Self Scourges from the Viewpoint of " The Desert Fathers" and Muslim Mystics (with emphasis on Ghazzāli's Thoughts)

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.