal of moral self- actualization leading to the formation of moral society in earth. In the state of Fana' the individual loses the person in the forgetfullness of the temporal world. This is both a rare possibility among the generality of mankind and an experience in dissociation of the soul from temporal activity, or it is limited to only those who will attain the helm of Islamic affairs in the conduct of a moral society.

Among these three options of the attributes of Fana', the first one presents a model of substitution and not complementarity between the goals of temporal order and the moral order, as self- annihilation of Fana' takes away temporal craving. Societal motivations premised in creative movement, growth, innovation and diversity along with social justice, purpose, balance and certainty are methodologically wiped out in the state of Fana', when extended to the formation of the moral order. In the second case, if attainment of Fana' in the Islamic leader enables him to discharge his duties with greater insight, then too this experience is brought to interact with the imperfection in the generality of community members. What then results is a diminution of the state of Fana' as a dynamic phenomenon in social reality.

Thus methodologically speaking, the concept of Fana' is an ideal built upon an impossible state of a collection of individuals constituting moral society, a case that has not existed in history except in the state of relatively highest level of perfection when Tawhid i.e. Qur'an, social solidarity, social justice, equality and organization became the distinctive realities with the coming of Islam and the Islamic State of Madinah.

There is yet another methodological problem in the above type of socio- psychological consciousness in Ihya. The state of Fana' as the end-all of moral self-actualization according to this masterpiece, if attainable and then externalizable to society at large, must mean a definition of society as the sum-total of the individual preferences and organizations converging to this ideal state. Such is also the perfect state of Al-Farabi. This is an idea similar to that presented in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Plato's Politics.7 Society. To the early Greeks the concept meant the ideal pursuit of ethical and moral values. The Telos was seen as the origin of this unified conception of the cosmic order in which men were to attain perfection by pursuit of reason. The end point of this pursuit would be happiness.

The summation of perfected individual moral preferences resulting in a social order, is also to be found in utilitarianism of more current times. Furthermore, in as far as utilitarianism has influenced the growth of occidental economic doctrines and scientific principles prescribing marginal rates of substitution between the world of matter and spirit, the calculus of pleasure and pains, the same state of perfection of knowledge in Fana', Nirvana, Telos and optimal information of economic neoclassicism, are similar methodological results.8 No real social, political and economic reconstructions, except metaphysical and analytical niceties, have been brought about by such ideal states.