← Volver a la ficha del textoNYYS LICAL
DIMENSIONS
OFISLAM
s0zb6 vo Tapas
eH ay aayog grog
by ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
MYSTICAL DIMENSIONS OF ISLAM
by ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
MYSTICAL
DIMENSIONS
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
© 1975 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cloth, published 1975, ISBN 0-8078-1223-4
Paper, published 1978, ISBN 0-8078-1271-4
First printing, October 1975
Second printing, August 1976
Third printing, April 1978
Fourth printing, March 1981
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Schimmel, Annemarie.
Mystical dimensions of Islam.
Includes bibliographical references.
1, Sufism. I. Title.
BP189.2,S34 297'.4 73-16112
ISBN 0-8078-1223-4
ISBN 0-8078-1271-4 (pbk.)
LO LT AESSALTN I SOR SHIRAZ
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS / xi
ABBREVIATIONS / xiii
FOREWORD / xvii
THE ARABIC ALPHABET AND
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION / xix
THE MUSLIM YEAR / Xxi
1,WHAT IS SUFISM? / 8
2. HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF
CLASSICAL SUFISM / 23
The Formative Period / 23
viii / CONTENTS
Some Mystical Leaders of
the Late Ninth Century / 42
Al-Hallaj, Martyr of Mystical Love | 62
The Period of Consolidation:
From Shibli to Ghazzali__/ 77
3. THE PATH / 98
The Foundations of the Path | 98
Stations and Stages [| 109
Love and Annihilation / 130
Forms of Worship / 148
4. MAN AND HIS PERFECTION / 187
Some Notes on Sufi Psychology | 187
Good and Evil: The Role of Satan | 193
Saints and Miracles | 199
The Veneration of the Prophet / 213
5. SUFI ORDERS AND FRATERNITIES / 228
Community Life / 228
Abit Said ibn Ab?rl-Khayr | 241
The First Orders | 244
6. THEOSOPHICAL SUFISM / 259
Suhrawardi Maqtil,
the Master of Illumination / 259
Ibn ‘Arabi, the Great Master | 263
Ibn al-Farid, Mystical Poet | 274
The Development of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mysticism of Unity | 279
7. THE ROSE AND THE NIGHTINGALE:
PERSIAN AND TURKISH
MYSTICAL POETRY / 287
Immortal Rose | 287
The Pilgrimage of the Birds:
San@iand ‘Attar | 301
Maulana Jalaluddin Rimi / 309
Turkish Popular Mysticism | 328
CONTENTS / ix
8. SUFISM IN INDO-PAKISTAN / 344
The Classical Period / 344
The “Naqshbandi Reaction” | 363
Khwaja Mir Dard,a“Sincere Muhammadan” | 373
Mystical Poetry in the Regional Languages—
Sindhi, Panjabi, Pashto | 383
9. EPILOGUE / 403
APPENDIX 1
Letter Symbolism in Sufi Literature / 411
APPENDIX 2
The Feminine Element in Sufism | 426
BIBLIOGRAPHY / 437
INDEX OF KORANIC QUOTATIONS / 469
INDEX OF PROPHETIC TRADITIONS / 471
INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES / 473
INDEX OF SUBJECTS / 491
ILLUSTRATIONS
EOS ES
ENS
NSN es x
pe ey
eal
The Martyrdom of al-Hallaj / 63
Womanin Trance / 151
Abi’l-Adyan Passing through the Pyre / 201
Rembrandt’s Copy of a Mogul Miniature / 233
San‘an Tending the Swine / 269
Saint with Tame Lions / 349
ABBREVIATIONS
Since this book is intended primarily for the general
reader, we have—though reluctantly—refrained from having too
many footnotes or too large a bibliography. The reader will find
much additional information about personalities, terminology, and
historical facts in the Encyclopedia of Islam (1913-36; 2d ed.,
1960-); the relevant articles have not been mentioned in the
footnotes.
The following frequently cited works are abbreviated
in the text:
A Abia Nu‘aym al-Isfahani. Hilyat ul-auliy@. 10 vols.
Cairo, 1932.
AD Fariduddin ‘Attar. Diwdn-i qas@id wa ghazaliyat. Ed-
ited by Sa‘id Nafisi. Tehran, 1339 sh./1960. Number
of poem cited.
AP Armaghdan-i Pak, Edited by Sheikh Muhammad Ikram.
Karachi, 1953.
B_ Razbihan Baqli. “Sharh-i shathiyat,’ Les paradoxes des
soufis. Edited by Henri Corbin. Tehran and Paris, 1966.
Paragraphs cited.
BA Razbihan Baqli. “‘Abhar al-‘ashiqin,’ Le jasmine des
fidéles d’amour. Edited by Henri Corbin. Tehran and
Paris, 1958. Paragraphs cited.
BO John K. Birge. The Bektashi Order of Dervishes. 1937.
Reprint. London, 1965.
CL Henri Corbin. L’Homme de lumiére dans le soufisme
iranien. Paris, 1971.
D Jalaluddin Rami. Diwan-i kabir ya Kulliyat-i Shams.
Edited by Badi‘uz-Zaman Furizanfar. Vols. 1-7. Teh-
ran, 1336 sh./1957. Number of poem cited.
Abi Hamid al-Ghazzali. Ihy@ ‘uliim ad-din. 4 vols.
Bulaq, 1289 h./1872—-73.
‘Ali ibn ‘Uthman al-Hujwiri. The “Kashf al-Mahjib,”
the Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism by al-Hujwiri.
xiii
xiv / ABBREVIATIONS
IK
SD
Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. Gibb Memorial
Series, no. 17. 1911. Reprint. London, 1959.
Khwaja Mir Dard. ‘I/m ul-kitab. Bhopal, 1309 h./1891—
92.
Abi Bakr Muhammad al-Kalabadhi. The Doctrine of
the Sufis. Translated by A. J. Arberry. Cambridge, 1935.
Abi Nasr as-Sarraj. Kitab al-luma‘ f?t-tasawwuf. Edited
by Reynold A. Nicholson. Leiden and London, 1914.
Jalaluddin Rimi. Mathnawi-i ma‘nawi. Edited and
translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. 6 vols. London,
1925-40. Volume and line cited.
Jalaluddin Rimi. Mathnawi-i ma‘nawi. Commentary
by Reynold A. Nicholson. g vols. London, 1925-40.
Marijan Molé. Les mystiques musulmans. Paris, 1965.
Fariduddin ‘Attar. Mantiq at-tayr. Edited by M. Jawad
Shakir. Tehran, 1962.
Maulana ‘Abdurrahman Jami. Nafahat al-wns. Edited
by M. Tauhidipir. Tehran, 1336 sh./1957.
Reynold A. Nicholson. Studies in Islamic Mysticism.
1921. Reprint. Cambridge, 1967.
Louis Massignon. La passion d’al-Hosayn ibn Mansour
Al-Hallaj, martyr mystique de Islam exécuté a Bagdad
le 26 Mars 922. 2 vols. Paris, 1922.
Abi l-Qasim al-Qushayri. Ar-risala fi Silm at-tasawwuf.
Cairo, 1330 h./1912.
Abw’l-Qasim al-Qushayri. Ar-rasa@il al-qushayriyya. Ed-
ited and translated by F. M. Hasan. Karachi, 1964.
Hellmut Ritter. Das Meer der Seele. Gott, Welt und
Mensch in den Geschichten Fariduddin “A ttars. Leiden,
1955-
Abw’l-Majd Majdid Sanat. Hadiqat al-haqiqat wa sha-
ri‘at at-tariqgat. Edited by Mudarris Razawi. Tehran,
1329 sh./1950.
Abwt’l-Majd Majdid Sana7i. Diwan. Edited by Mudarris
Razawi. Tehran, 1341 sh./1962.
Fariduddin ‘Attar. Tadhkirat al-auliya@. Edited by
Reynold A. Nicholson. 2 vols. 1905~—7. Reprint. London
and Leiden, 1959.
Fariduddin ‘Attar. Musibatname. Edited by N. Fisal.
Tehran, 1338 sh./1959.
ABBREVIATIONS / xv
Fariduddin ‘Attar. Ushturname. Edited by Mahdi Mu-
haqqiq. Tehran, 1339 sh./1960.
Paul Nwyia, S.J. Exegése coranique et langage mys-
tique. Beirut, 1970.
‘Ali ibn Ahmad ad-Daylami. Sirat-i Ibn al-Hafif ash-
Shirazi. Translated by Junayd-i Shirazi. Edited by Anne-
marie Schimmel. Ankara, 1955.
Yunus Emre. Divan. Edited by Abdiilbaki Gélpmarl1.
Istanbul, 1943.
FOREWORD
To write about Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, is an al-
most impossible task. At the first step, a wide mountain range ap-
pears before the eye—and the longer the seeker pursues the path, the
more difficult it seems to reach any goal at all. He may dwell in the
rose gardens of Persian mystical poetry or try to reach the icy peaks
of theosophic speculations; he may dwell in the lowlands of popu-
lar saint worship or drive his camel through the endless deserts
of theoretical discourses about the nature of Sufism, of God, and
of the world; or he may be content to have an all-around glimpse
of the landscape, enjoying the beauty of some of the highest peaks
bathed in the sunlight of early morning, or colored by the violet
haze of a cool evening. In any case, only the elect few will reach
the farthest mountain on which the mythical bird, Simurgh, lives
—to understand that they have reached only what was already in
themselves.
Thus, to set out and delineate some main features of Sufism,
both historically and phenomenologically, will yield no result
that satisfies everybody: it is easy to overlook certain aspects and
give too much weight to others. The amount of oriental and occi-
dental literature existent in print and in manuscript is beyond
counting, so that even from this viewpoint a full account is not
to be achieved.
Xvii
xviii / FOREWORD
Yet, my students at Harvard have urged me to put together the
notes that formed the basis of several courses on Sufism—notes
that consist both of literary evidence and of personal experiences
with numerous friends in the Islamic East, mainly in Turkey and
in Pakistan. My thanks are due to all of those who have helped
me—be it only by casual remarks—to formulate my ideas about
Sufism and to those who took part in the growth of this book.
I wish to thank especially Dr. Charles Forman of Wheaton Col-
lege, Norton, Massachusetts, who was kind enough to go through
the manuscript to polish it from the linguistic standpoint and to
suggest some simplifications.
With special gratitude I acknowledge a generous subsidy from the
Ozai-Durrani Funds, Harvard University, which was given in sup-
port of the exploration of Indo-Muslim culture contained in this
book.
My mother has, during many years, and especially during the
period of final typing, shown the virtues of patience and love, which
are so typical of the true Sufi; she never failed to encourage me
in my work.
ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
THE ARABIC ALPHABET
AND NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION
There is no single, commonly accepted system of trans-
literating languages written in Arabic characters. Furthermore, the
transcription system changes according to the languages concerned;
thus, an Arabic d would be a 2 in Persian, a z in Modern Turkish.
European scholars have used a wide variety of transcription sys-
tems, and one of the main problems is posed by the transliteration
of oriental names into a Western alphabet. Throughout this book
the generally accepted American transcription system has been
used. In the following list the other possible transcriptions of each
letter have been indicated after the semicolon. T means ‘‘modern
Turkish alphabet.”
Letter in Numerical Name and transcription
basic form value
\ 1 alif: 4, °, carrier of the
initial vowel.
Ye 2 b@: b
2 400 t@: t
& 500 tha? thot s=3s
z 3 jim: j; %, dj, dsch; T: c
ct 8 ha: h; T: bh
z 600 kh@: kh; bh, x; T: h
> 4 dal: d
3 700 dhal: dh; d; T:z
, 200 1a:
Ff Zay: Z
ie 60 sin: §
ae 300 shin: sh; 8, sch; T: §
see go sad: $;8,¢; T: s
Ne 800 dad: d; non-Arabic, z; T: z
xix
xX / THE ARABIC ALPHABET
Lb 9
Lb goo
ra 40 ‘ayn: °, or unnoticed
z 1000 ghayn: gh; g,g; T: &
ae 80 f@:f
é 100 qaf: q; k, k, gh; T: k
& 20 haf: k
J 30 lam: 1
¢ 40 mim: m
5 50 nin: n
5 h@?:h
b 6 waw: w; Vv, U, 6, ou
i 10 Hae bys fila:
The additional Persian letters:
: zh@: zh; j
t ch@: ch; é, tsch; T: ¢
o p@:p
& gaf: g
Urdu, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Pashto, as well as other Islamic lan-
guages of non-Arabic origin, have added a number of letters and
diacritical marks to secure the correct pronounciation.
The diphthongs, |, a+-u, and a+y, «|, are transcribed as aw, au,
0, ow, and ay, aj, ei, ej, respectively.
The three short vowels, which are not expressed in writing, are
transcribed as a, e; i, e; and u, o respectively.
THE MUSLIM YEAR
The Muslim year is a lunar year of 354 days, 12 months of
29 and go days. The calendar begins with Muhammad’s emigration
from Mecca to Medina in 622; thus the year 300 h.—g12-13 A.D., 600
h.=1203-4 A.D., 1000 h.=1591-92 A.D., and 1300 h.=1822-23 A.D.
Muharram: zo, “Ashiira, the memorial of Husayn ibn
‘Ali's death at Kerbela on ro Muharram 680 a.v.
Safar
Rabi‘ ul-awwal: 12, birthday of the Prophet.
Rabi‘ ath-thani: rz, anniversary of ‘Abdw?l-Qadir Gilani.
Jumada al-ala
Jumada al-akhira
Rajab: at the beginning, ragvib-nights (conception of
the Prophet). 27, mi‘raj, the Prophet's ascension to Heaven,
Sha‘ban: r4—r5, shab-i barat, when the destinies are fixed
for the coming year.
Ramadan: the month of fasting. In one of the last three
odd nights—generally thought to be the twenty-seventh—the laylat
ul-qadr, during which the Koran was revealed for the first time.
Shawwal: begins with the ‘id ul-fitr, the feast of breaking
the fasting.
Dhi’l-Qa‘da
Dhi’l-Hijja: the month of Pilgrimage to Mecca (haj)).
From the tenth to the twelfth, the ‘id ul-adha, Feast of Sacrifices.
MYSTICAL DIMENSIONS OF ISLAM
Glory to God Who has not vouchsafed to His
creatures any means of attaining unto knowledge
of Him except through impotence to attain
unto knowledge of Him.
Somebody asked Abii Hafs: “Who is a Sufi?”
He answered:
“A Sufi does not ask who a Sufi is.”
i et 1S SUFISM?
In recent years many books have been published on
Sufism and the spiritual life in Islam. Each of them has touched
upon a different facet, for the phenomenon usually called Sufism
is so broad and its appearance so protean that nobody can venture
to describe it fully. Like the blind men in Rimi’s famous story,
when they were made to touch an elephant, each described it ac-
cording to the part of the body his hands had touched: to one the
elephant appeared like a throne, to another like a fan, or like a
water pipe, or like a pillar. But none was able to imagine what the
whole animal would look like (M 3:1259-68).!
Such is the case with Sufism, the generally accepted name for
Islamic mysticism. To approach its partial meaning we have to ask
ourselves first, what mysticism means. That mysticism contains
something mysterious, not to be reached by ordinary means or by
intellectual effort, is understood from the root common to the
words mystic and mystery, the Greek myein, “to close the eyes.”
1. See Fritz Meier, “Zur Geschichte der Legende von den Blinden und dem Elefan-
ten,” in “Das Problem der Natur im esoterischen Monismus des Islams,” Eranos-
Jahrbuch 14 (1946): 174. “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a Hindu fable by John
Godfrey Saxe. Shah Waliullah of Dehli speaks of the blind who tried to describe a tree
according to the part their hands touched; see Shah Waliullah, Lamahat, ed. Ghulam
Mustafa Qasimi (Hyderabad, Sind, n.d.), p. 4.
3
4 | WHAT IS SUFISM?
Mysticism has been called “the great spiritual current which goes
through all religions.” In its widest sense it may be defined as the
consciousness of the One Reality—be it called Wisdom, Light,
Love, or Nothing.”
Such definitions, however, merely point our way. For the reality
that is the goal of the mystic, and is ineffable, cannot be under-
stood or explained by any normal mode of perception; neither
philosophy nor reason can reveal it. Only the wisdom of the heart,
gnosis, may give insight into some of its aspects. A spiritual experi-
ence that depends upon neither sensual nor rational methods is
needed. Once the seeker has set forth upon the way to this Last
Reality, he will be led by an inner light. This light becomes
stronger as he frees himself from the attachments of this world
or—as the Sufis would say—polishes the mirror of his heart. Only
after a long period of purification—the via purgativa of Christian
mysticism—will he be able to reach the via illuminativa, where he
becomes endowed with love and gnosis. From there he may reach
the last goal of all mystical quest, the unio mystica. This may be
experienced and expressed as loving union, or as the visio beatifica,
in which the spirit sees what is beyond all vision, surrounded by
the primordial light of God; it may also be described as the “lifting
of the veil of ignorance,” the veil that covers the essential identity
of God and His creatures.
Mysticism can be defined as love of the Absolute—for the power
that separates true mysticism from mere asceticism is loye. Divine
love makes the seeker capable of bearing, even of enjoying, all the
pains and afflictions that God showers upon him in order to test
him and to purify his soul. This love can carry the mystic’s heart
to the Divine Presence “like the falcon which carries away the
prey,” separating him, thus, from all that is created in time.
One can find these essentially simple ideas in every type of mys-
ticism. The mystics of all religions have tried to symbolize their ex-
periences in three different groups of images: The never-ending
quest for God is symbolized in the “Path” on which the “way-
farer’’ has to proceed, as in the numerous allegories dealing with
Pilgrim’s Progress or the Heavenly Journey. The transformation
2. The best introduction to mysticism is still Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study
in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911; paperback ed.,
New York, 1956).
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 5
of the soul through tribulation and painful purification is often
expressed in the imagery of alchemy or similar processes from
nature and prescientific science: the age-old dream of producing
gold from base material is realized on the spiritual level. Eventual-
ly, the nostalgia of the lover and the longing for union was ex-
pressed by symbols taken from human love; often a strange and
fascinating combination of human and divine love permeates the
verses of the mystics.
Notwithstanding similarities of description of mystical experi-
ences, it is advisable to distinguish between two main types, which
have been classified as Mysticism of Infinity and Mysticism of
Personality. The former type has found its highest and purest
expression in the system of Plotinus and in the Upanishads, par-
ticularly as elaborated in Shankara’s advaita philosophy. Sufism
comes close to it in some of the forms developed by the Ibn ‘Arabi
school. Here, the Numen is conceived as the Being beyond all
being, or even as the Not-Being, because it cannot be described
by any of the categories of finite thought; it is infinite, timeless,
spaceless, the Absolute Existence, and the Only Reality. By con-
trast the world possesses only a “limited reality,’ which derives
its conditioned existence from the Absolute Existence of the Di-
vine. It may be symbolized as the boundless ocean in which the
individual self vanishes like a drop, or as the desert, which shows
itself in ever new sand dunes that hide its depths, or as the water
out of which the world is crystallized like ice. This type of mys-
ticism was often attacked by prophets and reformers, because it
seemed to deny the value of the human personality and to result
in pantheism or monism, thus constituting the greatest threat to
personal responsibility. The idea of continuous emanation in
contrast to the unique divine act of creation was considered, by
both Muslim and Christian mystics, to be incompatible with the
Biblico-Koranic idea of a creatio ex nihilo. In the so-called Mys-
ticism of Personality, the relation between man and God is per-
ceived as that of creature and Creator, of a slave in the presence of
his Lord, or of a lover yearning for his Beloved. This type is more
commonly found in earlier Sufism.
These two types of mystical experience, however, are rarely met
with in their purest forms. Especially in mystical poetry, an author
may describe God in terminology taken from a pure love relation
6 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
and a few lines later use language that lends itself to an exclusively
“pantheistic’”’ interpretation.
A differentiation between the “voluntaristic’” and the “gnostic”
approaches to mystical experience is somewhat easier. The mystic
of the voluntaristic type wants to “qualify himself with the quali-
ties of God,” as the Prophetic tradition says, and to unite his own
will completely with God’s will, thus eventually overcoming the
theoretical difficulties posed by the dilemma of predestination and
free will. This mysticism can be seen as a practical life process. The
mystic of the gnostic type strives for a deeper knowledge of God:
he attempts to know the structure of His universe or to interpret
the degree of His revelations—although no mystic could ever dare
to “know” His Essence. Did not Dhi’n-Niin (d. 859), usually re-
garded as one of the founders of speculations about ma‘rifa, or
gnosis, warn his fellow mystics: ‘“To ponder about the Essence of
God is ignorance, and to point to Him is associationism (shirk),
and real gnosis is bewilderment” (N 34)? Despite this bewilder-
ment, the gnostic approach often led to the building of theosoph-
ical systems with its adherents tending to interpret every aspect
of mysticism in the light of their own particular theories, some-
times even denying the simple experience of loving submission.
In Islamic mysticism, both aspects are equally strong, and in later
periods they are intermingled.
In their formative period, the Sufis admitted of a twofold ap-
proach to God. As Hujwiri (d. circa 1071) says in his discussion of
the states of “intimacy” and “‘respect”’:
There is a difference between one who is burned by His Majesty in the
fire of love and one who is illuminated by His Beauty in the light of
contemplation. (H 367)
There is a difference between one who meditates upon the Divine acts
and one who is amazed at the Divine Majesty; the one is a follower of
friendship, the other is a companion of love. (H 373)
One might also recall the distinction made by Jami in speaking of
the two types of advanced Sufis: some are those
to whom the Primordial Grace and Lovingkindness has granted salva-
tion after their being submerged in complete union and in the wave of
tauhid [unification], [taking them out] of the belly of the fish “Anni-
hilation” on the shore of separation and in the arena of permanent sub-
sistence, so that they might lead the people towards salvation.
The others are those who are completely submerged in the ocean of
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 7
Unity and have been so completely naughted in the belly of the fish
“Annihilation” that never a news or trace comes to the shore of separa-
tion and the direction of subsistence . . . and the sanctity of perfecting
others is not entrusted to them. (N 8-9)
The distinction that modern history of religions makes between
the so-called “prophetic” and the ‘“‘mystic” spirit is clearly visible
in Jami’s description of the two types of mystics—those who prac-
tice complete reclusion (Weltabkehr) and are solely concerned
with their own salvation in the first “flight of the one toward the
One,” and those who return from their mystical experience in a
higher, sanctified state of mind and are able to lead other people
on the right path.
Approaches to the phenomenon “Sufism” are manifold. To an-
alyze the mystical experience itself is next to impossible since
words can never plumb the depths of this experience. Even the
finest psychological analysis is limited; words remain on the shore,
as the Sufis would say. It would be easier to understand Sufism
through an analysis of given structures: the French scholar Henri
Corbin, in his books on Ibn ‘Arabi, has shown to what depths such
a study of structure underlying a specific mystical-philosophical
system can lead. Analyses of the language of mysticism and the
development of the “mystical lexicon’ (Louis Massignon and,
more recently, Paul Nwyia) can help illuminate the formative
period of Sufi thought. The study of symbols and images used by
the mystics and of the degree of their interdependence belongs to
this field; it opens the way to an examination of the contribution
of Sufism to the development of Islamic languages, literatures, and
arts.
Since Sufism is to a very large extent built upon the principle of
the disciple’s initiation, the different methods of spiritual educa-
tion, the exercises practiced in the Sufi orders, the psychological
phases of the progress, the formation of orders, and their sociologi-
cal and cultural role are rewarding fields of research. Of prime
importance here are the penetrating studies of the Swiss scholar
Fritz Meier.
European scholars have responded to the phenomenon of Is-
lamic mysticism in different ways, as can be understood from these
remarks. Europe’s first contact with Sufi ideas can be traced back
to the Middle Ages: the works of the Catalanian mystic and scholar
Ramon Lull (d. 1316) show a remarkable influence of Sufi litera-
8 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
ture.® The first figure from the history of Sufism to be introduced
into European literature was Rabi‘a al-“Adawiyya, the great wom-
an saint of the eighth century; her legend was brought to Europe by
Joinville, the chancellor of Louis IX, in the late thirteenth century.
Rabi‘a’s figure was used in a seventeenth-century French treatise on
pure love as a model of Divine love,* and her story has been retold
more than once in the West, the latest echo being a contemporary
German short story (Max Mell, ‘“Die schGnen Hande’”’).
Travelers who visited the Near and Middle East in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries brought back information about rites
of the dervishes, with both the ritual dance of the Whirling Der-
vishes (Mevlevis) and the strange performances of the Howling
Dervishes (Rifa‘l’s) attracting casual visitors. In 1638 the learned
Fabricius of Rostock University edited and translated, for the first
time, a poem by the great Egyptian mystic Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235).
Most of the information about oriental spirituality, however,
was derived from the translations of Persian classical poetry—
Sa‘di’s Gulistén has been one of the favorite books of European
intellectuals since Adam Olearius produced its first complete trans-
lation into German in 1651. A century later, Sir William Jones at
Fort William, Calcutta, fostered the study of Persian poetry,
among other subjects, and as a result the first translations of Hafiz
became available in the West. His ideas about Sufi poetry have
influenced many English-speaking orientalists, although one may
find, in some works on Sufism written during the nineteenth cen-
tury, rather absurd views in wild confusion. Hafiz’s poetical imag-
ery—unfortunately mostly taken at face value—has largely colored
the Western image of Sufism.
In the nineteenth century, historical sources and important Sufi
texts were made available in print both in the Middle East and
in Europe, so that scholars could begin to form their own ideas
about the origin and early development of Sufism. Yet most of the
sources available were of rather late origin and rarely contained
reliable information about the earliest stages of the mystical move-
ment in Islam. That is why the interpreters usually agreed that
Sufism must be a foreign plant in the sandy desert of Islam, the
g- Annemarie Schimmel, “Raymundus Lullus und seine Auseinandersetzung mit
dem Islam,” Eine Heilige Kirche, fasc. 1 (1953-54).
4. Henri Bremond, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France, vol. g (Paris, 1928).
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 9
religion that was so little known and even less appreciated and that
could not possibly be related to any finer and higher spiritual
movement.?
A German professor of Divinity, F. A. D. Tholuck, produced
the first comprehensive book on Sufism in 1821, called Ssufismus
sive theosophia persarum pantheistica, and four years later an
anthology called Bliithensammlung aus der Morgenléndischen
Mystik. Amazingly enough, Tholuck—himself a good Protestant
and therefore not at all prone to mystical ideas—understood that
“the Sufi doctrine was both generated and must be illustrated out
of Muhammad’s own mysticism.”’ This statement is all the more
surprising in view of the miscellaneous character of the manu-
scripts and printed books at his disposal.®
During the following decades, several theories about the origin
of Sufism were brought forth, as A. J. Arberry has shown in his
useful book An Introduction to the History of Sufism.’ It will suf-
fice to mention a few of those theories.
E. H. Palmer, in his Oriental Mysticism (1867), held that Sufism
is “the development of the Primaeval religion of the Aryan race’’®
—a theory not unknown to some German writers during the Nazi
5. Basic sources are: A. J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam (Lon-
don, 1950), which deals with the history of the classical period of Sufism; Marijan
Molé, Les mystiques musulmans (Paris, 1965), the best short introduction to Sufism, its
history and meaning; G.-C. Anawati and Louis Gardet, Mystique musulmane (Paris,
1961), a fine study of the early period of Sufism and of Sufi practices, mainly dhikr,
“recollection,” as seen by Catholic theologians. See also Louis Gardet, Expériences
mystiques en terres nonchrétiennes (Paris, 1953). Cyprian Rice, O. P., The Persian
Sufis, 2d ed. (London, 1969), is a lovable and understanding booklet about mystical
experience. Fritz Meier, Vom Wesen der islamischen Mystik (Basel, 1943), is a small
but weighty book that stresses the importance of initiation in Sufism; it contains rich
source material. Seyyed H. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London, 1966; New
York, 1967), contains a number of important remarks about the Iranian aspect of
Sufism, which is dealt with more fully in the same author’s Sufi Essais (London, 1972).
Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message, which has been reprinted many times, is a modern
and subjective, yet impressive interpretation. Idries Shah, The Sufis, as well as his
other books, should be avoided by serious students.
6. Friedrich August Deofidus Tholuck, Ssufismus sive theosophia persarum pan-
theistica (Berlin, 1821), and the same author's Bliithensammlung aus der Morgen-
lindischen Mystik (Berlin, 1825), are still quite revealing.
7. The history of Sufi studies in Europe has been discussed by A. J. Arberry in An
Introduction to the History of Sufism (London, 1942).
8.E. H. Palmer, Oriental Mysticism: A Treatise on Sufistic and Unitarian Theos-
ophy of the Persians (1867; reprint ed., London, 1969), is immature but has some good
points; John P. Brown, The Dervishes (1868; reprint ed., London, 1968), gives much
important material, though it is not scholarly.
10 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
period. In any case, Sufism has often been considered a typically
Iranian development inside Islam. There is no doubt that certain
important Iranian elements have survived through the ages be-
neath its surface, as both Henri Corbin and Seyyed H. Nasr have
recently emphasized.°
Many eminent scholars, mainly in Great Britain, have stressed
the importance of Neoplatonic influences upon the development
of Sufism. Nobody would deny that Neoplatonism had deeply
permeated the Near East—the so-called ‘““Theology of Aristotle”
(which is, in fact, Porphyry’s commentary on Plotinus’s Enneads)
was translated into Arabic as early as 840. Neoplatonism was ‘‘in
the air,” as Reynold A. Nicholson pointed out in the famous in-
troduction to his selection from Jalaluddin Riimi’s lyrical poetry
in 1898—the first book in the long list of his still unrivaled publica-
tions in the field of Sufism.!° Nicholson, however, understood that
the early ascetic movement can be explained without difficulties
from its Islamic roots and that, therefore, the original form of
Sufism is “a native product of Islam itself.’’ Since Islam grew out
of a soil in which ancient oriental, Neoplatonic, and Christian
influences were strong, a number of secondary influences may have
worked upon Islam even in its earliest phase.
It is only natural that the Christian influences should have in-
terested many European scholars (Adalbert Merx, Arend Jan
Wensinck, Margaret Smith),!! who mainly tried to explore the
relations of Muslims with the Syrian monks. The best studies in
this field have been written by the Swedish Bishop Tor Andrae,
to whom we also owe the classical discussion of the veneration of
the Prophet Muhammad in mystical Islam.”
The problem of influences becomes more difficult when one
thinks of the relations with religious traditions outside the Near
9.See also Emil Brégelmann, Die religidsen Erlebnisse der persischen Mystiker
(Hannover, 1932); a short survey is given by A. H. Zarrinkoob, “Persian Sufism in Its
Historical Perspective,” Iranian Studies 3 (1970): 3-4.
10, Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (1914; reprint ed., Chester Springs,
Pa., 1962), is still a classic, though it is outdated at certain places. His Studies in Is-
lamic Mysticism (1921; reprint ed., Cambridge, 1967), contains three excellent studies
on outstanding personalities (Abit Sa‘id, Ibn al-Farid. Jill); and his The Idea of Per-
sonality in Sufism (Cambridge, 1923) is a collection of lectures.
a1. Adalbert Merx, Ideen und Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Mys-
tik (Heidelberg, 1893). Arend Jan Wensinck, Abil-farag Bar hebreaus, The Book of
the Dove (Leiden, 1919).
12. Tor Andrae, 1 Myrtentrddgdrden (Uppsala, 1947). For his other works see the
Bibliography.
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 11
Eastern world.’* Many scholars were, and some still are, inclined
to accept Indian influences on the formative period of Sufism, be-
ginning with Alfred von Kremer (1868) and Reinhart P. Dozy
(1869). But even Max Horten’s numerous articles in this field
could not bring any stringent proof of such influences“ in the
early period; for later times, the situation is slightly different.
For the earliest period, influences from Turkestan are much
more important, as Richard Hartmann has shown; Ignaz Goldzi-
her had already pointed out parallel traditions in Islamic mystical
tales and Buddhist stories, but this kind of parallelism can be
easily traced back to the common sources, e.g., the Indian fables
of the HitopadeSa and Panchatantra, which were translated into
the Near Eastern languages before and shortly after the advent of
Islam. And the miracles of saints are the same all over the world.
The Turkestani contribution is, however, highlighted in our day
by some Turkish mystics who show a tendency of speaking of a
typically “Turkish” type of mysticism that comprises a strict Mys-
ticism of Infinity, which describes God as “positive Not-Being.”
But such generalizations are dangerous.
Even the rather far-fetched possibility of early Chinese—i.e.,
Taoist—influences on Sufism has been discussed (first by Omar
Farrukh). For the later period, the Japanese scholar Toshihiko
Izutsu has drawn some interesting parallels between Taoist struc-
tures of thought and Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical system.'®
The study of a single mystic’s life and work can occupy a scholar
throughout his life: Louis Massignon’s research into the person-
ality of al-Hallaj, the ‘“‘martyr of divine love,” is the best example
for this approach; Hellmut Ritter’s masterly book on “Attar, Das
13.See Ignaz Goldziher, “Materialien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Sufismus,”
Wiener Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes 13 (1899). Reynold A. Nicholson,
“A Historical Enquiry concerning the Origin and Development of Sufism,” Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society, 1906, p. 303; Richard Hartmann, “Zur Frage nach der Her-
kunft und den Anfangen des Sufitums,” Der Islam 6 (1915); Annemarie Schimmel,
“The Origin and Early Development of Sufism,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical
Society, 1958.
14. Max Horten, Indische Strémungen in der islamischen Mystik (Heidelberg,
1927-28); like his article ‘‘Der Sinn der islamischen Mystik,” Scientia, July 1927, this
book should be used with caution.
15. Robert C. Zachner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (London, 1960), is well docu-
mented and thought-provoking, though it overstresses the Indian elements.
16. Omar Farrukh, At-tasawwuf fPl-Islam (Beirut, 1957). For parallels see Toshihiko
Izutsu, 4 Comparative Study of the Key Philosophical Concepts of Sufism and Taoism,
2 vols. (Tokyo, 1966-67). :
12 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
Meer der Seele (The Ocean of the Soul), is the result of an ideal
combination of strict philology combined with aesthetic and re-
ligious understanding. On the other hand, an investigation of a
particular mystical attitude, like Benedikt Reinert’s study of tawak-
kul, “trust in God,” reveals the various facets of one single stage
of the Path and sheds light on many kindred problems.
Whether we concentrate upon the history of Sufism, by using a
vertical cut, or upon its methods, expressions, and experiences, by
taking a cross section, the main problem is the fact that previously
unknown manuscripts frequently come to light.!7 The libraries
of the Islamic countries, and those in the West, still contain many
works that may shed new light upon any of the problems at stake.
Even now there is so much material available in the different
languages of Islam that any generalization seems impossible.’®
That is why this book can give only a glimpse of a few aspects of
Sufism; even this will, probably, be tinged by a personal predilec-
tion for mystical poetry derived from the large area of Iranian
cultural influence.
How did the Sufis themselves interpret the meaning of the word
Sufism?
In interpreting Islamic mystical texts, one must not forget that
many sayings to which we give a deep theological or philosophical
meaning may have been intended to be suggestive wordplay; some
of the definitions found in the classical texts may have been uttered
17. For this problem see Fritz Meier, “Ein wichtiger Handschriftenfund zur Sufik,”
Oriens 20 (1967).
18. As an antidote to the large amount of Arabic and Persian sources, one should
consult Ibn al-Jaui, Talbis Iblis (Cairo, 1340 h./1921-22), translated by David Samuel
Margoliouth as “The Devil's Delusion,” Islamic Culture 12 (1938), a poisonous book
attacking the degeneration of Sufism in the twelfth century. Oriental scholars have
published a number of general studies on the history of Sufism in the last twenty years,
during which there has been a growing interest in the spiritual life of Islam. Abi?l-
SAla? SAffifi, At-tasawwuf: ath-thaurat ar-rihiyya fPl-Islam (Sufism, the Spiritual
Revolution in Islam] (Cairo, 1963); Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi, Al-hayat ar-rihiyya
fPl-Islam [Spiritual Life in Islam] (Cairo, 1954); M. Qasim Ghani, Ta@?rikh-i tasawwuf
dar Islam [History of Sufism in Islam] (Tehran, 1330 sh./1951). Among the anthologies
of Sufi texts produced in the West, the following useful collections should be men-
tioned: Johannes Pedersen, Muhammedansk mystik (Copenhagen, 1923); Margaret
Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam (London, 1950); Margaret Smith, The Sufi
Path of Love (London, 1954); Martino Mario Moreno, Antologia della Mistica Arabo-
Persiana (Bari, Italy, 1951); Emile Dermenghem, Vies des saints musulmans (Algiers,
1942); Virginia Vacca, Vite e detti di Santi Musulmani (Torino, n.d.). Specialized
studies and anthologies will be mentioned in relevant places.
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 13
by the Sufi masters as a sort of ko’an, a paradox meant to shock the
hearer, to kindle discussion, to perplex the logical faculties, and
thus to engender a nonlogical understanding of the real meaning
of the word concerned, or of the mystical “state” or ‘“‘stage’ in
question. The resolution of apparent contradictions in some of these
sayings might be found, then, in an act of illumination. This is
at least one possible explanation of the fact that the masters give
many different answers to the same question. This ‘willful para-
dox”’ and “pious highfalutin” was perhaps “intended to make their
flesh creep a little for their health’s sake,” as W. H. Temple Gaird-
ner puts it, who with full right asks: “Do we not take their lan-
guage too seriously? It parades as scientific; it is really poetico-
rhetorical.’’!° Indeed, one aspect of mystical language in Sufism
that should never be overlooked is the tendency of the Arabs to
play with words. The structure of the Arabic language—built upon
triliteral roots—lends itself to the developing of innumerable word
forms following almost mathematical rules. It might be likened
to the structure of an arabesque that grows out of a simple geo-
metric pattern into complicated multiangled stars, or out of a
flower motif into intricate lacework. A tendency to enjoy these
infinite possibilities of the language has greatly influenced the
style of Arabic poets and prose writers, and in many sayings of the
Sufis one can detect a similar joy in linguistic play; the author in-
dulges in deriving different meanings from one root, he loves
rhymes and strong rhythmical patterns—features inherited by the
mystics of the Persian, Turkish, and Indo-Muslim tongues. But
this almost magical interplay of sound and meaning, which con-
tributes so much to the impressiveness of a sentence in the Islamic
languages, is lost in translation. So also are the numerous hidden
allusions inherent in every root of the Arabic tongue, which point
to the whole range of historical, theological, and poetical experi-
ences that may haye been present in the mind of the author of an
apparently simple statement or an easy-flowing verse.
Another problem is posed by the fondness of many Sufi authors
for inventing classifications, usually tripartite, to define certain
mystical states; they often press the meaning of a word rather than
explain it. The titles of the books composed by Sufis, particularly
19.W. H. Temple Gairdner, Al-Ghazzdli’s “Mishkat al-anwar”: The Niche for
Lights (London, 1915), p. 71.
14 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
in the postclassical centuries, show the same peculiarities; they
allude to mystical states, to technical expressions, and often contain
in themselves a whole spiritual program; other authors may give,
by the numerical value of the title, the date of its composition.
What, then, did the Sufis say about the origin of the name
tasawwuf, which we translate as Sufism (or, the older form, Sufi-
ism)?
Their definitions go back to the earliest period and thus defy
the tendency of some modern Western writers to apply this name
only to the later ‘‘theosophical’”’ aspect of Islamic mysticism. Some
of the pious would even ask the Prophet when he blessed them
with his appearance in their dreams: ‘What is Sufism?’’ (N 255)
Hujwiri, in the mid-eleventh century, summed up the discussion:
Some assert that the Sufi is so called because he wears a woollen garment
(jama-i siif), others that he is so called because he is in the first rank
(saff-i awwal), others say it is because the Sufis claim to belong to the
ashab-i Suffa (the people of the Bench who gathered around the Proph-
et’s mosque). Others, again, declare that the name is derived from safa
(purity). (HI go)
Another—Western—definition, namely the derivation from
Greek sophos, “wise,” is philologically impossible. The derivation
from suf, “wool,” is now generally accepted—the coarse woolen
garment of the first generation of Muslim ascetics was their dis-
tinguishing mark. Kalabadhi, one of the early theoretical writers
on Sufism (d. ca. ggo), says in this respect:
Those who relate them to the Bench and to wool express the outward
aspect of their conditions: for they were people who had left this world,
departed from their homes, fled from their companions. They wandered
about the land, mortifying the carnal desires, and making naked the
body; they took of this world’s good only so much as is indispensable for
covering the nakedness and allaying hunger. (K 5)
But Sufism is more. Junayd, the undisputed leader of the Iraqian
school of mysticism (d. 910), wrote: “Sufism is not [achieved] by
much praying and fasting, but it is the security of the heart and
the generosity of the soul” (QR 60). Junayd is also credited with
a definition in which he sees the prototypes of the Sufis in the
prophets as mentioned in the Koran (in later times the ascent
through the different stages of the prophets, or the identification
with the spirit of one of them, is one aspect of certain Sufi schools):
Sufism is founded on eight qualities exemplified in eight apostles: the
generosity of Abraham, who sacrificed his son; the acquiescence of Ish-
mael, who submitted to the command of God and gave up his dear life;
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 15
the patience of Job, who patiently endured the afflictions of worms and
the jealousy of the Merciful; the symbolism of Zacharias, to whom God
said “Thou shalt not speak unto men for three days save by signs” (Sara
3:36) and again to the same effect “When he called upon his Lord with a
secret invocation” (Siira 19:2); the strangerhood of John, who was a
stranger in his own country and an alien to his own kind amongst whom
he lived; the pilgrimhood of Jesus, who was so detached therein from
worldly things that he kept only a cup and a comb—the cup he threw
away when he saw a man drinking in the palms of his hand, and the
comb likewise when he saw another man using his fingers instead of a
comb; the wearing of wool by Moses, whose garment was woollen; and
the poverty of Muhammed, to whom God Almighty sent the key of all
treasures that are upon the face of the earth, saying, ‘““Lay no trouble on
thyself, but procure every luxury by means of these treasures,” and he
answered, ‘‘O Lord, I desire them not; keep me one day full fed and one
day hungry.” (H_ 39-40)
Some of Junayd’s contemporaries emphasized the ascetic side of
Sufism, a complete break with what is called “the world” and ego-
tism: “Sufism is to possess nothing and to be possessed by nothing”
(L 25).
“Sufism is freedom and generosity and absence of self-constraint”’
(L 57). Ruwaym’s (d. 915) advice to young Ibn Khafif, ‘Sufism is
to sacrifice one’s soul—but do not occupy yourself with the small-
talk of the Sufis!” (X go) shows that the danger of talking too much
in a sort of technical and quasi-esoteric language was felt quite
early. The Sufi should rather insist upon “faithfulness with the
contract” (N 226) and should be free, “neither tired by searching
nor disappointed by deprivation” (L 25). “The Sufis are people who
prefer God to everything and God prefers them to everything else”
(L 25). Some decades after Dhi’n-Nin (d. 859), who is credited
with the last sayings, Sahl at-Tustari defined the Sufi: ‘‘It is he whose
blood is licit and whose property is allowed [i.e., he who can be
killed and whose property can be legally given to the faithful] and
whatever he sees, he sees it from God, and knows that God’s loving-
kindness embraces all creation” (B 370).
The social and practical aspect of Sufism is understood from defi-
nitions like those of Junayd and Nari, according to whom “Sufism
is not composed of practices and sciences, but it is morals’ (H 42),
and “who surpasses you in good moral qualities surpasses you in
Sufism’ (N 311). It means to act according to God’s orders and
laws, which are understood in their deepest spiritual sense with-
out denying their outward forms. This way of life is possible only
through loving devotion: ‘Sufism is the heart’s being pure from
the pollution of discord’”—a sentence which Hujwiri (H 38) ex-
16 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
plains as follows: “Love is concord, and the lover has but one
duty in the world, namely to keep the commandment of the be-
loved, and if the object of desire is one, how can discord arise?”
The Sufis have spoken of the threefold meaning of tasawwuf
according to the shari‘a, the Muslim law, the tariqa, the mystical
path, and the kaqiqa, the Truth. It is a purification on different
levels, first from the lower qualities and the turpitude of the soul,
then from the bondage of human qualities, and eventually a purifi-
cation and election on the level of attributes (L 27-28).
But there are also warnings against “‘Sufism.’’ Shibli (d. 945), as
was so often the case, wanted to shock his audience when he asserted:
“Sufism is polytheism, because it is the guarding of the heart from
the vision of the ‘other,’ and ‘other’ does not exist” (H 38). He thus
attacks the ascetic who closes his eyes to the created world and wants
to concentrate exclusively upon God—but since God is the only
Reality, how can one think of “otherness” and so try to avoid it?
Therefore, “a true Sufi is he who is not,” as Kharaqani says, with a
paradox that has been repeated by other mystics (N 298, 225).
The Islamic mystics enjoyed the play with the root safd, “‘purity,””
when they discussed Sufism and the qualities of the ideal Sufi: “He
that is purified by love is pure (safz), and he who is purified by the
Beloved is a Sufi’ (H 34), i.e., he who is completely absorbed in the
Divine Beloved and does not think of anything but Him has at-
tained the true rank of a Sufi. It is not surprising that the Sufis made
attempts to designate Adam as the first Sufi; for he was forty days
“in seclusion” (like the novice at the beginning of the Path) before
God endowed him with spirit; then God put the lamp of reason in
his heart and the light of wisdom on his tongue, and he emerged like
an illuminated mystic from the retirement during which he was
kneaded by the hands of God. After his fall he performed acts of
penitence in India for 300 years until God ‘‘elected” him (istafa;
see Siira 3:25) so that he became pure (sdfz) and thus a true Sufi.”
Even a poet who cannot be called exactly a mystic, namely Kha-
gani, the greatest panegyrist of Iran (d. 1199), claims: “I am pure
since I am a servant of the purity of the Sufi’; and in one of the long
chains of oaths that he likes to insert in his gastdas he swears “‘by the
Sufis who love afflictions and are enemies of wellbeing.” He is thus
close to Rimi, who a century later defined Sufism in this way:
20. Qutbaddin al-Ibadi, At-tasfiya fi ahwal as-siifiyya, or Sifindme, ed. Ghulam
Muhammad Yiisufi (Tehran, 1347 sh./1968), p. 27.
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 17
“What is Sufism? He said: To find joy in the heart when grief
comes” (M 3:3261). Khaqani alluded to the Sufis
who carry in their waterbowl the water of life, like Khidr,
and whose rods are as miraculous as the rod of Moses.?4
Later Persian, Turkish, and Urdu literature abounds in poems that
praise the wonderful qualities of this or that Sufi saint or describe
the miracles worked by a mystical leader.
Sufism meant, in the formative period, mainly an interiorization
of Islam, a personal experience of the central mystery of Islam, that
of tauhid, “to declare that God is One.” The Sufis always remained
inside the fold of Islam, and their mystical attitude was not limited
by their adherence to any of the legal or theological schools. They
could reach their goal from any starting point—neither the differ-
ences between the legal madhhabs nor theological hairsplitting was,
basically, of interest to them. Hujwiri sums up the early Sufi atti-
tude toward science and theology when he poignantly observes:
“Knowledge is immense and life is short: therefore it is not obliga-
tory to learn all the science . . . but only so much as bears upon the
religious law” (H 11). That means: enough astronomy to find the
direction of Mecca as required for the correct performance of pray-
er, enough mathematics to figure out the legal amount of alms one
has to pay—that is what the Sufi, like every good Muslim, should
know. For God has condemned useless knowledge (Sira 2:96), and
did not the Prophet say: “I take refuge with Thee from knowledge
that profiteth naught” (H 11)?” ‘J/m, “knowledge,” the pursuit of
which is incumbent upon every male and female Muslim, is the
knowledge of a Muslim’s practical duties: “Do not read “ilm except
for the true life. .. . Religious science is jurisprudence and exegesis
and tradition—whoever reads anything else, becomes abominable”
(U 54). True gnosis, namely the gnosis of the One, is not attained
through books, and many a legend tells how a Sufi who had reached,
or thought he had reached, his goal threw away his books, for:
“Books, ye are excellent guides, but it is absurd to trouble about a
guide after the goal has been reached” (NS 21).
“To break the ink-pots and to tear the books” was considered by
some mystics the first step in Sufism. The great saint ‘Umar Suhra-
wardi, who studied scholastic theology in his youth, was blessed by
21. Khaqani, Diwan, ed. Sajjadi (Tehran, 1338 sh./1959), qasida p. 250, 51, 369.
22.N 32 attributed to Aba Hashim as-Sufi.
18 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
a saint who put his hands on his chest and made him forget all he
had studied, “but he filled my breast with the “lm ladunni” (Sira
18:65), the “knowledge immediately derived from God” (N 515).
‘Abdu’l-Qadir Gilani performed a miracle by suddenly washing
away the text of a philosophy book he considered dangerous to his
disciple (N 517); other Sufis were urged by dreams to cast their
precious collections of books into a river (N 482).
This predilection for immediate knowledge as contrasted with
legalistic scholarship was expressed in later times by many poets
and mystics who ridiculed the founders of the great law schools, es-
pecially Aba Hanifa (d. 767) and Shafi (d. 820). Sana’i’s verse (at-
tributed to both ‘Attar [AD 100] and Rumi [D 498]) is a case in
point:
Abia Hanifa has not taught love,
Shafi has no traditions about it.
(SD 605)
Sanai (d. 1131) has often contrasted the Sufi with the Kifi, the
learned lawyer Abii Hanifa from Kufa, and still in eighteenth-
century Sindhi mystical poetry the Sufi is called la-kifi, “non-
Kifi,” i.e., not bound to a particular religious rite.”
The Sufis claimed that the whole wisdom was included in the
letter alif, the first letter in the alphabet and symbol of God (see
Appendix 1). Are not many scholars who rely upon books “like the
donkey which carries books” (Siira 62:5)? Did not Noah live for
nine hundred years, with only the recollection of God? And, as
Rami adds with a slightly ironical bent, “he had not read the risala
nor the Qit al-quliib” (M 6:2652-53), the two handbooks of mod-
erate Sufism. For although the Sufis often condemned the bookish-
ness of scholars and admonished their disciples to “strive to lift the
veils, not to collect books,’ it is a fact that they themselves were
among the most productive writers in Islamic history. And many
of their theoretical works are no more readable or enjoyable than
the dogmatic treatises that they attacked in their poems.
The main target of Sufi criticism was philosophy, influenced by
Greek thought: “There is nobody more distant from the law of the
23.For the whole complex see Annemarie Schimmel, “Shah Abdul Latif’s Be-
schreibung des wahren Sufi,” in Festschrift fiir Fritz Meier, comp. Richard Gramlich
(Wiesbaden, 1974).
24. Maulana ‘Abdurrahman Jami, Lawa?ih (Tehran, 1342 sh./1963), no. 24, p. 40-
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 19
Hashimite prophet than a philosopher” (U 54; see also MT 291),
says ‘Attar, echoing Sana’i’s sentiments when he wrote:
From words like “primary matter’ and “primary cause”’
you will not find the way into the Presence of the Lord.*
The whole “Universal Reason” is nothing in the presence of a sin-
gle divine order, “Say!” (U 45)—a fine pun on hull, “universal,” and
qul, “say,” the divine address to the Prophet. The “little philoso-
pher”’ is both the laughing stock and the scapegoat for the mystics.
Strangely enough, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) has become the
representative of dry rationalism, although he was as much of a
mystical thinker as some of those classified as Sufis.?* Perhaps the
Sufi aversion to him, though already visible in Sana’i’s poetry (SD
57), was fostered by a story about Majduddin Baghdadi (d. 1219):
“He saw the prophet in his dream and was informed by him that
‘Ibn Sina wanted to reach God without my mediation, and I veiled
him with my hand, and he fell into the fire’ ”’ (N 427).
Such an anti-intellectualism, as it was sensed by the orthodox,
could lead to dangers for the communal life. One might mention
the type of the “wise idiot,”?’ represented in Islamic lore first by
Buhlil, a strange character who lived during the caliphate of Hartin
ar-Rashid (d. 809). To him, as later to many unknown and unnamed
mentally deranged persons, are ascribed sayings in which they give
frank expression of their criticism of contemporary life. But since
they were insane they escaped punishment: “God has freed them
from order and prohibition” (N 296). They are set free by God
from their normal state as “slaves” and live in perfect loving union
with Him, as ‘Attar points out (MT 245). The type of the majdhub,
the “enraptured one” who, under the shock of a mystical vision or
any psychological experience, is bereft of his senses and walks
around in a fashion prohibited by the religious law (i-e., stark
naked) belongs to the darker side of the Sufi world. Many a mystical
leader has complained about simpletons who attracted, by their
strange behavior and their alleged miracle mongering, the interest
of the crowd, who took them for representatives of true spirituality.
25. Abi71-Majd Majdid Sani, “Sana?Pabad,” in Mathnawiha, ed. Mudarris
Razawi (Tehran, 1348 sh./1969), line 42.
26. Henri Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (New York and London,
1960).
27. Paul Loosen, “Die weisen Narren des Naisaburi,” Zeitschrift ftir Assyriologie 27
(1912), deals with this type of mentally deranged “wise”? man or “saint.”
20 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
In the introduction to his Nafahat al-uns, Jami poignantly criticizes
the imitators of the different Sufi types and their vain and dangerous
attitudes. The innumerable verses of Persian poets who juxtapose
molla and lover, pulpit and gallows, and claim that true love is the
greatest enemy of reason and that the lover should be comparable
to Majniin, the demented lover who was the laughing stock of chil-
dren, may have enhanced the importance of this class of illiterate,
crude, and sometimes even very nasty “saints.”
Comparatively harmless types, living on the charity of the pious,
did not really endanger the Sufi movement; but the degeneration
of the wandering dervishes or faqirs, the “poor,” who performed
miracles and were beyond the law (bi shar‘), has done much to bring
Sufism into discredit. It was such people whom European travelers
in the East met first, so that one of the honorific names given to the
genuine mystic, faqir, “poor,’’ has become, in German, the designa-
tion of a mere trickster.
From the very beginning, the mystics strictly distinguished be-
tween the true Sufi, the mutasawwif who aspires at reaching a high-
er spiritual level, and the mustawif, the man who pretends to be a
mystic but is a useless, even dangerous, intruder. They knew well
that the spiritual path is “hard to travel except for those who were
created for that purpose”’ (H 4), and that it is impossible to become a
true Sufi if one is not born that way: ‘This patched frock must have
been sewn in pre-eternity,” for, as much as a person may strive to
reach the rank of a Sufi, “no ass can turn into a horse by energy and
zeal” (U 70-71). Therefore, the complaint about the decline of
Sufism almost coincides with its beginning; a saying of the ninth-
century mystic, the Persian Yahya ibn Mu‘adh, warns his fellow
mystics: ‘‘Avoid the society of three classes of men—heedless savants,
hypocritical Koran-readers, and ignorant pretenders to Sufism” (H
17; cf. B 411). Poets have satirized the self-styled Sufi (S 666), and in
the eleventh century it was repeatedly said: “Today Sufism is a
name without reality, but formerly it was a reality without name.
... The pretence is known and the practice unknown” (H 44). Peo-
ple were content with empty confession, and “blind conformity has
taken the place of spiritual enthusiasm” (H 7). The mystical con-
certs in which the Sufis might become enraptured and begin to spin
around their axis were taken, by many, for the essence of Sufism.
And to pretend mystical knowledge and experience was—and still
is—quite easy. The stock of delightful stories and the legends of
WHAT IS SUFISM? / 21
ancient saints could always attract people; well-recited verses might
move the listeners to tears; and it was certainly easier to beg food at
the doors of the rich and give a blessing in exchange than to pursue
anormal profession. Thus a saint of the eleventh century angrily de-
clared: “I looked into Hell, and I saw that most of its inhabitants
were those donning a patched frock and carrying a food-bowl” (B
309). These accursed people are, as Baqli explains the saying, the
traitors to mysticism, those who claim gnosis but have only the ex-
ternal color of truth, because they lack knowledge of the Muham-
madan religious law. “Their prayer-direction is the charming be-
loved [shahid], the candle [sham‘ at joyous meetings] and the belly
[shikam]” (SD 82). As time passed the complaints about the degen-
eration of Sufism became more eloquent. ‘Urfi, one of Akbar’s court-
poets (d. 1591), says in a quatrain:
The Sufi is busy with deceiving men and women,
The ignorant one is busy with building up his body,
The wise man is busy with the coquetry of words,
The lover is busy with annihilating himself.?*
He thus attributes to the lover the quality that should be that of the
Sufi: namely, to annihilate himself in the Beloved.
The word Sufi became a pejorative expression; the great mystic
of Delhi in the eighteenth century, Mir Dard, insistently repeated
that he did not want to be called a Sufi, but rather ‘“‘a true Muham-
madan.” He did not hesitate to call the representatives of mystical
doctrines opposed to his stern, law-bound mysticism “pig-natured,”
and he often expressed his contempt for the “shopkeeper sheikh,”
the “‘seller of patched frocks’ who was found everywhere in the
country. He would have agreed completely with his Arabian con-
temporary al-Badr al-Hijazi, whose satire on the decline of Sufism
Arberry has translated:*°
Would that we had not lived to see every demented madman held up by
his fellows as a Pole!
Their ulema take refuge in him, indeed, they have even adopted him
as a Lord, instead of the Lord of the Throne.
For they have forgotten God, saying “So-and-so provides deliverance
from suffering for all mankind.”
28. Muhammad ‘Urfi Shirazi, Kulliyat, ed. Ali Jawahiri (Tehran, 1336 sh./1957),
Pp. 448.
29. Arberry, Sufism, p. 128.
22 / WHAT IS SUFISM?
When he dies, they make him the object of pilgrimage, and hasten to
his shrine, Arabs and foreigners alike;
Some kiss his grave, and some the threshold of his door, and the dust .. . .
Hijazi has put his finger on the danger of the exaggerated venera-
tion of the spiritual master, the sheikh or pir (see chapter 5), what
Muhammad Iqbal has called “pirism,” which means the absolute
sway of the leader over his followers and the attendant exploitation
of ignorant peasants and villagers.
In their criticism of saint worship and pirism—a facet of popular
Islam the danger of which one can scarcely realize without hav-
ing lived in the East—Muslim modernists and moderate Sufis are
united. But to reach this point, we have first to travel the long road
through the outward history of Sufism. We shall see how this move-
ment has assumed various shapes appropriate to the times and the
personalities of its leaders, though its substance has remained the
same.
2. His LORICAL
OUTLINES of
CLASSICAL SUFISM
THE FORMATIVE PERIOD
“Islamic mysticism is the attempt to reach individual
salvation through attaining the true tawhid,” says one of the leading
Western orientalists.! In fact, the quintessence of the long history of
Sufism is to express anew, in different formulations, the overwhelm-
ing truth that “there is no deity but Allah” and to realize that He
alone can be the object of worship.
The history of Sufism is a chart showing some of the stations on
this path of interpretation, some of the forms in which this one
reality was expressed, some of the different ways in which the mystics
1. Hans Heinrich Schaeder, “Zur Deutung des islamischen Mystik," Orientalistische
Literaturzeitung go (1935): 845-
23
24 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
tried to reach their goal, whether individually or collectively,
through gnosis or through love, by means of asceticism or through
practices leading to ecstatic rapture. Its external history is a history
of the spiritual, theological, and literary movements inside Islam.
At the same time, because of its deep roots in the ritual practices
taught by the Koran, Sufism reflects the different attitudes of Mus-
lims toward “the world’’; thus we find among the mystics antiworld-
ly ascetics and active fighters for the glory of their faith, austere
preachers of repentance and enthusiastic hymnodists praising God’s
eternal loving-kindness, builders of highly sophisticated theosophi-
cal systems and enraptured lovers of Eternal Beauty.
The aims of all the mystics are essentially the same. For, as Henri
Corbin has stated, “the religious conscience of Islam is centered
upon a fact of meta-history” (W 46), namely, upon the transhistori-
cal fact of the primordial covenant as understood from the Koranic
word in Siira 7:171. Before creation, God called the future humani-
ty out of the loins of the not-yet-created Adam and addressed them
with the words: “Am I not your Lord?” (alastu bi-rabbikuwm), and
they answered: “Yes, we witness it” (bala shahidna). The idea of this
primordial covenant (mithdq) between God and humanity has im-
pressed the religious conscience of the Muslims, and especially the
Muslim mystics, more than any other idea. Here is the starting
point for their understanding of free will and predestination, of
election and acceptance, of God’s eternal power and man’s loving
response and promise. The goal of the mystic is to return to the ex-
perience of the “Day of Alastu,” when only God existed, before He
led future creatures out of the abyss of not-being and endowed them
with life, love, and understanding so that they might face Him
again at the end of time.
Sufism traces its origins back to the Prophet of Islam and takes
inspiration from the divine word as revealed through him in the
Koran.? God has manifested His will, or rather Himself, in the
words of the holy book, which is, basically, the only means by which
man can know Him. The Koran was accepted relatively early by the
faithful as uncreated and coeternal with God. It has been for every
Muslim, and particularly for the mystics, the “unique lexicon,” the
2.On Koranic exegesis see Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der islamischen Ko-
ranauslegung (Leiden, 1920); Paul Nwyia, Exegése coranique et langage mystique
(Beirut, 1970), an excellent analysis of early Sufi language, adds to Louis Massignon’s
classical study, Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane,
3d ed. (Paris, 1968).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 25
“essential textbook of his sciences, the key for his Weltanschau-
ung,” as Louis Massignon has put it (P 465). For everything con-
cerning worldly and spiritual affairs can be found in this book,
and its interpretation in different ages shows how the self-under-
standing of the Muslim community grew and changed. The mystics
have played a decisive role in the development of the Koranic sci-
ences; their hermeneutical methods range from a simple verbal
interpretation to symbolical and allegorical exegesis, without, how-
ever, denying the value of the exterior meaning of the Koranic
words. For the devout—some of whom could find up to seven thou-
sand meanings in a single Koranic verse—the holy book was “the
resurrection,” for, as Hallaj had claimed, ‘“‘in it there are the signs
of Divine Lordship [rubibiyya], information of the resurrection,
and news about the future till the eternity of eternities. Whosoever
knows the Koran is, so to speak, in the Resurrection” (B 265). The
words of the Koran have formed the cornerstone for all mystical
doctrines: the early Sufis lived under the threat of the Last Judg-
ment as described in the terrifying words of many siras, until they
discovered the promise of mutual love between God and man (Stra
5:59); they found in it the different stages of the human soul, which
rises from the “soul that commands evil” (an-nafs al-ammara) to
the “soul which is at peace with God” (an-nafs al-mutm@inna).
They read that God is closer to man than his jugular vein (Stra
50:16) and is, at the same time, the Lord and Creator of the universe,
immanent and transcendent. ‘The sights do not reach Him” (Stra
6:103), but “whithersoever ye turn there is the Face of God” (Stra
2:109). God has “‘put signs into nature and into the human soul”
(Siira 51:21), and it is necessary to see and to understand them.
God, as revealed in the Koran, is both the stern Judge and the
Merciful and Compassionate; He is All-knowing and Wise, but He
is also the Most Cunning. The numerous and often contradictory
attributes given to Allah in the Koran form the chain of the ninety-
nine most beautiful names—names that were to play an important
role in later mystical theories and in the life of prayer and were
sometimes used in almost magical connections. The hope of dis-
covering the Greatest Name of God has inspired many a Sufi who
dreamed of reaching the highest bliss in this world and the next
by means of this blessed name. God appears, through the Koranic
words, as the only real Agent who creates and predestines human
actions. He is the Absolute Personality—as the Sufis defined it: “He
26 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
alone has the right to say ‘I’ (W 249)—and the Reality, al-haqq, a
word that was used by most of the later mystics to designate God.
Just as the scholastic theologians defined God by forty-one attri-
butes—twenty attributes of necessity, twenty of impossibility, and
one of possibility—many of the later Sufis invented complicated
systems to draw closer to the mystery of the divine, the Absolute
Being, the Pure Existence, or whatever names they might find.
Pious mystics have often objected to these pseudophilosophical defi-
nitions containing names and words not found in the Koran and
therefore ill becoming Him who revealed Himself in the holy book.
But the Koran contains more than the description of God and of
the otherworld; it also regulates the practical and moral life of the
community, and the Sufis meticulously followed its injuctions. Fur-
ther, the recitation of the Koran was an important means of leading
the spirit into a meditative state, or even of producing a mystical
rapture. Recited in beautiful tones, the rhythmic and musical word-
ing of the holy book carried the minds of the devout into higher
spheres and might open a higher level of understanding to them.
The language of the Koran was common to Muslims all over the
world; it has helped to shape the expressions not only of theologians
or lawyer divines but of poets and men of letters; it permeated the
Islamic community as a living force. Even though millions of men
and women did not and do not understand its Arabic wording, they
still sense the numinous quality of the book and live with it. One
can certainly speak of a “‘koranization” of the memory*; and every-
one who has read Persian, Turkish, or any other Islamic idiom
knows how strongly the language of the Koran has penetrated the
literature and everyday language, and how beautifully the “letters
of the Koran” have been elaborated according to the artistic taste
of Persians, Turks, Indians, and Africans, creating the most ex-
quisite calligraphy—the typical art of the mystics.
Sufism traces its origin back to the Prophet himself. He is de-
scribed in the Koran as ummi, “‘illiterate” (Stra 7:157—58), a quality
that is central to the understanding of Islamic religiosity: just as in
Christianity, where God reveals Himself through Christ—the word
made flesh—the virginity of Mary is required in order to produce an
immaculate vessel for the divine word, so in Islam, where God re-
veals Himself through the word of the Koran, the Prophet had to be
3. Paul Nwyia, Ibn ¢Ata? Allah et la naissance de la confrérie Sadilite (Beirut, 1972),
p- 46.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM if 27
a vessel that was unpolluted by ‘‘intellectual’”’ knowledge of word
and script so that he could carry the trust in perfect purity.
Muhammad is the first link in the spiritual chain of Sufism, and
his ascension through the heavens into the divine presence, to which
the first lines of Stra 17 allude, became the prototype of the mystic’s
spiritual ascension into the intimate presence of God. According to
the tradition, esoteric wisdom was transmitted from Muhammad to
his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth of the
righteous caliphs (d. 661). Other members of his family and his
friends, according to legend, were endowed with mystical insight or
pursued mystical practices. The traditions (hadith) that go back to
the Prophet, or at least are attributed to him, served the Sufis when
they elaborated their own definitions of the various stages and states.
Every tendency within Islam, and so within Sufism, found material
to support its claims from Prophetic traditions. In later times a con-
siderable number of hadith that are not found in the official collec-
tions as they were compiled in the second half of the ninth century
were used by the Sufis. In a comparatively short time, Muhammad’s
personality gained great importance for the spiritual life of his com-
munity: He was the ideal leader, and the duty of every Muslim was
to imitate him. His veneration soon reached mythical heights, until
he was conceived by the medieval mystics as the Perfect Man par
excellence, the cause and goal of creation, the friend of God and
the intercessor on behalf of his community (see chapter 4).
The Western student of Islam, used to the traditional picture of
Muhammad as it emerged during hundreds of years of hatred and
enmity in the Christian world, will be surprised to see the strong
“mystical’’ qualities attributed to this man who was, according to
the usual Western understanding, a mere politician, shrewd and
sensual, or, at the best, the founder of a heresy derived from Chris-
tianity. Even most recent studies of the Prophet, which have shown
his sincerity and his deep religious concern, do not convey that
quality of mystical love that his followers feel for him.
We do not know how many of the later tales of Muhammad’s
ascetic piety are true and how many simply reflect the ideals of later
mystical devotion. A number of his sayings about the importance
of prayer, and mainly of the night vigils, seem to be authentic, and
“when his eyes slept his heart did not sleep,” as his beloved young
wife A‘isha relates. The classical manuals of Sufism contain large
collections of sayings in which the Prophet exhorts the faithful to
28 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
constant prayer and to the recollection of God during every mo-
ment of life (L 64; G 1:265—66). Indeed, a prophet who was so cer-
tain of being God’s instrument must have relied upon prayer; for
through prayer he could experience, over and over again, the pres-
ence of Him who had sent him.
Mystical tradition includes some of Muhammad’s companions
among the spiritual ancestors of Sufism—we have already men-
tioned the so-called ahl as-suffa, ‘the People of the Bench,” poor
and pious members of the community who lived in the mosque of
Medina. Among the Prophet's companions, Aba Dharr al-Ghifari
(d. 653) is often mentioned as ‘‘un socialiste avant la lettre,” as Louis
Massignon puts it; it is to him that the tradition ascribes many sen-
tences about poverty, and he appears as the prototype of the true
faqir, the poor person who possesses nothing but is totally possessed
by God, partaking of His everlasting riches.
Even more important is Salman al-Farisi, a Persian-born barber
who was taken into Muhammad’s household and became the model
of spiritual adoption and mystical initiation—he is, thus, the symbol
of the Persians, who were adopted into Islam, and links the Arabian
world with the Iranian tradition. His spirituality was later consid-
ered a decisive element in the history of Persian Sufism and in Shia
thought.‘ Salman the Barber was later regarded as the patron saint
of small artisans, just as some of the ninth- and tenth-century Sufis
were to become patrons of the artisan groups whose professions they
shared; Salman came to stand for the impact of Sufism on the large
masses (see MM 5).
Another name mystically connected with the Prophet is that of
Uways al-Qarani, who is supposed to have lived in Yemen and who
never met the Prophet.* It is said that Muhammad knew of his piety
and uttered these famous words: “The breath of the Merciful (nafas
ar-Rahmdn) comes to me from Yemen.” Uways, about whom the
tradition relates that he spent all his nights in prayer (T 1:21), be-
came, for the later Sufis, the prototype of the inspired Sufi who has
been guided solely by divine grace, knowing of the Prophet without
outward connection. Thus wwaysi, or, as the Turks say, veysi me-
shreb, is the mystic who has attained illumination outside the regu-
lar mystical path and without the mediation and guidance of a
4. Louis Massignon, “Salman Pak et les prémices spirituelles de I'Islam iranien,”
Société des études iraniennes 7 (1984).
5. A. S. Husaini, “Uways al-Qarani and the Uwaysi Sufis,” Moslem World 57, no. 2
(April 1967).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 29
living sheikh. And the “breath of the Merciful’ has become, in po-
etical language, the symbol for the act of divine guidance, which,
like the morning breeze, opens the contracted bud of the human
heart.
Out of this nucleus of pious people around Muhammad has
emerged a definition that was adopted by the Sufis: that is, the three-
fold attitude of islam, iman, and ihsan.® The Koran speaks of islam
and imdn; islam is the complete and exclusive surrender of the
faithful to God’s will and his perfect acceptance of the injunctions
as preached in the Koran, whereas im4@n, “faith,” constitutes the in-
terior aspect of Islam. Thus a muslim need not be a mw min ‘“‘one
who has faith,”” but the mw?min is definitely a muslim. As to ihsan,
it was added—according to most traditions by the Prophet himself—
with the meaning “that you worship God as if you see Him,” for
even though man does not see God, God always sees man, and the
Koran asserts that “mercy is with those who practice ihsan [al-
muhsiniin, ‘those who do well’]” (Stra 7:54). With the addition of
this third element the complete interiorization of Islam begins; tor
the believer has to feel that he stands every moment in the presence
of God, that he has to behave with awe and respect, and must never
fall back into the “sleep of heedlessness,” never forget the all-
embracing divine presence.
We know little about the earliest appearance of ascetic tendencies
in Islam. But when, in 661, ‘Ali, the fourth caliph, was assassinated
and the dynasty of the Omayyads came to power, the different trends
within the community became more conspicuous. The continuous
expansion of the Muslim Empire made the pious ponder the dis-
crepancy between the eschatological threat in the early Koranic
revelations and the necessity to expand the realms of Muslim rule
by conquering more and more of the lands of the infidels. These
conquests were led by a dynasty whose members were anything but
representative of Muslim ideals: the Omayyads were always ac-
cused of utter worldliness and impious behavior (with the exception
of ‘Umar II, 717-20). The resistance of the pious circles to the
government grew stronger and was expressed in theological debates
about the right ruler of the faithful and the conditions for the lead-
ership of the community. The negative attitude toward the govern-
ment engendered during these decades has significantly shaped the
G6. Arend Jan Wensinck, Concordance et indices de la tradition musulmane (Leiden,
1936-71), 1: 467b.
go / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
feeling of the pious throughout the history of Islam; the Sufis would
often equate “‘government’’ with “evil.” Medina, the city of the
Prophet, was one center of pious conservatives; other groups lived
in the new Muslim settlements in Iraq, a province where the love
for Muhammad's family was particularly strong and which was
antagonistic to Syria, the country where the Omayyad rulers had
set up their capital.
The name that stands for the early ascetic, antigovernmental at-
titude is that of the patriarch of Muslim mysticism, Hasan al-Basri
(d. 728).7 He saw the glorious conquests of the Arabs in 711, the
memorable year when they crossed the straits of Gibraltar (which
still bears the name of the Muslim conqueror Tariq, jabal Tariq,
“Tariq’s mountain’’), and when they also reached Sind, the lower
Indus valley, and laid the foundation of a Muslim rule that still
continues in present Pakistan; in the same year, 711, the Muslims
reached the borders of Transoxania, which was destined to become
an important center of Muslim learning and piety. Hasan al-Basri,
however, sober and clearsighted as he was, sensed the dangers in-
herent in a society that had become interested in conquest alone, in
collecting wealth and worldly goods, while tending to forget the
Koranic word (Siira 55:26): “Whatever is on earth is perishing save
His Face.” He used to admonish his listeners to live strictly accord-
ing to the rules laid down by the Koran so that they would not be
ashamed at Doomsday: “‘O son of Adam, you will die alone and en-
ter the tomb alone and be resurrected alone, and it is with you alone
that the reckoning will be made!’ Why care so much for this perish-
able world? “Be with this world as if you had never been there, and
with the Otherworld as if you would never leave it.’ Many cen-
turies later his words still echo in Persian, Turkish, and Pashto
mystical verses.
Hasan al-Basri was deeply steeped in the sadness and fear so
typical of ascetics of all religions. “It was as if Hellfire had been
created exclusively for him and for ‘Umar II,” says one historian.
His preaching and his exhortations, produced in beautiful sonorous
Arabic, influenced many a pious soul in Iraq and elsewhere. His
scrupulosity and his fear of the Day of Judgment are reflected in
many sayings of his contemporaries or of later Muslims, who might
7. Hans Heinrich Schaeder, in “Hasan al-Basri,” Der Islam 13 (1923), dealt for the
first time with Hasan but never completed his study. Hellmut Ritter, “Hasan al-Basri,
Studien zur Geschichte der islamischen Frémmigkeit,” Der Islam 21 (1933), gave an
excellent analysis. Quotations are taken from Ritter's article.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 31
exclaim, when thinking of God’s terrible wrath and of their own
sinful lives: ‘‘O that I were dust and ashes!”—a saying that was pro-
jected back even into the mouth of Muhammad’s most trustworthy
companions (cf. Siira 78:41).
Louis Massignon has seen in Hasan and in the ascetics who fol-
lowed him a “realistic critical tendency” as opposed to the more
“idealistic tradition” that prevailed in Kufa, the seat of the first
Shia groups and the home town of Abii Hashim, the first to be called
as-Siifi. It is true that the first ascetic tendencies in Basra and its en-
vironment were almost exclusively devotional and lacked any in-
terest in speculative thought. In contrast with the growing luxury
of life, the men and women of these groups advocated strict renun-
ciation of the world and what was in it and relied upon the Proph-
et’s word: “If ye knew what I know ye would laugh little and weep
much.” Therefore they were known as “those who constantly weep”
(al-bakk@iin), for both the miserable state of the world and the
meditation of their own shortcomings made them cry in hope of
divine help and forgiveness. Ibn ar-Rimi, the Iraqi poet of the
ninth century, has dramatically described them in one of his poems,
and Kharaqani, in the eleventh century, attests that “God is fond of
His servant’s crying’’ (N 299). It is, therefore, not surprising that
one of Hasan al-Basri’s disciples founded a settlement of ascetically
inclined people in Abbadan on the Persian Gulf: that disciple was
‘Abdu’] Wahid ibn Zayd (d. 794), described as a typical representa-
tive of the virtue of wara‘, ‘‘abstinence,’ and of permanent sadness.
Through him, Hasan’s ideals reached Syria, where Abi Sulayman
ad-Darani (d. 830) and his disciple Ahmad ibn Abi’l-Hawari (d.
851) are the best-known members of the Basrian ascetic movement.
A new chapter in the history of Islam was opened when the Ab-
basids—related to Muhammad’s uncle ‘Abbas—came to power in
750. According to the traditional interpretation, the long rule of
this dynasty (their last member was killed by the Mongols in 1258)
marks the high tide of Muslim culture and civilization. Arts and
sciences, law and philology, theology and philosophy were develop-
ing; every branch of human knowledge was cultivated. The legal
injunctions of the Koran were brought into a more systematic form
by the scholars who are considered the founders of the four orthodox
law schools: Abii Hanifa (d. 767), Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), ash-
Shafi (d. 820), and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855). They took into
account legal points ranging from obscure matters pertaining to
32 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
laws of inheritance to the smallest details for the correct perfor-
mance of the ritual prayer or the pilgrimage. The four schools dif-
fered from each other only on minor points; they were all founded
upon the Koran and the sunna, i.e., the Prophetic tradition, and
made the ijma‘, the consensus of the “doctors of law’ on a certain
point, an instrument for introducing innovative legal decisions.
They differed on the degree of personal judgment that was granted
to the jurist in making his decisions. As early as the late tenth cen-
tury, the possibility of free investigation into the sources of law
(ijtihad) in matters that previously had been decided was no longer
permitted; this led to a fossilization of jurisprudence, and the ijma‘,
once a force for creative change in Islam, became the cause of its
stagnation. Although Islamic law was never codified, the classi-
cal handbooks, along with their commentaries and scholia, were
handed down verbatim through the generations—and the Sufis have
often raised their voices against the spiritless legalism that stifled
free development of the personal spiritual life.
Theological issues were widely discussed, mainly in connection
with the problem of the legitimacy of the leader of the community,
which embraces the question of predestination as well as the prob-
lem of whether or not a grave sinner can remain within the pale of
Islam. The first attempts at defining the central theme of Islam, the
unity of God, were made at approximately the same time, with
theologians gradually learning the skills of dialectical disputation
and logic. They fought relentlessly against any trace of Manichaean
dualism, of Christian trinitarianism, or of whatever seemed to con-
stitute shirk, ‘associating anything with God,” i.e., worship of any-
thing besides the sovereign ruler Allah. Defense of God’s absolute
unity led to discussions concerning the attributes of God, from
which ensued the problem of whether the Koran, as God’s own
word, was created (according to the Mu‘tazila) or uncreated (ac-
cording to the followers of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the majority of
the faithful). But here, too, the zeal for accuracy of definition led
the scholars into hairsplitting discussions—as had been the case with
the legalists—and Ma‘rif al-Karkhi, a leading Sufi of the early
ninth century in Baghdad, sighed: “When God loves His servant,
He opens for him the door of actions [i.e., religious and pious acts]
and closes the door of theological disputations.” * The theological
8.¢Abdur Rahman as-Sulami, Kitab tabaqat as-Sifiyya, ed. Niaddin Shariba
(Cairo, 1953), p. 87.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 33
discussions had repercussions upon religious thought in general, as,
indeed, was the case with the new interest in Greek science and phi-
losophy. The reign of the caliph Ma’min (813~33) marks the begin-
ning of that remarkable activity of Arab translators (many of whom
were non-Muslims) who made Greek science and philosophy avail-
able to Muslim scholars; these, in turn, elaborated the given data,
adding many new practical insights. The noteworthy results of their
scholarship deeply influenced Western thought and science in the
later Middle Ages.
All these currents helped develop the language; the jurists, the
theologians, and the translators gave Arabic a greater pliability,
adding new dimensions to an already rich and beautiful language.
The mystics, too, made considerable contributions in this regard—
Paul Nwyia, noting the ‘‘adventures of the mystics’ in language, has
highlighted the fact that, “thanks to the mystics, in the Arabic lan-
guage, an authentic language, that of experience, was born” (W 4).
The writings of the early Sufis show not only variety of expression
but an increasing profundity of thought as the mystical experience
is refined. In the prayers of some of the Sufis in the tenth century, or
in certain poems by Hallaj, the ineffable experience has been ab-
stracted in words of unforgettable beauty.
A similar development is visible, in later times, in the non-Arab
countries: the literary language of Iran owes much to writers who
gave voice to mystical yearnings in Persian; Turkish was trans-
formed by the mystical poet Yanus Emre (d. circa 1321) into a de-
lightful literary idiom. Likewise the Indo-Muslim languages (Sin-
dhi, Panjabi, and to a great extent Urdu and Pashto) are in large
part the result of the speech and song of mystical leaders who could
not address their simple disciples in high-flown theological Arabic
or poetical Persian; in order to express the mysteries of divine love
and devotion, they were obliged to use the vernaculars, making
them vehicles of the most lofty thought. Then they emerged as lan-
guages well able to serve as a literary medium for nonmystical
writers.
The expansion of the Islamic Empire during the late Omayyad
and early Abbasid periods had brought the Muslims into contact
with large groups of non-Muslims representing different cultural
levels and varied traditions. The presence of Zoroastrian influences
must certainly be accepted from the beginning of the Abbasid pe-
riod, when the capital was shifted from Damascus to Baghdad. Per-
34 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF GLASSICAL SUFISM
sian noblemen served at the court; Persian traditions from the
“Book of Kings’ were incorporated into the Arabic narrative litera-
ture, helping to shape the image of the ideal ruler; and Persian
mythology was to become a substitute for the weak pre-Islamic Ara-
bic tradition. In Eastern Iran and Transoxania, the Muslims met
Buddhists whose ascetic practices were of some interest to them.
Their contacts with Hinduism as a religion were negligible in this
period, although India contributed extensively to the development
of Islamic mathematics and astronomy. But India in general was
considered the country of the sage, and the home of magical prac-
tices performed by blackish, ugly people. Manichaeism, so wide-
spread in the Near and Middle East, and in Central Asia, attracted
the interest of the theologians, and more than one mystic was ac-
cused of Manichaean inclinations. Mandaeans and Jews constituted
a small, but active, minority.
The most significant contacts of the early Abbasid Muslims were
with Christians, split into numerous groups ranging from the Nes-
torians to the many Monophysite sects and churches.® Christian
ascetics and hermits who inhabited places in Iraq and the moun-
tains of Lebanon are mentioned frequently in Sufi stories—and in
pre-Islamic poetry there were already allusions to the light shining
forth from the Christian hermit’s cell. A meeting with a Christian
ascetic or with a wise monk is a fictional element in Sufi legends of
early times: such a person usually explains some mystical truths to
the seeker; or the disciple admires his austerity but is informed by
a heavenly voice that all his asceticism will not gain him salvation
since he has no faith in Muhammad. Jesus, the last prophet before
Muhammad according to Koranic revelation, appears to the Sufis as
the ideal ascetic and also as the pure lover of God. A homeless pil-
grim, wandering without knowing where to put his head, he in-
structs the devout about the importance of modesty, peace, and
charity, for “just as the seed does not grow but from dust, so the
g. There are several studies devoted to the mystics of the first three centuries: Henry
Frederick Amedroz, “Notes on Some Sufi Lives,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
1912; Margaret Smith, Studies in Early Mysticism in the Near and Middle East (Lon-
don, 1931), deals with the relationships between Christian and Islamic mysticism. The
same problem has been discussed by Tor Andrae, “Zuhd und Ménchtum,” Le monde
oriental 25 (1931), and in several other studies by this Swedish theologian. His post-
humously published book J Myrtentrédgdrden (Uppsala, 1947), translated into Ger-
man by Hans Helmhart Kanus as Islamische Mystiker (Stuttgart, 1960), is an excellent
introduction to the pre-Hallajian development of Sufism and deserves an English
translation.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 35
seed of wisdom does not grow but from a heart like dust.” It is the
Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount whose image is reflected in say-
ings of the first generations of Sufis, and he continued to be a fa-
vorite figure in later Sufi poetry as well: he and his virgin mother
become exalted symbolic figures—the woman unspoiled by worldly
concern, the pure receptacle of the divine spirit, and the prophet
born out of the divine command, surnamed ‘‘Spirit of God,” be-
came models of the pure spiritual life.
It is even possible that the first Sufis adopted from the Christian
ascetics the woolen garment from which their name derives. These
Sufis were people who meticulously fulfilled the words of the law,
prayed and fasted, constantly recollecting God, and were absolutely
bound by Koran and tradition. Thus says one of them: “Sometimes
Truth knocks at my heart for forty days, but I do not permit it to
enter my heart unless it brings two witnesses, the Koran and the
Prophetic tradition” (L 104). The country of incomparable ascetic
achievement was Khurasan in the northeastern part of the Abbasid
Empire. A saying ascribed to one of the ninth-century Khurasanian
ascetics serves well as an introduction to the mentality typical of
this remarkable group: ‘‘Who wants to attain to the highest honor
should prefer seven to seven: poverty to wealth, hunger to satiety,
the low to the elevated, humiliation to honor, modesty to pride,
sadness to joy, death to life” (N 45). As late as the thirteenth century
Jalaluddin Rimi alludes in one of his verses to the ascetics of Herat
and Merw-i Taliqan, declaring that even they would be intoxicated
if the scent of the wine of love were to reach them from the Ma-
ghreb, the far west (D 1966). But this scent very rarely reached
them, though perhaps more true mystical love is hidden beneath
their outward austerity than a modern reader can realize."
One of the most famous conversion stories in early Sufism is that
of Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad. He was a highwayman, albeit a magnanimous
one, between the cities of Abiward and Sarakhs. One day, on the
way to his beloved, he happened to hear a verse from the Koran and
immediately gave up banditry, thereafter devoting himself to the
study of the Prophetic tradition in Kufa. He died in Mecca in 803.
10. Abii Talib al-Makki. Qiat al-qulab fi mu‘amalat al-mahbib, 2 vols. (Cairo,
1310 h./1892-93), 2:74.
11. Early ascetic Sufism has beeen treated by Paul Klappstein, Vier turkestanische
Heilige, ein Beitrag zum Verstiéindnis der islamischen Mystik (Berlin, 1919), and Jakob
Hallauer, Die Vita des Ibrahim ibn Edhem in der Tedhkiret al-Ewlija des Ferid ed-
Din Attar (Leipzig, 1925)—both rather superficial.
36 vi HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Fudayl is a typical representative of early orthodox asceticism,
“and when he died, sadness was taken away from the world” (Q 9).
This sadness is reflected in many of his sayings. He disliked the com-
pany of people, and in words reminiscent of his contemporary Ra-
bia, the woman saint, he said: “When night comes I am happy that
Tam alone, without separation, with God, and when morning comes
I get distressed because I detest the view of those people who enter
and disturb my solitude” (T 1:31). Although Fudayl was married,
he considered family life one of the greatest obstacles on the way to
God; he was seen smiling only once in thirty years—when his son
died. This event was, for him, a sign of divine grace: “When God
loves His servant, He afflicts him, and when He loves him very
much He takes hold of him and leaves for him neither family nor
wealth” (G 4:282). (The feeling of happiness at the death of family
members was not unknown among medieval Christian mystics
either, as the story of Angela di Foligno shows). Even Jalaluddin
Rumi wrote, quite without feeling, in a verse of his Mathnawi:
“The death of his children was for him like sweetmeat”’ (M 3:1927);
and the indifference of some Indo-Muslim Chishti saints of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the death of family members
is well known. On the other hand, many of the great Sufis and
founders of mystical fraternities were married and had large fami-
lies—Ahmad-i Jam had forty-two children (N 357), and ‘Abdu’l-
Qadir Gilani had forty-nine sons. Yet so rare is it to find any ap-
proval of happy family life in Sufi sayings that one is quite unpre-
pared for the exception one meets in Mir Dard, the saint of Delhi
in the eighteenth century, who exclaimed in one of his books: “I
love my wife and my children dearly.” *
Among the early ascetics, a preference for celibacy was common
in spite of the Prophet’s example of married life and his advice to
raise a family. But, as Darani says, ‘‘the sweetness of adoration and
undisturbed surrender of the heart which the single man can feel
the married man can never experience” (G 2:22). The restlessness
caused by marriage, the distraction from God, has often been de-
scribed by the Sufis (N 217), and the sorrows of family life might be
regarded as “punishment for the execution of legally permitted
lusts” (N 185). Fudayl’s elder contemporary, Ibrahim ibn Adham
12. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s
Spiritual Consciousness (1911; paperback ed., New York, 1956), p- 216.
13. Khwaja Mir Dard, “Nala-yi Dard,” no. 70, in Chahar risdla (Bhopal, 1310 h./
1892-93).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM if 37
(d. circa 790), whom he met at Mecca, expressed such a notion in a
striking sentence often quoted in Sufi poetry and prose: “When a
man marries he embarks on a ship, and when a child is born he suf-
fers shipwreck” (L 199). Ibrahim ibn Adham—‘‘the key of mystical
sciences,” as Junayd called him (H 103)—has become, in Islamic tra-
dition, one of the proverbial examples of true poverty, abstinence,
and trust in God. According to the legend, he renounced the
princely life in Balkh, the old Buddhist capital where he was born (a
story embellished with echoes of the Buddha legend). He later be-
came the subject of many pious tales in Eastern Islamic lands. A ro-
mance was even composed about his adventures and was known
particularly in the Malayan archipelago.
Although his residence was Balkh,
Balkh became corrected, namely talkh [“‘bitter’’],
says ‘Attar (U 264), with a pun: by changing the diacritical dots of
the first letter of Balkh, he implies that the former seat of power and
wealth became bitter for the young, highborn ascetic.
Ibrahim is credited with making the first classification of the
stages of zwhd, ‘‘asceticism.” Because of its tripartition, which was
common after the ninth century, it looks like a word from some la-
ter source, for it discerns: (a) renunciation of the world, (b) renun-
ciation of the happy feeling of having achieved renunciation, and
(c) the stage in which the ascetic regards the world as so unimpor-
tant that he no longer looks at it.
The stories of the degree of asceticism achieved by these early
Sufis sound somewhat incredible to a modern mind; yet they
counted it happiness to live completely free of worldly things, even
though they might use only a brick for a pillow (N 49) and a worn-
out mat of straw for a bed (if they did not prefer to sleep in a seated
position or refrain from sleep at all). They cared neither for their
outward appearance nor for their attire, and although they strictly
observed the ritual purity required for prayer, Ibn Adham was
proud of the huge number of lice living in his coat, and as late as
goo, a maidservant of a Sufi from Baghdad exclaimed: “O God, how
dirty are Thy friends—not a single one among them is clean!” (N
621).
One of Fudayl’s disciples was Bishr, called al-Hafi, “the bare-
footed one,” who considered even shoes to be a “veil” on the path to
God. Bishr, like his master, came from Merw and, also like Fudayl,
38 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
was converted by a miracle: on the road he found a piece of paper,
which he took with him because the name of God was written on it
—this pious act of the otherwise worldly man was soon recompensed
when, by divine grace, he was transformed into a Sufi. He settled in
Baghdad, where he died, after a perfectly scrupulous life, in 841.
Bishr is said to have dwelt upon the concept of ikhlds, “absolute sin-
cerity,” in every thought and action, an attitude that was elaborated
to perfection by his younger contemporary in Baghdad, al-Harith
al-Muhasibi.
Among the early Khurasanian Sufis, the former merchant Shagiq
al-Balkhi (d. 809) is worthy of mention. Recent research has shown
that he was not only an expert on tawakkul, “absolute trust in God”
—a path taken up by his disciples Hatim al-Asamm (d. 851) and
Hatim’s pupil Abi Turab an-Nakhshabi (d. 859)—but that he was
also the first to discuss the ‘mystical states’’ and was deeply con-
cerned with what he calls “the light of pure love of God” (W 228).
With this idea he comes close to the saint of Basra, Rabi‘a al-
‘Adawiyya, who died only a few years before him (801).
Rabi‘a was “‘that one set apart in the seclusion of holiness, that
woman veiled with the veil of sincerity, that one enflamed by love
and longing ..., lost in union with God, that one accepted by men
as a second spotless Mary...” (T 159). Rabi‘a is generally regarded
as the person who introduced the element of selfless love into the
austere teachings of the early ascetics and gave Sufism the hue of true
mysticism. Jami has beautifully explained the difference between
these ascetics and the genuine Sufis: “The ascetics regard the Beauty
of the Otherworld with the light of faith and certitude and despise
the world, but are still veiled by a sensual pleasure, namely the
thought of Paradise, whereas the true Sufi is veiled from both worlds
by the vision of the Primordial Beauty and Essential Love” (N 10).
R4abi‘a was a slave girl, set free by her master. The most famous
story illustrative of the singlemindedness of her devotion is this:
Once, in the streets of Basra, she was asked why she was carrying a
torch in one hand and a ewer in the other, and she answered: “I want
to throw fire into Paradise and pour water into Hell so that these
14. Margaret Smith, RabiSa the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam (Cambridge,
1928), is a fundamental study that also deals with the role of women in Sufism in
general. “Abdur Rahman Badawi, Shahidat al-Sishq al-ilahi, RabiSa al-CAdawiyya
(Cairo, 1946).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 39
two veils disappear, and it becomes clear who worships God out of
love, not out of fear of Hell or hope for Paradise.”
This love for love’s sake has become the central topic of Sufism;
almost every mystical poet in Islam has expressed the idea that ‘‘the
lover must be in the way of love so that he does not remember Hell
or Paradise” (N 597). For ‘‘a few houris and castles” that are prom-
ised to the pious in Paradise are mere veils hiding the eternal divine
beauty—“‘when He fills your mind with Paradise and houris know
by certain that He keeps you far from Himself’ (MT 204). It would
certainly be better if God took away Paradise or cast the ascetic who
feared hellfire into that very fire, for both Paradise and Hell are
created, and thus distinct from God (T 1:73).
Rabi‘a’s love of God was absolute; there was no room left for any
other thought or love. She did not marry, nor did she give the
Prophet a special place in her piety. The world meant nothing to
her. She would shut the windows in spring without looking at the
flowers and become lost in the contemplation of Him who created
flowers and springtime. This story has often been retold by the mys-
tical poets of Iran. Every true mystic should know that “‘the gardens
and the fruits are inside, in the heart,’”’ as Rimi says in his version of
Rabi‘a’s story (M 4: 1357; see also U 198). Rabi‘a seems to have
been the first Sufi to speak about the jealous God—a concept not
unknown to prophetic piety; but whereas the jealous God of the
orthodox does not allow anybody to worship anything besides Him,
Rabi‘a’s God “‘will suffer none to share with Him that love which is
due to Him alone.’’*® And so she addresses Him in small poetical
effusions:
O Beloved of hearts, I have none like unto Thee,
therefore have pity this day on the sinner
who comes to Thee.
O my Hope and my Rest and my Delight,
the heart can love none other but Thee.”
In such perfect love, the mystic has “ceased to exist and passed out
of self. 1am one with Him and altogether His.” !® Rabi‘a had medi-
tated upon the Koranic statement that God’s love precedes man’s
15. Smith, Rabia, p. 98.
16. Ibid., p. 108.
17. Ibid., p. 55.
18, Ibid., p. 110.
40 4 HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
love: “He loves them and they love Him” (Siira 5:59): “Love has
come from Eternity and passes into Eternity and none has been
found in seventy thousand worlds who drinks one drop of it until
at last he is absorbed in God, and from that comes the saying: He
loves them and they love Him” (T 1:67). It was this Koranic passage
that provided the Sufis of the following generations with proof for
their theories of the mutual love between the Creator and the
creature.
There is nothing left to distract the lover from God—the spiritual
eye sees nothing but Him when the eye of the body is closed. He is
enough for the loving soul: “O my Lord, whatever share of this
world Thou dost bestow on me, bestow it on Thine enemies, and
whatever share of the next world Thou doest give me, give it to Thy
friends—Thou art enough for me” (T 1:73). Rabi‘a’s prayer has
been repeated, with variations, by Sufis of all ages, probably in the
most shocking form by Shibli (d. 945), the mystic of Baghdad whose
paradoxes are famous in Sufi history: “‘O God, hand this world and
the Otherworld over to me so that I may make a morsel from this
world and throw it into a dog’s mouth, and make a morsel of the
Otherworld and put it into a Jew’s mouth, for both are veils before
the true goal” (T 2:165). For Rabi‘a the only thing that mattered
was the hope of God and the word of His praise, which was sweeter
than any other word. The nightly prayer, one of the pivots of early
ascetic life, becomes, with her, a sweet and loving conversation be-
tween lover and beloved:
O God, the night has passed and the day has dawned. How I long to
know if Thou hast accepted my prayers or if Thou hast rejected them.
Therefore console me for it is Thine to console this state of mine. Thou
hast given me life and cared for me, and Thine is the glory. If Thou
want to drive me from Thy door, yet would I not forsake it, for the love
that I bear in my heart towards Thee.!9
It was a daring prayer, often repeated by the early Sufis, that the
true lover would not leave the door of the beloved even if driven
away.
Rabi‘a was not the only woman saint in the eighth century; sey-
eral women chose the mystical path, sighing for the heavenly be-
loved who, though absent from their sight, is never absent from
their hearts. Because of her intense feelings Rabi‘a was accepted as
the model of selfless love even by those who otherwise despised
19. Ibid., p. 27.
1
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 41
women—but since in the unity of God the lovers no longer have a
separate existence, no distinction can be made between man and
woman (T 1:59).
During the ninth century different trends in the mystical teach-
ings and the approach to God emerged, and religious experiences
were expressed in various styles and forms. But the roots of these de-
velopments went back to an earlier period. That has been shown
very clearly in Pere Nwyia’s research. He has emphazised that Ja‘far
as-Sadiq, the sixth imam of the Shia (d. 765), was certainly one of
the greatest teachers of early Sufism. His commentary on the Koran,
part of which is preserved in Sulami’s tafstr, shows an exceptional
insight into mystical phenomena (W 161). Ja‘far discerned the four
different aspects of the Koran: expression, for the common people;
allusion, for the privileged or elite; touches of grace (lat@if), for the
saints; and finally the “realities,” for the prophets (W 167). This
pluralistic structure of the holy book led Ja‘far to sketch a hier-
archical structure of the faithful according to the degree of their
interior knowledge—a principle developed by later Sufis when they
identified the “stages’’ and “‘stations” and then divided them into
those for the common people, for the elect, and for the elite of the
elite. The hierarchical principle is also found in later theories of
saintship, and it is a typical facet of Shia thought as well. Imam
Ja‘far alluded to a structure of mystical experience that leads in
twelve stages from source to source, which looks like a preparation
for the stations through which the Sufi initiate has to pass on the
Path. Some of Ja‘far’s hermeneutic principles seem to contain
thoughts that were, until recently, ascribed to later mystics; he even
analyzed the “‘theopathic locutions,” the so-called shathiyat, in
which the mystic utters words that he should not say. Ja‘far’s model
case for such an experience is the conversation between Moses and
God on Mount Sinai (Stra 20:11-21).
Moses was the prophet who heard God—heard His voice speaking
in him and through him; but Muhammad was blessed with the
vision of God during his ascension—he entered the intimate prox-
imity of the beloved, and here, as Ja‘far’s modern interpreter states,
“the language of experience becomes the language of love” (W 187).
‘That means that before the time of Rabi‘a the first steps were taken
in the direction of an authentic love mysticism. The definition of
divine love as given by Ja‘far, and often repeated by later mystics, is
this: “a divine fire that devours man completely” (W 187).
42 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
SOME MYSTICAL LEADERS OF THE LATE NINTH CENTURY
The discoveries about the earliest Sufis show that some of
the definitions attributed to mystics of the ninth century can prob-
ably be dated much earlier. They also show how Shia and Sufi ideas
were, at that early stage, interdependent. But many problems still
await solution. The thoughts of Ja‘far and, perhaps, other early mys-
tical thinkers must have been at work beneath the surface, per-
meating the mystical life until they appeared in the sayings of a
number of Sufis, all near contemporaries, who reveal the potential
variety within the mystical life. I refer to Dhi’n-Nin the Egyptian
(d. 859), Bayezid Bistami the Iranian (d. 874), Yahya ibn Mu‘adh
from Rayy (d. 871), and al-Harith al-Muhasibi the Iraqi (d. 857).
Dhivn-Nin is one of the most attractive and intriguing figures in
the history of early Sufism, aptly called “one of the most eminent of
their hidden spiritualists’ (H 100). Thauban ibn Ibrahim, sur-
named Dhi’n-Niin, “‘he with the fish,” was born of Nubian parents
in Ikhmim in Upper Egypt; he studied religious sciences and is re-
ported to have transmitted traditions from Malik ibn Anas, the
founder of the Maliki law school. Dhi’n-Niin was “‘the unique [au-
thority] of his time in scholarship and piety and mystical state and
culture” (Q 8). During the Mu‘tazilite persecution of the orthodox
he, too, was imprisoned, because of his belief in the doctrine that
the Koran was uncreated; the caliph Mutawakkil, however, deeply
impressed by one of his sermons, set him free. He was accused of
being a philosopher and an alchemist, and the genuineness of his
mystical state was sometimes doubted; Ibn an-Nadim’s Fihrist (2:
862) in the tenth century mentions two of his works among alchem-
istic scriptures. We know little about his life, and his teachings are
still scattered in the hagiographic books. Ibrahim al-Qassar, who
saw him in his childhood, remembers that he was disappointed by
the great mystical leader who was outwardly so humble and meek,
but Dhi’n-Nin reproached the boy, whose thoughts he had read by
means of his inner power (N 166). Many miracles are ascribed to
him, and in strange legends he figures as a kind of magician whom
men and jinn obeyed. It is said that “he traveled the road of
blame.’”’ But when he died, legend asserts, “it was written on his
forehead: “This is the friend of God, he died in love of God, slain
by God’ ” (H 100). This love of God has been expressed in one of his
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 43
sayings (which has also been attributed to other mystics because it
shows very well the inclination of the early Sufis to speak in allu-
sions without divulging the secret of their loving intimacy with
God): “O God! Publicly I call Thee ‘My Lord,’ but in solitude I
call Thee ‘O my Beloved’! (A 9:332). According to the tradition,
Dhiv’n-Niin formulated for the first time a theory of ma‘rifa, intui-
tive knowledge of God, or gnosis, as opposed to “ilm, discursive
learning and knowledge; many sayings about “‘love”’ and “intimacy”
are also attributed to him. However, we would scarcely agree with
Edward G. Browne, who considers him “‘the first to give to the ear-
lier asceticism the definitely pantheistic bent and quasi-erotic ex-
pression which we recognize as the chief characteristics of Sufism.” *°
Nicholson was inclined to accept Neoplatonic influences upon
Dhivn-Nin. Since this mystic lived in Egypt, where Neoplatonic
and hermetic traditions were in the air, and was regarded by some
of his contemporaries as a “philosopher,” he may well have been
acquainted with some Neoplatonic ideas. In a famous passage, he
has described the gnostic (rif), the true mystic with spiritual in-
sight; but we do not find a ‘‘philosophical” approach in these words
of his:
The gnostic becomes more humble every hour, for every hour is drawing
him nearer to God. The gnostics see without knowledge, without sight,
without information received, and without observation, without de-
scription, without veiling and without veil. They are not themselves, but
in so far as they exist at all they exist in God. Their movements are
caused by God, and their words are the words of God which are uttered
by their tongues, and their sight is the sight of God, which has entered
into their eyes. So God Most High has said: “When I love a servant, I,
the Lord, am his ear so that he hears by Me, I am his eye, so that he sees
by Me, and I am his tongue so that he speaks by Me, and I am his hand,
so that he takes by Me.” ?!
This last-quoted hadith quds?,” an extra-Koranic word attributed
to God, forms one of the cornerstones of mystical teaching in Sufism:
man is, through acts of supererogatory piety, slowly lifted above his
own base qualities and instead distinguished by the good qualities
seen in God, until he completely lives in Him and through Him.
Dhin-Nin’s alleged ‘‘philosophical-gnostic’”’ character is not re-
20. Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (1902; reprint ed.,
Cambridge, 1957), 23505.
21. Margaret Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam (London, 1950), no. 20; see
A 9:385 ff.
22. Sahih al-Bukhari, ed. L. Krehl and W. Juynboll (Leiden, 1862-1908), 4:281.
44 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
flected in another of his sayings either: “I knew God by God, and
I knew what is besides God by the Messenger of God” (L 104). “The
sign of the lover of God is to follow the Friend of God, i.e., the
Prophet, in his morals, and his deeds and his orders and his cus-
toms” (T’1:125).
Stories connected with the Greatest Name of God are told about
this mystic; but his reply in the following anecdote reveals the pious
Muslim rather than a man who relies upon magical practice: “One
said to Dhi’n-Nin: ‘Show me the Greatest Name of God.’ He said:
‘Show me the smallest one!’—and scolded him’ Dhi’n-Nin em-
phasized God’s incredible majesty and power and, inspired by two
of the Koranic names of God, al-muhyi, “He who bestows life,” and
al-mumit, “He who kills,” he appropriately described the state of
the mystic: “Nothing sees God and dies, even as nothing sees God
and lives, because His life is everlasting, and who ever sees Him, re-
mains in Him and is made everlasting” (A 9:373). The theories of
fand and baq4, “annihilation, extinction,’ and “everlasting life,
duration” in God, central topics of Sufism, are developed here out
of the Koranic context.
Dhivn-Nan, like most of the mystics, often juxtaposed the divine
qualities and names. Jamal, ‘eternal beauty,” and jaldl, “eternal
majesty,” coinciding in kamal, “eternal perfection,” are the quali-
ties of Him who must be addressed as “Thou art who Thou art,
eternally, in eternity.” God, the eternal perfection to which no
created being has access, reveals Himself to man under the aspects
of beauty and fascination, kindness and mercy, or under the aspects
of majesty and wrath, power and revenge. More than a thousand
years after Dhi’n-Niin, the German theologian Rudolf Otto has
built up a theological system based upon the contrast between the
mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinans, which consti-
tute the two main qualities of the Numen; he has, thus, expressed
in scientific language a truth that had been known to every Sufi in
the world of Islam for centuries. Dhi’n-Nun frequently dwelt upon
the quality of majesty, jalal, the tremendum, in God—an approach
typical of early Islamic thought. That is why he believed affliction
to be indispensable to man’s spiritual development; it is the “salt
23.°Abdul Wahhab ash-Sha‘rani, Lawdqih al-anwar al-qudsiyya (Cairo, 1311 h./
1893-94), P- 144.
24. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (1914; reprint ed., Chester Springs,
Pa., 1962), p. 183.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 45
of the faithful, and when the salt lacks, the faithful becomes rotten”
(A 9:373). The faithful lover enjoys the tribulations sent by his
beloved, as Dhi’n-Niin has said; but the great mystic disliked those
who turned this attitude into a mere show: “When one of his
brethren, a so-called lover, was boasting during his illness: ‘Who
suffers from the pain which God sends him, does not love God,’ he
replied: ‘I would rather say: ““He who boasts of his love of God,
does not love Him”’” (T 1:123).
One of the most attractive aspects of Dhi’n-Nin is his poetic
talent and his wonderful command of the Arabic language. He
composed small, charming poems—a new development in Sufism,
although Rabi‘a is credited with a few poetical exclamations. He
praised the Lord in long, hymnlike poems and popularized a kind
of romantic mystical story, a literary type often found in later hagio-
graphic works. He told how he wandered along the Nile, or
strolled alone in the desert, when suddenly he would meet a strang-
er who revealed to him mysteries of the Path: ““He met a woman
at the sea shore and asked her: ‘What is the end of love?’ And she
answered: ‘O simpleton, love has no end.’ And he asked: ‘Why?’
She said: ‘Because the Beloved has no end’ ” (T 1:12) . This story is
typical of Dhivn-Niin’s tendency to introduce a dramatic element
into the discussion of complicated problems that cannot be re-
solved through intellectual efforts. The answer of the unknown
woman (in other cases it may be a slave girl, a negro, or an old
anchorite) points immediately to the heart of the matter: since
love is the essence of the divine, it is, like God Himself, without
beginning and without end.
The romantic and poetic aspect of Dhi’n-Niin can be understood
best from his prayers. The Koran asserts that everything created
worships God; everything utters praise and thanks to its creator in
its own tongue, which may be the human voice, the humming of
the bee, the growing of the leaves, the scent of the flower, or just
the lisan ul-hal, the ‘‘state of speaking by itself,’ someone’s whole
attitude. The created world gains, thus, a religious meaning—a
meaning that the early ascetics had lost sight of because they con-
sidered it to be a detestable veil that distracted them from God.
But for Dhi’n-Nin and the generations of Sufis following him, the
worth or worthlessness of the world is determined not by itself, but
by man’s relation to it. It is again regarded as God's creation and
46 ‘ HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
thus as something dependent upon Him and belonging to Him.
That is how Dhi’n-Niin felt:
O God, I never hearken to the voices of the beasts or the rustle of the
trees, the splashing of the waters or the song of the birds, the whistling
of the wind or the rumble of the thunder, but I sense in them a testimony
to Thy Unity, and a proof of Thy incomparability, that Thou art the
All-Prevailing, the All-Knowing, the All-True. (A 9:342)
Such psalmlike prayers of praise, in beautiful, rhythmic rhyme-
prose are unforgettable, and they deeply impressed the mystical
writers of later centuries. The great poets of Iran understood the
language of the flowers and birds as clearly as Dhi’n-Niin; the
proems of ‘Attar’s epics translate this praise of the creatures into
human poetical language, and he was able to express the silent
yearning of all creatures in the forty chapters of his Musibatnama.
Dhi’n-Niin’s compatriot Sha‘rani, the last great mystic of Egypt in
the sixteenth century, tells a story that reminds the reader immedi-
ately of Dhi’n-Niin’s hymnic praise:
Whoever recollects God in reality, forgets all else besides Him, because
all the creatures recollect Him, as is witnessed by those who experience a
revelation (kashf). I experienced this state from evening prayer until one
third of the night was over, and I heard the voices of the creatures in the
praise of God, with elevated voices so that I feared for my mind. I heard
the fishes who said: Praised be the King, the Most Holy, the Lord.?5
The late thirteenth-century mystical poet Yunus Emre, who de-
clared that he would praise the Lord together with the stones and the
fountains, with the gazelles and with the prophets, was just as faith-
ful an interpreter of the Koranic words that everything was created
in order to worship and praise the Creator as was his seventeenth-
century compatriot Merkez Efendi, about whom a charming story
was told to me by Turkish friends:
The sheikh of the Khalvati order in Istanbul, Siinbiil Efendi, in looking
for a successor, sent his disciples forth to get flowers to adorn the con-
vent. All of them returned with large bunches of lovely flowers; only one
of them—Merkez Efendi—came back with a small, withered plant. When
asked why he did not bring anything worthy of his master, he answered:
“I found all the flowers busy recollecting the Lord—how could I inter-
rupt this constant prayer of theirs? I looked, and lo, one flower had
finished its recollection. That one I brought.” It was he who became the
successor of Siinbiil Efendi, and one of the cemeteries along the Byzan-
tine wall of Istanbul still bears his name.
The poetic aspect of Dhi’n-Niin has been highlighted because
25. Ash-Sha‘rini, Lawdqih, p. 156. See also the description of Kazarani in T 2:295.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM He 47
that is most conspicuous in his sayings. A detailed study of his life
and work would, in all probability, reveal many previously un-
known aspects of his teachings and show whether he was, indeed,
the first “theosophist’” among the Sufis or rather the hymnodist
who rediscovered the divine glory as praised by the creatures. In
later times Dhi’n-Niin became a subject of tales and legends.
Another early saint has been almost completely transformed
into a kind of Sufi symbol—Abii Yazid (Bayezid) Bistami (d. 874).*°
His personality looms large on the horizon of early Persian Sufism.
Few mystics have impressed and perplexed their contemporaries
and successive generations as much as this ascetic from the little
place known as Bistam (Bastam) in northwestern Iran. Strange
experiences and great faith are ascribed to him. His theopathic
locutions and paradoxes attracted another, though very different,
mystic, Junayd (d. g10), the leader of the Baghdad school, who,
however, held that Bayezid had not reached the final goal of the
seeker.
Numerous attempts at explaining Bayezid’s personality and his
enigmatic utterances have been made in Europe. The finest one
is the short and penetrating study by Hellmut Ritter. R. C. Zaehner
has stressed the possibility of Indian influences upon Bayezid. The
import of the story that Bayezid’s mystical master was a certain
Abi ‘Ali as-Sindi, i.e., from Sind, is still doubtful; even if this man
had been from the lower Indus valley and not from a village called
Sind close to Bistam, it seems scarcely possible to draw far-reaching
consequences from this geographical fact: not every man from Sind
could be expected to know all the intricacies of Hindu monistic
philosophy. It is, of course, tempting to imagine such an acquaint-
ance with Vedantic speculations on the part of Bayezid, and some of
the equations brought forth by Zaehner seem very plausible; yet it
seems more likely that the mystic of Bistam should have reached
his goal by means of the Islamic experience of fand, annihilation,
as he formulated it for the first time, rather than by an experience
26. Hellmut Ritter, “Die Ausspriiche des Bayezid Bistami,” in Westdstliche Abhand-
lungen, Festschrift fiir Rudolf Tschudi, ed, Fritz Meier (Wiesbaden, 1954). Reynold A.
Nicholson, “An Early Arabic Version of the Mi‘raj of Aba Yazid al-Bistami,” Islamica
2 (1925). On possible Indian influences see Robert C, Zachner, Hindu and Muslim
Mysticism (London, 1960), and the critical article by M. ‘Abdur Rabb, “The Problem
of Possible Indian Influence on Abia Yazid al-Bistami,” Journal of the Pakistan His-
torical Society, January 1972. ‘Abdur Rahman Badawi, Shatahdt as-siifiyya, 1: Aba
Yazid al-Bistami (Cairo, 1949).
48 / HISTORIGAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
that, in the Vedantic sense, would have led him to an extension of
the atman, “the innermost self,” until it realizes its unity with the
essence of everything as expressed in the words tat twam asi, ‘“‘that
is you.” Bayezid hoped for a complete extinction of the traces of
self, not for an extension of anything created (cf. MM 56). The
negative way is his; but he was also the first to describe the mystical
experience in terms of the image of the mi‘raj, the heavenly journey
of the Prophet. His sayings burn with hopeless longing and possess
a weird beauty, and they are often frightening in their powerful
imagery. His yearning is absolute, and so is his disappointment.
Bayezid’s nephew, to whom we owe the transmission of many
of his sayings, once asked him about his renunciation, and he
answered:
Renunciation (zwhd) has no value. I was three days in renunciation, on
the fourth day I had finished it. The first day I renounced this world,
the second day I renounced the Otherworld, the third day I renounced
everything save God; when the fourth day came, nothing was left to me
but God. I reached a desperate longing. Then I heard a voice addressing
me: “O Bayezid, you are not strong enough to endure with Me alone.” I
said: “That is exactly what I want.” Then the voice said: “You have
found, you have found!” (T 1:167)
God is so overwhelming that man becomes nothing even when
thinking of His name or pronouncing the word Allah with proper
awe: “Bayezid once uttered the call to prayer and fainted. When
he came to his senses he said: ‘It is amazing that a man does not die
when uttering the call to prayer.’ ’?” But then, how are we to under-
stand his description of his flight beyond space three times thirty
thousand years—until eventually he found nothing but Bayezid in
the divine throne and behind the veil that hides God? And again
there is his reply to someone who asked him: When does man reach
God? ““O you miserable one—does he reach Him at all?’’*8 One of
his mystical friends—the traditions about the name differ—sent him
a prayer rug on which to pray; but he answered: “I have put to-
gether the worship of the inhabitants of the heavens and the seven
earths and put it into a pillow and put that pillow under my
cheek” (T 1:144). And at other times, when somebody came to see
him, he replied: “I myself am in search of Bayezid.”
His sentences are paradoxes, wrapped in wonderful imagery: for
27. Ritter, “Bayezid,” in Westéstliche Abhandlungen, ed. Meier, Pp. 234-
28. Ibid., p. 240.
29. Ibid.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 49
twelve years he was the blacksmith of his self until he made of
himself a pure mirror (T 1:139); he saw “longing” as a palace in
which the sword “horror of separation” is placed and a narcissus
stem “union” given in the hand of hope—but even after seven
thousand years the narcissus is fresh and green, for no one has ever
attained it (T 1:166).
Bayezid might acknowledge at one moment that he eventually
found that God had remembered him before he remembered God,
knew him before he had known Him, and that God’s love of man
precedes man’s love of God (A 10:34); but at another moment the
same Bayezid sighs:
As soon as I attained to His Unity I became a bird with a body of One-
ness and wings of Everlastingness, and I continued flying in the air of
Quality for ten years, until I reached an atmosphere a million times as
large, and I flew on, until I found myself in the field of Eternity and I
saw there the Tree of Oneness. ... And I looked, and I knew that all this
was a cheat.
Then again, he exclaimed, with the pride of one who had found
his goal:
He got up once and put me before Himself and addressed me: “O Baye-
zid, my creatures desire to behold thee.” So I said: “Adorn me with Thy
Unity and dress me with Thy I-ness and raise me to Thy Oneness so that,
when Thy creatures see me, they may say: We have seen Thee, and it is
Thou and I am no longer there.” (L 382)
It must have been in such a state of rapture that Bayezid said:
“Subhani—Praise be to Me, how great is My Majesty!” This typical
shath has puzzled many later mystics and has often been repeated
by the poets of Iran and Turkey and Muslim India as proof of the
unitive state reached by the perfected mystic. Sarraj, to give one
example of moderate Sufi interpretation, understands Bayezid to
be talking “‘as if he were reciting the Koranic word: ‘I am God, there
is no God besides Me’ ” (Sitra 20:14) (L 390)—which is certainly a
mild explanation. Bayezid came to attain this state by an austere
via negationis and constant mortification, by emptying himself of
himself, until he had reached, at least for a moment, the world of
absolute unity where, as he said, lover, beloved, and love are one
(T 1:160), and where he himself is the wine, the wine-drinker, and
the cupbearer (T 1:159)—a formulation used by later Persian poets
in their hymns praising the purifying and transforming power of
divine love.
5O - HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
A strange figure of dark fire, Bayezid stands lonely in early Ira-
nian Sufism. His paradoxes constantly yield new meaning, yet they
continue to be elusive—unless the reader were to share the mystic’s
experience. Or would one, then, return and claim with Bayezid
that ‘everything was a cheat’’?
Whatever the experiences of the mystic from Bistam were, his
personality inspired many later writers. His name occurs, in poetry,
more frequently than that of any other mystic, with the exception
of “Mansir’” Hallaj, with whom he was sometimes associated, al-
though Hallaj believed that “poor Abi Yazid” had arrived only at
the threshold of the divine (P 250). The poets could easily contrast
his unflinching faith and deep religious engagement with the
“infidelity of Yazid” (playing on the similarity of their names); the
second Omayyad caliph Yazid was responsible for the tragedy of
Kerbela, in which the Prophet's grandson was killed, together with
his family, in 680, and his name has become anathema to every
pious Muslim. Thus Sana’i asks:
Who ever agreed with the Yazid “‘base soul,”
how could he know the state of Bayezid?
(S 632)
For the “‘soul that inspires evil” is similar to the cruel enemy of the
Prophet's family and thus stands in contrast to the great mystical
leader. ‘“‘Bayezid of his time’ has become an honorary epithet for
aman of outstanding mystical piety, and Sufi pretenders have been
warned “not to make themselves Bayezids’ (M 6:2548). In his
Mathnawi, Rimi tells the legend that Bayezid’s disciples rebelled
against him when he exclaimed: “Under my garment there is noth-
ing but God!” But when they tried to kill him, the strokes of their
knives wounded themselves (M 4:2102-40), for the perfect saint is
a pure mirror who reflects the attributes of others to them. In an-
other passage he relates the story of a Zoroastrian who refused to
accept Islam because he felt too weak to embrace a religion that had
produced spiritual heroes like Bayezid (T 1:149; M 5:3358)—a story
that has been taken over, in our day, by Muhammad Iqbal in his
Jawidname (1932), where it serves to assert the spiritual strength
of the Islamic religion and the true Muslims.
There are still sacred places dedicated to the memory of the
lonely mystic of Bistam in the remotest corners of the Islamic
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 51
world: in Zousfana in the Maghreb and in Chittagong in Bangla
Desh, where huge, whitish turtles inhabit a tank to which people
come to obtain blessings for themselves and for their children.
Sufi hagiography often mentions a letter sent to Bayezid by
Yahya ibn Mu‘adh, who wrote: “‘I am intoxicated from having
drunk so deeply of the cup of His love.—Abia Yazid wrote to him
in reply: ‘Someone else has drunk up the seas of Heaven and earth,
but his thirst is not yet slaked: his tongue is hanging out and he is
crying “Is there any more?”’’”’ (A 10:40). Bayezid’s metaphysical
thirst has never been quenched; he belongs to those who,
even if they would drink every day seven seas of union from this goblet,
they would say from thirst to thirst:
Standing in the water, athirst
and not being granted a drink....
(B 442)
His correspondent Yahya ibn Mu‘adh ar-Razi was a completely
different type, personifying another major trend in early Sufism.
Yahya came from Rayy (near present Tehran), lived for a while
in Balkh, and died, in 871, in Nishapur, “‘and he spoke constantly
about hope” (Q 16). According to Hujwiri, he was the author of
many books—which seem to be lost—and his sayings ‘‘are delicately
moulded and pleasant to the ear and subtle in substance and profit-
able in devotion” (H 122). Indeed, the scattered words and short
poems that have come down to us from the “preacher Yahya” are
pleasantly different in style from the utterances of the Khurasanian
and the Baghdadian Sufis. He was mainly a preacher who called
people to God, and, although a number of Sufis are related to have
preached in public, he is the only one to be distinguished by the
title al-wa@7z, ‘‘the preacher.” He also talked about divine love, and
to him is ascribed the famous saying: ‘‘Real love does not diminish
by the cruelty of the beloved, nor does it grow by His grace, but is
always the same’”’ (A 10:58)—an idea that has been worked out by
the Persian poets to its final consequences.
Yahya held that “one mustard seed of love is better than seventy
years of worship without love” (T 1:306). Religion is, for him, hope
in God, whose mercy is infinite and who listens to the prayer of the
human heart.
The preacher from Rayy once spoke about the difference between
52 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
the person who comes to attend a banquet for the sake of the ban-
quet and the one who attends in the hope of meeting his friend;
such is the difference between the ascetic who longs for Paradise
for the sake of joy and bliss and the lover who hopes for the beatific
vision of his eternal beloved (P 516). Yahya spoke the oft-repeated
word: ‘Death is beautiful, for it joins the friend with the Friend!”
(T 1:308). The most characteristic expression of Yahya’s piety is the
reflection, in a number of his prayers, of an almost “evangelical”
trust in the compassionate God. In dialectical form, they show the
contrast between the helpless sinner and the Almighty Lord who
can forgive His miserable creatures out of His inexhaustible trea-
sure of mercy:
O God, Thou hast sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh the rebel and said,
“Talk mildly with him’—O God, this is Thy kindness towards one who
claimed to be God; how, then, is Thy kindness towards one who is Thy
servant out of his innermost soul? ...O God, I fear Thee because I ama
slave, and I hope in Thee because Thou art the Lord! . .. O God, how
should I not hope in Thee, while Thou art merciful, and how should I
not fear Thee because Thou art powerful? O God, how can I call upon
Thee, being a rebellious slave, and how could I not call upon Thee who
art a merciful Lord? (T 1:309—10)
Yahya deeply trusted in God’s forgiveness, which can cover every
sin, for no matter how near perfect a man may be, sinning is part
of human nature: ‘““O God, though I can not refrain from sin,
Thou canst forgive sins” (T 1:310). And this God will lead him
eventually to the place that He chooses out of His loving-kindness:
“O God, I have done nothing for Paradise, and I have no strength
to endure Hell—everything is left to Thy mercy!” (T 1:310). The
preacher from Rayy stands amazed and overwhelmed before the
mystery of divine love—is it not the greatest miracle of grace that
God, the ever rich who needs nothing, should love men? How, then,
should man, who is so much in need of God, not love Him? He
sums up his whole feeling in one short prayer: ‘‘Forgive me, for I
belong to Thee” (T 1:310).
Among Yahya’s successors—though not exclusively his disciples—
there are two main ones in central and western Iran who are men-
tioned by later authors. His disciple in Nishapur was Aba ‘Uthman
al-Hiri (d. 910), who had been educated in part by Shah Kirmani
in the spiritual tradition of Khurasan. Al-Hiri is regarded as one
of the great leaders of his time, who established Sufism in Nishapur;
but he was criticized by some contemporaries for thinking too
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 53
much of the purification of the soul without turning his views
exclusively to God. He is regarded as one of the first to introduce
a strict system of education for his disciples, a trend that developed
finally into the perinde ac cadaver obedience that distinguishes
later Sufi education.*® The second master of Rayy is Yusuf ibn
Hlusayn ar-Razi (d. 916), who belongs to the line of the ascetic Abia
Turab and who seems to have met Dhi’n-Nan in his early years. He
is credited with sayings about ikhlas, ‘‘perfect sincerity,” as well as
with sentences about the constant recollection of God.
Rabi‘a ushered in a new and productive period in the develop-
ment of the mystical life in Iraq. Among the many Sufis who lived
and worked in the capital, Baghdad, as well as in other Iraqian
cities, mention must be made of Rabi‘a’s younger contemporary
Ma‘riif al-Karkhi (d. 815). Legends speak of his strong mystical
power; his prayers were heard, and after his death people from
Baghdad would cross the Tigris to the section of Karkh and pray
for rain at his tomb. He was among the first to speak about divine
love, and his teaching that one cannot learn love, for it is a divine
gift and not an acquisition (T 1:272), has had a great impact on
mystical thought. Qushayri attributes to Ma‘rif special strength in
rida, perfect contentment with God’s decrees (Q 9).
Ma‘rif’s disciple Sari as-Saqati, “the huckster’’ (d. circa 867),
gratefully acknowledged that his teacher’s blessings had enabled
him to achieve high spiritual rank. The biographers claim that
Sari was the first to discuss the various mystical states (ahwdal), a
central topic of mystical writers. His piety and scrupulosity are
reflected in the remark that he was afraid that his nose might turn
black because of his sins. In his meetings he used to discuss topics
of mystical love, which he was apparently the first to define as “real
mutual love between man and God’’—a scandal to the orthodox,
who accepted “love of God” only in the sense of obedience. Also
attributed to Sari are sayings about the problem of tauhid, ‘‘to de-
clare that God is one,” which was later elaborated by his disciple
and nephew Junayd. A delightful episode preserved in the Nafahat
al-uns reveals the great Sufi leader in a very human light: “During
his illness people used to visit him and would ask him for his bless-
ings and prayers, and he, eventually exhausted, taught them to
30. For the whole problem see Fritz Meier, “Hurasan und das Ende der klassischen
Sufik,” in La Persia nel medioevo (Rome, 1971).
54 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
pray: ‘O God, teach us how to behave when visiting the sick’ ”’
(N 54; A 10:122).
During those years when Sari was discussing the mystical stages,
his compatriot al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857) was writing his fun-
damental books on mystical psychology.*! Born in Basra in 781, he
was probably influenced by the teachings of Hasan al-Basri’s fol-
lowers. Muhasibi belonged to the Shafi‘i school of law, as did Ju-
nayd, Ridhbari, and many other Sufis; but he also acquired the
theological and philosophical vocabulary of the Mu‘tazila—which
brought criticism from the Hanbalites. Yet the study of Mu‘tazilite
theological methods gave him greater eloquence, and it is he who
gave Sufism a highly developed technical language.
Muhasibi—whose surname is derived from muhdsaba, the con-
stant analysis of even the most secret motions of the soul and the
heart—taught the relentless fight against man’s lower nature, not
just the outward struggle of the ascetic against the “flesh,” but a
subtle psychological analysis of every thought as well as uninter-
rupted spiritual training. Such training, of course, goes along with
utmost scrupulosity. Muhasibi claimed to have a nerve in his
finger that would warn him whenever food was not perfectly clean
legally (N 572). He has described very eloquently the state of the
seeker of the path to God:
God has appointed self-mortification for the seeker, for the training of
his soul. Men are ignorant of the high station of that one who is preoccu-
pied with his Lord, who is seen to be thinking little of this world, who is
humble, fearful, sorrowful, weeping, showing a meek spirit, keeping far
from the children of this world, suffering oppression and not seeking
revenge, despoiled, yet not desiring requital, He is dishevelled, dusty,
shabby, thinks little of what he wears, wounded, alone, a stranger—but
if the ignorant man were to look upon the heart of that seeker, and see
how God has fulfilled in him what He promised of His favor and what
He gives Him for exchange for that which he renounces of the vain
glory of the world and its pleasure, he would desire to be in that one’s
place, and would realise that it is he, the seeker after God, who is truly
rich, and fair to look upon, who tastes delight, who is joyous and happy,
Sy he has attained his desire and has secured that which he sought from
is Lord.
Muhasibi’s subtle analysis of riya, “hypocrisy,” and his whole meth-
_31. Margaret Smith, An Early Mystic of Baghdad (London, 1935). Joseph van Ess,
Die Gedankenwelt des Harit al-Muhasibi, anhand von Ubersetzungen aus seinen
Schriften dargestellt und erléiutert (Bonn, 1961), is an excellent analysis of Muhasibi’s
teachings. Some of Muhasibi’s works have been edited; these are listed under his name
in the Bibliography.
32. Smith, Readings, no. 12.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 55
odological approach became fundamental and indispensable to the
early Sufis; Ghazzali, the master of moderate medieval mysticism,
depends largely upon him.
Among the disciples of Sari as-Saqati, Aba Bakr al-Kharraz (d.
899) is known in the West through Arberry’s translation of his
Kitab as-sidq, “The Book of Truthfulness.” 9? His mystical hints,
ishadrat, seem to have influenced Junayd. Tradition credits him
with having been the first to discuss the theory of fand, ‘“‘annihila-
tion,” and baqd, “permanent life in God.” Recently discovered
documents reveal that he can be regarded as one of Junayd’s masters
and that he contributed to mystical psychology in his Kitab al-
faragh, which has been analyzed by Pére Nwyia (W 240 ff£.).
Nwyia has also brought to light Kharraz’s importance for the
definition of tawhkid, in which he anticipates some of Junayd’s and
even Hallaj’s ideas: “Only God has the right to say ‘I,’ for whoever
says ‘I’ will not reach the level of gnosis.”” That is why Satan was
punished, for he said, ‘J am better than Adam,” and that is why
the angels had to prostrate themselves before Adam, for they had
claimed, “We are higher than he.” The only true subject is, in fact,
God. Kharraz goes even further by showing that this divine “I” is
ontologically connected with the divine name al-Haqq, “the Real-
ity”—this seems to be the nucleus of Hallaj’s famous phrase andl-
Haqq (W 249). From these theories we can understand how ‘Abdul-
lah-i Ansari, the leading mystic and hagiographer of Herat in the
eleventh century, could make the remark: “Abi Sa‘id [sic] Kharraz
would have needed a trifle lameness, for nobody could walk along
with him” (N 74).
Kharraz was writing a treatise on saintship at almost the same
time that Sahl at-Tustari (d. 896) was discussing the problem of
saintship and Tirmidhi was working on his book Khatm al-auliy@,
“The Seal of Saints.” This coincidence indicates that during the last
two or three decades of the ninth century the necessity for a
systematization of mystical thought was being felt, and that the
problem of sanctity and saintship was one of the central ones at the
time.
Sahl’s name stands for a certain tendency that was rejected in
part by subsequent generations. It is, however, difficult to find
heterodox trends in the teachings of this apparently introverted
33. Abit Bakr al-Kharraz, Kitab as-sidq, The Book of Truthfulness, ed. and trans.
A. J. Arberry (Oxford, 1937).
56 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
ascetic, who was praised by Junayd as “the proof of the Sufis” (QR
59). He had spent a couple of years in the ascetic settlement at
Abbadan and was eventually exiled to Basra. His most frequently
cited theory is that of the obligatory character of repentance, which
should be a permanent state in the faithful. This austere outlook
fits the ascetic life in which Sahl tried to combine tawakkul and
work; for, as he thought, it would be an offense to the Prophetic tra-
dition to avoid or condemn work as a means of gaining one’s liveli-
hood, but an offense against the faith to neglect “trust in God.” *
Sahl tried to remain aloof from the theological discussions that
had shaken the Muslim community in the preceding decades; he
advocated the duty of obeying the political ruler. Instead, he retired
into the sweetness of his inner life and found there the peace that
the disturbed outward world could not give him. He wrote an ex-
tensive commentary on the Koran in which he discussed the four-
fold meaning of each verse. His theories of saintliness are highly
interesting: he spoke of a pillar of light formed from the souls of
those who are predestined to become saints—it was the time in both
Sufi and Shia circles that theories about the preexistent light of
Muhammad were being developed, and other mystics had put forth
the theory that the souls of the true lovers belong to a divine light.
According to Sahl, only the saints are predestined to attain the
mystery of lordliness, sirr ar-rubtibiya—here lies, probably, one
source of Hallaj’s similar theories, for Hallaj had lived with
Sahl for a while.
Sahl’s teaching was continued by his disciple Ibn Salim (d. gog);
hence their school was known as the Salimiyya. The author of the
first comprehensive manual of Sufism, Abi Talib al-Makki, be-
longed to this group.
Sahl’s younger contemporary at-Tirmidhi developed peculiar
ideas about sainthood. Tirmidhi is surnamed al-Hakim, “the phi-
losopher,” which points to the fact that through him Hellenistic
philosophical ideas were penetrating Sufism. Tirmidhi died early
in the tenth century in Mecca, where he lived after the study of
34-Cihad Tune, “Sahl ibn SAbdullah at-Tustari und die Salimiya” (Ph. D. diss.,
University of Bonn, 1970). Tunc is a Turkish theologian; his discussion of Sahl is not
fully satisfactory.
35. Osman Yahya, “L’oeuvre de Tirmidi, essai bibliographique,” Mélanges Louis
Massignon, 3 vols. (Damascus, 1956-57), 3:411{f.; Nicholas Heer, “Some Biographical
and Bibliographical Notes on al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi,” in The World of Islam: Studies
in Honour of Philip K. Hitti, ed. R. Bailey Winder and James C. Kritzeck (London,
1960).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 57
Shafiite law in Balkh and a prolonged stay in Iraq. He, too, wrote
a commentary on the Koran “in the light of the questions which
his own experience posed to him and which he interpreted in a
vocabulary enriched by the philosophical rapport and the experi-
ences of the earlier mystics” (W 156). He thus gave the words a
more profound meaning, and it is significant that the founder of
the Naqshbandi order in the fourteenth century attributed to him
a particular power when the disciple undergoes the process of di-
recting his concentration toward the spirit of one of the great mas-
ters (N 119).
Tirmidhi’s main contribution to the theory of Sufism is probably
his ‘Seal of the Saints,’’ in which he developed the terminology of
sainthood that has been used since that time. The leader of the
Sufi hierarchy is the qutb, ‘‘pole’’ or “‘pivot,” or ghawth, “help.”
The saints govern the universe, certain groups of three, seven, forty,
or three hundred saints being entrusted with various duties in
maintaining the world order (see Chapter 4). Like the prophets,
whose seal is Muhammad, the saints have their seal, the last and
culminating figure in the hierarchy.
The degrees of sainthood as sketched by Tirmidhi are related to
the degree of illumination and gnosis reached by the person in
question—it is not a “hierarchy of love.” With him, the emphasis
upon gnosis, ma‘rifa, becomes more explicit; he thus prepares the
way for later theosophic speculation.
But while Sahl and Tirmidhi wrote about saintship and gnosis,
‘Amr al-Makki (d. gog) was probably the first to compose a system-
atic treatise on the degrees of love, intimacy, and proximity.
The undisputed master of the Sufis of Baghdad was Abi’l-Qasim
al-Junayd, who is considered the pivot in the history of early Su-
fism.** The representatives of divergent mystical schools and modes
of thought could refer to him as their master, so that the initiation
chains of later Sufi orders almost invariably go back to him.
Like many other mystics, Junayd came from Iran; born in Niha-
wand, he settled in Baghdad and studied law according to the Shafi-
ite rite. In Sufism he was educated by his uncle Sari as-Saqati;
36. A. J. Arberry, “Junaid,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1935, p- 499:
A. H. Abdel Kader, The Life, Personality and Writings of al-Junayd, Gibb Memorial
Series, n.s. 22 (London, 1962). See the review of Abdel Kader's book by Joseph van
Ess, Oriens 20 (1967). A fine analysis is given in Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysti-
cism, pp. 135 ff.
58 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Muhasibi’s psychological insight seems to have impressed him, and
the influence of Kharraz on his formation is apparently greater than
has been proved at the moment. One of his fellow Sufis, al-Haddad,
is reported to have said: “If intellect (‘aqgl) were a man, it would
have the form of Junayd” (N 80). a saying that alludes to the seri-
ousness, sobriety, and penetrating mind of the master.
Junayd—faithful to the Muhasibi tradition—sees in Sufism a way
of constant purification and mental struggle: ““‘We did not take
Sufism from talk and words, but from hunger and renunciation of
the world and cutting off the things to which we were accustomed
and which we found agreeable” (Q 19). The mystical life meant,
for him, the permanent striving to return to one’s origin, that
origin that was in God and from which everything proceeds, so that
eventually the mystic should reach the state ‘‘in which he was be-
fore he was.” That is the state of the primordial covenant (Stra
7:171), when God was alone and what is created in time was not
yet existent. Only then can man realize perfect tawhid; only then
can he witness that God is one from eternity to eternity.
The tremendous majesty of God in His aloneness and unity
permeates every thought of Junayd; he feels that majesty whose
will must be accepted in every moment of life, and before whom the
servant becomes nothing through constant obedience, worship, and
permanent recollection of His name, until he reaches the ‘‘annihila-
tion in the object mentioned,” when the recollecting human is no
longer separated from the object of his recollection, God. Unifica-
tion means, for Junayd, “the separation of the Eternal from that
which has been originated in time by the Covenant” (H 281); and
it also means ‘‘to go out of the narrowness of temporal signs into
the wide fields of eternities’’ (L 29). Like other mystical leaders,
Junayd spoke about the different stations and stages on the Path;
he praised poverty, fagr, which is ‘‘an ocean of affliction, yet its
affliction is completely glory” (L 174). Mystical love means, to him,
“that the qualities of the Beloved replace the qualities of the lover”
(L 59); it is a transformation of the lover on the level of attributes.
A major aspect of Junayd’s teaching is his emphasis on the state
of sobriety (sakw) as contrasted to intoxication (sukr). Bayezid
Bistami preferred mystical intoxication because it obliterates the
human attributes and annihilates man completely in the object of
adoration, taking him out of himself. Junayd and his followers,
however, considered the “second sobriety” the highest and prefera-
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 59
ble state: after the ecstatic intoxication man becomes once more
aware of himself in the “life in God,” when all his attributes, trans-
formed and spiritualized, are restored to him. Fand, “annihilation,”
is not the ultimate goal, but baq4, “remaining,” a new life in God.
Junayd’s claim, like that of Bayezid, is absolute; he concentrated
every thought, every love, every inclination, every admiration,
every fear, and every hope on God and asked Him to annihilate
everything that might exist outside this perfect concentration (A
10:282).
Junayd knew very well that mystical experience and thought
cannot be rationalized and that it is dangerous to speak openly
about the deepest mysteries of faith in the presence of the uniniti-
ated (particularly since orthodox circles viewed the activities of
the Sufis with growing suspicion). It was for this reason that he had
rejected Hiallaj, who was to become the model for all who are pun-
ished because they speak openly about the mysteries of love and
unity. Junayd, therefore, refined the art of speaking in isharat, sub-
tle allusion to the truth—a trend, attributed first to Kharraz, that
became characteristic of later Sufi writings. His letters and short
treatises are written in a cryptic style; their language is so dense
that they are difficult to understand for one not acquainted with
his peculiar way of thinking and teaching. This language of ex-
quisite beauty rather veils than unveils the true meaning.
One of Junayd’s friends in Baghdad was Ruwaym (d. 915); in
fact, the Baghdad Sufis were divided in their preferences between
these two masters. Ansari admitted 150 years later that he “would
prefer one hair of Ruwaym to a hundred of Junayd” (N 95).
Ruwaym is remembered by later hagiographers mainly because
he did not practice the same extraordinary austerities as many of
his contemporaries and did not overemphasize tawakkul, absolute
trust in God. “He disguised himself in the attitude of a rich
man” (N 95). Ibn Khafif, the Shirazi Sufi leader, relates how Ru-
waym’s little daughter, prettily dressed in red, ran into her father’s
arms, and he caressed her and explained to his surprised visitor that
he liked to care for his family and would not leave everything to
tawakkul (X 85). For him, tawakkul meant trust in God’s eternal
promise to look after His creatures (L 52), but it did not mean to
turn completely away from worldly concerns.
Two more figures of the Baghdad circle should be mentioned,
both of them famous for their love. They are Abivl-Husayn an-
60 fi HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Nari (d. 907) and Sumnin, whose sobriquet was al-Muhibb, ‘‘the
lover”’ (d. after goo).
Nuri had been a disciple of Sari as-Saqati and was, thus, a con-
frére of Junayd; after having spent some years in Raqqa in north-
ern Iraq, he had returned to the capital. He is the greatest repre-
sentative of that pure love that had been introduced by Rabi‘a, a
disinterested love for which God has not asked and for which He
will not recompense the lover. That his love—a love that rejoices
in suffering—was not only theoretical was proved when Ghulam
Khalil brought charges against the Sufis of Baghdad in 885. Ac-
cused of heresy, and likely to be sentenced to capital punishment,
Nii offered his life to save his companions; the caliph, touched
by such magnanimity, investigated the case, found the Sufis to be
good Muslims, and set them free. Brotherly love was, for Nuri, the
perfect expression of truthfulness as well as of genuine spiritual
poverty, which meant preferring others to himself.
Nii was considered a heretic (zindiq) by the orthodox because
he spoke of being a lover (“ashiq) of God, a strong term that was
misinterpreted by the theologians (see B 389). His love was over-
whelming, and in his enthusiasm he tended to “tear the veils’ (L
59) and therefore expose himself to blame and danger. He was,
however, not only the representative of a love that overflows all
borders and tempts man to seemingly blameworthy acts; he also
composed a number of theoretical works that have only recently
come to light. Like Shaqiq, he speaks of the light of God, which is
the first thing to appear when God wants to guide a person on the
mystical path (W 348). His Maqdmat al-quliib “The Stations of
the Hearts,” contains a fine analysis of the psychological stages and
their “seats” in the human heart. Nwyia (W 326) has drawn the
attention of scholars to Niri’s colorful imagery, which until recent-
ly was known only from his short musical poems and some frag-
ments of prose. But to truly appraise his power of expression, one
should read Nari’s elaborate comparison of the heart to a house in
which a king, Certitude, resides, assisted by two viziers, Fear and
Hope, and surrounded by ten chiefs, which are the main duties of
a pious Muslim. Another description of the cleaning of this house
reminds us immediately, in its consequences, of Jalaluddin Rimi’s
famous verses about the lover who is admitted to the abode of the
beloved only after he has become annihilated, for “there isno room
for two I’s in this narrow house” (M 1:3056-63)—an echo of a basic
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 61
mystical experience through the centuries. Niri’s description of
the seven citadels, surrounded by seven ramparts and a wall, as God
has built them in the heart, is somewhat reminiscent of St. Theresa’s
Interior Castle, though the Baghdad Sufi does not reach the psycho-
logical depth of the great Carmelite nun.
Nari’s definition of the heart as a garden prefigures later Per-
sian garden poems: the garden of the heart is either blessed or de-
stroyed by rain—rain being, in the East, a symbol of divine activity
and, generally, of divine mercy. Nuri speaks of the two-fold rain,
one of grace and mercy and one of divine wrath and revenge; the
first one is revealed by thunders of majesty in the hearts of those
who repent, by the lightning of desire in the hearts of the ascetics,
by the showers of generosity in the hearts of the lovers, and by the
breeze of appeasement in the hearts of the gnostics. But the thun-
derstorm of revenge sends the thunder of rupture into the hearts
of the idolaters, the lightning of hatred into the hearts of the hypo-
crites, the rains of enmity into the hearts of the oppressors, and the
wind of the veiling screen into the hearts of those who transgress
the law. Nari was, as can be understood from these few details,
indeed a forerunner of the later poets, who never tired of express-
ing their mystical experiences in the imagery of gardens, flowers,
rains, and fruits—those poets who would symbolize the word coming
to them from the beloved by the life-bestowing morning breeze, or
the advent of the Prophet by a merciful rain that quickens the
parched hearts of mankind.
Nari seems not to have been a conforming member of the Bagh-
dad Sufi circles. There are stories that recount Junayd’s criticizing
him for exuberant words and startling miracles. Indeed, his way
of educating his lower soul was quite peculiar: he was afraid of lions
and therefore stayed in the lion-infested forests along the Tigris
to conquer his fear.3?7 Does he not remind us of the age-old mytho-
logical tales in which the hero goes into the forest, the symbol of
his unconscious, in order to overcome the animals, which represent
his lower instincts? Niri’s death, too, occurred in a strange way:
enraptured by the recitation of a verse, he ran into a nearby reedbed
where the reeds had just been cut; the razor-sharp edges of the
stumps hurt his feet without his being aware of the pain; soon
afterward he died from the wounds.
37-Ibn al-Jauzi, Talbis iblis (Cairo, 1921-22), p. 381, dwells intensely upon this
frequently told story.
62 ye HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Among the friends who had been tried and imprisoned with
Nari was Sumniin the Lover, who called himself ‘‘the Liar’: “He,
without fear, and completely love, he without reason and complete-
ly heart, that moth of the candle of Beauty, that man confused by
the dawn of union’’—that is how ‘Attar introduced him in lovely
rhyming sentences (T 2:82). He told touching stories about the
Lover: the lamps in the mosque shattered when Sumniin began
preaching about disinterested and selfless love, and birds killed
themselves while listening to his heart-rending sermons. Before
‘Attar, Hujwiri had said that Sumntn “‘held a special madhhab in
love and considered love the root and the foundation of the way
towards God” (H 398). Later, Jami related that men and women
gave up their spirits during his preaching.
Sumnin considered love superior to gnosis (P 39)—a problem
much discussed at that time among the Sufis. The solution finally
depends upon the personal attitude of each traveler on the mystical
path. Sumniin knew, like Dhi’n-Niin and all those who had ex-
perienced divine love, that it is always connected with affliction.
When he was asked why, he replied: “In order that not every ordi-
nary person may claim love, for he will run away when he sees afflic-
tion” (T 2:85). Love is the true religion of the spiritual elite, and
its subtlety and depth cannot be conveyed by words. The meta-
phors that Sumniin the Lover used to express the ineffable experi-
ence of this love, of which he was only a fragile vessel, are not taken
from the vocabulary of worldly love. Rather, they are perfectly
chaste, lucid, almost immaterial:
I have separated my heart from this world—
My heart and Thou are not separate.
And when slumber closes my eyes,
I find Thee between the eye and the lid.
(A 10:310)
There is a direct line from the verses of Sumnin to the sublime
poems being written at the same time by the most famous mystic
of Baghdad and of the whole early period of Sufism, al-Hallaj.
AL-HALLAJ, MARTYR OF MYSTICAL LOVE
When Hallaj was in prison, he was asked: ‘“‘What is love?” He an-
swered: “‘You will see it today and tomorrow and the day after tomor-
row.” And that day they cut off his hands and feet, and the next day they
The Martyrdom of al-Hallaj, from a manuscript of Amir Khosrau’s
Diwan, seventeenth-century India.
The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore
64 i HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
put him on the gallows, and the third day they gave his ashes to the
wind....
This story, told by ‘Attar (T 2:142), conveys in a nutshell the
secret of Hallaj’s life, love, and death. With the intuition of a great
psychologist, ‘Attar has condensed into these words the tragedy of
a man who deeply influenced the development of Islamic mysticism
and whose name became, in the course of time, a symbol for both
suffering love and unitive experience, but also for a lover’s greatest
sin: to divulge the secret of his love.
European scholars have been attracted by Hallaj’s fate since his
name was first discovered in Arabic sources. After the British
scholar Edward Pocock (d. 1691), it was the German, protestant
theologian F. A. D. Tholuck who drew attention to him whom he
calls “the Sufi most famous (inclytissimus) by fame and fate’ ** who
“removed the veil of pantheism publicly with incredible audacity.”
The quotation that Tholuck then gives is both wrongly spelled
and wrongly interpreted so that Hallaj’s image was seriously dis-
torted in subsequent times.
Tholuck regarded Hallaj as a pantheist; that became the opinion
of the nineteenth-century scholars, and it was, and to some degree
still is, accepted by a number of theologians. Some have accused
Hallaj of blasphemy, while others considered him a secret Chris-
tian. This latter view was taken up in the late nineteenth century
by August Miiller and lingers on in the minds of some scholars.
Other orientalists, in the light of the sources at hand, tended to
regard him as a neuropath or as a pure monist. Alfred von Kremer
tried to locate the source of Hallaj’s famous word an@l-Haqq, “I
am the Absolute Truth,” in Indian sources, and Max Horten drew
the comparison between this mystical statement and the aham
brahmasmi of the Upanishads, in which a number of oriental schol-
ars have also concurred. Max Schreiner and Duncan Black Mac-
donald regarded Fiallaj as a full-fledged pantheist; contrary to them,
Reynold A. Nicholson stressed the strict monotheism and the very
personal relation between man and God in Hallaj’s thought. Fi-
nally, Adam Mez dwelt upon possible connections between the great
Sufi and Christian theology.
Now, thanks to the lifelong work of Louis Massignon, the en-
vironment and influences on Hallaj have been explored so that his
38. Friedrich August Deofidus Tholuck, Ssufismus sive theosophia persarum
pantheistica (Berlin, 1821), p. 68.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 65
life and teachings have become better known and better understood
in the West.** Massignon has edited the difficult rhyming prose of
the Kitab at-tawdsin and has collected Hallaj’s scattered poems,
which, in marvelous density, give utterance to the transcendence
of God and His immanence in the human heart. The mystery of
loving union is celebrated in verses free of any trace of the symbol-
ism of profane love. Massignon devoted his whole life to the explo-
ration of the spiritual world of Hallaj, adding more and more
details, which he set forth in a monumental biography of the martyr-
mystic that first appeared in 1922—just one thousand years after
Hallaj’s execution. In fact, Hallaj is, as Hans Heinrich Schaeder
says in his review of Massignon’s book, the martyr of Islam par ex-
cellence because he exemplified the deepest possibilities of personal
piety to be found in Islam; he demonstrated the consequences of
perfect love and the meaning of submission to the unity of the divine
beloved—not with the aim of gaining any sort of private sanctity but
in order to preach this mystery, to live in it and to die for it.
Who was this man who has been the object of both hatred and
love, the model of suffering, the arch-heretic of orthodox writings,
the ideal of enraptured Sufis?
Ibn an-Nadim, relying upon certain inimical sources, said of him
in the tenth century:
Al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj was a crafty man and a conjurer who
ventured into the Sufi school of thought, affecting their ways of speech.
He laid claim to every science, but nevertheless [his claims] were futile.
He even knew something about the science of alchemy. He was ignorant,
bold, obsequious, but courageous in the presence of sultans, attempting
great things and ardently desiring a change of government. Among his
adherents he claimed divinity, speaking of divine union .. . 40
This—together with the paragraphs that follow in Ibn an-Nadim’s
book—articulates the conventional reading of Hallaj’s personality.
Sober historical facts, however, though sometimes not too clear,
reveal something close to the following picture of his life:
39. Louis Massignon, La passion d’Al-Hosayn ibn Mansour Al-Hallaj, martyr
mystique de V’Islam exécuté 4 Bagdad le 26 Mars 922, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922); see Hans
Heinrich Schaeder’s review, Der Islam 15 (1926). Massignon, “Le diwan d’al-Hallaj,
essai de reconstitution,” Journal asiatique, 1931; new edition as separate book (Paris,
1955)- Massignon and Paul Kraus, Akhbar al-Hallaj, texte ancien relatif a la prédica-
tion et au supplice du mystique musulman al-Hosayn b. Mansour al-Hallaj, 3d ed.
(Paris, 1957). See the Bibliography for other works by Massignon, Roger Arnaldez,
Hallaj ou la religion de la croix (Paris, 1964).
40. The Fihrist of al-Nadim, ed. and trans. Bayard Dodge, 2 vols. (New York, 1970),
1:474.
66 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Husayn ibn Mansir al-Hallaj, born in the province of Fars in
858, grew up in Wasit and Tustar, where cotton was cultivated and
where cotton carders (that is the meaning of halldj) like his father
could pursue their occupation. The young man attached himself to
Sahl at-Tustari and accompanied him to Basra. Later he became a
disciple of ‘Amr al-Makki in Baghdad and also of Junayd. He be-
came estranged from ‘Amr when he married another mystic’s daugh-
ter. She remained his only wife, and much information about Hal-
]aj’s later life is given on the authority of their son Hamd. After a
short while, Hallaj’s father-in-law began to regard him as a “‘cun-
ning sorcerer and miserable infidel.” In connection with his first
pilgrimage, Husayn stayed in Mecca for a year, undergoing terrible
hardships in asceticism. After his return to Baghdad, Junayd fore-
told—according to the legends—an evil end for his former disciple.
At this point the tradition contains the following anecdote:
When he knocked at Junayd’s door, the master asked: ‘“Who is there?”
and he answered: “an@l-Haqq, I am the Absolute [or Creative] Truth
[or the True Reality].”
This sentence has become the most famous of all Sufi claims. In
fact, it appears in a chapter of Hallaj’s Kitab at-tawasin and was
probably taken from this source very early. In this chapter Hallaj
discusses his own claim together with that of Pharaoh and Satan,
Pharaoh having asserted, according to the Koran, ‘I am your highest
Lord” (Sitra 79:24) and Satan, “I am better than Adam” (Stra
7:12). Hallaj, then, asserts his own claim, “I am the Absolute
Truth.” This passage led later mystics into deep speculations about
the two different “I’s,” that of Pharaoh and that of the loving mys-
tic; the solution is given in the divine revelation that “Pharaoh saw
only himself and lost Me, and Husayn saw only Me and lost himself”
(N 444), so that the “I” of the Egyptian ruler was an expression of
infidelity but that of Hallaj expressed divine grace (M 2:2522).
Whatever the reason for the statement and@l-Haqq may have been,
Junayd uttered his verdict against his former disciple, accusing him
of propagating an unsound religious claim. The antagonism of the
other mystics of the Baghdad school, especially of ‘Amr al-Makki
and his group, mounted. Hallaj left the capital. For five years he
traveled, ultimately reaching Khurasan, where he discussed reli-
gious problems with the people; it was there, his son thinks, that he
was surnamed hallaj al-asrar, “the cotton carder of the innermost
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 67
hearts,” since he knew all things hidden in the human heart and
soul.
During a second pilgrimage to Mecca, 400 disciples accompanied
him, and eventually, in 905, Hallaj took a boat to India. His ene-
mies ascribed this journey to his desire to learn magic, specifically,
the rope trick. But he told his family that his aim was to call the
heathen to God. From Gujerat he wandered through Sind, the
lower Indus valley, which had been a part of the Muslim Empire
since 711. The seeds he sowed there grew in later centuries in the
mystical poetry of this province. From Sind, Hallaj traveled to the
northern borders of India, then to Khurasan, to Turkestan, and
eventually to Turfan—Massignon has suggested that he may have
gone with the caravans that brought brocade from his home town of
‘Tustar to the East and returned with Chinese paper to the Islamic
countries. Some sources say that his words were written down on
precious paper decorated in the style of the Manichaean manu-
scripts from Central Asia. In the eyes of the Baghdad government
these externals drew suspicion upon him. An even greater cause for
suspicion was his supposed relations with the Carmathians, who
ruled not only Bahrain but also northern Sind and Multan—places
that the mystic had just visited. Did he not, after all, receive letters
from distant Eastern lands in which he was addressed by strange
names?
The Akhbar al-Hallaj, a collection of anecdotes about Hallaj,
gives a vivid impression of his life in Baghdad before and especially
after his return from this last long journey. He is described preach-
ing and calling people to God, in intense love and excessive asceti-
cism. But in spite of his constant preoccupation with prayer and
ascetic practices, Hallaj was sure that he had not completely fulfilled
his duties toward God. In his ascetic mood he would prefer to feed
the black dog at his side, the image of his lower nature, instead of
taking food himself. At the same time he claimed miraculous pow-
ers; in Mecca he produced sweetmeat from Yemen, and he sent
down heavenly food in the middle of the desert.
One can understand how his behavior encouraged opposition on
the part of both political and religious circles. Because of that Hal-
laj performed the pilgrimage once more, this time staying for two
years in the holy city of Mecca. Then he bought a house in Baghdad,
but soon Muhammad ibn Da’iid, the son of the founder of the Za-
68 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
hirite school of law, denounced him, inciting other scholars to join
in attacking the man who claimed to have reached real union with
his divine beloved, an idea that the representatives of platonic love
could not accept.
Aside from the subtle problems of mystical love, political and so-
cial problems were at stake. Hallaj was a friend of the chamberlain
Nasr al-Qushiri, who favored better administration and juster taxa-
tion, dangerous ideas in a time when the caliph was almost power-
less and the viziers, though all-powerful for a short period, changed
frequently. The Shia groups who supported the vizier Ibn al-Furat
considered Hallaj as dangerous as did the Sunni orthodox wing sur-
rounding the ‘‘pious vizier” ‘Ali ibn ‘Isa. All of them were afraid
that the effect on the people of spiritual revival might have reper-
cussions on the social organization and even on the political struc-
ture. The idea of converting the hearts of all Muslims and teaching
them the secret of personal sanctification and not just of blind ac-
ceptance would certainly have been dangerous for a society whose
religious and political leaders lived in a state of stagnation with
neither the strength nor the intention to revitalize the Muslim
community.
At the end of 912 Hallaj was apprehended while traveling near
Sus; for three days he was set in a pillory, then imprisoned. Both the
caliph’s mother and the chamberlain Nasr—who called him “a
righteous man’’—tried to make his imprisonment as comfortable as
possible; but his situation grew worse during the financial crisis of
919, when the vizier Hamid tried by every means to have him exe-
cuted. Searching the houses of his disciples, the police found frag-
ments of correspondence in cryptic letters, partly decorated with
picturesque forms, probably calligraphic signs representing the
name of ‘Ali and some of the divine names. But years passed before
the vizier could force the highest judge of Iraq to sign Hallaj’s death
sentence. On 26 March g22 he was put to death.
The story goes that Hallaj went dancing in his fetters to the place
of execution, reciting a quatrain about mystical intoxication; then
he asked his friend Shibli to lend him his prayer mat and performed
a prayer during which he once more touched the mystery of the in-
effable unity and separation of man and God. When people began
to throw stones at him, Shibli—so the legend has it—threw a rose,
and Hallaj sighed. Asked the reason for his sigh, he answered:
“They do not know what they do, but he should have known it.”
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 69
And the saying that “the rose, thrown by the friend, hurts more than
any stone” has become a Turkish proverb.
Hallaj’s last words were: “hasb al-wajid ifrad al-wahid lahu—it is
enough for the lover [‘who has found in ecstasy’] that he should
make the One single’’—i.e., that his existence should be cleared away
from the path of love (H 311). That is genuine tawhid, fully interi-
orized, and paid for with the lover’s blood.
Hallaj’s hands and feet were cut off, and he was put on the cross
or, more probably, on the gallows, then decapitated; his body was
burned and the ashes thrown in the Tigris. This was the death for
which his whole life had been a preparation. He had often urged the
people of Baghdad to kill him so that he might be united with God
and they might be recompensed for defending their simple and
sincere faith. One of his most touching hymns begins with the
words:
Ugqtulini ya thigati—inna fi qatli hayati.
Kill me, o my trustworthy friends, for in my being killed
is my life—
words that have been repeated by mystics throughout the ages as a
basis for their meditations.
Hallaj’s comprehensive work—of which the Fihrist gives a list—is
preserved only in fragments. Mention has already been made of his
Kitab at-tawasin, probably written during his imprisonment.** It
contains eight chapters, each of them called tasin, after the myste-
rious letters at the beginning of Stra 27, which are said to indicate
divine majesty and power. This little book deals with problems of
divine unity and with prophetology. It contains a discussion be-
tween God and Satan, in which the latter refuses to obey the divine
order to prostrate himself before Adam and, true muwahhid (con-
fessor of divine unity) that he is, is caught in the dilemma between
God’s eternal will that nobody should worship any being save Him
and His explicit order to fall down before a created being. This
situation has sometimes served to explain Hallaj’s own hopeless di-
lemma. Hallaj’s satanology inspired a number of later mystics to
develop these ideas (see Chapter 4).
Portions of the Kitab at-tawdsin are beautiful hymns in honor of
the Prophet. Among the traditions that he personally affirmed, Hal-
41. Husayn ibn Mansir al-Hallaj, Kitab at-tawasin, texte arabe . . . avec la version
persane d’al-Baqli, ed. and trans. Louis Massignon (Paris, 1913).
79 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
1aj included the saying that “God has not created anything he loves
more than he loves Muhammad and his family” (B 639). If there is
any doubt as to whether Hallaj was a faithful Muslim, one need
only read his description of Muhammad in the “Tasin as-siraj” of
the Kitab at-tawdsin. These short, rhyming sentences achieve new
heights in the veneration of the Prophet:
All the lights of the Prophets proceeded from his light; he was before all,
his name the first in the book of Fate; he was known before all things, all
being, and will endure after the end of all. By his guidance have all eyes
attained to sight... . All knowledge is merely a drop, all wisdom merely
a handful from his stream, all time merely am hour from his life... .
In another chapter, Hallaj describes the fate of the moth that ap-
proaches the flame and eventually gets burned in it, thus realizing
the Reality of Realities. He does not want the light or the heat but
casts himself into the flame, never to return and never to give any
information about the Reality, for he has reached perfection. Who-
ever has read Persian poetry knows that the poets choose this story
of the moth and the candle as one of their favorite allegories to ex-
press the fate of the true lover (SD 311; an almost word-for-word
Persian poetical paraphrase is found in ‘Attar’s Mantiq at-tayr,
when the poet speaks of the seventh and last valley of the mystical
journey [MT 258]). Through the medium of Persian poetry the
same symbol reached Europe. Goethe’s famous poem “‘Selige Sehn-
sucht,” in his West-Ostlicher Divan, reflects this very mystery of
dying in love and reaching a new, higher life in union. The Goe-
thean Stirb und werde, “die and become,” translates very well the
Prophetic tradition “die before ye die” (in order to gain new life),
which formed one of the cornerstones of Sufism and, of course, of
Hallaj’s theories.”
Hallaj’s poetry is a very tender and intense expression of mystical
yearning. Its language is chaste; the favorite symbols are the wine
cup, the crescent, the goblet of intoxicating mystical joy, the virgin,
the soul bird, and similar images. He sometimes uses cabalistic word
plays and relies on the secret meaning of the letters of the alphabet;
alchemistic expressions are also found at times. All of his verses are
weighted with deep theological and mystical meaning and filled
with enigmas, but so great is their beauty that they can be enjoyed
even by those who do not care for deep religious interpretation but
42. Al-Hallaj, “Tasin al-fahm,” Kitab at-tawasin, pp. 16ff. Hans Heinrich Schaeder
has studied the symbolism of the moth and the candle in his essay “Die persische
Vorlage von Goethes Seliger Sehnsucht,” in Festschrift E. Spranger (Berlin, 1942).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM i§ 7
do enjoy Arabic poetry at its best—an extremely refined art with
many overtones that evoke strange and fascinating echoes in the
reader (see P go4). One can understand from his poems what Hal-
1aj meant when he declared that God is visible in every trace of His
creation, and although the common folk, the blind and dumb,
animal-like creatures, do not recognize Him, the mystic drinks not a
single drop of water without discovering His vision in the cup. God
is He ‘‘who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the
tears flow from the eyelids.’’ Some of Hallaj’s great hymns reveal
abysses of loneliness, like his threnody for all things on earth that
are left blind and hopeless because the witness has gone and left
them alone.
A small part of Hallaj’s theology can be reconstructed from the
scattered fragments of his commentary on the Koran preserved in
the Tafstr of Sulami (d. 1021), one of the leading authorities on the
mystical theology of his time. The Riwdayat—collected by Rizbihan
Baqli in the late twelfth century—allow some insight into the work-
ing of Hallaj’s mind. They consist of traditions that are not very dif-
ferent from, and are often verbally congruent with, the generally
accepted hadith; yet they are introduced not by a chain of human
transmitters, as is the rule in hadith transmission, but by a chain
going back to cosmic and supernatural powers, to stars and sun, to
angels and spirits. That is the way Hallaj authenticated these tradi-
tions for himself. This personal acceptance and realization of the
religious truth was, perhaps, one of his most original contributions
to Muslim spiritual life; it even led him to the doctrine of the isqat
al-far@id, i.e., that certain religious duties can be exchanged for
other acts that are more useful at the moment. Instead of performing
the pilgrimage, he advised people to invite orphans and to feed and
dress them and make them happy for the day of the Great Feast.
Such ideas, of course, were not acceptable to the legalists.
Some of Hallaj’s letters have been preserved, as have a few of his
prayers and a small number of isolated sayings, which often have a
dialectical form that seems to be typical of the mystical mind: “Do
not let yourself be deceived by God, nor cut off your hope from
Him; do not wish His love, and do not resign from loving Him.” By
such paradoxes the ineffable mystery of the love relation between
man and God is disclosed. And this love relation is, in fact, the
central theme of Hallaj’s prayers and sermons. Love, for Hallaj, was
certainly not sheer obedience: “Love is that you remain standing in
72 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
front of your beloved, when you are deprived of your qualities and
when the qualification comes from His qualification.” This love is
realized through suffering—man can be united with the divine will
by accepting suffering and even longing for it: “Suffering is He
Himself, whereas happiness comes from Him.” That is one of the
decisive sayings of Hallaj. But this suffering is not a means of de-
humanizing man and bringing him back into his first state, “as he
was before he was,” as was held by the followers of Junayd. Hallaj
did not advocate destruction for the sake of destruction; he saw in
suffering a positive value by means of which man might understand
that ‘ishq, “love,” is the essence of the essence of God and the mys-
tery of creation. The word “ishq, with its connotation of “passionate,
overflowing love,” came to mean, for him, dynamic divine love; but
this term was considered dangerous, if not illicit, even by moderate
Sufis. In Hallaj’s theory, the compensation for having offered God
unconditional love was the beatific vision, without an interven-
ing “I.”
The sentence ana@’l-Haqq, “Iam the Absolute Truth,” or, as it was
translated later, “I am God,” led many mystics to believe that Hal-
1aj was a pantheist, conscious of the unity of being. Hallaj’s theory,
however, maintains the absolute transcendence of God beyond the
dimensions of created things, his qidam, the preeternity that sepa-
rates Him forever from the hadath, “what is created in time.”” How-
ever, in rare moments of ecstasy the uncreated spirit may be united
with the created human spirit, and the mystic then becomes the liv-
ing personal witness of God and may declare ana’l-Haqq. We must
remember that, according to Hallaj, God’s nature contains human
nature within it. This human nature was reflected in the creation of
Adam, and Adam became huwa huwa, “exactly He.” This theory
has led many critics to the assumption that the Christian dogma of
the incarnation influenced Hallaj, an assumption seemingly sup-
ported by his use of the Christian terms lahat, ‘‘divine nature,” and
nasitit, “human nature.’”’ But his theories are too complicated to be
reducible to this or that influence. Indeed, they so intimately reflect
the uniqueness of Hallaj’s thought that it is useless to trace each one
back to its source.
Hallaj was willing to suffer for himself and for others. The mys-
tery of his death is aptly described in Emile Dermenghem’s words
about the true Muslim saint:
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 73
The saint is he who takes upon him the sins and the pain of the world;
the unjust death is, for him, one of his means of accomplishments. He is
the “great Help” and the consolation of the people. He is a living accu-
sation for the world: his existence insults the tyrants, his death makes
tremble his executioners, his canonisation is a victory of faith, of love,
and of hope.**
This is the spirit in which Husayn ibn Mansir al-Hallaj went to the
gallows. Since he was put to death by the government—or the estab-
lishment—his influence became even stronger after his execution
than it had been during his lifetime.** About the year 1000 the Syri-
an poet Ma‘arri wrote that in his day people still stood on the
banks of the Tigris awaiting Hallaj’s return.
Persian poetical tradition has praised Hallaj; the founders of the
mystical fraternities as well as the theoreticians of Sufism frequently
referred to him—sometimes in terms of pity, sometimes in admira-
tion, and sometimes rejecting him or declaring him to be merely a
beginner on the mystical Path. The fact that he proclaimed the se-
cret of love openly made him appear to more sober mystics as one
who had not reached his goal: for them he resembled the kettle that
sings as long as the water is not yet boiling; when the water boils and
evaporates, the kettle becomes silent. Other mystics have accused
him of believing that the human and divine natures can be united,
resulting in the heretical doctrine of hulil, “incarnation.” Even
Hujwiri, in a book written in the mid-eleventh century—unfortu-
nately no longer extant—in spite of all his admiration for Hallaj, felt
obliged to declare him “not firmly settled.”
A great number of Sufi poets, however, have shown their predilec-
4g. Emile Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans U'Islam maghrebin (Paris, 1954),
- 94.
q oe Louis Massignon, “La survie d’al-Hallaj,” Bulletin d’études arabes Damas 11
(1945-46); Massignon, “La legende de Hallacé Mansur en pays turcs,” Revue des
études islamiques, 1941-46; Massignon, “L’oeuvre Hallagienne d’Attar,” Revue des
études islamiques, 1941-46; Massignon, “Qissat Husayn al-Hallaj,” Donum Natalicum
H. S. Nyberg, ed. E. Gren et al. (Uppsala, 1954). Annemarie Schimmel, ed. and trans.,
Al-Halladsch, Mirtyrer der Gottesliebe (Cologne, 1969), an anthology compiled from
Hallj’s writings and from poetry and prose by Muslim authors from different coun-
tries; Schimmel, “The Martyr-Mystic Hallaj in Sindhi Folk-Poetry,” Numen 9
(1962): 3; Abdulghafur Rawan Farhadi, “Le majlis de al-Hallaj, de Shams-i Tabrezi et
du Molla de Roum,” Revue des études islamiques, 1954, a Persian passion play,
ta‘ziya; Salih Zeki Aktay, Hallac-i Mansur (Istanbul, 1942), a Turkish tragedy; M.
Salih Bhatti, Mansur Hallaj (Hyderabad, Sind, 1952); Salah CAbdu?s-Sabir, Ma?sat al-
Hallaj (Beirut, 1964), trans. K. J. Semaan as Murder in Baghdad (Leiden, 1972). Almost
every collection of modern Arabic poetry contains some poems in honor of al-Hallaj,
for example, the works of Adonis and al-Bayati.
74 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
tion for Hallaj, and the Persian tradition largely follows the exam-
ple set by Ibn Khafif of Shiraz, who had visited him in prison and
defended him, even to the extent of calling him an ‘Salim rabbani,
“a divinely inspired master.” Some of Hallaj’s disciples sought
shelter in Iran during the critical years of Hallaj’s persecution, and
there they secretly transmitted his ideas. We owe the preservation
of the most important Hallajian texts to Rizbihan Baqli, the mystic
of Shiraz who stands in the Ibn Khafif tradition; Raizbihan’s com-
mentaries on the Kitab at-tawasin and on many other sayings of the
master are the most valuable source for our understanding of large
parts of Hallaj’s theology. Another leading representative of the
Hallajian tradition in Iran—though from a different point of view—
is Fariduddin ‘Attar, the poet (d. 1220 in Nishapur). He had ac-
cepted Hallaj as his spiritual guide in a vision, and Hallaj’s name
recurs often in ‘Attar’s lyrical and epic poetry. ‘Attar’s description
of Hallaj’s suffering, found in his hagiographical work Tadhkirat
al-auliy@, has deeply influenced almost all later mystics who wrote
about the martyr-mystic in the Persian-speaking lands—Turkey,
Iran, Central Asia, and India. The details of his account of Hallaj’s
execution are repeated in nearly every subsequent book; they have
been poetically elaborated in many languages—Persian, Turkish,
Urdu, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Pashto—but in substance they remained
unchanged.
The work of the greatest of the mystical poets to write in Persian,
Jalaluddin Rimi, contains numerous allusions to the fate of Man-
str, “the victorious,” as Hallaj is often called after his father; some
of his utterances and verses have been embellished by Rimi in an
entirely ingenious way. Turkish Sufi tradition also shows a strong
penchant for Mansir. In the Bektashi order, his name is connected
with the central place of initiation, which is called dar-e Mansir,
“the gallows of Mansiir”’; Bektashi poets from the fourteenth cen-
tury onward have often imitated the ‘‘unitive cry,’ an@l-Haqq, and
have heard echoes of these words everywhere. And one ought not
fail to mention Nesimi, the Hurtifi poet (executed in 1417) who
considered himself “a new Mansur” and reenacted in his own life
the passion and death of Hallaj.
Most recently Turkish literature has borne witness to the abiding
inspiration of Hallaj with the appearance of a play called Mansiir-e
Hallaj; its author tries to establish his hero as an heir to Zoro-
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 75
astrian ideas. The date of the play is especially significant: it was
written in 1940, at a time when Islamic religious instruction was
banned from Turkish schools and laicism had reached its apex.
In Iran, the name of the martyr-mystic has become a common-
place in the verses of almost all poets; they allude to the gallows and
the sad fate of the lover, sometimes even likening the tresses of their
beloved to the rope of Mansir’s gallows. They see the red rose on its
bough as a symbol of Fiallaj on the gallows tree, and they find the
word an@l-Haqq manifest in the heart of every atom and every drop
of water. Even among the ta‘ziyas, the plays written in commemora-
tion of Husayn ibn ‘Ali’s martyrdom at Kerbela on the tenth of
Muharram 680, Enrico Cerulli has discovered one piece that deals
with the fate of Hallaj, who is here in strange juxtaposition with
Maulana Rumi and his mystical preceptor and beloved Shams-i
Tabriz (the combination of Hallaj and Shams is also known from
Indo-Muslim folk poetry). The tragic figure of Mansir occurs in
modern Persian drama, too.
The poets in Iran and Afghanistan were outdone in their de-
votion to the Hallajian tradition by the Indian poets writing in
Persian who made use of the figure of Hallaj from the eleventh cen-
tury on. The images and forms they used are almost identical with
those found in classical Persian poetry. An even stronger predilec-
tion for Mansur is to be found in the mystical folk songs composed
in the vernaculars of Muslim India and adjacent areas. The Pathans
knew the name of the martyr of love (who is even mentioned in their
proverbs), as did the Panjabis. His name occurs in most of the mysti-
cal Panjabi songs as the representative of love, contrasted with the
dry asceticism of the theologians and the bookishness of the mol-
lahs. Hallaj is mentioned just as frequently in Sindhi poetry: one
can scarcely find any book of mystical verses in Sindhi or its north-
ern dialect, Siraiki, that does not contain allusions to him or his
fate. He is the great lover; he plays “the drum of unity” (a modern
Turkish poet, Asaf Halet Celebi, has also written a fine poem on
the “drum of Mansi’); his goblet is filled with the primordial wine
of unity; and he is one of those who must suffer because of their
overflowing passion and because God loves them too much. He is
the model for every loving soul who will gladly suffer and die for the
sake of his love; but he is also in constant danger because it is not
permitted to proclaim the word of love openly—
76 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
The secret that is hidden in the breast is not a sermon;
you cannot utter it in the pulpit, but on the gallows,
That is—since the days of Sana*i—one of the central ideas in Persian
and Indo-Muslim poetry, which has found its finest expression in
the verse just quoted by Ghalib (d. 1869). Or is the poet, perhaps,
declaring that death is the only legitimate way to express the secret
of loving union? And does he aver that the ultimate experience is
communicable through the silent language of martyrdom, for in the
martyr (shahid) God has His true witness (shahid)?
There is nothing more touching than to hear the plaintive Sindhi
folk songs in a remote corner of the Indus valley through which the
great mystic had wandered in order to call the people to God a
thousand years ago:
When you want to know the way of love,
ask those who are like Mansir.
In our day, there is renewed interest throughout the Islamic
world in the figure of Hallaj, thanks, in large part, to Massignon’s
comprehensive work. Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), who in his youth
described the great mystic as a pantheist—as he had seen him
through hundreds of Persian, Urdu, and Panjabi poems—later
recognized Hallaj’s strong personal religious commitment and saw
in him one of the few who had attained to an experience of the
divine higher than that of ordinary people. He recognized that
Hallaj had called the slumbering Muslims to a personal realization
of the truth, thus coming into conflict with the religious authorities
who were afraid of any ardent witness for the living God. In the
scene in Jupiter-Heaven in the Jawidndme that depicts his spiritual
journey through the spheres, Iqbal has even treated Hiallaj as a sort
of medieval forerunner of himself and has emphasized his dynamic
concept of love and faith as an ideal for every free Muslim.
Even in the Arab lands, in which Hallaj was less renowned than
in those areas influenced by the Persian mystical tradition, he has
gained fame recently: the philosopher ‘Abdu’r-Rahman Badawi has
likened Mansir’s experience to that of Kierkegaard, seeing in him
a true existentialist. Poets like Adonis in Lebanon and ‘Abdw'l
Wabhab al-Bayati in Iraq have written sensitively of the secret of
his personality; and a young socialist writer from Egypt, Salah
“Abdu’s-Sabir, has composed a Tragedy of Hallaj. Its form shows
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / wae
influences of Eliot’s dramatic technique. The interesting aspect of
the work is the intensity with which the author highlights the social
side of Hallaj’s message.
Hallaj’s name has found its way into the remotest corners of the
Islamic world. It can be discovered in the folklore of East Bengal
and the Malayan archipelago; it has been used by some Sufi fraterni-
ties in their celebrations, and a Tunisian order has an entire litany
in honor of the martyr-mystic. Mansiir’s suffering through “gallows
and rope” has become a symbol for the modern progressive writers
in India and Pakistan who underwent imprisonment and torture
for their ideals like ‘the victorious” of old.
In Salah SAbdu’s-Sabir’s tragedy the members of the chorus sing
about the words of Hallaj:
—And we will go, to scatter in the plough furrows of the
peasants what we have stored up from his words ....
—And we will preserve them among the merchants’
goods.
—And we will give them to the wind that wanders o’er
the waves.
—And we will hide them in the mouths of singing camel-
drivers who traverse the desert.
—And we will note them down on papers, to be kept in
the folds of the frock.
—And we will make them into verses and poems.
All of them:
Tell me—what would become of his words,
if he were not martyred?
THE PERIOD OF CONSOLIDATION: FROM SHIBLI TO GHAZZALI
Hallaj represents the culminating point of early Sufism;
but the mystical impetus of the early Baghdad school continued in
a number of Sufis who lived shortly after him and represented,
again, different aspects of Sufism. Hallaj’s most faithful friend, Ibn
“Ata’—with whom he had exchanged some beautiful poetical let-
ters—was killed in connection with Hallaj’s execution and, thus,
paid for his friendship with his life. Another friend, Abi Bakr ash-
Shibli, survived Hallaj by twenty-three years.
Shibli had been a high governmental official before his conver-
78 rf HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
sion to the mystical life. When he died in 945 at the age of eighty-
six, he left behind a considerable number of sayings and paradoxes
upon which following generations often pondered. His strange be-
havior resulted from time to time in his confinement in an asylum;
thus he was spared, according to his own statement, the fate of Hal-
laj, for he tried to express some of Elallaj’s lofty ideas in more com-
prehensible language. In one poem he compares himself to a frog:
Now praised be God, that like a frog am I
Whose sustenance the watery deeps supply.
It opens its mouth, and straightway it is filled.
It holds its peace, and must in sorrow die.
Shibli’s contemporaries and later Sufis are divided in their feel-
ings about him—Junayd called him “the crown of these people”
(N 180), whereas others, acknowledging his strong mystical “state,”
yet held that he was not a proper interpreter of tawhid (N 145). The
sayings and short, delicately expressed verses attributed to him*®
show his overwhelming feeling of God’s unity and of the love that
removes from the heart all but the beloved or consumes all but the
will of the beloved (Q 190). “To love Him for His acts of grace
means to be a polytheist’”’ (A 10:36g9), for, in the tradition of Rabi‘a,
God has to be the only goal for the lover who not only loves Him
with his heart but all of whose limbs “are hearts pointing to Thee”
(L 91). Similarly, “the best recollection is to forget recollection in
vision” (L 220). God, the ever living and everlasting, should be the
only object of love: “Shibli saw somebody weeping because his be-
loved had died and blamed him: ‘O fool, why do you love someone
who can die?’ ” (T 2:172). God’s face, i.e., His essence, is the proof
for the lover on the day “when proofs are required” (L 209).
Like Nuri, Shibli sometimes used the kind of imagery that be-
came commonplace in later Persian poetry. Thus he describes the
“gnostics,”” those who know God by intuitive knowledge and are,
therefore, the nearest perfect of men:
‘They are comparable to springtime: thunder clashes and the clouds
pour rain, the lightning flashes and the wind blows, the buds open and
the birds sing—such is the state of the gnostic: his eye weeps, his mouth
smiles, his heart burns, he gives away his head, he mentions the name of
the Beloved and walks around His door, (T 2:177)
Such a description could have come from any of the later Persian
45. Aba Bakr Shibli, Diwan, ed. Kamil M. ash-Shaybi (Cairo, 1967).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM ih 79
mystics, who so often compared their condition to clouds and light-
ning; they knew that the weeping of the cloud is indispensable for
the growth of a flower out of a heart that should be like soil.
When mentioning Muhammad’s name in the call to prayer,
Shibli is reported to have said: “If Thou hadst not ordered it, I
would not mention another name besides Thee’ (Q 17). He there-
fore regarded as infidel and polytheist anyone who might think of
the angels Michael and Gabriel—for, according to the Prophetic
tradition, in the moment of closest proximity there is no room even
for Gabriel, who is pure spirit; lover and beloved are alone, without
separation (B 413).
Ruzbihan Baqli preserved many of Shibli’s paradoxes, which
foreshadow trends that became explicit in later mysticism. When he
told his disciples to go away and to know that wherever they were
they were under his protection and he would be with them, he
points to the power of himma, that “high spiritual ambition,” or
“power,” that is strong enough to keep safe those who believe in the
master. Being united in perfect tawhid with God, he can protect his
disciples wherever they may wander about (B 322), since he himself
works and walks through God. The claim of the sheikh to possess
this strong himma is reflected in many legends about saints of later
times.
Another story told about Shibli is typical of the so-called munda-
qara, “quarrel,” of saints: He threw one of his fellow mystics into
the Tigris, saying, “If he is sincere, he will be saved, like Moses;
if not, he will be drowned, like Pharaoh.” A few days later he was
challenged by that very person to take live charcoals from an oven
without being hurt (B 494). It seems that this kind of contest was
not uncommon among the early Sufis; later sheikhs used to settle
questions of priority in a similar way.
Baqli explains Shibli’s exclamation that “fire of Hell will not
touch me, and I can easily extinguish it,’ when he says, faithfully
interpreting the genuine mystical experience, that ‘in the world
those who have been drawn close to God are burnt by the fire
of pre-eternal loye so that it is for them that God ordered the fire
to be ‘cool and pleasant’ [Siira 21:69], as He did for Abraham”
(B 460). In another saying, Shibli claimed that hellfire could not
burn even a single hair on his body. Baqli sees here a manifestation
of what he calls iltibas, the envelopment of the human being in the
light of preeternity: the divine uncreated light is incomparably
80 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
stronger than the created fire of Hell. For, according to a hadith of
which the Sufis were particularly fond, Hell addresses the true
believer with the words: “Thy light has extinguished my flames’
(B 452). The mystic who has been surrounded by the primordial
and everlasting divine light is no longer subject to the change of
mystical states, to death, Paradise, and Hell. Such a person may
leave the early station of renunciation and abstinence and become
a perfect lover; by love he becomes “like a lion in the forest of
affliction” (B 154).
Shibli’s daring paradoxes find a counterpart in the less often
quoted but extremely interesting sayings of his contemporary Abii
Bakr al-Wasiti, who came from Farghana, settled for a while in
Baghdad, and then returned to Khurasan. He too belonged to the
group of Junayd and Nari, but his sayings bear the stamp of a very
independent personality. “He would have needed a trifle of mercy”
(N 74), says Ansari, who praises him as the “leader of tawhid’” and
“the master of the East in the science of subtle allusions” (N 175).
Complete isolation and absolute concentration upon Him who is
recollected are expressed in his sentences. According to him, the
utterance of the formula Allahu Akbar, “God is greater” (than
everything), during the act of ritual prayer is “‘as if one said “Thou
art too mighty to be joined by prayer, or to be separated from by
omitting to pray’: for separation and union are not personal no-
tions, they follow a course preordained in eternity” (K 144).
The overwhelming greatness of God, who teaches man how to
pray and who addresses him before man dares to address Him, is
visible through every word written by Niffari.*° This Iraqian mystic,
who died in 965, left writings, called Mawdgif and Mukhdatabat,
that seem to have been studied carefully by later Sufis. Even Ibn
‘Arabi may have been inspired by the daring ideas of this mystical
thinker. Niffari spoke of the state of waqfa, “standing,” during
which he was addressed by God, who inspired him to write down
His words either during or after this experience. Niffari’s whole
work, thus, is presented as a replica of Muhammad's experience,
a dialogue in which man becomes the confidant of God (W 358),
46. Muhammad ibn SAbdi?l-Jabbar an-Niffari, The “Mawaqif” and “Mukhatabat”
of Muhammad ibn SAbdi?l-Jabbar al-Niffari with Other Fragments, ed. A. J. Arberry,
Gibb Memorial Series, n.s. 9 (London, 1935). Of special importance are the texts re-
cently discovered and edited by Pére Nwyia: Paul Nwyia, Trois oeuvres inédites de
mystiques musulmans; Saqiq al-Balhi, Ibn SAta, Niffart (Beirut, 1973).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 81
as it is described by Pére Nwyia (whose study on Niffari opens
previously undiscovered perspectives in the experiences of the mys-
tic). Such a dialogue between God and the mystic is not alien to
later Sufis, who not infrequently claimed that God spoke to them,
and a comparison between Niffari’s experiences as set forth in his
books with those of the eighteenth-century Indo-Muslim mystic
Mir Dard (contained in his “Im ul-kitab) would yield significant
similarities.
Niffari’s sayings are full of paradoxes. They show the perfect
passing away of the mystic, who has passed beyond all the veils
between the human and the divine; at the same time they make
clear the impossiblity of expressing mystical experience at all. The
center of Niffari’s experience is that of prayer; over and over he is
taught by God to recollect Him, and then again the impossibility
of this task is put before him: ‘‘Thoughts are contained in letters,
and fancies in thoughts; the sincere recollection of Me is beyond
letter and thoughts, and My name is beyond recollection.’ *” God
wants His servant to rest in His recollection, but: “Do not speak,
for he that reaches unto Me does not speak.’ ** How, then, is recol-
lection to be performed? And what meaning does it have? ‘““My
recollection is the electest thing I have manifested, and My recollec-
tion is a veil.” 4° For this recollection is contained in letters, and
Niffari “unmasked the idolatry of the letter’ (W 370) at a time
when Muslim orthodoxy was going more and more by the letter
and becoming increasingly intellectualized. It was he who spoke
of the hijab al-ma‘rifa, “the veil of gnosis” (W 380), which, tender
and subtle as it may be, can constitute the greatest barrier between
man and God.
Niffari clearly formulated the theory—probably known to mys-
tics before him—that prayer is a divine gift: “To Me belongs the
giving: if I had not answered thy prayer I should not have made
thee seeking it.’®® It is an idea well known in Christian tradition,
where it found its most famous expression in the words of Pascal:
“You would not seek Me if you had not found Me.” Much earlier,
it became a cornerstone of the Muslim theology of prayer and was
most poetically expressed by Jalaluddin Rimi (see Chapter 3).
47. Maw., no. 55/20.
48. Mukh., no. 22/5.
49. Maw., no. 49/2-
50. Mukh., no. 42/10.
82 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
Niffari also expressed the feeling of the persistent love with which
God follows man in a divine address that can be compared, as his
modern commentator has in fact done, to Francis Thompson’s
Hound of Heaven.**
In certain aspects the late tenth century was the period of organiza-
tion and consolidation for Sufism. It was the time during which, on
the political level, the influence of different Shia groups grew in
every part of the Muslim Empire. Since 945—the year of Shibli’s
death—Baghdad had been under the control of the Iranian Buwai-
hids, a Shia dynasty; Northern Syria was ruled by the Hamdanite
dynasty, which was also Shia—Aleppo for a short time rivaling
Baghdad asa gathering place for poets, philosophers, and musicians.
Central Arabia had been conquered, in 930, by the Carmathians,
an extreme Shia group whose capital was located in Bahrain and
whose branches extended to the Indus valley; there, at Multan,
Hallaj had been in touch with them, according to the tradition.
In North Africa, the Shiite Fatimid dynasty was gaining in power;
in 969 they conquered Egypt, there to establish a splendid rule
that was to last for two centuries.
It is a well-known fact that many of the Sufis—and many of the
pious Sunnites in general—felt a kind of sentimental allegiance
to the family of the Prophet without believing in Shia doctrines.
The veneration of ‘Ali was widespread among the Muslims, and
he was often regarded as an important link in the spiritual chain
leading the Sufi masters back to the Prophet. Widespread, too, was
the veneration of the sayyids, Muhammad's descendants through
‘Ali and Fatima. Even in our day some of the sayyid families in
countries like Muslim India or Pakistan consider themselves exalted
above the common Muslim, surrounded by a sanctity or transmit-
ting a baraka (spiritual power, blessing) that gives them a peculiar
status. This veneration shown to the ahl al-bayt, the Prophet's
family, constitutes in later times a very important aspect of popular
Sufism.
The relationship between Shia thought as it crystallized in the
ninth and tenth centuries and the theories of Sufism that emerged
at about the same time has not yet been completely elucidated;”
51. Maw., no. 11/16.
52. Kamil M. ash-Shaybi, ds-sila bayn at-tasawwuf wa?t-tashayyuS (Cairo, ca. 1967).
See Seyyed H. Nasr, “Shi‘ism and Sufism,” in Sufi Essais (London, 1972).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 83
but some of the Sufi teachings about the primordial light of Mu-
hammad and the theories of saintship seem to correspond very
closely in their hierarchical structure to Shiite theories about the
imamate and the gradual initiation of adepts into the deeper realms
of faith, into new levels of spiritual interpretation. The role played
by Ja‘far as-Sadiq’s commentary on the Koran in the formation of
some Sufi ideas has already been mentioned. In later times, the con-
nections between these two forms of Muslim spirituality became
visible once more in the development of the Sufi fraternity located
in Ardebil in Northwestern Iran—from a regular Sufi order it
turned into the cell of Shia propaganda in Iran. The activities of
this group resulted eventually in the victory of Shah Ismail the
Safawid in 1501, and at that time Shiism became the official creed
of Iran. It seems symptomatic that both in Arabic and in early
European sources the Safawid ruler is often called ‘Sufi’ or the
“Grand Sophi.” Yet from that time onward Sufism and the Shia
creed were rarely combined, and only a few Shia orders exist to-
day. In spite of the relatively close relationship between the two
movements in the period of formation, the Sufi congregations
usually supported the Sunni case and often became defenders of
the official Sunnite creed under the later Abbasid caliphs (MM 86).
During the Abbasid period the need was felt to formulate some
of the main lines, a Leitbild, of moderate Sufism. The case of
Hallaj had confronted the Sufis with the danger of persecution,
and even without his tragic death one might well have felt that the
Path had to be made accessible to people who could never reach the
abysses of mystical experience Hallaj had reached, or who could
not be compared in sobriety to Junayd, in burning love to Nuri,
or in paradoxical speech to Shibli. It was left to men like Ibn Khafif
of Shiraz (d. 982, at about 100 years of age)** and similar mystics
to teach the Path, to make it understandable—at least in part—to
the intellectuals, and to set an example to larger groups of the
faithful.
It would, however, be wrong to speak of a real “reconciliation”
between Sufism and orthodoxy. For the Sufis were, on the whole,
53. Ali ibn Ahmad ad-Dailami, Sirat-i Ibn al-Hafif ash-Shirazi, ed. Annemarie
Schimmel (Ankara, 1955). See Annemarie Schimmel, “Zur Biographie des Abu SAbdal-
lah ibn Chafif a3-Sirazi,” Die Welt des Orients, 1955; and Schimmel, “Ibn Khafif, an
Early Representative of Sufism,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 1959.
N Goo mentions that the famous poet Sa‘di (d. 1292) lived close to Ibn Khafif’s tomb
(which is now in a rather dark quarter of Shiraz, close to the charcoal sellers).
84 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
as good Muslims as the rest of the community in Baghdad, Nisha-
pur, or Egypt. They did not reject the religious law but rather
added to it—additions that made more exacting demands on their
personal lives. The genuine mystical practices, like the performance
of the dhikr, the constant recollection of God, occupied only part
of their time. Many Sufis followed normal professions to earn their
livelihoods. The surnames of some of them point to these profes-
sions: saqati, ‘“huckster”; hallaj, ‘cotton carder’; nassaj, ‘weaver’;
warraq, “bookseller” or “‘copyist”’; qawdariri, “glassmaker’’; haddad,
“blacksmith”; bann@, ‘“‘mason’’ were among them. Some would
work regularly and use a trifle of their gain for themselves, dis-
tributing the main part to the Sufis, so that it could be said, for
example, that a person “veiled his saintliness under the modest
shape of a cupper” (N 572). Some left their original professions
after they had gained fame as mystical leaders and attracted a few
disciples. Others were trained as theologians, traditionalists, or
jurists in one of the four schools of law. Still, it was considered
important to prove to the world the perfect orthodoxy of Sufi
tenets, and therefore a number of books were composed almost
simultaneously in the last quarter of the tenth century.
The oldest authority is Abii Nasr as-Sarraj, from Tus in eastern
Iran (d. 988), whose Kitab al-lumas fit-tasawwuf is an excellent ex-
position of the doctrines of the Sufis, with numerous quotations
from the sources. The matters at stake are lucidly laid before the
reader. Sarraj, who was for a while a disciple of Ibn Khafif, is close
enough to the great masters of the Path to understand and interpret
their sayings and their way of life. His definitions of the different
states and stations, his long quotations from Sufi prayers and letters,
his words about the behavior of the Sufis at home and on their jour-
neys, and his explanations of difficult expressions are of great value
to the student of Sufism, though his book apparently has not been
as widely read as other handbooks. Sarraj himself had reached a
high rank in practical Sufism; according to one story, he was dis-
cussing some mystical problems with his friends on a cold winter
day, ‘‘and the sheikh got into a ‘state’ and put his face on the fire-
place and prostrated himself before God in the midst of the fire
without being hurt’ (N 283).
54. Kitab al-luma‘ fi?t-tasawwuf, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, Gibb Memorial Series,
no, 22 (Leiden and London, 1914); A. J. Arberry, ed., Pages from the “Kitab al-
luma®” (London, 1947).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 85
A near contemporary of Sarraj, al-Kalabadhi, who died in Bu-
khara about ggo, wrote his Kitab at-ta‘arruf in an effort to find a
middle ground between orthodoxy and Sufism.** His book is, on the
whole, the somewhat dry exposition of a Hanafi jurist and not as
enjoyable as Sarraj’s study. Yet the work contains valuable material
for the study of early Sufism; it was widely read, along with a
commentary, in medieval Muslim India. A commentary of 222
Prophetic traditions is also ascribed to Kalabadhi. The study of Mu-
hammad’s sayings was regarded as essential by the Sufis, who tried
to follow their beloved Prophet's example as closely as possible.
The third book written during this period was Aba Talib al-
Makki’s comprehensive Qit al-qulib, “The Food of the Hearts.”
Though Makki (d. 996 in Baghdad) was considered a follower of
the Salimiyya school, his book had a pronounced influence on later
Sufi writings. Ghazzali relied heavily upon this work, and quota-
tions in later sources—in Rumi's Mathnawi and in medieval Indian
books—show how widely it was used.
Shortly after the composition of these three theoretical books on
the tenets and doctrines of Sufism, two attempts were made to deal
with the Sufis in the same way as Arab historians had dealt with
scholars, heroes, philologists, and other groups: by dividing them
into “classes” belonging to succeeding periods. Sulami (d. 1021)
called his work simply Tabaq4t as-siifiyya, ‘“The Classes of the Su-
fis.” Aba Nu‘aym al-Isfahani (d. 1037) chose for his ten-volume
work the more romantic title Hilyat al-auliya@, “The Ornament of
the Saints.” *” Beginning with the Prophet and his companions, Abi
Nu‘aym brought together every available bit of information about
the pious and their deeds; his book is a storehouse of information,
which, however, must be used with caution. Yet even in its present
edition, which is not free from mistakes, the book is indispensable
for the study of the biographies of early Sufis.
Sulami’s Tabaqat has constituted a source for later hagiogra-
phers.®® Half a century after his death, the book was expanded and
55- Aba Bakr Muhammad al-Kalabadhi, At-taSarruf li-madhhab ahl at-tasawwuf,
ed. A. J. Arberry (Cairo, 1934), trans. A. J. Arberry as The Doctrine of the Sufis (Cam-
bridge, 1935).
56. Aba Talib al-Makki, Qat al-qulib fi muSamalat al-mahbab, 2 vols. (Cairo,
1310 h./ 1892-98).
57. Aba Nu‘aym al-Isfahani, Hilyat al-auliya@, 10 vols. (Cairo, 1932-38).
58. ‘Abdur-Rahmin as-Sulami, Kitab tabaqat as-Sifiyya, ed. Johannes Pedersen
(Leiden, 1960), has an extensive introduction; Sulami’s Kitdb has also been edited by
Nuraddin Shariba (Cairo, 1953). For other editions see the Bibliography under
86 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF GLASSIGAL SUFISM
translated into Persian by ‘Abdullah-i Ansari, the patron saint of
Herat; his translation, in turn, was revised and brought up to date
in the late fifteenth century by Jami, also in Herat, in his Nafahat
al-uns.
Sulami dealt not only with the biographies of the mystics, but
also with the different strands of Sufism as they had developed by
his time. He thus concerned himself with the group of the Mala-
matiyya, to whom he devoted a special treatise.5® He distinguishes
between the orthodox people, the ahlal-ma‘rifa, “‘gnostics,” i.e.,
the true Sufis, and the malamatiyya, ‘‘those who draw blame (ma-
lama) upon themselves.”
The ideal of the Malamatiyya developed out of a stress on ikhlas,
“perfect sincerity”; Ansari sometimes praises a person for his “‘per-
fect malama and sincerity” (N 340). Muhasibi had taught that even
the slightest tendency to show one’s piety or one’s religious behavior
was ostentation. Thus the Malamatis deliberately tried to draw the
contempt of the world upon themselves by committing unseemly,
even unlawful, actions, but they preserved perfect purity of heart
and loved God without second thought. Typical is the story told by
Jami: “One of them was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a
town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he
publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left
him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank” (N 264).
These pious relied upon the Koranic words, ‘“‘and they do not fear
the blame of a blaming person’ (Sara 5:59), and probably also
thought of the nafs lawwama, “the blaming soul,” the conscience
that warned them at every step in the religious life (Siira 75:2). But
the attitude itself is not novel—Marijan Molé (MM 172~74) has
shown that, particularly among the early Syrian Christians, there
was a similar trend to hide one’s virtuous actions; stories about some
of these Christian saints, who would rather live as actors or rope-
dancers than show their deep religious concern, at once call to mind
anecdotes about the Malamatiyya.
Sulami. Siileyman Ates, Siilemi ve tasavoufi tefsiri (Istanbul, 1969), is a Turkish study
of the famous commentary on the Koran by Sulami, a work that still awaits a critical
ST ee Hartmann, “As-Sulami's ‘Risalat al-Malamatiya,’” Der Islam 8 (1918), is
a fine analysis of Sulami's treatise. For the whole problem see Abdiilbaki Gélpinarh,
Meldmilik ve Meldmiler (Istanbul, 1931); Abw?1-SAla? Affifi, Al-malamdtiyya wa?s-
siifiyya wa ahl al-futuwwa (Cairo, 1945); Morris S. Seale, “The Ethics of Malamatiya
Sufism and the Sermon of the Mount,” Moslem World 58 (1968): 1; and the discussion
in Nwyia, Ibn ‘41a Allah, p. 244.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 87
Al-malama tark as-salama, ‘‘blame is to give up well-being,” says
Hamdan al-Qassar, one of the first among the Khurasanian Sufis to
adopt this way of life (H 67). Sulami sees them as veiled from the
vulgar by God’s jealousy: He has granted them all kinds of spiritual
graces, but does not expose them to the view of the common people;
their outward behavior is that of people who live in separation from
God, but inwardly they dwell in the sweetness of divine union.
They thus prefigure the lover in Persian poetry, who was to describe
himself in terms of a detestable creature, calling the hatred of the
“others” upon himself, but never revealing the secret of his intense
love.
Hujwiri, half a century after Sulami, is more critical of the ma-
lamati attitude, for even in the actions of those who want to attract
blame upon themselves he sees a trace of subtle hypocrisy: “The
ostentatious men purposely act in such a way as to win popularity,
while the malamati purposely acts in such a way that people reject
him. Both have their thought fixed on mankind and do not pass
beyond that sphere” (H 6). That may sound hard, but from the
viewpoint of a perfect mystic every interest in people’s reaction—be
it positive or negative—is a sign of selfishness, and therefore of
imperfection.
Jami regarded the malamati as sincere, mukhlis, whereas the true
Sufi is mukhlas, made sincere by God (N 10), not by an act that can
be attributed to himself. But Jami, writing in the mid-fifteenth
century, saw the problem that was involved in the whole malamati
attitude more clearly than his predecesssors had. The problem had
arisen when people affiliated themselves with the Malamatiyya or
claimed to be one of them without accepting the difficult burden of
genuine malamati practices: ‘‘Now a group has brought forth licen-
tiousness and treating lightly of the Divine law and heresy and lack
of etiquette and respectlessness—but maldémat was not, that some-
body would act by showing no respect to the law: it was, that they
did not care for the people in their service of God.’’ Thus complains
Ansari as early as the eleventh century, not long after Sulami, in a
discussion of the life of Hamdin al-Qassar (N 61). Jami accepted
Ansari’s assessment and went on to contrast the malamati, who ad-
heres to the duties and performs many supererogatory acts of piety
in secret, and the qalandar, the wandering dervish who performs
only the absolute minimum in religious duties. The galandar, in
his description, is the less rigorous mystic, who enjoys his unfettered
88 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
life. The galandar is chiefly known in the West as a kind of free
thinker—even a charlatan—without deeper religious concern; but
this, Jami asserts, is not true of the genuine galandar (N 15).
Sulami influenced successive generations mainly as teacher and
biographer. Through his disciple, Nasrabadi, the mystical chain
reaches Abii Sa‘id ibn Abi’l-Khair, to whom the first Persian mysti-
cal quatrains are, erroneously, ascribed and who was the first to
draw upa simple monastic rule for his Sufi community (see Chapter
5). The spiritual chain from Sulami also leads to al-Qushayri (d.
1074) through his father-in-law Abii ‘Ali ad-Daqqaq. Qushayri took
up once more the task of writing a treatise on Sufism.® His Risala
describes Sufi teachings and practices from the viewpoint of a full-
fledged Ash‘arite theologian; this school—to which Ibn Khafif had
belonged as well—flourished in Iran and elsewhere under the Sel-
jukids. Qushayri’s Risdla—written in 1046—is probably the most
widely read summary of early Sufism; it was analyzed in the West
prior to most other books on Sufism. It is comparable, in some ways,
to Sarraj’s Kitab al-luma‘, beginning with short biographies of the
Sufis and containing detailed chapters on Sufi terminology and ex-
pressions. Some of the author's shorter treatises give a good insight
into his own spiritual experiences, especially into his prayer life.®
One of Qushayri’s colleagues, who had attended his meetings and
had visited almost every leading Sufi of his time, was Hujwiri from
Ghazna. He later came to Lahore, the capital of the Ghaznawids in
India, and he died there in 1071. His shrine, called that of Data
Ganj Bakhsh, is still a popular place of pilgrimage in Lahore.”
Hujwiri’s important innovation is that he wrote his Kashf al-
mahjib, “Unveiling of the Hidden,” in Persian and thus ushered in
a new period in mystical literature. A monument of early Persian
and noteworthy for its expressiveness, the Kashf, “which belongs
to the valid and famous books” (N 316), contains much interesting
information rarely found in other sources. Although the author’s
60. Abw1-Qasim al-Qushayri, Ar-risdla fi Silm at-tasawwuf (Cairo, 1330 h./1911-12).
Richard Hartmann, AL-Kuschairis Darstellung des Sufitums (Berlin, 1914), is a very
useful analysis of the Risdla.
61. Abwl-Qasim al-Qushayri, Ar-rasa?il al-qushayriyya, ed. and trans. F. M. Hasan
(Karachi, 1964). The most important treatise was edited and analyzed by Fritz Meier,
“Quiayris Tartib as-sulak,” Oriens 16 (1963)-
62. Ali ibn CUthman al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-mahjiib, ed. V. A, Zukovskij (Leningrad,
1926; reprint ed., Tehran, 1336 sh./1957); al-Hujwiri, The “Kashf al-Mahjub,” The
Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism by al-Hujwirt, trans, Reynold A. Nicholson, Gibb
Memorial Series, no. 17 (1911; reprint ed., London, 1959)-
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 89
inclination toward systematization sometimes goes too far, it is
singularly valuable in its approach and its balanced discussion.
The eastern provinces of Iran have always been proud to be a fer-
tile soil for mystically inclined souls. A contemporary of Qushayri
and Hujwiri was ‘Abdullah-i Ansari (1006-89), whose work, like
that of Hujwiri, was written in part in his Persian mother tongue.
It proves the breadth of spirit of Sufism that two masters so totally
different in their outlook as Qushayri and Ansari could live at close
proximity during the same politically restless period. While Qu-
shayri followed the Ash‘arite creed of the ruling Seljukids, Ansari
belonged to the stern Hanbalite school of law. The traditional idea
that Hanbalite rigorism and mystical emotion are mutually exclu-
sive can no longer be maintained—not only was Ansari an energetic
representative of this school, but ‘Abdu’l-Qadir Gilani, the founder
of the most widespread mystical fraternity, also belonged to this
madhhab. Perhaps it was precisely the strict adherence to the out-
ward letter of the God-given law and the deep respect for the divine
word that enabled Ansari and his fellow Hanbalites to reach a
deeper understanding of the secrets of the revelation.
Ansari’s father had been a mystic, too; when the boy was still
small, his father had left his family to join friends in Balkh. The
young scholar pursued his studies in Herat and Nishapur. He tried
several times to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca but was detained
because of confused political circumstances in the eastern provinces
occasioned by the untimely death in 1030 of Mahmid of Ghazna,
the conqueror of northwestern India and supporter of the caliph
and of Muslim orthodoxy.
Although young Ansari did not reach Mecca, his life was changed
by his meeting with the distinguished mystic Kharaqani in 1034,
shortly before the master died at the age of eighty. Kharaqani’s
sayings, preserved in the Tadhkirat al-auliya and elsewhere, show
tremendous force, but are devoid alike of any learnedness or theo-
logical systematization. This illiterate peasant, who could not pro-
nounce Arabic correctly (N 336, 353), was a typical wwaysi, initiated
not by a living master but by the powerful spirit of Bayezid Bistami.
Legends dwell on the spiritual relation between these two men: it is
said that the scent of Kharaqani reached Bayezid long before his
63. Serge de Laugier de Beaureceuil, Khwadja Abdullah Ansari, mystique hanbalite
(Beirut,1965), is a fine study of Ansari and his work. Pére Beaureceuil has also edited
some of Ansari’s works with their commentaries.
go / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
spiritual disciple was born (M 4:1802—50) and that Kharaqani used
to pray every evening in Kharaqan, then mysteriously be trans-
ported to Bistam—a distance of about 1500 kilometers—pray there,
and then perform the morning prayer back in his own village (T
2:201).
Kharaqani’s prayers burn with intense love and yearning, as
when he swore that he would not give his soul to the angel of death,
for he had received it from God, and only to Him would he return it
(T 2g:212). Longing for God made him melt away, but the Lord told
him, in one of his rare dreams after long periods of sleeplessness,
that the longing he had endured for sixty years was nothing, “for
We have loved thee already in the pre-eternity of eternities’” (T
2:253). And he was sure that he would be resurrected among the
martyrs, ‘for I have been killed by the sword of longing for Thee”
(T 2:229), as he asserts.
This enthusiastic and demanding master caused a spiritual
change in ‘Abdullah-i Ansari, with the result that Ansari began to
write his commentary on the Koran, which was, unhappily, never
finished. The advent of the Seljuks in eastern Iran in 1041 brought
affliction on Ansari; he was persecuted, spent years in destitution,
and endured much suffering at the hands of the authorities in their
defense of Ash‘arite theology. The grand vizier Nizamulmulk even
exiled him from Herat in 1066, but he was soon called back. Shortly
afterward the caliph himself honored the famous orator and mighty
preacher whose fame had spread around Herat. Eventually Ansari
lost his sight and spent the last eight years of his life in darkness and
under the threat of another expulsion. He died in Herat on 8 March
1089.
Ans§ari’s productivity is amazing in light of the difficulties he had
to face during his career. Among the great number of books written
in both Arabic and Persian, the Mandzil as-s@irin, ‘“The Stations on
the Way,” has had several commentators. The mystic of Herat also
translated Sulami’s Tabaqat into the Persian vernacular of his
region. But in spite of his many works in theoretical Sufism, his
smallest book has won him the greatest admiration: the Munajat,
“Orisons,” a prayer book in rhyming Persian prose, interspersed
with some verses, in which he pours out his love, his longing, and his
64. Hellmut Ritter, “Philologika VIII: Ansari Herewi—Sena?i Gaznewi,” Der Islam
22 (1934); Vladimir Ivanow, “Tabaqat of Ansari in the Old Language of Herat,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January-July 1923.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / gl
advice.® Its simple and melodious Persian prose makes this small
book a true vade mecum for anyone who needs a devotional aid for
meditation in lonely hours.
Nothing shows better the change in emphasis and style, in Sufi
outlook and expression, than a comparison of Ansari’s Munajat with
another small book written in the same mixture of poetry and prose
in the same city of Herat 400 years later, by the author who re-
worked Ansari’s hagiographical book and relied heavily upon him,
namely the Law@ih, by Maulana Jami. This book has become one
of the most widely used manuals of later Sufi teachings—but how far
is its intellectual and rational approach to the divine truth, its high-
flown technical expression about absolute existence and relative
being, from the intense earnestness and simplicity of Ansari’s
orisons!
At the same time that Ansari was being persecuted by the Seljuk
government, another mystic was cooperating with that regime and
lending it support through his writings. That was Abi: Hamid al-
Ghazzali, Ash‘arite theologian and, later, mystic, who has often
been called the greatest Muslim after Muhammad. An anecdote
told by Jami illustrates how highly esteemed he was in most moder-
ate Sufi circles: “The North African Sufi leader Abi’l-Hasan ash-
Shadhili (d. 1258) saw in a dream vision that the Prophet of Islam
was extolling himself with Ghazzali before Moses and Jesus . . . and
he had ordered the punishment of some who had denied him, and
the marks of the whip remained visible on their bodies until they
died” (N 373).
Ghazzali was born in Tus, near present-day Meshed, in 1058,
three years after the Seljuks had taken over the rule in Baghdad. His
life was closely connected with the fate of this dynasty, whose power
grew in the ensuing years to extend over all of Iran and parts of
eastern Anatolia. Aba’ Hamid, along with his younger brother
Ahmad, followed the usual course of theological studies; the teacher
to whom he owed most and with whom he worked closely was al-
Juwaini, surnamed the imam al-haramayn (d. 1083). Nizamulmulk,
the vizier, appointed Ghazzali professor at the Nizamiyya madrasa
in Baghdad. With the zeal of an ardent adherent of Ash‘arite the-
ology, the vizier had founded colleges (madrasa) all over the Seljuk
65. Abdullah-i Ansiri, Munajat % nasd@ih (Berlin, 1924); this little book has been
reprinted many times. Ansari, The Invocations of Shaikh Abdullah Ansari, trans. Sir
Jogendra Singh, gd ed. (London, 1959); Singh’s translation lacks the rhyming patterns,
which are essential, and the poetic flavor.
g2 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
territories. They served as training institutions for theologians and
proved to be models for later colleges in the Muslim world.
The school at Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate, was without
doubt the most important among the institutions founded by Ni-
zamulmulk. It therefore caused great amazement when the success-
ful professor Ghazzali, after a breakdown in 1095, left his teaching
position to enter the spiritual life. After long journeys that led him
to Syria, Jerusalem, and perhaps Egypt, Aba: Hamid returned to his
home and family and once more taught in his hometown of Tus.
There he died in December 1111.%°
Ghazzili’s literary activity was as great as that of any of his col-
leagues; his books cover different branches of learning, but mainly
theology and its confrontation with philosophy. We are fortunate
enough to possess his spiritual autobiography, written after his
“conversion.” It is called Al-munqidh min ad-dalal, “The Deliverer
from Error,” and has often been translated;® it has even been com-
pared to Augustine’s Confessions, though it conveys nothing of the
author’s earlier external life. Rather it shows his attempts at coping
with the various elements of Islamic intellectual life that confronted
him in the course of his studies and his teaching. He had studied the
works of the philosophers who, inspired by Greek thought, had de-
veloped the logical tools required for scholarly discussion, but who
had nevertheless remained, in the opinion of the faithful, outside
the pale of orthodox Islam. Ghazzali’s works refuting the philo-
sophical doctrines were in turn refuted by Averroes (d. 1198), the
66. The literature about Ghazzali is almost inexhaustible; some major works and
translations are: Duncan Black Macdonald, “The Life of al-Ghazzali,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 20 (1899); Arend Jan Wensinck, La pensée de Ghazzali
(Paris, 1940); W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: A Study of Al-Ghazali (Edin-
burg, 1963). The first independent study on Ghazzali appeared in Berlin in 1858:
Reinhard Gosche, Uber Ghazzalis Leben und Werke; later, the Spanish scholar Asin
Palacios devoted a number of books and articles to him. Philosophical investigations
of problems of Ghazzili’s thought and faith were introduced by Julius Obermann,
Der religidse und philosophische Subjektivismus Gazzdlis (Leipzig, 1921), a book the
main thesis of which can no longer be accepted. Pére Farid Jabre has devoted several
important books to Ghazzili’s theology. A good introduction into particular problems
of Ghazzili’s theological approach is Fadlou Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable
God (Leiden, 1964); The Ethical Philosophy of al-Ghazzali has been studied by
Muhammad Umaruddin (Aligarh, 1951), The Dutch scholar Arend Theodor van
Leeuwen sees Ghazzali, correctly, as apologist: Ghazali as apologeet van den Islam
(Leiden, 1947).
67. Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, Al-munqidh min ad-dalal, ed. A. Mahmid (Cairo,
1952); translated by W. Montgomery Watt as The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali
(London, 1953); other translations have been done by Claud H. Field (London, 1910);
J. H. Kramers (Amsterdam, 1951); and Barbier de Meynard, in Journal asiatique, 1877.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 93
greatest Arabic commentator on Aristotle; some of them served
medieval Christian theologians in their fight against the Averroist
school.
The main source of danger for the Seljuks was, in Nizamulmulk’s
and in Ghazzali’s view, the Ismaili movement, a branch of Shia
thought that had gained a firm footing in various parts of the Mid-
dle East. Egypt was still ruled by the Fatimid caliphs. During Ghaz-
zali’s lifetime, in 1094, the Persian Ismaili leader Hasan-i Sabbah
took the side of the younger son of the Fatimid caliph during the
struggle for succession, with the result that an Ismaili spiritual es-
tate was built up around this Nizar on the mountain castle Alamit
near Kazvin. From there the Ismailis threatened orthodox Muslims
and, later, the Crusaders; Nizamulmulk fell victim to one of Hasan-i
Sabbah’s disciples, known as the Assassins. Ghazzali wrote several
treatises against these batiniyya, “the people of esoteric meaning,”
and in his autobiography tried once more to explain the dangers in-
herent in the Ismaili system, especially in the doctrine of the neces-
sity of the guidance of an infallible imam, which seemed to him
particularly dangerous to the Sunnite community.
Another group with which the medieval scholar concerned him-
self was his own colleagues, the theologians and lawyer divines—
that class of learned men who practically ruled the life of the Mus-
lims by their interpretation of the divine law. Their concern with
the outward details of the law had always been a point of criticism
for the pious, and particularly for the Sufis. Their worldliness and
their many connections with the government aroused those
who, acutely conscious of the danger of fossilization of the revealed
word under the crust of legal formalism, strove after the interioriza-
tion of religion. Ghazzali wrote: ‘““Those who are so learned about
rare forms of divorce can tell you nothing about the simpler things
of the spiritual life, such as the meaning of sincerity towards God or
trust in Him.’’®* Acquainted with all aspects of Muslim intellectual
life, and having proved his philosophical and logical adroitness in
many defenses of orthodox Islam, Ghazzali eventually turned to
mysticism. Perhaps this was a response to his long-standing skepti-
cism; perhaps a sudden conversion led him to the mystical quest.
Whatever the reason, it was typical of Ghazzali that he approached
the mystical Path first from the intellectual side. As he says: ““Knowl-
edge was easier for me than activity. I began by reading their books
68. Watt, Muslim Intellectual, p. 113.
94 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
. and obtained a thorough intellectual understanding of their
principles. Then I realized that what is most distinctive of them can
be attained only by personal experience, ecstasy, and a change of
character.” ® We may understand this change to ‘“‘gnosis because of
agnosticism” and agree with W. H. Temple Gairdner’s fine remark:
“What saved God for him from his obliterating agnosticism was the
experience of the mystic leap, his own personal mi‘raj.’’7° And there
it does not matter very much that we do not know who his mystical
guide was nor to whom his chain of initiation goes back. We only
know that out of his experience came his greatest work, the Ihy@
‘uliim ad-din, ‘Revival of the Religious Sciences,” a comprehen-
sive work of forty chapters—forty being the number of patience and
trial, the number of days of seclusion that the adept undergoes at the
beginning of the Path. The number forty is often identical with
“multitude” and is thought to comprise an almost infinite number
of items; therefore collections of forty hadith (arba‘in) or of forty
pious sentences are very common in the Muslim world. It seems to
me typical of Ghazzali’s way of thought that the center of the book,
the twentieth chapter, is devoted to the central figure in Islam, the
Prophet Muhammad.”
The first quarter of the Ihy@ is entitled Tbadat, “Matters of Wor-
ship and Service’’; it begins with a chapter on knowledge but deals,
in general, with ritual questions like purity, prayers, and devotional
acts. Each prescription is preceded by Koranic verses and Prophetic
traditions and is explained by the practice of the early faithful and
Sufis. The second part of the book deals with the ‘‘Customs,” and
corresponds, to an extent, to the teachings as laid down in the adab-
books: how to eat and drink, how to lead a married life, and the like
69. Ibid., p. 195.
70. W. H. Temple Gairdner, The Niche for Lights (London, 1915), p. 51-
71,Aba Hamid al-Ghazzili, Ihy@ Sulim ad-din, 4 vols. (Bulag, Egypt, 1289
h./1872); commentary by the Indian-born scholar Sayyid Murtada az-Zabidi, [thaf as-
sadat al-muttaqin, 10 vols. (Cairo, 1311 h./1893-94). The Ihy@ has been analyzed in
G. H. Bousquet’s useful book “hyd Souloum ad-din” ou vivification des sciences de
la foi (Paris, 1955), which contains summaries of all forty chapters. Part translations
are: Hans Bauer, Islamische Ethik, 4 vols. (Halle, 1916); Hans Wehr, Al-Ghazali’s Buch
vom Gottvertrauen (Halle, 1940); Herman Henry Dingemans, Al-Ghazali’s boek der
liefde (Leiden, 1938), not fully satisfactory; Leon Bercher and G. H. Bousquet, Le
livre des bon usages en matiére de mariage (Paris, 1953); Susanna Wilzer, “Untersuch-
ungen zu Gazzili’s ‘kitab at-tauba,’” Der Islam 32-33 (1955-57); William McKane, Al-
Ghazali’s Book of Fear and Hope (Leiden, 1962); Nabih A. Faris, The Book of Know!-
edge (Lahore, 1962); Leon Zolondek, Book XX of al-Gazdlt’s “Ihya? Suliim ad-Din”
(Leiden, 1963); Heinz Kindermann, Uber die guten Sitten beim Essen und Trinken
(Leiden, 1964); Nabih A. Faris, The Mysteries of Almsgiving (Beirut, 1966).
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM h 95
—problems that the modern Western reader does not readily relate
to religion but that are, in the Islamic (as in the Jewish) view, as
much subject to religious rules as is the act of worship. For man
should feel every moment that he is in the presence of God, even
when occupied by the most worldly activities, and he should be pre-
pared to meet his Lord at any moment of his life.
After the central chapter on the Prophet and his exalted qualities,
the third section of the book deals with “Things Leading to De-
struction” and the last one with ‘““Things Leading to Salvation.”
This final part is closest to what we would expect from a mystical
writer: it discusses the different stations and states of the wayfarer,
like poverty and renunciation, patience and gratitude, love and
longing. Here we find some of the finest passages of the whole book,
all of which is written in a lucid style with simple, logical argu-
ments. In the chapter on “Love and Longing,” Ghazzali has ex-
pressed some of his personal experiences of the Path to God, which
never ends but leads to ever new depths.
The whole Jky@ may be called a preparation for death: its last
chapter is devoted to death in its terrible and its lovable aspects:
terrible, because it brings man into the presence of the stern judge
at Doomsday, which may be the beginning of everlasting punish-
ment; lovable, since it brings the lover into the presence of his
eternal beloved and thus fulfills the longing of the soul, which has
finally found eternal peace. All that Ghazzali teaches in the preced-
ing thirty-nine chapters is only to help man to live a life in accor-
dance with the sacred law, not by clinging exclusively to its letter
but by an understanding of its deeper meaning, by a sanctification of
the whole life, so that he is ready for the meeting with his Lord at
any moment.
This teaching—a marriage between mysticism and law—has made
Ghazzali the most influential theologian of medieval Islam.” To
fully appreciate his achievement one must remember that during
72. Of Ghazzali’s other works the following translations have been published:
Margaret Smith, ‘Al-Ghazzali, ar-risala al-ladunniya,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, 1938; Hellmut Ritter, Das Elixir der Gliickseligheit, aus den persischen und
arabischen Quellen in Auswahl iibertragen (Jena, 1923); Mohammed Brugsch, Die
kostbare Perle im Wissen des Jenseits (Hannover, 1924), an eschatological treatise;
Ernst Bannerth, Der Pfad der Gottesdiener (Salzburg, 1964), the spurious Minhdj al-
“abidin; R. R. C. Bagley, Ghazali’s Book of Counsel for Kings (nasthat al-mulitk) (Ox-
ford, 1964), a politico-ethical treatise; Franz-Elmar Wilms, Al-Ghazalis Schrift wider
die Gottheit Jesu (Leiden, 1966), a translation of Ar-radd al-jamil, a polemic work
against Christian theology. Others who have edited or translated some of Ghazzali’s
96 / HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM
his lifetime the first signs of Sufi theosophy became visible; certain
mystics were more interested in gnostic knowledge than in the prac-
tical way of life as taught by the early Sufis. Since Ghazzali was ap-
prehensive of the dangers of esoteric and gnostic currents inside
Islam (as he had shown in his struggle against Ismaili theories) and
at the same time scorned the rigidity and pedantry of the scholars
and jurists, he undertook in his book to “‘live through the verities
of faith and test those verities through the Sufi experimental
method.’’”
It is the life of the heart that matters, and Ghazzali’s method of
combining the life of the heart in strict accord with the law and with
a theologically sound attitude made even orthodox theologians take
the Sufi movement seriously. The moderate Sufi outlook began to
color the life of most average Muslims. On the other hand, Ghaz-
zali’s struggle against Hellenistic influences and a more or less Neo-
platonic philosophy was probably instrumental in repudiating these
currents for a while. During that time, however, they crystallized
anew and came back as Sufi theosophy, a new development destined
to take shape in the century after Ghazzali’s death.
One of the most puzzling questions among the many unsolved
problems for the scholar is where to place Ghazzali’s Mishkat al-
anwar, ““The Niche for Lights,” in the whole body of his writings. It
may be regarded as an expression of that set of opinions that the
perfected mystic “‘believes in secret between himself and Allah, and
never mentions except to an inner circle of his students.’ In this
book he reaches heights of mystical speculation that are almost
“gnostic’’ when he interprets the Light verse of the Koran (Stra
24:35) and the tradition about the seventy thousand veils of light
and darkness that separate man from God: in his fourfold classifica-
tion he does not hesitate to put most of the pious orthodox behind
the “veils mixed of darkness and light,” whereas even certain phi-
losophers are “veiled by pure light.” The Mishkat al-anwar shows a
highly developed light metaphysics—God is the Light—and many
later mystics have relied upon this book rather than upon his Ihya@
“‘uliim ad-din,
works are Ignaz Goldziher, Otto Pretzl, Samuel yan den Berghe, Heinrich Frick, and
Duncan Black Macdonald. There is a good bibliography in Peter Antes, Das Prophe-
tenwunder in der friihen AS‘ariya bis al-Gazali (Freiburg, 1970).
73. Fazlur Rahman, Islam (London, 1966), p. 144.
74. Gairdner, Niche for Lights, p. 19; see Arend Jan Wensinck, “Ghazali’s Mishkat
al-anwar,” Semietische Studien, 1941.
HISTORICAL OUTLINES OF CLASSICAL SUFISM / 97
No thinker of medieval Islam has attracted the interest of West-
ern scholars more than Ghazzali. Numerous translations of his
works are available in Western languages. Discussions about Ghaz-
zali’s true character have been going on for decades. Was he a sub-
jectivist, or a faithful member of the Muslim community who ac-
cepted the given religious fact? How can the divergent viewpoints
on the several issues of philosophy and theology be explained? To
what extent was he sincere in his conversion? Many aspects of his
thought have been studied in recent years, but much remains to be
done.
Will the admiration reflected in Shadhili’s dream continue?
Many a Western scholar, though in milder words, would subscribe
to it. Or will Pére Anawati’s criticism prove right: “Though so
brilliant, his contribution did not succeed in preventing the an-
chylosis that two or three centuries later was to congeal Muslim
religious thought’’?”> Or was his greatness itself the reason for the
congealing of moderate Islam?
75.G.-C. Anawati and Louis Gardet, Mystique musulmane (Paris, 1961), p. 51-
3. THE PATH
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PATH
Mystics in every religious tradition have tended to de-
scribe the different steps on the way that leads toward God by the
image of the Path. The Christian tripartite division of the via purga-
tiva, the via contemplativa, and the via illuminativa is, to some ex-
tent, the same as the Islamic definition of sharia, tariqa, and haqiqa.
The tariqa, the “path” on which the mystics walk, has been de-
fined as “the path which comes out of the sharia, for the main road
is called shar‘, the path, tarig.” This derivation shows that the Sufis
considered the path of mystical education a branch of that high-
way that consists of the God-given law, on which every Muslim
is supposed to walk. No path can exist without a main road from
which it branches out; no mystical experience can be realized if
the binding injunctions of the shari‘a are not followed faithfully
first.! The path, tariqa, however, is narrower and more difficult to
walk and leads the adept—called salik, ‘“‘wayfarer’—in his sulik,
“wandering,” through different stations (maqam) until he perhaps
1. Qutbaddin al-Ibadi, At-tasfiya fi ahwal as-stifiya, or Siifiname, ed. Ghilam
Muhammad Yasufi (Tehran, 1347 sh./1968), p. 15.
98
THE PATH / 99
reaches, more or less slowly, his goal, the perfect tawhid, the exis-
tential confession that God is One.
The tripartite way to God is explained by a tradition attributed
to the Prophet: “The shari‘a are my words [aqwali], the tariqa are
my actions [a‘mdlz], and the hagiga is my interior states [ahwali].”
Shari‘a, tariqa, and haqiqa are mutually interdependent:
The law without truth is ostentation, and the truth without the law is
hypocrisy. Their mutual relation may be compared to that of body and
spirit: when the spirit departs from the body, the living body becomes a
corpse, and the spirit vanishes like wind. The Muslim’s profession of
faith includes both: the words “There is no god but Allah” are the
Truth, and the words “Muhammad is the apostle of God” are the Law.
Any one who denies the Truth is an infidel, and any one who rejects the
Law is a heretic. (H 383)
“To kiss the threshold of the shari‘a’’? was the first duty of anyone
who wanted to enter the mystical path. The poets have often spoken
in verses, and the mystics in poignant sentences, of the different
aspects of these three levels (sometimes ma‘rifa, “gnosis,” would be
substituted for hagiga, “truth’”’). Thus it is said in Turkey:
Shari‘a: yours is yours, mine is mine.
Tariqa: yours is yours, mine is yours too,
Ma‘rifa: there is neither mine nor thine.
The meaning is this: in the fariqa, the mystic should practice ithar,
ie., preferring others to himself, but in the unitive stage the differ-
ence between mine and thine has been subsumed in the divine
unity.
Once the mystics had identified these three main parts of religious
life, they began to analyze the different stages and stations that the
wayfarer has to pass on his way. They distinguished between maqam,
“station,” and hal, “state”: “State is something that descends from
God into a man’s heart, without his being able to repel it when it
comes, or to attract it when it goes, by his own effort” (H 181). Or,
as Rimi puts it more poetically:
The hdl is like the unveiling of the beauteous bride,
while the maqam is the [king’s] being alone with the
bride.
(M 1:1435)
The maqam is a lasting stage, which man reaches, to a certain ex-
tent, by his own striving. It belongs to the category of acts, whereas
2. AbWI-Majd Majdud Sana%i, Sana? abad, line 39.
100 / THE PATH
the states are gifts of grace. The maqamat, “‘stations,”’ define the
different stages the wayfarer has attained in his ascetic and moral
discipline. He is expected to fulfill completely the obligations per-
taining to the respective stations, e.g., he must not act in the station
of respect as if he were still in the station of repentance; he also must
not leave the station in which he dwells before having completed all
its requirements. The states that come over him will vary according
to the station in which he is presently living; thus the qabd, “‘con-
traction,” of someone in the station of poverty is different from the
qabd of someone in the station of longing.
The mystical theoreticians were not certain whether a state could
be appropriated and kept for a while or whether it was a passing ex-
perience; they also differ in their classification of the stations and in
their description of certain experiences that are seen sometimes as
stations, sometimes as states. Even the sequence of the stations is not
always clear; it varies according to the capacity of the adept, and
God’s activity can change stations or grant the wayfarer a state with-
out apparent reason.
Three of the early classifications show the variability of the
sequence.
Dhi’n-Niin speaks of faith, fear, reverence, obedience, hope, love,
suffering, and intimacy; he classifies the last three stations as confusion,
poverty, and union (A 9:374).
His younger contemporary in Iran, Yahya ibn Mu‘adh, gives a spiri-
tual chain closer to the generally accepted form—repentance, asceticism,
peace in God’s will, fear, longing, love, and gnosis (A 10:64).
And the Traqian Sahl at-Tustari, again a few years younger, defines
the sequence as follows: response to God’s call, turning toward Him, re-
pentance, forgiveness of sins, loneliness, steadfastness, meditation, gno-
sis, discourse, election, and friendship (G 4:48).
The manuals of Sufism enumerate still other stations; but the main
steps are always repentance, trust in God, and poverty, which may
lead to contentment, to the different degrees of love, or to gnosis,
according to the mental predilection of the wayfarer. In order to
enter the spiritual path, the adept—called murid, “he who has made
up his will” (to enter the Path)—is in need of a guide to lead him
through the different stations and to point the way toward the goal.
Ad-din nasiha, “religion consists of giving good advice,” was a
Prophetic tradition dear to the mystics, who saw in the constant
supervision of the disciple’s way by the mystical guide a conditio
THE PATE §/ 101
sine qua non for true progress, though the image of the sheikh at-
tarbiya, who acutely supervised every breath of the murid, has de-
veloped only in the course of time. A later mystic has compared the
master—sheikh in Arabic, pir in Persian—to the prophet (for a tradi-
tion says that “the sheikh in his group is like the prophet in his
people”): “All the prophets have come in order to open people’s
eyes to see their own faults and God’s perfection, their own weak-
ness and God’s power, their own injustice and God’s justice... .
And the shaikh is also there for the purpose of opening the eyes of
his disciples” (N 441). The master who had to teach the method and
the exercises had first to test the adept to determine whether he was
willing and able to undergo the hardships that awaited him on the
Path. The newcomer was sometimes made to wait for days at the
sheikh’s door, and sometimes as a first test was treated very rudely.
Usually three years of service were required before the adept could
be formally accepted in a master’s group—one year in the service of
the people, one in the service of God, and one year in watching over
his own heart.
The methods of humiliating future Sufis were numerous. If they
were ordered to beg so that they would be rebuked by the people,
the intent was not the material profit derived from begging, but the
discipline. Shibli, once a high government official, eventually
reached the point of saying: “I deem myself the meanest of God’s
creatures” (H 359), and only then was he accepted by Junayd. A
story that illustrates this attitude very well is told about Majduddin
Baghdadi in the twelfth century:
When he entered the service of a sheikh, he was made to serve ‘“‘at the
place of ablution,” i.e., to clean the latrines. His mother, a well-to-do
lady physician, asked the master to exempt the tender boy from this
work, and sent him twelve Turkish slaves to do the cleaning. But he
replied: “You are a physician—if your son had an inflammation of the
gall bladder, should I give the medicine to a Turkish slave instead of
giving it to him?” (N 424)
The disciple would probably not have undergone these trials had
he not had absolute trust in his master. It was, and still is, a rule
that a preformed affinity has to exist between master and disciple.
Many Sufis wandered for years throughout the Islamic world in
search of a pir to whom they could surrender completely; and a
number of sheikhs would not accept a new disciple unless they had
seen his name written on the Well-preserved Tablet among their
102, / THE PATH
followers (N 536, 538). Did not the Prophet say that the spirits are
like armies—those who know each other become friendly with
each other?
After the adept had performed the three years of service he might
be considered worthy of receiving the khirqa, the patched frock,
“the badge of the aspirants of Sufism’ (H 45). The relation of the
novice to the master is threefold: by the khirqa, by being instructed
in the formula of dhikr (recollection), and by company (suhbat),
service, and education (N 560). In investing the murid with the
patched frock, Sufism has preserved the old symbolism of garments:
by donning a garment that has been worn, or even touched, by the
blessed hands of a master, the disciple acquires some of the baraka,
the mystico-magical power of the sheikh. Later Sufism knows two
kinds of khirqa: the khirqa-yi irada, which the aspirant gets from
the master to whom he has sworn allegiance, and the khirga-yi tabar-
ruk, the “frock of blessing,’ which he may obtain from different
masters with whom he has lived or whom he has visited during his
journeys—if a master considered him worthy of receiving some of
his baraka. The khirqa-yi irda is bestowed upon him only by his
true mystical leader, who is responsible for his progress.
The khirgqa was usually dark blue. It was practical for travel,
since dirt was not easily visible on it, and at the same time it was
the color of mourning and distress; its intention was to show that
the Sufi had separated himself from the world and what is in it.
In Persian poetry the violet has often been compared to a Sufi who
sits, his head on his knees, in the attitude of meditation, modestly
wrapped in his dark blue frock among the radiant flowers of the
garden. In later times in certain circles mystics would choose for
their frocks a color that corresponded to their mystical station
(CL 166), and sabzpiish, “he who wears green,” has always been
an epithet for those who live on the highest possible spiritual level
—be they angels, the Prophet, or Khidr, the guide of the mystics
(cf. V 52).
The patched frock was, of course, often interpreted in a spiritual
sense; warnings against attributing too much importance to this
woolen dress were not infrequent: ‘‘Purity (safa) is a gift from God,
whereas wool (siif) is the clothing of animals” (H 48). Some of the
Sufis invented complicated rules for the sewing and stitching of
their patched frocks, disputing whether to use thin or coarse thread
in putting the patches together, and for some of them these exter-
THE PATH / 103
nals were so important that others might accuse them of worship-
ing the khirga like an idol. The mystical interpretation of the
dervish garb is given in a fine passage by Hujwiri:
Its collar is annihilation of intercourse [with men], its two sleeves are
observance and continence, its two gussets are poverty and purity, its
belt is persistence in contemplation, its hem is tranquillity in [God’s]
presence, and its fringe is settlement in the abode of union. (H 56)
The novice who has entered the master’s group becomes “‘like
the son of the sheikh”; he is considered part of him according to the
tradition, “the son is part of the father.” The sheikh helps him
to give birth to a true “heart” and nourishes him with spiritual
milk like a mother, as it is often repeated.
The Sufis have always been well aware of the dangers of the
spiritual path and therefore attributed to the sheikh almost un-
limited authority: “When someone has no sheikh, Satan becomes
his sheikh,” says a tradition, for the satanic insinuations are mani-
fold; the murid may even feel uplifted and consoled by certain
experiences that are, in reality, insinuations of his lower self or of a
misguiding power. Here the sheikh has to control him and lead him
back on the correct path, for
whoever travels without a guide
needs two hundred years for a two days journey.
(M 3:588)
One might read all the books of instruction for a thousand years,
but without a guide nothing would be achieved (Y 514).
The master watches every moment of the disciple’s spiritual
growth; he watches him particularly during the forty-day period of
meditation (arba‘in, chilla) that became, very early, a regular insti-
tution in the Sufi path (derived, as Hujwiri says, from the forty-day
fast of Moses, when he hoped for a vision from God, as related in
Siira 7:138). The sheikh interprets the murid’s dreams and visions,
reads his thoughts, and thus follows every movement of his conscious
and subconscious life. In the first centuries of the Sufi movement
the idea was already being expressed that in the hands of the master
the murid should be as passive as a corpse in the hands of an un-
dertaker. Ghazzali, the main representative of moderate Sufism in
the late eleventh century, also maintained that complete and abso-
lute obedience is necessary, even if the sheikh should be wrong:
“Let him know that the advantage he gains from the error of his
104 / THE PATH
sheikh, if he should err, is greater than the advantage he gains from
his own rightness, if he should be right.’’* This attitude in later
times lent itself to dangerous consequences; indeed, it is one of the
reasons for modernist Muslims’ aversion to Sufism. But the original
intent was genuine: the master should act like a physician, diag-
nosing and healing the illnesses and defects of the human soul.
The image of the master (who is often identified with the true mysti-
cal beloved) as the physician who cures the lover’s heart occurs
frequently in Persian poetry throughout the centuries.
Visiting his master is a religious duty of the disciple (N 115),
for he will find from him what he will not find elsewhere. And to
serve a master is the highest honor of which a disciple can boast—
even if it were only that he “cleaned Junayd’s latrines for thirty
years’ (N 222). Even to have met a leading sheikh at once endows
a man with a higher rank (N 115).
Under the guidance of such a trusted master, the murid could
hope to proceed in the stations on the Path. The sheikh would
teach him how to behave in each mental state and prescribe periods
of seclusion, if he deemed it necessary. It was well known that the
methods could not be alike for everybody, and the genuine mystical
leader had to have a great deal of psychological understanding in
order to recognize the different talents and characters of his murids
and train them accordingly.* He might exempt a disciple for a time
from the forty-day seclusion, for instance, because he was spiritually
too weak, or because his spiritual ecstasy might overwhelm him.
The isolation of the murid for a period of forty days necessitates
a deep change in consciousness, and some of the Sufi theoreticians
were aware—as every good sheikh in fact was—that the seclusion
might constitute, for weaker adepts, a source of danger rather than
of elevation. If he were to concentrate too much upon himself
rather than upon God, or if passions might overcome him and
make him nervous and angry, it might be better to have him live
in the company of other people for his spiritual training’ because
of the mutual influence and good example (L 207).
Generally, the disciple should consider the dark room in which
3. Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (London, 1949), p+
ee Shihabuddin ‘Umar as-Suhrawardi, SAwdrif al-ma‘arif (Printed at the
margin of Ghazzali’s Ihy@, Bulaq, 1289 h./1872~73), chaps. 26-28.
5. Safiname, p. 108.
THE PATH / 105
he observes his seclusion as a tomb, and his frock as a shroud (N
418). Mystics would often retire into seclusion for periods of medi-
tation and were praised if, at the time of their death, they had
completed thirty or forty chilla. Sometimes they would construct
a special chillakhadna, a room for seclusion, which might even be
subterranean (N 325), close to the center of the fraternity or in a
blessed place nearby.
The mystical path has sometimes been described as a ladder, a
staircase that leads to heaven, on which the salik slowly and pa-
tiently climbs toward higher levels of experience. But the Muslim
mystics knew that there is another way of reaching higher experi-
ences: it is the jadhba, “‘attraction,’ by which a person can be
exalted, in one single spiritual experience, into a state of ecstasy
and of perfect union. However, it seems typical that the name of
majdhib, “the attracted one,” was usually given to people who were
mentally deranged and who were, in a sense, thrown out of the way
of normal behavior by the overwhelming shock of an “unveiling.”
The sources often described such “attracted” people, who are
completely lost and submerged in the divine unity, their eyes “like
two cups filled with blood” (N 479), inspiring awe, and at times
shocking people by their behavior.
One should not forget, too, that certain Sufis claimed to be
traveling the Path without formal initiation. They were called
uwaysi, recalling the Prophet’s contemporary Uways al-Qarani in
Yemen. But even in his case, some legally inclined mystics would
hold that he was “‘spiritually” initiated by the Prophet despite the
distance, for initiation by a nonvisible master or by a saint who had
died long ago was considered possible in Sufi circles. Thus, Kha-
raqani was introduced into the Path through the spirit of Bayezid
Bistami, while ‘Attar was inspired by Hallaj’s spirit. The spirit of
the saint is thought to be alive, able to participate actively in the
affairs of this world, often appearing in dreams and guiding the
wayfarer on his Path, for ‘‘the friends of God do not die.’ Later
Sufis—particularly the Naqshbandiyya—practiced a concentration
upon the “spiritual reality” of the great masters in order to be
strengthened in their mystical pursuits.
A final possibility of initiation from a source other than a human
master was through Khidr. Khidr, identified with the mysterious
companion of Moses mentioned in Stra 18, is the patron saint of
106 / THE PATH
travelers, the immortal who drank from the water of life. Sometimes
the mystics would meet him on their journeys; he would inspire
them, answer their questions, rescue them from danger, and, in
special cases, invest them with the khirqa, which was accepted as
valid in the tradition of Sufi initiation. Thus they were connected
immediately with the highest source of mystical inspiration. Ibn
‘Arabi, the theosophist (d. 1240), is one of those who claimed to
have received the khirga from Khidr.
The mystical Path is long and hard for the murid and requires
constant obedience and struggle. The correct initial orientation
of the adept is decisive for the success of the journey: who begins
in God will also end in Him (L 241). Under the spell of some
poetical utterances of later Persian poets, or impressed by dervishes,
who were anything but observant of Muslim law, westerners have
often regarded the Sufis as representatives of a movement that has
freed itself from the legal prescriptions of Islam, no longer caring
for religion and infidelity. Sufi became almost an equivalent for
“free thinker’? with many Europeans.
That is, however, not correct. One should not forget that the
sharia, as proclaimed in the Koran and exemplified by the Proph-
et (L 27), together with a firm belief in the Day of Judgment, was
the soil out of which their piety grew. They did not abolish the rites
but rather interiorized them, as it was said: ““The people who know
God best are those who struggle most for His commands and follow
closest the tradition of His Prophet’ (N 117). The performance of
ritual prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca constituted, for the
majority of the early Sufis, the minimal religious obligation with-
out which all possible mystical training would be useless and
meaningless. Many of them performed the pilgrimage to Mecca
frequently—up to seventy times, if we can believe the hagiogra-
phers. They knew that the true seat of the divine spirit was not the
Kaaba made of stone but the Kaaba of the faithful worshiper’s
heart (U 43), in which God might reveal Himself to those who
completed the Path.
When you seek God, seek Him in your heart—
He is not in Jerusalem, nor in Mecca nor in the hajj,
says Ytnus Emre (Y 520), voicing the conviction of many of his
contemporaries and followers. Yet the pilgrimage remained a
central point in the Sufi life, and Mecca was not only a place where
THE PATH / 107
the Sufis would meet and join in discussion, but where many of
them were blessed with revelations and illuminations.
The recitation of the Koran was another important duty of the
mystic: ““A disciple who does not know the Koran by heart is like
a lemon without scent” (N 131). The divine word is the infallible
source of spiritual uplifting; it inspires joy and awe and leads to
secret conversations with God, for “God reveals Himself to His
servants in the Koran,” as ‘Ali reportedly said (B 584).
Even though Paradise and Hell did not matter to the devotees of
mystical love, they were well aware that their deeds would bear
fruit, and one of the favorite sayings attributed to the Prophet was
constantly repeated by the moderate mystics: “This world is the
seedbed for the Otherworld.” Every act bears fruit by helping or
hindering the adept in his progress toward his goal, and “if you
plant colocynth, no sugarcane will grow out of it’ (D 1337).
An interesting variation of the hadith just quoted is found in the
Persian mystical tradition. Rimi, following Sana’i’s example, held
that every thought that becomes embedded in the heart will turn
into a form visible to everybody at the Day of Judgment, just as
the thought of the architect becomes visible in the plan of the
house, or as the plant grows out of the seed hidden in the soil (M
5:1791—1803), and death will meet man like a mirror, which shows
either a beautiful or an ugly face according to his good or evil deeds.
The Zoroastrian idea of the witness in Heaven who meets the
deceased soul has clearly inspired these ideas. Sana°i went even
further—he thought that evil thoughts might completely transform
man at the end of time so that some people might even appear as
animals because they followed bestial instincts and animal lusts
in their lifetime (SD 618).
One has to work day and night,
to plough and to clean the field of the soul.
(U 264)
And what has been sown during the winter—in the darkness of
this material world—will be apparent in the springtime of eternity
(M 5:1801).
In this constant watching over one’s actions and thoughts, the
greatest danger is that the adept may neglect, for a moment, his
spiritual duties (ghaflat), that he may become entranced by the
“sleep of heedlessness,” as later poets liked to call this state. The
108 / THE PATH
story of Sassui, the loving wife who found that her husband had
been carried away from her while she was asleep, is (in later Sindhi
poetry) a perfect illustration of the sleep of heedlessness and negli-
gence that deprives the soul of the company of its Lord and beloved.
And while the ordinary believer repents his sins, the elite repents
heedlessness (L 44).
The adept should turn with his whole being toward God—ikh-
las, “absolute sincerity,’ and giving up selfish thoughts in the
service of God are the basic duties of every mystic. A prayer without
ikhlas is of no avail; a religious thought that is not born out of this
sincerity is meaningless, even dangerous. Praise and blame of the
crowd do not mean anything to one who has turned wholly and
without any qualification to the Lord; and though he will constant-
ly be acting virtuously, he will forget his good and pious actions in
his attempt to act solely for God. He forgets, of necessity, the
thought of recompense for his works in this world and the world
to come.
It is told that Warraq, one of the early Sufis, was seen wearing a long coat
on which he had written the letter kh on one side, the letter m on the
other side, so that he could always remember the kh of ikhlas and the m
of muruwwa, “virtue.” (N 125)
An act of perfect sincerity, done for God’s sake, might result in
spiritual progress even though it might appear outwardly foolish.
Typical is the story of a not very bright murid whom some mischievous
people teased, telling him that he would gain spiritual enlightenment
by hanging himself by his feet from the roof and repeating some mean-
ingless words they taught him, He followed their advice in sincerity and
found himself illuminated the next morning. (N 320)
An overstressing of the ideal of ikhlds has led to the attitude of
the maldmatiyya, “those who are blamed,” those who conceal their
virtuous deeds in order to perform their religious duties without
ostentation (see chapter 2). For the greatest sin is riya, “hypocrisy”
or “ostentation,” and the master of psychological analysis in early
Sufism, Muhasibi, dealt extensively with this danger. Sufi texts tell
many stories about people whose hypocrisy was revealed, and they
were put to shame. A famous example is this:
A man ostentatiously prayed the whole night through in a mosque he
had entered at dusk and where he had heard a sound that seemed to in-
dicate the presence of a human being. But when the call for morning
prayer was heard, he discovered that his companion in the mosque was a
dog, thus rendering all his prayers invalid and himself impure.
THE PATH / 109
STATIONS AND STAGES
The first station on the Path, or rather its very beginning,
is tauba, “repentance”; tauwba means to turn away from sins, to ab-
jure every worldly concern.® As the poet says:
Repentance is a strange mount—
it jumps towards heaven in a single moment from the
lowest place.
(M 6:464)
Tauba can be awakened in the soul by any outward event, be it a
profane word, which is suddenly understood in a religious sense,
a piece of paper on which a relevant sentence is written, the recita-
tion of the Koran, a dream, or a meeting with a saintly person.
One of the several stories about Ibrahim ibn Adham’s conversion
is particularly well known:
One night, he heard a strange sound on the roof of his palace in Balkh.
The servants found a man who claimed, in Ibrahim’s presence, to be
looking for his lost camel on the palace roof. Blamed by the prince for
having undertaken such an impossible task, the man answered that his,
Ibrahim’s, attempt at attaining heavenly peace and true religious life in
the midst of luxury was as absurd as the search for a camel on top of a
roof. Ibrahim repented and repudiated all his possessions. (Cf. M
6:820ff.)
The “world” was considered a dangerous snare on the way to
God, and particularly in the time of the old ascetics harsh, crude
words were uttered to describe the character of this miserable
place, which was compared to a latrine—a place to be visited only
in case of need7—to a rotting carcass, or to a dunghill: “The world
is a dunghill and a gathering place of dogs; and meaner than a dog
is that person who does not stay away from it. For the dog takes
his own need from it and goes away, but he who loves it is in no
way separated from it” (N 65). Most of the Sufis, however, would
speak of the transitoriness of the world rather than of its perfect
evil; for it was created by God, but it is perishable since nothing
but God is everlasting. Why should the ascetic bother about it at
6, See Ignaz Goldziher, “Arabische Synonymik der Askese,” Der Islam 8 (1918), a
study of the technical terms of early Sufism.
7. Abi Talib al-Makki, Qu al-qulub fi muSamalat al-mahbib, 2 vols. (Cairo, 1310
h,/ 1892-93), 1:244; see Tor Andrae, Islamische Mystiker (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 84ff.
110 / THE PATH
all, since compared to the glory of God, the world is nothing more
than a gnat’s wing (A 10:84)?
When the disciple leaves this world in his act of repentance, the
problem arises as to whether or not he should remember his former
sins. Sah] at-Tustari demands that even after repentance sins should
never be forgotten (L 43), for remembrance constitutes a remedy
against possible spiritual pride. However Junayd, his contempo-
rary, defined true repentance as “‘the forgetting of one’s sins” (L 43),
and Junayd’s colleague Ruwaym defined ftauba as “‘repenting from
repentance,” i.e., complete obliteration of the thought of sin and
penitence. Junayd’s idea is taken up by Hujwiri: “The penitent
is a lover of God, and the lover of God is in contemplation of God:
in contemplation it is wrong to remember sin, for recollection of
sin is a veil between God and the contemplator’”’ (H 296).
In keeping with his inclination to systematization, Hujwiri speaks
of tauba as return from great sins to obedience; indba is the return
from minor sins to love, and auba the return from one’s self to
God (H 295). This tripartition is not found elsewhere.
The Sufis knew how often “repentance was broken’’—an expres-
sion connected, in later Persian poetry, with the breaking of the
wine bottle, which induced people to sin again and required re-
newed repentance. But the mystical leaders were sure that the door
of repentance remains open; it is
a door from the West until the day
when the sun rises in the West
(M 4:2504)
ie., until Doomsday, says Rimi, on whose mausoleum in Konya
the famous lines are written:
Come back, come back, even if you have broken
your repentance a thousand times.
In the primary stages of the Path, the adept has to increase in
abstinence (wara‘), caused by fear of the Lord, and in renunciation
(zuhd). The latter word means, again in the traditional tripartite
arrangement of concepts, to give up whatever is ritually and re-
ligiously allowed, to give up this world, and eventually to give up
everything that distracts the heart from God, even to renounce the
thought of renunciation. That includes, of course, giving up the
hope for heavenly reward or the fear of Hell.
THE PATH / 111
It was easy for the ascetic to renounce things declared doubtful
by Muslim law; but the tendency to renounce even things con-
sidered lawful by the community of the faithful sometimes reached
absurd degrees. Pious women would not spin in the light of a
neighbor’s candle; a mystic whose only sheep had grazed on some-
one else’s lawn by mistake would no longer drink its milk, declaring
it to be illicit for him after such a transgression. Food or anything
belonging to or coming from the ruling classes was regarded as
suspect. It is well known that in the old days the most pious scholars
refused to accept government offices; even in later periods relations
between the Sufis and the rulers were often cold, if not strained,
since the mystics were not interested in any contact that might
pollute their pure intentions. That is why in anecdotes and in
poetry, and so often in ‘Attar’s epics, the dervish is made the
mouthpiece of social criticism: he puts his finger on the wound of
society and points to the corrupt state of affairs.
For the early considerations of renunciation and “‘eating the
licit,” a seemingly characteristic story is told by Hujwiri in con-
nection with the problem of whether or not a mystic should be a
celibate (which he advocates); but the anecdote shows even better
the exaggerated zwhd and the punishment that follows a single
moment of heedlessness:
One day, when Ahmad ibn Harb was sitting with the chiefs and nobles
of Nishapur who had come to offer their respects to him, his son entered
the room, drunk, playing a guitar, and singing, and passed insolently
without heeding them. Ahmad, perceiving that they were put out of
countenance, said ‘‘What is the matter?”’ They replied: “We are ashamed
that this lad should pass by you in such a state.” Ahmad said: ‘He is ex-
cusable. One night my wife and I partook of some food that was brought
to us from a neighbour’s house. That same night this son was begotten
and we fell asleep and let our devotions go. Next morning we inquired
of our neighbour as to the source of the food that he had sent to us, anu
we found that it came from a wedding-feast in the house of a government
official. (H 365)
In later Sufi texts stress is laid not so much on zuhd as on its negative
counterpart, hirs, “greed,” a quality opposed to both renunciation
and true poverty. The Persian poets have never ceased warning
their readers of greed, which is “‘a dragon and not any small thing”
(M 5:120). This quality was found, as history shows, not only in
the worldly leaders but also in many of those who claimed to have
attained the highest spiritual rank and who used outward zuhd
to cover their inner greed. The zahid-i zahirparast, the ascetic who
11g / THE PATH
still worships outward things, i.e., who has not reached sincere
selflessness and loving surrender, has been ridiculed in many
Persian poems.
The forward movement on the Path, as initiated by repentance
and renunciation, consists of a constant struggle against the nafs,
the “soul’’—the lower self, the base instincts, what we might render
in the biblical sense as “‘the flesh.” The faithful had been admon-
ished in the Koran (Stra 79:40) to “fear the place of his Lord and
hinder the nafs from lust.” For the nafs is the cause of blameworthy
actions, sins, and base qualities; and the struggle with it has been
called by the Sufis “the greater Holy War,” for ‘‘the worst enemy
you have is [the nafs] between your sides,” as the hadith says (L 12).
The Koranic expression an-nafs al-ammdara bi’s-si’, “the soul com-
manding to evil” (Sira 12:53) forms the starting point for the Sufi
way of purification. The holy book contains also the expression
an-nafs al-lawwama, “the blaming soul” (Stra 75:2), which cor-
responds approximately to the conscience that watches over man’s
actions and controls him. Eventually, once purification is achieved,
the nafs may become mutma’inna (Siira 89:27), ‘‘at peace’’; in this
state, according to the Koran, it is called home to its Lord.®
The main duty of the adept is to act exactly contrary to the nafs’s
appetites and wishes. There is nothing more dangerous for the
disciple than to treat the nafs lightly by allowing indulgences and
accepting (facilitating) interpretations, says Ibn Khafif.® It is in-
cumbent upon every traveler on the Path to purge the nafs of its
evil attributes in order to replace these by the opposite, praise-
worthy qualities. Sufi hagiography is full of stories about the ways
in which the masters of the past tamed their appetites and, if they
failed, the manner of their punishment.
The nafs is something very real, and many stories tell of its having
been seen outside the body. Sometimes it took the form of a black
dog that wanted food but had to be trained and sent away; other
mystics saw their nafs coming out of their throats in the form of a
young fox or a mouse (H 206). The nafs can also be compared to
a disobedient woman who tries to seduce and cheat the poor way-
farer (the noun nafs is feminine in Arabic!). A recurrent image
is that of the restive horse or mule that has to be kept hungry and
8. A. Tahir al-Khanqahi, Guzida dar akhlaq w tasawwuf, ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran,
1347 sh./1968), p. 224. i
g-‘Abdur-Rahman as-Sulami, Kitab tabaqat as-Siifiyya, ed. Niraddin Shariba
(Cairo, 1953), p. 465.
THE PATH / vig
has to undergo constant mortification and training so that, eventu-
ally, it serves the purpose of bringing the rider to his goal (H 202—
204).'° Sometimes it is likened to a disobedient camel—Riimi com-
pares the struggle of the intellect with the nafs to the attempts of
Majnin to turn his camel in the right direction, toward the tent
of his beloved (M 4:1532)—and it is only natural that poets all over
the desert areas, like Shah ‘Abdu’I-Latif in Sind, are particularly
fond of this comparison. Even the comparison of the nafs to a pig
is not rare. It is found mainly in ‘Attar’s poetry; like Sana’i before
him, he felt that those who obeyed their piglike nature would
themselves be changed into pigs (U 236-37; R 102-3).
Sometimes the nafs has been likened to Pharaoh, the self-centered
ruler (U 16; M 4:3621) who did not listen to the call to faith uttered
by Moses but claimed a divine rank for himself and consequently
was drowned in the Red Sea; or to Abraha, who intruded in the
holy city of Mecca and should be scared away with stones (SD 313;
cf. Stira 105).
Old, popular beliefs were revived when the nafs was said to take
the form of a snake; but this serpent can be turned into a useful
rod, just as Moses transformed serpents into rods. More frequent,
however, is the idea that the power of the spiritual master can blind
the snake; according to folk belief, the snake is blinded by the
sight of an emerald (the connection of the pir’s spiritual power
with the green color of the emerald is significant). Thus, his in-
fluence renders the nafs-snake harmless (M 3:2548).
The image of training the horse or the dog conveys the most near-
ly accurate impression of the activity of the Sufi: the lower faculties
are not to be killed, but trained so that even they may serve on the
way to God. A story told about the Prophet Muhammad well ex-
presses this faith in the training of the base soul; the expression
used here for the “lower qualities, instincts,” is shaytdn, “Satan”:
“When asked how his shaytaén behaved, he answered: ‘Aslama
shaytdni; my shaytén has become a Muslim and does whatever I
order him,’ ” i.e., all his lower faculties and instincts had been
turned into useful tools in the service of God. Provided that man
obeys God in every respect, the lower soul will obey its master, as
everything in the world will obey the one who has completely sur-
rendered his will to the will of God.
10. Annemarie Schimmel, “Nur ein stérrisches Pferd,” in Ex Orbe Religionum
Festschrift Geo Widengren (Leiden, 1972).
114 / THE PATH
The struggle against the nafs has always been a favorite topic of
the Sufis, and they have never tired of warning their disciples of
its ruses, not only in the crude forms of sensual appetites but in
the guises of hypocrisy and false piety, which must be carefully
observed and obliterated.
The nafs has a rosary and a Koran in its right hand,
and a scimitar and a dagger in the sleeve,
(M 3:2554)
says Rimi, taking up a warning formulated four hundred years
earlier by Dhi’n-Nin. Even to indulge in constant acts of worship
or prayer can become a pleasure for the nafs; the mystic, therefore,
has to break every kind of habit, for otherwise his nafs will over-
come him in a subtler way (N 98). The ‘pleasure derived from
works of obedience” should be avoided (N 83), for that is fatal
poison.
One of the great dangers for the wayfarer is laziness or leisure;
as long as he has not yet reached his goal, it would be better for him
to occupy himself with seemingly useless things, like digging one
pit after the other (N 156, go), than to spend a moment in leisure,
for “leisure (faragh) is an affliction” (N go).
The chief means for taming and training the nafs were, and still
are, fasting and sleeplessness. The first ascetics have often been de-
scribed as q@im al-lail wa sa@im ad-dahr, “spending their nights
upright in prayer and maintaining a perpetual fast by day.” The
old saying that the three elements of Sufi conduct are qillat at-ta‘am,
qillat al-manam wa qillat al-kalam, “‘little food, little sleep, little
talk’ (to which often “‘loneliness, keeping away from men,’ was
added) is still as valid as it was a thousand years ago.
Lack of sleep was considered one of the most effective means on
the mystical Path—‘‘the eye is weeping instead of sleeping’ \—and
the caliph ‘Umar (634-44), who was certainly not a Sufi, reportedly
said: ‘‘What have I to do with sleep? If I slept by day, I would lose
the Muslims, and if I slept by night I would lose my soul” (G 1:318).
The ascetic spent his nights at prayers recommended in the Koran,
which gave him time to enjoy blessed conversation with his Lord
through prayer. Many of the mystics would avoid stretching out
their legs or lying down when slumber overcame them, for all of
11. Muhammad Gisiidaraz, Diwan anis al-Sushshaq (n.p., n.d.), p. 18.
THE PATH / 115
them hoped for some revelation after the long nights of sleepless-
ness, which extended over years, if we can believe the sources. The
most beautiful story pertaining to this attitude has been told and
retold for centuries: Shah Kirmani did not sleep for forty years,
but eventually he was overwhelmed by sleep—and he saw God.
Then he exclaimed: “ ‘O Lord, I was seeking Thee in nightly vigils,
but I have found Thee in sleep.’ God answered: ‘O Shah, you have
found Me by means of those nightly vigils: if you had not sought
Me there, you would not have found Me here’’” (H 138). These
ascetics and Sufis were hoping—as later poets have expressed it so
excellently—to have the vision of a sun that is neither from east
nor from west but rises at midnight, and thus to enjoy a spiritual
enlightenment not comparable to any worldly light (cf. U 160).
For practical purposes, however, the qillat at-taSam, ‘‘to eat little,”
is even more important than to avoid sleep. The Sufis would fast
frequently, if not constantly. Many of them extended the fasting
in Ramadan observed by every Muslim; but in order to make fast-
ing more difficult, they invented the so-called saum d@idi, which
meant that they would eat one day and fast one day, so that their
bodies would not become accustomed to either of the two states.
“Fasting is really abstinence, and this includes the whole method
of Sufism” (H 321).
The first mystic to speak of the “alchemy of hunger” was, as far
as we can see, Shaqiq al-Balkhi from the Khurasanian ascetic school.
He claimed that forty days of constant hunger could transform
the darkness of the heart into light (W 216), and many sayings of
the early Sufis praise this hunger, which “is stored up in treasure-
houses with Him, and He gives it to none but whom He particular-
ly loves” (L 202). ‘Hunger is God’s food by which He quickens the
bodies of the upright” (M 5:1756), says Rumi, who also argues
that, just as the host brings better food when the guest eats little,
God brings better, i.e., spiritual, food to those who fast. But “hun-
ger is the food of the ascetics, recollection that of the gnostics”
(N 157).
The accounts of the extended periods of fasting of Muslim
mystics are astounding, and we have little reason to doubt their
authenticity. The wish to die in the state of fasting may induce
the Sufi even to throw away the wet piece of cotton that his
friends put in his mouth to relieve him in his state of agony (N
116 / THE PATH
245). It would be worth investigating to what extent this restriction
to extremely small quantities of food contributed to the longevity
of the Sufis. It is astonishing how many of them lived to be very old.
Like the early Christian monks who lived exclusively on the host,
the Muslim saints considered hunger the best way to reach spiritu-
ality. To be empty of worldly food is the precondition for enlight-
enment. “Could the reedflute sing if its stomach were filled?” Rami
asks repeatedly. Man can receive the divine breath of inspiration
only when he keeps himself hungry and empty.
Ruzbihan Baqli tells about a saint who totally fasted for seventy
days, during which he remained in the contemplation of samadiyyat,
“eternity”: “In this state food comes to him from the word ‘I stay
with my Lord who feeds me and gives me to drink’” (Stira 26:79).
“This is no longer the station of struggle, but that of contempla-
tion” (B 364). In cases of this kind, hunger is no longer a means for
subduing the nafs but a divine grace: adoration is the food for the
spiritual man (H 303), and the Sufi is nourished by the divine light
(M 4:1640-44). Some mystics, like Ibn Khafif, have confessed that
their goal in permanent fasting and diminishing their food was
to be like the angels, who also live on perpetual adoration (X 107).
Gabriel’s food was not from the kitchen,
it was from the vision of the Creator of Existence.
Likewise this food of the men of God
is from God, not from food and dish.
(M 3:6-7)
And why care for the body, which is, as the Sufis liked to say, only
“a morsel for the tomb” and should therefore be bony and lean
(D 777)?
Some of the ascetics exaggerated fasting and hunger in the pre-
paratory stages to such an extent that one can almost speak of an
“idolatry of the empty stomach” (W 216). There are known cases
of Sufis who starved to death (L 417). Others not only fasted and
restricted their diet to the absolute minimum but, in addition to
that, took a purgative on every third day.”
Yet the great masters have always acknowledged that hunger is
only a means to spiritual progress, not a goal in itself. Just as Aba
Sa‘id ibn Abi’l-Khair, after years of incredible ascetic hardships,
eventually enjoyed food—and good food!—many of the later mystics
1g. Umar Muhammad Daudpota, Kalaém-i Girhori (Hyderabad, Sind, 1956), p- 23-
THE PATH / 114
would agree that “the soul-dog is better when its mouth is shut by
throwing a morsel into it.’
Strangely enough, as early as the tenth century, the fondness of
the Sufis for halvah, sweetmeat, is mentioned; and in the eleventh
and later centuries poets often speak in derogatory terms of the
Sufi with milk-white hair who has made the recollection (dhikr)
of sugar, rice, and milk his special litany (SD 149). This derogatory
attitude is echoed in the poetry of Bedil (d. 1721), who criticized
the Sufis whose only dhikr, recollection, is to constantly mention
food. And Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) made the fake murid ex-
plain that God, though “closer than the jugular vein” (Siira 50:16),
is not closer to man than his stomach.
Many later orders taught that the middle way, between excessive
hunger and excessive eating, was safest for the disciple’s progress
(N 395). According to the later Naqshbandiyya and other moderate
orders, the people who truly fast are those who keep their minds
free from the food of satanic suggestions and so do not allow any
impure thoughts to enter their hearts: ‘Such people’s sleep is
worship. Their walking and going and resting are glorification of
God, and their breathing praise of God.”
One of the most important stations on the Path is tawakkul,
complete trust in God and self-surrender to Him. The Swiss
scholar Benedikt Reinert has devoted to this subject a book that
must be regarded as a model for future research into the concepts
of early Sufism.'* The definition of tawakkul is of central impor-
tance for an understanding of classical Sufi thought. Darani, the
spiritual descendant of Hasan al-Basri, defined it as the apex of
zuhd, “renunciation.” The problem was soon posed as to whether
tawakkul was an attribute of the faithful or a consequence of perfect
faith. Thus Muhasibi, representative of orthodox views, holds that
the degree of tawakkul can vary in accordance with the degree of
faith a person has. Throughout the ninth century—probably be-
ginning with Shaqiq al-Balkhi—the pious discussed the different
aspects of this attitude, which Dhi’n-Nin defined as “complete
certitude.” According to these definitions, real tawhid demands
tawakkul: God, in His absoluteness, is the only actor, and there-
fore man has to rely completely upon Him. Or, to define it different-
13. Dard Shikoh, Sakinat al-auliy@, ed. M. Jalali Naini (Tehran, 1334 sh./1965),
p. 238.
14. Benedikt Reinert, Die Lehre vom tawakkul in der dlteren Sufik (Berlin, 1968),
an excellent study of the development of “trust in God” and its ramifications.
118 / THE PATH
ly: since the divine power is all-embracing, man must have complete
trust in this power.
The same end is reached if the problem is approached from the
angle of predestination. Rizq, “our daily bread,” has been guaran-
teed from preeternity. Why worry, then? Is not one of God’s names,
ar-Razzaq, ‘He who bestows sustenance’? And He has shown His
kindness to every being from his birth, even from the moment of
conception, by nourishing him first with blood, then with milk.
Since everything is created by and belongs to God, man possesses
absolutely nothing of his own; therefore it would be vain to strive
to attract or refuse anything. The Muslim creed expressly states
that ‘what has been destined for man cannot possibly miss him,”
be it food, happiness, or death.
The overwhelming feeling of God’s all-encompassing wisdom,
power, and loving-kindness is reflected in the Muslim tradition as
fully as in some of the Psalms and in the Christian tradition. The
word ascribed to the Prophet, “if ye had trust in God as ye ought
He would feed you even as He feeds the birds,” sounds almost
evangelical. This deep trust in God’s promise to feed man and
bring him up, as it developed out of the Koranic teaching, has
permeated Muslim life. Sana°i said about 1120:
If your daily bread is in China,
the horse of acquisition is already saddled,
and either brings you hurriedly to it,
or brings it to you, while you are asleep.
(S 106)
And even today Muslim intellectuals may say: ““Wherever your
rizq is, there you will find it, and it will find you.”
The Muslim mystics often use the expression husn az-zann, “to
think well of God,” which may sound strange to modern ears, but
which means once more the absolute, hopeful trust in God’s kind-
ness. God definitely knows what is good for man and gives bread and
death, punishment and forgiveness according to His eternal wis-
dom. This attitude has been a source of strength for millions of
Muslims, but it is not to be confused with the stoic acceptance of
a blind fate, as it is usually understood in terms of predestinarian
ideas. The faith in the rizq that will reach man was certainly carried
too far by an early mystic who forbade his disciple to stretch out
his hand to grasp a dried-up melon skin.
THE PATH / 119
Tawakkul in its interiorized sense means to realize tauhid; for
it would be shirk khafi, “hidden associationism,” to rely upon or
be afraid of any created being. This aspect of tawakkul is one of the
basic truths in Sufi psychology: as soon as every feeling and thought
is directed in perfect sincerity toward God, without any secondary
causes, neither humans nor animals can any longer harm the mystic.
Thus tawakkul results in perfect inner peace. The numerous stories
about Sufis who wandered “in tawakkul” through the desert with-
out fear of lions or highway robbers, without any provisions, reflect
this attitude in a somewhat romantic fashion. Ironically, one of the
leading masters of tawakkul, Abi. Turab an-Nakhshabi, was de-
voured by lions in the desert (Q 17).
But exaggerated tawakkul might induce man into perfect pas-
sivity. Then it might produce strange figures like the dervish who
fell into the Tigris; asked whether he wanted to be saved, he said
no,” and asked whether he would rather die, he again said ‘“‘no”—
“for what have I to do with willing?’ God had decreed at the time
of creation whether he was to be drowned or saved. Another story
that deals with the unhealthy exaggeration of tawakkul is told about
Ibrahim ibn al-Khawass, an Iragian Sufi who used to wander in the
deserts without any provisions (‘al@t-tawakkul). But a colleague of
his thought even this too lax, since “his Sufi dress begged for him’’;
he made him wear luxurious attire and then sent him to the desert
to practice real trust in God (X 105). This same wayfarer would re-
fuse the company of Khidr, the patron of pious travelers, because
his graceful company seemed to negate his perfect trust in God
alone—had not Abraham, after all, refused help even from Gabriel
when Nimrod cast him onto the blazing pyre? And he was rewarded
for this act of tawakkul by God’s changing the fire into a cool rose
garden. How, then, could the Sufi ascetic even think of danger if
everything was in the hands of God? And why should he get in-
volved in a profession to gain his livelihood if God would send him
his food in any case, if there was food predestined for him?
The ascetic regarded everything worldly as contaminated; noth-
ing was ritually clean enough for him to occupy himself with. He
would rather spend his days and nights in worship than pollute him-
self by “practical’’ work. And even if he did work, why should he try
to gain more than was needed just for one day? To store money or
goods was regarded as a major sin—did the pious know whether he
would still be alive within an hour, or by the next morning? “Ex-
120 / THE PATH
tension of hope,” til al-amal, is one of the most disliked attitudes in
Sufism; Ghazzali’s chapter on ‘‘Fear and Hope,” in his Ihya’ ‘uliim
ad-din, echoes these feelings and gives a lucid picture of the austere
outlook of early Sufism, Even mystics who cannot be regarded as
typical representatives of strict tawakkul often distributed all their
money in the evening or gave away everything they had on Friday.
They also refused any medical treatment.
The importance of the problem of tawakkul for early Sufi
thought and practice can be understood from the fact that the earli-
est standard work on mysticism, Abii Talib al-Makki’s Qiit al-qulib,
contains sixty pages (big folio with very small print) about this topic,
more than about any other aspect of Sufism. Through Ghazzali, who
drew heavily upon Makki’s book, these ideas became widely known
in medieval Islam. However, neither strict Hanbalite orthodoxy
nor the moderate Sufis accepted the notion of tawakkul in an over-
stressed form; exaggerations like those just mentioned were criti-
cized by many of the leading pious. They considered this exag-
gerated attitude a violation of the Prophetic tradition—did not
Muhammad himself advise a bedouin: ‘‘First tie your camel’s knee,
and then trust in God’? Sahl at-Tustari is the perfect example of a
mystic who tried to combine a life in the “world” with complete
tawakkul, and his contemporary Junayd taught his disciples how to
regard earning: ‘““The proper method of earning . . . is to engage in
works which bring one nearer to God, and to occupy oneself with
them in the same spirit as with works of supererogation commended
to one, not with the idea that they are a means of sustenance or ad-
vantage” (K 73).
In the course of time, tawakkul came to be regarded more as a
spiritual attitude than as an external practice. If everybody had
lived according to the ideals promoted by some of the early ascetics,
the whole economic and social fabric of the Muslim Empire would
have collapsed. However, as a basic station on the mystical Path and
as a spiritual force, an unshakable trust in divine wisdom and
power, tawakkul is still an important element of Muslim piety.
The central attitude in Sufi life is that of fagr, “poverty.” The
Koran (Siira 35:16) has contrasted man in need of God with God,
the ever Rich, the Self-sufficient, and here lies one of the roots of the
Sufi concept of poverty. In fact, the main names under which the
mystics have been known in the West—though often in distorted
EMESPATH / 121
images—are faqir, “poor,” and dervish, “poor, mendicant.’’ Poy-
erty was an attribute of the Prophet, who claimed, according to
the tradition, faqri fakhri, “poverty is my pride.” There are numer-
ous legends about the destitute state and the poverty of his house-
hold and the members of his family.
The Sufis considered outward poverty a necessary station at the
beginning of the Path, and they tried to preserve it as long as possi-
ble, often throughout their lives. There is no reason to doubt the
validity of the stories in which the utter destitution of some of the
great mystics is dramatically described. The reed mat on which the
mystic slept, and which often constituted his only worldly posses-
sion, became in later Persian poetry a symbol of spiritual wealth,
since it gives its owner a rank higher than that of Solomon on his
air-borne throne:
Everyone who has to write the manuscript of the
etiquette of Poverty
puts a ruler from the strips of the reed-mat on the pages
of his body.'®
Poverty interpreted in a spiritual sense means the absence of de-
sire for wealth, which includes the absence of desire for the blessings
of the otherworld. One of the aspects of true faqr is that the mystic
must not ask anything of anyone—Ansiari, though utterly poor,
never asked his wealthy friends even for a blanket, though he knew
that they would have wanted to give him one, but ‘‘since they did
not perceive my misery, why ask them?” (N 347). For to ask would
mean to rely upon a created being, and to receive would burden the
soul with gratitude toward the giver, a burden that was considered.
most embarrassing and heavy; both in poetry and in everyday speech
this feeling of minnat, “gratitude,” has a negative value for the
faithful.
If man has no wish for himself in this world and the next, then he
may be called a genuine faqir (N 111). To possess anything means
to be possessed by it—the world enthralls those who possess some of
its goods, whereas “the true faqir should not possess anything and
thus not be possessed by anything” (L 108). He needs God, nothing
else.
15. Abit Talib Kalim, Diwan, ed. Partaw Baida*i (Tehran, 1336 sh./1957), ghazal
no, 316.
122 / THE PATH
Later Sufis have stretched this concept of absolute poverty so far
that even Jesus, the ideal of poverty for the early ascetics, was re-
garded as imperfect in his poverty; he used to carry a needle with
him, which proved that his relation with the world was not yet com-
pletely severed, and that is why he was assigned a place only in the
fourth heaven, not in the proximity of the Lord. This story belongs
among the favorites of Persian poets in their praise of poverty (cf.
SD 85).
Hujwiri spoke, correctly, about the form and the essence of pov-
erty: ‘Its form is destitution and indigence, but its essence is for-
tune and free choice” (H 19). The dervish, the Sufi, may be rich if
he has the right attitude, which means that his outward wealth and
power are of no interest to him and that he would be willing to give
them up at any moment. The final consequence—after quitting
this world and the next—is to “quit quitting” (tark at-tark), to com-
pletely surrender and forget poverty, surrender, and quitting.
About the year goo, there was discussion in Baghdad and elsewhere
about the superiority of the poor or the rich. Most of the Sufis agreed
that faqr was superior and preferable to wealth, provided that it was
combined with contentment (N 417)—and this is the general solu-
tion found in later medieval Sufism, as in Abi Najib as-Suhrawar-
di’s Adab al-muridin.
Many of the early sources are filled with praise for the true faqir
and sometimes equate him with the genuine Sufi. Yet Jami, follow-
ing Aba Hafs ‘Umar as-Suhrawardi’s distinction among ‘“‘ascetic,”’
“poor,” and “Sufi,” as explained in the “Awarif al-ma“arif, regarded
the faqir, in the technical sense, as inferior to the real Sufi, for whom
faqr is nothing but a station on the Path. If he makes poverty a goal
in itself, the faqir is veiled from God by his very “‘will to be poor’’
(N 11). That is basically an elaboration of a saying by Ibn Khafif:
“The Sufi is he whom God has chosen (istafa) for Himself, out of
love, and the faqir is he who purifies himself in his poverty in the
hope of drawing near [to God]” (N 12).
Others have praised faqr as the central quality of the mystic, as
Rimi says in an interesting comparison:
It is like the highest sheikh, and all the hearts are murids,
the hearts of the lovers turn around it.
@ 890)
Hujwiri has described this kind of poverty very beautifully:
THE PATE / 123
Dervishhood in all its meanings is a metaphorical poverty, and amidst
all its subordinate aspects there is a transcendent principle. The Divine
mysteries come and go over the dervish, so that his affairs are acquired by
himself, his actions attributed to himself, and his ideas attached to him-
self. But when his affairs are freed from the bonds of acquisition, his ac-
tions are no more attributed to himself. Then he is the Way, not the
wayfarer, i.e., the dervish is a place over which something is passing,
not a wayfarer following his own will. (H29)
Faqr, here, is almost equated with fand, ‘annihilation in God,”
which is the goal of the mystic, as Rimi said once in the Mathnawi
(M 5:672). For ‘Attar poverty and annihiliation constitute the
seventh and last vale on the Path leading to God, after the traveler
has traversed the valleys of search, love, gnosis, independence, tau-
hid, and bewilderment (MT).
Along this line of interpretation a phrase was invented that be-
longs among the standard sayings of later Sufism: al-faqr idha
tamma huwa Allah, “‘when faqr becomes perfect (complete), it is
God.” The heart, annihilated in absolute poverty, lives in the
eternal richness of God, or, rather, absolute poverty becomes abso-
lute richness. That may be what the author of this sentence felt. Its
origin is not known. Sometimes it is called a hadith. It has been
attributed to Uways al-Qarani, but that is impossible; Jami (N 267)
ascribes it to a disciple of Kharaqani, which would be historically
possible. Whatever its source may be, the sentence was used fre-
quently among the mystics after the eleventh century; Rimi (D
1948) was fond of it, as was Jami; and the Sufi orders—Qadiriyya and
Naqshbandiyya—made it known as far as Malaysia.'®
The equation of faqr with annihilation, and the emphasis on the
negative, nonexistent aspect of things is expressed, in Islamic art, by
the large empty hall of the mosque, which inspires the visitor with
numinous grandeur. It is also reflected in the negative space in the
arabesques or in calligraphy. Only by absolute faqr can the created
world become a vessel for the manifestations of God, the eternally
rich,
There is another Prophetic tradition, however, in which Mu-
hammad claims that ‘‘poverty is the ‘blackness of face’ [i.e., shame]
16. See Hasan Lutfi $usut, Zslam tasaveufunda Hacegdn Hanedant (Istanbul, 1958),
p-. 156; Maulana ‘Abdurrahman Jami, Law@ih (Tehran, 1342 sh./1963), no. 8. See
al-Attas, The Mysticism of Hamza al-Fansiiri (Kuala Lumpur, 1970), pp. 46, 226, 462.
An inscription from a Qadiriyya tekke in Konya, dated 1819, in my possession, contains
a Persian quatrain ending with these words. They are also quoted by the Indo-Persian
poet Mirza Bedil (d. 1721), Kulliyat, 4 vols. (Kabul, 1962-65), 1:1009.
124 / THE PATH
in both worlds.” 7 How is one to interpret this statement after so
much praise of faqr? Baqli saw in it a condemnation of the claim to
be a fagir (B 605); but Sana’i had invented an ingenious interpreta-
tion nearly a century before him: just as the Negro—proverbially
cheerful in classical Arabic literature—is happy and smiling in spite
of his black face, so the true poor person is filled with spiritual hap-
piness and permanent joy in his state of poverty (S 88). This sounds
farfetched but is a typical example of the art of interpretation as
practiced by the Sufis. It shows, at the same time, the central place
attributed to the happiness of poverty among the Sufis, who are the
nihil habentes omnia possedentes. There is still another interpre-
tation of the ‘‘blackness of face’: perfect poverty is the state of reach-
ing the pure divine essence, which is the Black Light by which one
sees and which itself remains invisible (CL 168, 176)—another inter-
pretation that emphasizes the close relation between fagr and fanda.
Another station on the Path, which has often been described, is
sabr, “patience,” taught by the Koran as the attitude of Job and of
Jacob—‘“‘and God is with those who show patience” (Siira 2:103).
“Sabr is to remain unmoved before the arrows of the divine de-
crees,” says Muhasibi (W 283). Others would change the words
“divine decrees” into “affliction,” but the meaning remains the
same: perfect patience is to accept whatever comes from God, even
the hardest blow of fate. With their tendency to classify the stations
and stages, the Sufis divided patient people into three classes: the
mutasabbir, who attempts to be patient; the sabir, who is patient
in afflictions; and the sabir, who is perfectly patient under any con-
dition. ““To be patient before God’s orders is more excellent than
fasting and prayer’ (N 164).
The old Arabic saying, “patience is the key to happiness,” has
been repeated thousands of times by mystics and poets, who never
tired of inventing new parables to show the necessity of patience:
only through patience does the fruit become sweet; only through
patience can the seed survive the long winter and develop into
grain, which, in turn, brings strength to the people, who patiently
wait for it to be turned into flour and bread. Patience is required to
cross the endless deserts that stretch before the traveler on the Path
and to cross the mountains that stand, with stone-hearted breasts,
between him and his divine beloved.
17. Al-Khanqahi, Guzida, p. 17.
Patience, O father, is an iron shield,
on which God has written ‘‘victory has come.”
(M'5:2479)
Yet patience, indispensable as it is, is only ‘‘a messenger from the
divine beloved” —
Patience always says: “I give glad tidings from union
with Him.”
Gratitude always says: “I am the possessor of a whole
store from Him!”
(D 2142)
Patience is an important milestone on the Path, but a person who
has reached the station of gratitude (shukr) is already blessed by
divine grace. There is no doubt that gratitude is superior to pa-
tience; the problem posed by the Sufis of the old school is only
whether a patient, poor or a grateful, rich man is closer to God. One
might say that patience is more praiseworthy than gratitude, for
patience goes against one’s body, whereas gratitude conforms to the
body, or that the dichotomy of the two states is resolved in the state
of rida, “contentment,” which makes man whole.
Gratitude is divided into different ranks: gratitude for the gift,
gratitude for not giving, and gratitude for the capacity to be grate-
ful. For though the common man deserves to be applauded when he
expresses his gratitude at receiving a gift, the Sufi should give thanks
even if his wish is not fulfilled or a hope is withheld.
A famous story about patience and gratitude, repeated in almost
every book about early Sufis, appears in Sana’i’s Hadigqa in the fol-
lowing form:
An Iragian Sufi visited a sheikh from Khurasan and asked him about
real Sufism as taught in his country. He replied that, when God sent
them something they would eat it and be grateful, if not, they would en-
dure patience and take the wish out of the heart. Whereupon the Ira-
qian Sufi replied: ‘““That kind of Sufism is what our dogs do in Iraq—
whe they find a bone they eat it, otherwise they are patient and leave
’ Being asked by his companion how he, then, would define Sufism, he
aor “When we have anything we prefer others to ourselves [i.e.,
give it away], if not, we occupy ourselves with thanks and pray for for-
giveness.” (S 495)
This story, which has been attributed to various people, clearly
shows the higher rank of those who offer thanks even when de-
prived of everything. It is reminiscent of the prayer of Job, the
126 / THE PATH
great model of patience in Christian and Islamic lore: ‘“The Lord
gave, and the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
On the highest level the Sufis understood that even the capacity
for thanking is a divine gift, not a human act (cf. Q 80 ff.), and there-
fore “it behooves to be grateful for the gratitude” (B 515). The Sufi
who acts in this way has before him the example of the Prophet,
“who in the highest bliss of being drowned in the ocean of the
bounty of gratitude wanted to express his thanks in the tongue with-
out tongues and found himself incapable and said la uhsi than@an
Salaika, ‘I cannot count the praise due to Thee’ ” (B 514). This say-
ing is one of the cornerstones of mystical gratitude. Gratitude, in its
deepest sense, is an insight into the wise working of God. As “Attar
expressed it in his poetical description of the mystical states:
What is gratitude? To imagine the rose from the thorn,
and to imagine the nonvisible part to be the whole.
(U 41)
Gratitude toward God teaches man to see with the heart’s eye the
blessings veiled in affliction. Yet “gratitude is a wild bird the which
to catch and to fetter is difficult.’’!® Patience, however, is a mount
that never fails on the difficult road.
Shukr, gratitude, is related to rida, which is not a patient bearing
and suffering of all the vicissitudes of life, but happiness in poverty
and affliction. ‘Rida is the joy of the heart in the bitterness of the
divine decree” (L. 53), says Dhi’n-Niin. Hujwiri is probably right
in his statement that ridd@ is a result of love, inasmuch as the lover is
content with what is done by the beloved (H 180). It is definitely the
attitude of a loving heart, but the Sufis disagree about whether to
define it as a station or a state. A verse by Sana’i defines the mufarrih,
a medicine to make the heart more cheerful and to calm down ner-
vous tension, a kind of tranquilizer:
The mufarrih that the saints make
is prepared in the hospital of contentment.
(S 341)
The story of Husri, an early tenth-century mystic, points to the es-
sence of contentment: “‘Husri once said in prayer: ‘O God, art
Thou content with me that I am content with Thee?’ And the an-
swer came: ‘O liar—if you were content with Me, you would not
18. San@Pabad, line 317.
THE WATH | 127
ask whether I am content with you’ ”’ (T 2:290). In perfect ridaé the
mystic should not think about whether or not God has accepted his
act of resignation and contentment; he should accept every divine
decree, be it wrath or grace, with equanimity and joy. This interior
joy, this perfect agreement with God’s decrees, transforms the beg-
gar into a king and opens the way toward a participation in the
divine will, toward love and “higher predestinarianism.”
The mystics differ in their opinions as to whether “fear” and
“hope” (khauf and raja’) are stations or states (Sarraj feels that they
are states). Psychologically, one would prefer that they be classified
among the stations, for they belong to the essential and long-
standing aspects of mystical life in its primary stages, and even at
later levels. To feel fear is essential for every pious Muslim. Did not
the Koran speak often of the fear of God, or fear of the Judgment,
and does it not contain enough warnings to make the heart of even
the most pious tremble with fear? But hope is just as essential, for
life would be impossible without hope, and ‘‘fear and hope are the
two wings of action without which flying is impossible” (L 62). Or,
as Sahl saw it: fear is a masculine element, hope a feminine one, and
the two together engender the deepest realities of faith (K 89).
The early ascetics emphasized the aspect of fear more than that
of hope. They even went so far as to attest that a man who lives in
fear inspires his neighbors’ trust, for they know that they are secure
from his machinations and need not suspect him of meanness (W
223). But even a representative of pure love mysticism, like Riizbi-
han Baqli, praises fear of God as the ‘‘whip of divine power [jaba-
riiti], which hits the soul that commands to evil with the lash of
‘decent behavior’ [adab]” (BA 223). The chapter on “Fear and
Hope” in Ghazzali’s Iny@ ‘uliim ad-din reflects very well the differ-
ent attitudes of the faithful in regard to these states and demonstrates
the strength of the feeling that an equilibrium between both forces
is absolutely necessary for a sound religious life (G 4:288).!%
In the course of time, hope proved stronger than fear, though the
advanced mystics knew fear as well and even rejoiced in it. But in
their case it is no longer the fear of God’s judgment or the terrors
of Hell that keeps them on the watch, but rather the fear of God’s
19. Al-Makki, Quit, 2:58ff. See the definition in al-Khanqahi, Guzida, p. 22: “Who
worships God only by fear, is a hariiri (i.e, Kharijite), who worships him only by
hope is a murjiite, and who worships him by love, is a zindiq, heretic’; only a
balanced combination of the three elements constitutes a true Muslim.
128 / THE PATH
makr, His “ruses.” In the moment of perfect happiness the mystic
can never be sure that God will not use this exalted state as a snare
to capture him, to tempt him once more to worldly thought, pride,
hypocrisy, to distract him from his highest goal. Miracles, for in-
stance, could be interpreted as divine ruses, for they are still con-
nected with the world; even the small joys of daily life might hide
ruses of God that should be feared. And who can be sure that he will
be saved or accepted by God? One can hope for it, but never without
fear.
However, the notion of ‘thinking well” of God, i.e., of trusting
in His promise to forgive the sinner, proved stronger in mystical
life. Did not the tradition attest that God’s grace precedes His
wrath? Out of this faith grew the whole prayer life of the Sufis. Just
as the firm belief in God’s unending mercy and the hope for His
loving-kindness permeate the prayers of an early Sufi like Yahya
ibn Mu‘adh, later mystics always relied upon the principle of hope,
as Rimi put it in a lovely comparison:
[Is there anyone] who has sown the corn of hope in this
soil
to whom the spring of His grace did not grant hundred-
fold [fruit]?
(D 1253)
But neither fear nor hope is required any longer once the wayfarer
has reached his goal:
The seaman is always on the planks of hope and fear—
when the plank and the man become annihilated, there
remains only submersion.
(D 395)
The stations of fear and hope correspond, in the states, to what
is called bast and qabd. Bast, from the root “to get wider and en-
large,’’ means an extension of enthusiastic feeling, a perfect joy and
ease that may develop, in some cases, into true ‘cosmic conscious-
ness,” into the feeling of partaking of the life of everything created,
into that rapture of which the intoxicated poets of Iran and Turkey
have sung so often. It is this state that inspired them to invent long
lines of anaphora circling around the beauty of the divine beloved
—verses that tried to describe His ineffable, sparkling glory or con-
vey to others the state of happiness in which the whole world is seen
THE PATH / 129
in a changed light, transparent and filled with opaline colors of
exquisite beauty.
What is bast? To leave off the two worlds in one rapture,
to cast oneself on a hundred new worlds!
(U 42)
But whereas bast is the experience of extension and perhaps inten-
sification of the self, gabd, ‘“‘constraint,” means the compression of
the soul—‘‘to make one’s home in a needle’s eye” (U 42)—darkness,
the oppressing desert of loneliness in which the mystic spends days
and sometimes months of his life. Nevertheless, gabd has been re-
garded as superior to bast by some leading mystics, for, as Junayd
says, “when He presses me through fear he makes me disappear
from myself, but when He expands me through hope He gives me
back to myself” (G 33). In qabd, the “TY” disappears, which is prefera-
ble to the extended self-consciousness produced by bast. In the
state of gabd, the “dark night of the soul,” man is left completely to
God, without any trace of himself, without strength to want any-
thing; and it is out of this darkness that the light of unitive experi-
ence, or of vision, may suddenly appear—like the “‘sun at midnight.”
It is clear, from the previous definitions, that the mystics were
fond of the juxtaposition of corresponding states. The manuals
enumerate long lists of such mystical states, the true implications of
which are difficult for the uninitiated to understand. They speak of
huditir wa ghaiba, ‘presence and absence,” which can be defined as
“presence near God and absence from oneself,” or vice versa. Jam‘,
“collectedness” and “perfect unification,” goes together with ¢af-
riga, “separation after union.” Sukr, “intoxication,” is combined
with sahw, ‘‘sobriety.” Eventually the complementary stages of
fand, “annihilation,” and baq4, ‘‘duration, remaining in God,” are
reached. The pair sukr and sahw is of special importance to mystical
terminology and has been mentioned in connection with Junayd’s
criticism of Bayezid. True sobriety is defined by Hujwiri as ‘“‘reach-
ing the goal” (H 230), and the same author says that one of his mysti-
cal masters said: “Intoxication is the playground of children, but
sobriety is the death-field of men” (H 186).
Before a discussion of the last stations and states on the Path and
its goal, a definition that enables a better understanding of some
Sufi formulations should be mentioned. It is the word wagqt, liter-
ally, “time,” which came to designate the “present moment,” the
130 / THE PATH
moment in which a certain mystical state is granted to the Sufi.
“Time is a cutting sword’’; it cuts whatever is before and after it and
leaves man in absolute nakedness in the presence of God. The Sufi
has therefore been called ibn al-waqt, ‘the son of the present mo-
ment,” i.e., he gives himself completely to the moment and receives
what God sends down to him without reflecting about present, past,
and future (cf. N 285). But on the highest level of experience, when
the Sufi turns into a s@fi, ‘‘pure,” it may be said:
The Sufi is ‘‘son of the Moment”...
The Safi is submerged in the Light of the Majestic,
not the son of anything, and free from “times” and
“states.”
(M 3:1426, 1433-34)
LOVE AND ANNIHILATION
The last stations on the mystical path are love and gnosis,
mahabba and ma‘rifa. Sometimes they were considered complemen-
tary to each other, sometimes love was regarded as superior, and at
other times gnosis was considered higher. Ghazzali holds: ‘‘Love
without gnosis is impossible—one can only love what one knows”
(G 4:254). The Sufis have tried to define the different aspects of
ma‘rifa, knowledge that is not reached by discursive reason but is a
higher understanding of the divine mystery. In later times the term
“Grif, “gnostic,” has often been used for the advanced mystic in gen-
eral, for “the faithful sees through God’s light, the gnostic sees
through God” (L 41). Most of the mystics would agree with the mys-
tical interpretation of Sura 27:34, “Kings destroy a town when they
enter it’; the “king’’ is interpreted as ma‘rifa, for this divinely in-
spired knowledge empties the heart completely of everything so
that nothing but God is contained in it (W 170). The scholars and
theoreticians of Sufism, like Hujwiri (H 267), have written many
definitions of ma‘rifa, but the most poignant formulation is that
of Junayd: “Gnosis... is the hovering of the heart between declar-
ing God too great to be comprehended, and declaring Him too
mighty to be perceived. It consists in knowing that, whatever may
be imagined in thy heart God is the opposite of it’ (K 133).
We shall dwell here mainly upon those mystical currents in
which love was praised as the highest possible state, following St.
Augustine’s dictum, res tantum cognoscitur quantum diligitur,
THE PATH / 131
“one can know something only insofar as one loves it.” 2° The prayer
ascribed to the Prophet is a good starting point: ‘“O God, give me
love of Thee, and love of those who love Thee, and love of what
makes me approach Thy love, and make Thy love dearer to me
than cool water” (G 4:253). In early Sufism the problem of love
was the central point of divergence. Orthodoxy accepted mahabba
only as “‘obedience,’”’ and even some of the moderate mystics would
say that “‘to love God means to love God's obedience” (T 1:287) or,
“true love is to act in the obedience of the beloved” (N 55). Aba
‘Talib al-Makki sums up the ideas of moderate Sufism: ‘““The Proph-
et of God made love of God a condition of faith by saying that God
and His messenger should be more beloved to the faithful than
anything else.”’”! And the Sufis were certain that “nothing is dearer
to God than that man loves Him” (T 1:321).
When Dhivn-Nin expressed the thought that “fear of Hellfire,
in comparison with fear of being parted from the beloved, is like
a drop of water cast into the mightiest ocean,’ he stated very well
the main object of this early love mysticism. His younger con-
temporary, Sari as-Saqati in Baghdad, who had first formulated the
idea of mutual love between man and God, uttered the same feeling
in a prayer that has been preserved by Hujwiri:
It is the custom of God to let the hearts of those who love Him have
vision of Him always, in order that the delight thereof may enable them
to endure every tribulation; and they say in their orisons: We deem all
torments more desirable than to be veiled from Thee. When Thy beauty
is revealed to our heart, we take no thought of affliction. (H 111; cf. A
10:120)
It was apparently Sari’s nephew Junayd who discovered the truth:
“Love between two is not right until the one addresses the other,
O) Thou T’", (T2329).
The whole complex of love was so inexhaustible that the mystics
20. See “Love, Muhammadan,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James
Hastings, 13 vols. (1908-27), 8:176; Ignaz Goldziher, “Die Gottesliebe in der islamischen
Theologie,” Der Islam g (1919), a fundamental study of the early development of
mystical love in Islam. Annemarie Schimmel, Studien zum Begriff der mystischen
Liebe im Islam (Marburg, 1954); Schimmel, “Zur Geschichte der mystischen Liebe
im Islam,” Die Welt des Orients, 1952. A number of scholars have maintained that
“love” constitutes the essence of Sufism; see, for example, Mir Valiuddin, Love of God
(Hyderabad, Deccan, 1968), or the anthology by René Khawam, Propos d'amour des
mystiques muslumanes (Paris, 1960), and many popular writings.
21, Al-Makki, Qiit, 2:50.
22, Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (1914; reprint ed., Chester Springs,
Pa., 1962), p. 116.
192 / WHESPAGH
invented different stages and used different terms to classify it; yet
the definitions given for hubb, mahabba, wudd, and mawadda are
by no means clear. The usual classification of the stages in love dates
back to early times. Bayezid spoke of the fourfold nature of love:
“Tt has four branches: one from Him, that is His grace, one from
you, that is to obey Him, one for Him, and that is your recollecting
Him, and one between both of you, and that is love” (A 10:242).
Abi Talib al-Makki knew nine aspects of love, and Hujwiri gives
a classification of the lovers, which Ghazzali adopted as well, in
slightly elaborated form: “Those who regard the favor and benefi-
cence of God toward them and are led by that regard to love the
Benefactor, and those who are so enraptured by love that they
reckon all favors as a veil and by regarding the Benefactor are led
to [consciousness of] His favors’’ (H 308). As in most of the mystical
states, some reach love by more or less rational arguments, ascending
from the created to the creator, whereas others are completely lost
in the vision of the creator and are brought to contemplate created
things only because they are witnesses of His greatness.
Among the different stages of love, the Sufis have mentioned
uns, “intimacy”; gurb, “proximity”; shauq, “longing”; and others.
The sequence differs according to their personal experiences. The
ascending steps are charmingly described in the saying: ‘“The hearts
of the gnostics are the nests of love, and the hearts of the lovers
are the nests of longing, and the hearts of the longing are the nests
of intimacy” (A 10:362). Complete submersion in intimacy is
illustrated in the story of a Sufi whose master placed him in a lonely
corner. The master then completely forgot him for a week, but
when he came and asked his guest to forgive him, the Sufi answered:
“Do not worry, God has taken away the fear of loneliness from His
friend” (N 94)—the intimacy with God leaves no room for wahshat,
“feeling frightened by loneliness.” The term wahshat is usually
meant as a complementary term to uns—it includes the feeling of
loneliness in the wilderness, far away from the intimacy and tran-
quility of home, but also the estrangement from everything created
that the Sufi feels in his intimacy with God (G 4:291). Uns, on the
other hand, is connected with the aspects of divine jamdl, the mani-
festation of God’s loving and consoling qualities, and, as such, it is
contrasted with hayba, “reverence, awe,’ which awakens in the
Sufi’s heart at the manifestation of God’s grandeur and power (cf.
A.9:377)-
THE PATH / 133
As to qurb, ‘‘proximity,” the Sufis have always been eager to
define it other than spatially; it is an ethical proximity, brought
forth by the fulfillment of God’s orders, the opposite of separation
from God, caused by man’s disobedience (H 148). Later mystics
invented a complicated system of different grades of qurb, like
“proximity of the attributes” and “‘proximity of the names,” which
refer to the degree to which one is invested with higher, loftier
divine attributes. The term qurb an-nawafil, “proximity caused by
supererogative works of worship,” goes back to a hadith qudsi that
must have been in circulation in very early times. God says:
My servant ceases not to draw nigh unto Me by works of devotion, until
I love him, and when I love him I am the eye by which he sees and the
ear by which he hears. And when he approaches a span I approach a
cubit, and when he comes walking I come running. (L 59)
The Nagqshbandiyya school in India, however, prefers the qurb
al-far@id, caused by the punctual performance of the prescribed
ritual duties and as such the “state of the prophets,” to the qurb
an-nawafil, which is, for them, the station of the saints. It should
be added that some mystics would not accept the term qurb at all,
since it presupposes a duality between lover and beloved, while
true Sufism consists of realizing unity (N 222).
This same feeling has led some mystics to deny the station of
“longing,” for one longs for someone absent, and God is never
absent (N 222). Contrary to those who considered longing unneces-
sary, if not illicit, for a true lover lives constantly with Him who
is “closer to you than your jugular vein” (Siira 50:16), others would
boast of their longing, like Bayezid: “If the eight Paradises were
opened in my hut, and the rule of both worlds were given in my
hands, I would not give for them that single sigh which rises at
morning-time from the depth of my soul in remembering my long-
ing for Him...” (T 1:159).
Others, again, would claim that genuine longing has no end,
since the beloved has no end. The more the mystic approaches the
divine beloved, the more he apprehends the fathomless depth of
His qualities, the abyss of His essence: therefore his longing to
plumb deeper and more wonderful mysteries can never end. Ghaz-
zali has described this state perfectly in the relevant chapter in the
Thy@ ‘uliim ad-din (G 4:277). It is this dynamic force of love and
longing that has inspired so many Persian poets.
14. ;/ “RHE wPaTe
Every moment this love is more endless,
in every time people are more bewildered in it,
(U 9)
says ‘Attar, and Hafiz continues:
The adventure between me and my beloved has no end—
That which has no beginning cannot have an end.
How could this love, inspired by God, be adequately described?
It is greater than a hundred resurrections,
for the resurrection is a limit, whereas love is
unlimited.
Love has got five hundred wings, each of them reaching
from the Divine Throne to the lowest earth.
(M_ 5:2189-90)
That is how Rumi tries to explain the grandeur of love, and SUrtr,
in the late sixteenth century, admonishes the lover not to be heed-
less, ‘‘for in that sacred station of love there are a hundred places,
the first of which is resurrection!”’?*
The only means of drawing near to the divine beloved is by
constant purification and, in exchange, qualification with God’s
attributes. Junayd has defined this change brought forth by love:
“Love is the annihilation of the lover in His attributes and the
confirmation of the Beloved in His essence’ (H 40). “It is that the
qualities of the Beloved enter in the place of the qualities of the
lover” (L 59). Many centuries later, Shah Waliullah of Delhi (d.
1762) invented an apt symbol for this spiritual purification, using
the traditional image of the fire of love: man, like a piece of ice,
will be put in a kettle on the flames; thus he will melt, become
warm, boil, and eventually, evaporating as steam, be as close as
possible to the quality of heat inherent in divine love.™
Ghazzali has compared this purifying love to the “good tree
whose root is firm and whose branches are in the sky,” as described
in the Koran (Siira 14:24); the fruits show themselves in the heart,
on the tongue, and on the limbs (G 4:282). These fruits are obedi-
ence to the orders of God and constant recollection of the beloved,
which fills the heart and runs on the tongue—the importance of
23. Urfi-yi Shirazi, Kulliyat, ed. Ali Jawahiri (Tehran, 1336 sh./1957), P- 305.
24. Shah Waliullah, Sata‘at, ed. Ghulam Mustafa Qasimi (Hyderabad, Sind, 1964),
no. 40.
THE PATH / 135
recollection for the development of love has often been emphasized
by the mystics (see pp. 167—78). This love is a flame that burns every-
thing except the beloved (M 5:588), just as longing is God’s fire,
which He kindles in the hearts of His friends to burn down every-
thing that may occupy their hearts (L 64).
Obedience, as the Sufis understood it, is complete surrender—
acceptance of the will of the beloved whether it manifests itself in
kindness or in wrath. Love neither diminishes by cruelty nor in-
creases by kindness (H 404); and the lover has to remain at the
door of the beloved even if driven away—he has ‘“‘to make his soul
a broom at His door” (T 2:193). But even that degree of surrender
was not enough for later generations, since it implies a shade of
self-will:
I want union with him, and he wants separation;
thus I leave what I want so that his wish comes true
(G 4:117)
—that is how the true lover should act. Pain and death are welcome if
the beloved decrees it.
If you would say ‘“‘Die!"’ I would die in full obedience,
and would say “Welcome to him who calls me to death.”
(N 96; A 10:301)
For death means the annihilation of the individual qualities, the
lifting of the veil that separates the primordial beloved from the
lover created in time.
“There is nothing good in love without death” (G 4:300); death
may be understood as dying to one’s own qualities or even as cor-
poreal death, since this leads the lover toward the beloved (A 10:9).
The tradition “die before ye die” gave the Sufis the possibility of
pondering the implications of the slaying of the lower qualities and
the ensuing spiritual resurrection in this life (cf. U 10). But “out-
ward” death was also an aim in itself, as the case of Hallaj shows—
to lift the disturbing “I” that stands between lover and beloved.
Ghazzili relates a touching story about Abraham, who was called by
the angel of death and refused to follow him, since he could not
believe that God would kill someone who had loved him so much.
But he was addressed: “Have you ever seen a lover who refuses to
go to his beloved?” Upon hearing this, he gladly submitted his soul
to the angel (G 4:253). The lover who has learned to accept death
136 / THE PATH
as a bridge to the beloved should “give his soul with a smile like a
rose’ (M 5:1255); that is why Hallaj danced in fetters when he was
led to execution. The idea that the martyr is granted special heaven-
ly privileges, as the Koran attests, has, perhaps, helped in shaping
the idea of the “martyr of love,” who enjoys a special position with
God when he is killed by the sword of longing or has died on the
thorny path that leads toward the beloved, where thousands of
hearts and livers adorn the thornbushes like red flowers, as Ghalib
depicts the way of love. The mystics would rely on the Koranic
word: “Do not call them dead who have been slain for God’s sake—
nay, they are alive’ (Stra 3:163; B 281). It is the sword of Ja, the
first half of the profession of faith, that slays the lover (M 3:4098),
and then there remains nothing “but God” (M 5:589). The rec-
ompense of those slain by love is more precious than anything
else. The Sufis know a wonderful hadith qudsi, which was revealed
to Shibli when he asked God about the meaning of Hallaj’s martyr-
dom: “Whom My love kills, for him shall I be blood money.”’ The
martyr of love will be rewarded by God Himself, no longer sepa-
rated from Him for whose love he has shed his blood.
Ideas such as these have led the mystics to accept willingly all
kinds of tribulations, which were even regarded as signs of special
kindness from God. ‘‘He is not sincere in his love who does not
enjoy the stroke of the friend” (L 50). But even that was not enough
—the sincere person is the one who forgets the stroke when looking
at the friend.®° Out of these ideas about suffering, later Sufi poetry
developed the motif of the physician who wounds the patient and
heals him, the wound being healed only by the one who caused it
(A 10:273). Tribulations and afflictions are a sign that God is near,
for, to quote Hallaj’s daring sentence again, “Suffering is He Him-
self.” The more He loves a person, the more He will test him,
taking away from him every trace of earthly consolation so that the
lover has only Him to rely upon (A 9:345). It is small wonder that
a hadith about this suffering was very common among the Sufis:
“The most afflicted people are the prophets, then the saints, and
then so forth.” The prophets, being nearest to God, have to suffer
most, as is attested to by many Koranic stories, which were embel-
lished in the course of time; and the list of suffering lovers becomes
longer from century to century. Affliction, bal@, is ingeniously
combined with the word bala, ‘‘Yes,’ that the souls spoke at the
25. Al-Makki, Qut, 2:67.
THE PATH / 137
Day of the Covenant, thus accepting in advance every tribulation
that might be showered upon them until Doomsday (SD 41; U 133).
Just as grape juice is purified by the constant ‘‘tribulation’”’ of
fermenting until it becomes pure wine, and just as wheat is ground
and kneaded and apparently mistreated until it becomes bread,
thus the human soul can mature only through suffering. And when
the ascetic seeks God’s loving-kindness and forgiveness (rahma),
the lover seeks his pain (zahma)—a meaningful pun of Persian poets.
This indulgence in suffering, the feeling that affliction is the
fastest steed to bring man to perfection (as Meister Eckhart said
just at the time that the greatest Sufis expressed these views)—this
attitude has contributed to the development of a certain imagery
in later Sufi poetry that is difficult for uninitiated Western readers
to appreciate and that has even caused misunderstanding among
modern Islamic thinkers. It is an imagery that compares, for ex-
ample, the lover to the polo ball, rolling without head and feet
wherever the friend’s polo stick drives him.
Before the tenth century, however, discussions about mystical
love and longing were conducted mainly on the theoretical level.
The question was one of semantics. The word mahabba had been
objected to by the orthodox, but when the first attempts were made
to introduce the word ‘“ishq, ‘‘passionate love,” into the relation
between man and God, even most of the Sufis objected, for this
root implies the concept of overflowing and passionate longing,
a quality that God, the self-sufficient, could not possibly possess;
nor was it permissible that man should approach the Lord with such
feelings. Nari, who probably introduced the use of the word “ishq,
defended himself by declaring that “the “ashiq ‘lover’ is kept at a
distance, whereas the muhibb ‘lover’ enjoys his love” (B 289).
It was left to Hallaj openly to express by this term the inner dy-
namics of the divine life—‘‘le désir essentiel,” as Louis Massignon
calls it—an idea that was to influence later Sufi thought decisively
until Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi poetically changed the words of the pro-
fession of faith into la ilaha ill@l-‘ishq, “there is no deity save Love,”
a formulation that I often heard from Turkish Sufis.
The discussions on mystical love became more complicated in the
Baghdad circles about goo, with the introduction of the notion of
hubb ‘udhvi, ‘platonic love.” Jamil, a noted poet from the tribe of
“Udhra in the late seventh century, had sung of his chaste love for
Buthayna in delicate verses that almost foreshadow the love lyrics
138 / THE PATH
of Spanish and French troubadours; and soon a hadith was coined,
according to which the Prophet had said: “Whoever loves and
remains chaste, and dies, dies as a martyr.”
It was Muhammad ibn Da’id, the son of the founder of the
Zahirite law school who composed, in Hallaj’s day, a book on the
ideal chaste love, containing one hundred chapters of poetry about
hubb ‘udhri and stressing the necessity of the “martyrdom of chas-
tity.” He and his followers denied the possibility of mutual love
between man and God and excluded every human object from
mystical love, Yet two centuries later the two currents merged in
the verses of some of the greatest Persian mystical poets.
Another accusation brought against the love theories of the Sufis
was that they represented Manichaean ideas. Worship of God by
love is the sin of the Manichaeans, the heretics par excellence who
imagine that their souls are particles of the eternal divine light,
imprisoned in the body, and that a magnetic attraction from the
origin of this love will attract them to become united with their
origin again. This interpretation is incorrect for the early stages of
mystical love, but it points to a development that was inherent in
Sufi love theories: love became, with many of the later Sufis, the
“growing power” that causes the possibilities of perfection in every-
thing to unfold.*® The “essential desire” of Hallaj’s God often turns
into a more or less magnetic force that has caused emanation and
draws everything back to its source.?”
But love as experienced by the early Sufis is a strong personal
and existential commitment. Hallaj did not even hesitate to place
it higher than faith (¢mdn): “It is a primordial divine grace without
which you would not have learned what the Book is nor what Faith
is’ (P 610). The mystics felt that the love they experienced was not
their own work but was called into existence by God’s activity. Did
not the Koran attest: “He loves them, and they love Him” (Siira
5:59)—a word that shows that God’s love precedes human love?
Only when God loves His servant can he love Him, and, on the
other hand, he cannot refuse to love God, since the initiative
comes from God (A 10:7). Love cannot be learned; it is the result of
divine grace—‘‘If a world would draw love into it, it could not do it,
and if they would strive to reject it, they could not do it, for it is a
26. Ibn Sina, “Risdla fil-Sishq”: Traitée sur Vamour, ed. August Ferdinand Mehren
(Leiden, 1894).
27. Fritz Meier, “Das Problem der Natur im esoterischen Monismus des Islams,”
Eranos-Jahrbuch 14 (1946), p. 218, on Nasafi’s theories.
THE PATH / 199
gift, not an acquisition. It is divine” (H 398). The Sufis, deepening
the general Muslim knowledge that the divine greatness overpow-
ers everything, have always felt that man is far too weak to seek God.
Not a single lover would seek union
if the beloved were not seeking it,
(M 3:4394)
sings Rimi, three hundred years after these ideas had been formu-
lated for the first time. The idea that God was ‘‘a hidden treasure
that longed to be known” has grown out of this feeling of God’s
desire to love and to be loved. He is, as Muhammad Iqbal has said
in our day, “‘like us, a prisoner of Desire.’ ?*
The Sufis have often tried to describe the state of the true lover
in poetical images. Bayezid saw the springlike quality of love: “I
walked in the steppe, it had rained love, and the soil was moist—
just as the foot of man walks in a rose garden, thus my feet walked
in love” (T 1:155). And Shibli takes up this spring imagery, which
was to become a central theme of Persian poetry: ‘“The ‘time’ of the
gnostic is like a spring day, the thunder roars and the cloud weeps
and the lightning burns and the wind blows and the buds open
and the birds sing—this is his state: he weeps with his eyes, smiles
with his lips, burns with his heart, plays with his head, says the
friend’s name and roams around his door’ (T 2:177). In descrip-
tions like this, technical treatises on Sufism suddenly turn into sheer
poetry. Many of these descriptions are couched in the form of a
hadith, which declares, “verily God has servants who .. .,”’ or take
the form of a hadith qudsi, like the one quoted by Ghazzali:
Verily, I have servants among my servants who love Me, and I love
them, and they long for Me, and I long for them and they look at Me,
and I look at them... And their signs are that they preserve the shade at
daytime as compassionately as a herdsman preserves his sheep, and they
long for sunset as the bird longs for his nest at dusk, and when the night
comes and the shadows become mixed and the beds are spread out and
the bedsteads are put up and every lover is alone with his beloved, then
they will stand on their feet and put their faces on the ground and will
call Me with My word and will flatter Me with My graces, half crying
and half weeping, half bewildered and half complaining, sometimes
standing, sometimes sitting, sometimes kneeling, sometimes prostrating,
and I see what they bear for My sake and I hear what they complain
from My love. (G 4:278)
28. Muhammad Iqbal, Zabur-i Sajam (Lahore, 1927), part 2, no. 29; trans. A. J.
Arberry as Persian Psalms (Lahore, 1948), part 2, no. 29.
140 / THE PATH
These lovers will be granted a special place at Doomsday, beyond
the communities of the various prophets, and those who love each
other in God will be on a pillar of red garnet and will look down
on the inhabitants of Paradise.*® But a description of mystical love
is altogether impossible—no one could put this truth better than
Sumniun, surnamed “the Lover”: “A thing can be explained only
by something that is subtler than itself. There is nothing subtler
than love—by what, then, shall love be explained?” (H 178).
Science would be of no avail on this Path—only the light of gnosis,
the light of certainty gained through intuitive knowledge, could
help in approaching the mystery of love. The sciences are like eye-
glasses, which cannot see by themselves but stand between the eye
and the objects, as a seventeenth-century mystic from Sind said,
using a modern image but remaining, in substance, faithful to the
traditional view. He explains by this image an alleged hadith that
calls ‘Silm, “knowledge,” the “greatest veil” separating man from
God. On the way of love, intellect is like the donkey that carries
books (Sia 62:5); it is a lame ass, whereas love is like the winged
buraq that brought Muhammad into the presence of God (D 1997).
The contrast between love and discursive reason provided an
inexhaustible topic for later poets; they would like
to hang intellect like a thief
when love becomes the ruler of the country.
(D 420)
Thus the figure of Majniin, the demented lover, lost in his con-
templation of Laila, might serve as a model for the mystical lover.
Love is the most genuine quality of the human race. God created
Adam out of love; Adam bears in himself the divine image, and
no other created being can follow him in the way of love.
When the angel falls in love,
he is the perfect human.
(U 96)
The mystics did not hesitate to give people who do not know love
names such as “‘cow,”’ “jackass,” ‘‘hard stone,” or “animal,” based
on the Koranic sentence, “they are like beasts, nay, even more
29. Abu?l-Hasan ad-Daylami, Kitab ‘atf al-alif al-malaf ila@l-lam al-ma‘tiif, ed.
Jean-Claude Vadet (Cairo, 1962), § 101, § 363.
PHEPATEA | 141
astray” (Stiira 7:178). The expression “lower than a dog” occurs
(M 5:2008), for even animals know at least one aspect of love.
The most charming story in this respect, probably told first by
“Attar (U 129) and retold by “Iraqi, deals with a preacher in Shiraz
who spoke so poignantly about love that everybody dissolved in
tears. A man had inquired of him before the sermon whether by
chance he knew where his lost donkey had gone. After the sermon,
the preacher asked the community if there was anybody who had
never experienced love.
A certain fool ill-favored as an ass
in sheer stupidity sprang to his feet.
“Art thou the man, the elder asked, whose heart
was never bound by love?” Yea, he replied.
Then said the sage: ‘““Ho, thou that hadst an ass,
lo, I have found thine ass. The cropper, quick!’’*°
The genuine lover is the most honored person in both worlds, for
the Prophet said: ‘‘Man is with him whom he loves.”’ Thus the lover
is constantly with God, whom he loves to the exclusion of every-
thing else (T 2:85).
Love is, for the Sufis, the only legitimate way to educate the base
faculties. The rules of asceticism in themselves are purely negative;
as indispensable as they are, they have to be performed out of love.
Only by this method can the shaytdn, the lower soul, be transformed
—he becomes like Gabriel, and his demonic qualities die (M 6:3648).
Having reached this stage, which may be called “loving tauhid,”
man sees with the eye of intuitive knowledge and understands the
ways of God. Loving acceptance of God’s will can resolve the enigma
of free will and predestination in a higher unity.
Whether the final station be seen as love or as gnosis, the disciple
has to continue in his preparatory activities, like dhikr and con-
centration, which may eventually lead him to the goal, fanad and
baq@.*! He should concentrate on perfect collectedness in contem-
plation (muraqaba), and from this point he may attain vision
(mushahada). But it is a vision that can be described only approxi-
mately as presence or proximity, combined with ‘Silm al-yaqin,
go. Fakhruddin “Iraqi, The Song of the Lovers (Sushshaqname), ed. and trans.
A, J. Arberry (Oxford, 1939), pp. 30 ff.
31. Reynold A. Nicholson, “The Goal of Muhammadan Mysticism,” Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, 1913.
142 / THE PATH
“knowledge of certitude” (L 69). The station of sincere ‘ilm al-
yaqin leads further to ‘ayn al-yaqin, “vision of certitude”’ or “essence
of certainty’—the station of the gnostics—until it is consummated
in haqq al-yaqin, the “real certitude”’ or “reality of certainty,” which
is the place of God’s friends.® These terms are taken from Stra 102
and Siira 56:95, where they have, however, no mystical connotations
at all. Haqq al-yagin is attained in fana; it has been symbolized,
in Hallaj’s Kitab at-tawdsin, as the way of the moth, which experi-
ences ‘ilm al-yagin when it sees the light of the candle, ‘ayn al-yagin
when it draws near and feels its heat, and haqq al-yaqin when it is,
finally, burned and consumed by the flame.
The true meaning of fand has been one of the controversial topics
in the study of Sufism. The German term Entwerden, as used by
the medieval mystics, is closer to its meaning than words like
“annihilation,” ‘being naughted,” or ‘‘passing away,” since it is the
opposite of “becoming,” werden.
Some scholars have tried to equate fana with the Hindu or
Buddhist concept of nirvana, but this is incorrect. It is not the ex-
perience of being freed from a painful circle of existence, since
Islam lacks the idea of karma and accepts the reality of the indi-
vidual soul. Fand is, in the beginning, an ethical concept: man
becomes annihilated and takes on God’s attributes—it is the place of
the alleged hadith takhallaqii bi-akhlaq Allah, ‘‘qualify yourself
with the qualities of God,” i.e., through constant mental struggle
exchange your own base qualities for the praiseworthy qualities by
which God has described Himself in the Koranic revelation. The
next stage is annihilation in vision, when the soul is surrounded by
the primordial light of God. The third and final stage, then, is “an-
nihilation from one’s vision of annihilation,’ in which one is
immersed in the wujtid, the ‘‘existence” of God or, rather, the
“finding” of God. For the word wujiid, which is usually translated
as “existence,” means, originally, the “being found’”—and that is
what the mystic experiences. There is a well-known verse that points
to existence as created in time:
When I said: What have I sinned? she answered:
Your existence is a sin with which no sin can be
compared.
(L 59)
32. Al-Khanqahi, Guzida, p. 208.
THE PATH / 143
Man should recover the state he had on the Day of the Primordial
Covenant, when he became existentialized, endowed with individ-
ual existence by God, which, however, involved a separation from
God by the veil of createdness (cf. MM 65). This veil cannot be
lifted completely during one’s lifetime. The mystic cannot com-
pletely and substantially be annihilated in God, but he may be lost
for a while in the fathomless ocean of bewilderment, as it has been
defined by Kalabadhi: “Fand . . . may consist of being absent from
his own attributes, so that he appears to be really mad and to have
lost his reason . . . . For all that he is preserved to perform his duties
to God .... On the other hand he may be a leader to be followed,
governing those who attach themselves to him” (K 131). The prob-
lem is whether or not the mystic can return to his own qualities
after this experience: “The great Sufis . . . do not hold that the
mystic returns to his own attributes after a passing away. They
argue that passing-away is a divine bounty and fit for the mystic,
a special mark of favour, not an acquired condition: it is a thing
which God vouchsafes to those whom He has chosen and elected for
Himself” (K 127).
The best interpretation of fand and the following stage, baqa,
has been given by the Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu,** who
explains fand as “the total nullification of the ego-consciousness,
when there remains only the absolute Unity of Reality in its purity
as an absolute Awareness prior to its bifurcation into subject and
object’’—the state the Sufis would call jam‘, ‘‘unification, collected-
ness.” The Sufi experiences the return to the moment when God
was, and there was nothing else. Fand is ‘certainly a human ex-
perience . . . but man is not the subject of this experience. The
subject is rather the metaphysical Reality itself’’—we may think of
Rutimi's attempt at clarifying the same state with an example taken
from grammar: mata Zayd, “Zayd died,” a sentence in which Zayd
is the subject, but not the acting subject (M 3:3683).
Then man may reach the state of baq4, “persistence” or “‘subsis-
tence” in God, and experience the ‘‘second separation” or “‘gather-
ing of the gathering,” jam‘ al-jam‘: “Man is resuscitated out of the
nothingness, completely transformed into an absolute Self. The
multiplicity becomes visible again—but in a changed form, namely
33- Toshihiko Izutsu, “The Basic Structure of Metaphysical Thinking in Islam,”
in Collected Papers on Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, ed. Mehdi Mohaghegh and
Hermann Landolt (Tehran, 1971), p. 39f., an illuminating article.
144 /| THE PATH
as determinations of the one Reality.” In this state, the mystic acts
completely through God.
When you seek baqd, request it from the dervishes—
the dervishes are the warp and woof of the garment
(qaba) of baqa,
(SD 186)
says Sana’i, with a fine pun; but for most of the mystics baq@ is
connected particularly with the prophetic activity. God, who has
promised the loving soul that he will “become his eye by which he
sees,” has shown this aspect of religious life, which is turned toward
the world in the acts of the prophets. For after the Battle of Badr
(624), Muhammad was addressed: “Ma ramayta idh ramayta, ‘you
did not cast when you cast, but God did it’” (Siira 8:17). And al-
though many Sufis claimed to have attained baqd, the distinction
between the “saintly” and ‘prophetic’ aspects of fandé and baqa
gained new importance in later Sufi theories, mainly with the
Nagqshbandis.
Fand is not to be confused with ittihad, “union,” a term that
presupposes the existence of two independent beings and has, there-
fore, been regarded as heretic, as has hulil, “indwelling,” which
means the incarnation of the divine in man. Orthodox Muslims
accused not only the Christians, but also Hallaj and the represen-
tatives of love mysticism, of accepting the concept of hulil. Fana,
however, is the nullification of the mystic in the divine presence.
Later mystics tried to explain the state of fana@ and baqa in won-
derful images. The metaphors of Islamic mysticism and philosophy
are not merely poetic ornaments but are indicative of a peculiar
way of thinking. The Sufis have, for instance, spoken of the ex-
perience of the Black Light—the light of bewilderment: when the
divine light fully appears in the mystic’s consciousness, all things
disappear instead of remaining visible (medieval and Renaissance
mystics in Germany would speak of the tiberhelle Nacht). Such is
the experience of fand—a blackout of everything until the mystic
perceives that this blackness is ‘‘in reality the very light of the Abso-
lute-as-such,” for existence in its purity is invisible and appears as
nothing. To discover the clarity of this black light is to find the
green water of life, which, according to the legends, is hidden in
the deepest darkness—baq4, persistence in God, is concealed in the
very center of fand.
THE PATH / 145
Hallaj had used the allegory of the moth and the candle to allude
to the state of extinction. Rimi, in order to explain Hallaj’s unitive
expression ana’l-Haqq, compares the mystic in this state to a piece
of iron that is thrown into the furnace and becomes so hot that it
regards itself as fire (M 2:1445), though a substantial union cannot
be achieved. This imagery, known from Christian mysticism as well,
is also found in the terminology of the Narbakhshi mystics in Iran
(MM 129).
The same Rimi has also interpreted Kharaq4ni’s saying—‘‘there
is no dervish in the world, and if there be a dervish, that is non-
existent’’—in a line that perhaps comes closest to elucidating the
mystery of fand:
Like the flame of the candle in the presence of the sun,
he is (really) non-existent, (though he is) existent in
formal calculation.
(M 3:3669-73)
One of the strangest symbols for the experience of fand and baqa
has been used by mystics from ‘Attar to the eighteenth-century In-
dian Mir Dard: The divine essence is compared to a salt mine, into
which a dog, or a donkey, falls; thus, losing its low qualities, the ani-
mal is transformed into this element and preserved in it. The com-
parison is all the more fitting since ba-namak, “‘saltish,” also means
“cute, charming,” and can thus be used to describe the charming
beloved in whom the lover becomes completely absorbed.**
It is in this state of absorption that the mystics have sometimes
uttered expressions that do not fit into the orthodox views, or even
into moderate Sufism. The so-called shathiyat (plural of shath),
like Hallaj’s ana’l-Haqq or Bayezid’s “‘Glory be to Me! How great
is My Majesty!” are among the most famous of these ‘“‘theopathic
locutions” or paradoxes, to which Ruzbihan Baqli has devoted a
whole book. Their study is one of the most interesting, but also
most difficult, topics in the history of Sufism, and the daring, partly
jubilant, partly bewildered words that Rtzbihan has put together
and interpreted in an existential, authentic way allow a glimpse
into the depths of mystical experience, which, however, can never
be appropriately expressed in human words.
34. The same expression has also been used for the tomb. For the imagery see
Fariduddin ‘Attar, Diwan-i qas@id wa ghazaliyat, ed. Sa‘id Nafisi (Tehran, 1339
sh./1960), no. 515; Jalaluddin Rami, D 3041, M 2:1344, and M
856; Khwaja Mir
Dard, “Dard-i Dil,” no. 161, in Chahar risala (Bhopal, 1310 h./1892-93)-
146 / THE PATH
Just as the mystics have constantly invented new symbols to
describe the state of fand@ and baqa, they have also attempted to
show what tauhid is. Tauhid, ‘‘to declare that God is One,” is the
goal of religious life for the Muslim in general and for the Sufi in
particular. Hujwiri speaks of three kinds of tauhid: “God's unifica-
tion of God, i.e. His knowledge of His Unity; God’s unification of
His creatures, i.e. His decree that a man shall pronounce Him to
be one, and the creation of unification in his heart; man’s unifica-
tion of God, i.e. their knowledge of the Unity of God” (H 278).
For the orthodox mystics, tawhid meant, first of all, the recognition
that there is no agent but God and that everything and everybody
are dependent upon Him. This idea could easily lead to the ac-
knowledgment that only He had real existence and that only He
had the right to say “I’—that God is the only true subject.
In the chapter on love in the Ihy@ ‘uliim ad-din, Ghazzali defines
the orthodox way of reaching tawhid very clearly:
Whoever jooks at the world because it is God’s work, and knows it be-
cause it is God’s work, and loves it because it is God’s work, does not look
save to God and does not know save God, and does not love save God,
and he is the true unifier (muwahhid) who does not see anything but
God, nay who does not even look at himself for his own sake but because
he is God’s servant—and of such a person it is said that he is annihilated
in unification and that he is annihilated from himself. (G 4:276)
This is an elaborated formulation of what an earlier Sufi, quoted
by Hujwiri, had said: ‘‘Unification is this: that nothing should oc-
cur to your mind except God” (H 158). Junayd, in turn, has taken
the idea of,tawhid back to the Day of the Primordial Covenant:
Unification is this, that one should be a figure in the hands of God, a
figure over which His decrees pass according as He in His omnipotence
determines, and that one should be sunk in the sea of His unity, self-
annihilated and dead alike to the call of mankind to him and his answer
to them, absorbed by the reality of the divine unity in true proximity,
and lost to sense and action, because God fulfils in him what He hath
willed of him, namely that his last state become his first state, and that
he should be as he was before he existed. (H 282-83)
True tauhid, then, means to forget tauhid (B 383). It is a state in
which the sharp-sighted are blinded and men of reason are confused
(L 33). The poets have often repeated the verse:
And in everything there is a witness for Him
that points to the fact that He is One.
(L 33)
THE PATH / 147
The all-pervading presence of God as witnessed by the muwahhid
has often been expressed by the Sufis in the saying, “I did not see
anything without seeing God before it and after it and with it and
in it.” Some parts of this sentence can be traced back to early Sufism
and have been attributed by some later writers to the first four
caliphs of Islam as representing the four different approaches of
one who confesses tawhid.** But Hujwiri has given the more correct
version—Muhammad ibn Wasi‘ said: “I never saw anything without
seeing God therein,” which indicates an advanced stage of contem-
plation in which the mystic sees only the agent. This insight can be
developed through perfect faith and is istidlali, ‘gained through
inference.” Shibli, however, exclaimed: “I never saw anything
except God.” Enraptured (jadhbi), he sees only God, nothing else
(H_ 91, 330).
It was easy to move from Shibli’s statement to the feeling ex-
pressed in so many Persian and Turkish verses: “In mosques and
taverns, in pagan and Muslim only God I saw!”’ The mystics could
support such expressions from the Koran: ““Whithersoever ye turn,
there is the Face of God” (Stira 2:109), a sentence that forms one
of the cornerstones of later mystical theories, supplying the Sufis
with the proof that God, the only agent, the only true existent, is
visible, to the enlightened mystic, in every shape and behind every
Bea
disguise. As Sana’i’s famous lines attest:
The word that you speak about faith may be Hebrew or
Syrian,
The place that you seek for God’s sake, may be Jablagqa
or Jablasa.
(SD 52)
From here it is only one step to the feeling of God’s all-embracing
presence that Persian poets since ‘Attar (U 223) have condensed
in the sentence hama ist, ‘Everything is He’”’—an interpretation of
tawhid that has always been attacked by the more orthodox Sufis
because it apparently denies the transcendence of God. It is from
these enthusiastic expressions of unity, found in most of the Persian
mystics in more or less outspoken form, that Western scholars have
gained the impression that Sufism is nothing but measureless
pantheism.
Sarraj, though rather close to the beginnings of Sufi speculation,
35. Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Hamza al-Fansiiri, p. 265.
148 / THE PATH
is certainly right when he says that the manifold definitions of
tauhid defy explanation and convey only a weak shade of the
reality—‘‘and if one enters into explanation and expression, then
its splendour becomes hidden and disappears” (L 31).
FORMS OF WORSHIP*®
Ritual Prayer
One of the five pillars of Islam is the ritual prayer (salat;
in Persian and in Turkish, namdz) to be performed five times a day
at prescribed hours between the moment before sunrise and the
beginning of complete darkness. In the Koran, night prayer was
recommended but not made obligatory for believers. Early Muslim
ascetics and mystics regarded ritual prayer, in accordance with the
Prophet’s saying, as a kind of ascension to Heaven, as a mi‘raj that
brought them into the immediate presence of God. “Ritual prayer
is the key to Paradise,” says a tradition; but for the mystics, it was
even more. Some of them connected the word saldt with the root
wasala, ‘‘to arrive, be united”; thus, prayer became the time of
connection, the moment of proximity to God (L 150). Did not the
Koran repeatedly state that all of creation was brought into being
for the purpose of worshiping God? Thus, those who wanted to
gain special proximity to the Lord, and prove their obedience and
love, were, without doubt, those who attributed the most impor-
tance to ritual prayer. They might even be able to make the angel
of death wait until their prayer was finished (T 2:119).
One of the prerequisites of ritual prayer is that ritual purity
(tahara) be performed according to the strict rules laid down in the
Prophetic tradition. The mystics laid great stress on the meticulous
performance of the ablutions, which became, for them, symbols
of the purification of the soul (H 293). A good translator of the
feelings of his fellow mystics, Shibli said: “Whenever I have ne-
glected any rule of purification, some vain conceit will rise in my
heart” (H 293). Hagiographical literature is filled with stories about
36. Friedrich Heiler, Das Gebet, 5th ed. (Munich, 1923); translated by Samuel Mc-
Comb as Prayer (1932; paperback ed., New York, 1958), condensed and without the
extensive critical apparatus of the original. Heiler’s book is the best introduction to
the problem as seen by a historian of religion. Edwin Elliot Calverley, Worship in
Islam, Being a Translation, with Commentary and Introduction, of al-Ghazzdli’s Book
of the “Ihya>” on the Worship (Madras, 1925).
THE PATH / 149
Sufis who indulged in ritual purification to the extent that they
would perform the great ablution (ghusl) before every prayer or
before visiting their spiritual director (N 292), which was, for them,
a religious duty comparable to prayer. Some would purify them-
selves in a river even in the middle of the Central Asian winter;
others would become enraptured at the very moment the water for
ablution was poured over their hands.?7 And a number of Sufis
boasted of being able to perform the morning prayer while still in
ritual purity from evening prayer, meaning that they had neither
slept nor been polluted by any bodily function. Some of them even
reached a state of remaining in ritual purity for several days.
As for the details of ritual prayer, the early Sufis followed the
prescriptions of the law exactly. They tried to imitate the model
of the Prophet even in the smallest details. Since one tradition
holds that Muhammad once performed the salat of tiptoe, some
Sufis wanted to follow him in this peculiar way; but a dream vision
informed one of them that this was reserved exclusively for the
Prophet and that the normal believer need not imitate it (X 24).
If confined to bed, they would repeat each prostration and move-
ment twice, since, according to the tradition, “the prayer of the
sitting man is worth only half that of the standing person” (X 39;
cf. S 144). Stories are told about mystics who, though unable to
walk or move at all, regained their strength the very moment the
call to prayer was heard, but returned to their state of weakness as
soon as they had performed their religious duty.
At the moment the mystic utters the niya (the intention to per-
form his prayer) with the correct number of rak‘as (units of prostra-
tion, genuflection, etc.), he expresses the intention to turn away
from everything created. During prayer he feels as if he were waiting
before God at Doomsday. Muhasibi has described well this feeling
of overwhelming awe:
What predominates in the heart of the mystic while he is at prayer is his
sense of the mystery of Him in Whose Presence he stands and the might
of Him Whom he seeks and the love of Him Who favours him with
familiar intercourse with Himself, and he is conscious of that until he
has finished praying, and he departs with a face so changed that his
friends would not recognise him, because of the awe that he feels at the
Majesty of God. It is so that one who comes into the presence of some
king, or someone for whom he yearns and whom he fears, stands in his
37. Mir SAli Shir QaniS, Tuhfat ul-kiram (Hyderabad, Sind, 1957), p- 386.
150 / THE PATH
presence, with a different attitude from what was his before he entered
and goes out with an altered countenance. And how should it not be so
with the Lord of the world, Who has not ceased to be nor will cease to
be, He Who hath no equal?**
Muhasibi’s younger contemporary Kharraz, “in a book in which
he describes the etiquette of ritual prayer’ (L 152 f.), makes us
sense even more intensely the mystic’s attitude as required in his
salat:
When entering on prayer you should come into the Presence of God as
you would on the Day of Resurrection, when you will stand before Him
with no mediator between, for He welcomes you and you are in confiden-
tial talk with Him and you know in whose Presence you are standing, for
He is the King of kings. When you have lifted your hands and said “God
is most great” then let nothing remain in your heart save glorification,
and let nothing be in your mind in the time of glorification, than the
glory of God Most High, so that you forget this world and the next,
while glorifying Him.
When a man bows in prayer, then it is fitting that he should after-
wards raise himself, then bow again to make intercession, until every
joint of his body is directed towards the throne of God, and this means
that he glorifies God Most High until there is nothing in his heart
greater than God Most Glorious and he thinks so little of himself that he
feels himself to be less than a mote of dust.*?
The most touching description of this state of awe, in which every
limb joins in the worship until body and mind alike are directed
toward God, is Rimi’s story of Daqiiqi and his congregational
prayer (M 3:2140—44, 2147-48):
Daqiqi advanced to perform the prayer: the company
were the satin robe and he the embroidered border.
Those [spiritual] kings followed his leadership,
[standing] in a row behind that renowned exemplar.
When they pronounced the takbirs, they went forth from
this world, like a sacrifice.
O Imam, the [real] meaning of the takbir is this: ‘“‘We
have become a sacrifice, O God, before Thee.”
At the moment of slaughtering you say Allah akbar: even
so [do] in slaughtering the fleshly soul which ought to
be killed....
Whilst performing the prayer [they were] drawn up in
38. Margaret Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam (London, 1950), no. 16.
Al-Harith al-Muhisibi, Kitab ar-ri€ dya li-huqig Allah, ed. Margaret Smith (London,
1940), p. 28.
39. Smith, Readings, no. 26.
Woman in trance at a saint’s tomb in Pakistan.
Photograph by Dr. Jan Marek, Prague
152 / THE PATH
ranks before God as at Resurrection, and engaged in
self-examination and orisons.
Standing in God’s presence and shedding tears, like one
who rises erect on [the day of] rising from the dead.
Notwithstanding their eagerness to perform the saldt punctually,
some Sufis reached such a state of absolute absorption or rapture
that ritual prayer seemed to constitute for them an interruption
of their mystical state. Hujwiri has defined the various types of
mystics by their attitudes toward the salat: some hold that it is
a means of obtaining the presence of God; others regard it as a
means of obtaining absence (H 301). Some would pray hundreds
of rak‘as a day in order to remain in constant communion with
God; others had to ask somebody else to count their rak‘as during
the act of prayer because they themselves were not capable of doing
it, since, in their enraptured state, time could expand into thou-
sands of years in one hour (N 455), so that the correct timing would
escape them. Some mystics regarded saldt as an ascetic discipline
that was absolutely necessary to preserve and that the disciples had
to follow carefully; others saw and experienced it as an act of divine
grace. The Sufi who experienced mystical union through prayer
would certainly prolong his salat by adding long litanies of supere-
rogative rak‘as to the basic, prescribed form, whereas the mystic
whose rapture or contemplation was more or less interrupted by
the prescribed ritual would certainly not perform more than the
minimal requirements. When a Sufi was completely lost in ecstasy
for a period of days, or even weeks, he was exempt from praying.
There were mystics who were transported into an ecstatic state as
soon as they pronounced the word “Allah” in the beginning of the
call to prayer, without even reaching the next word, akbar, “most
great” (N 281). And the mystical poets—beginning with Hlallaj—
often spoke of the state in which intoxication and perfect love
would make them forget morning and evening and the times of
ritual prayer.”
The Sufis have interpreted the meaning of the salat differently.
Most of them would probably agree with Najmuddin Kubra’s defi-
nition that prayer according to the shari‘a is service, according to
40. Husayn ibn Mansi al-Hallaj, “Diwan, Essai de reconstitution by Louis Mas-
signon,” Journal asiatique, January—July 1931, Muqatta‘a no. 20; see Shibli in N 181.
THE PATH / 153
the tariqa, proximity, and according to the kagigqa, union with
God.
An esoteric interpretation might see in the different movements
of the praying Muslim a representation of the movement of wor-
ship found throughout creation: the prostration reminds him of
the vegetable state, the ruki‘, ‘‘genuflection,” of the animal state,
and the upright position is the prerogative of human beings. Every-
thing worships God in its own way. The angels spend eternities
worshiping the Lord in a single attitude, according to their rank;
only man can represent, in his different prayer movements, the full-
ness of adoration that is the duty of everything created.” This idea
underlies a Bektashi poem in which the forms of prayer are con-
nected with the name of Adam, the model of humanity:
When you stand up, an alif is formed, |
In bending behold: a dal is made; 3
When you have prostrated, a mim takes shape: ¢
That is, I tell you, to perceive man—Adam. ¢ 5 |
(BO 207)
Other interpreters have seen in the Arabic letters of the name of
Muhammad (4...) the figure of man, prostrate before God. And
Bedil, in the late seventeenth century, compares the human life
to the movements of ritual prayer:
Youth is standing upright, old age genuflection, and
annihilation prostration.
In existence and nonexistence one can do nothing but
perform the ritual prayer.
(Divan 1:386)
“The prostration of the body is the proximity of the soul” (M 4:11),
for God Himself said in the Koran: “Prostrate and draw near”
(usjud wa?qtarib; Siira 96:19).
The formulae used during the ritual prayer were also interpreted
according to their esoteric meaning—especially the fatika, the first
Sura of the Koran, which is recited in Islam as often as, or perhaps
even more than, the Lord’s Prayer in Christianity:
41. Najmuddin Kubra, Risdla fi fadilat as-salat (Istanbul Universitesi Kiitiiphanesi,
Arab. 4530), 2b.
42. Henri Corbin, “Imagination créatrice et priére créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn
Arabi,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 25 (1956), Pp. 195-
154 / THE PATH
Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds!
The Compassionate, the Merciful!
King on the day of reckoning!
Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help.
Guide Thou us on the straight path,
The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious;
with whom Thou art not angry, and who go not astray.
A hadith qudsi makes God declare that He has divided this prayer
between Himself and His servant. Relying on this sentence, Ibn
‘Arabi found in the seven lines of the fatika the perfect expression
of the relation between man and God: the first three lines are the
action of the faithful directed toward the Lord, the fourth line is
a reciprocal action, and the last three lines express the divine activity
acting upon man.*
The different interpretations the Sufis give of the ritual prayer
and its details would fill a large volume. They range from the simple
act of obedience to the feeling that God himself performs the prayer,
as Ibn al-Farid says in the T@iyya:
Both of us are a single worshipper who, in respect to the
united state, bows himself to his own essence in every
act of bowing.
None prayed to me but myself, nor did I pray to any one
but myself in the performance of every genuflexion.**
Even the mystical interpretations of ritual prayer were not suffi-
cient to satisfy the mystic’s thirst for more and more intimate dis-
course with his beloved. The problem of how such prayer might
reach God has been posed more than once—perhaps most impres-
sively by Niffari, who was graced by God’s address:
Thou desirest to pray all night, and thou desirest to recite all the sections
of the Quran therein; but thou prayest not. He only prays all night who
prays for Me, not for any known rosary or comprehended portion of
scripture. Him I meet with my face, and he stays through My Self-subsis-
tence, desiring neither for Me nor of Me. If I wish, I converse with him:
and if I wish to instruct him, I instruct him.
The people of the rosary depart when they have achieved it, and the
people of the portion of the Quran depart when they have read it; but
my people depart not, for how should they depart? *
4g- Ibid., p. 187.
44. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Idea of Personality in Sufism (1921; reprint ed.,
Cambridge, 1967), p. 19; verse 153-54 of the T@iyya.
45- Niffari, Mukh., no. 50.1-2.
THE PATH / 155
‘True prayer is constant. It cannot be limited to a number of rak‘as
and portions of the Koran, but permeates man’s whole being—an
idea that in our day has been expressed once more by Muhammad
Iqbal, who follows Rimi’s example.*°
Free Prayer®™
In part, the longing for more and more intense conversa-
tion with God was satisfied by the possibility of uttering free prayers.
Adoration, as well as supplication, is an important part of the
mystical prayer life, and if the classical rule lex orandi lex credendi
can be applied anywhere, it certainly applies to the mystical circles
in Islam.
“To be deprived of prayer (du‘a) would be a greater loss for me
than to be deprived of being heard and granted” (T 1:56). These
words of one of the very early Sufis form a keynote for our under-
standing of the moderate Sufi viewpoint concerning prayer. Prayer
can be classified as an intimate conversation, mundjat, between
man and God, as an exchange of words of love that console the af-
flicted heart even if they are not immediately answered. It is “the
language of yearning for the beloved” (Q 121). From this viewpoint,
the importance of night prayer in mystical circles can be properly
understood. According to the tradition, Hasan ibn “Ali, the Proph-
et’s grandson, was once asked:
How is it that those people are most beautiful who pray
at night?
He said: Because they are alone with the All-Merciful
who covers them with light from His light.
(G 1:323)
And another mystic who neglected nightly prayer was accused by
God: ‘‘He lies who claims to love Me, and when the night comes
sleeps away from Me” (H 458). Night prayer, though perhaps worth-
less in the eyes of the common people, is “like a radiant candle” in
God’s eyes (M 3:2375).
Only the stern, quietistic mystics—in Islam as well as in other re-
ligions—doubted whether it was lawful to utter a prayer at all: God,
46. Annemarie Schimmel, “The Idea of Prayer in the Thought of Iqbal,” Moslem
World 48 (1958): 3- : AY
47. Annemarie Schimmel, “Some Aspects of Mystical Prayer in Islam," Die Welt
des Islam, n.s. 2 (1952): 2+
156 / THE PATH
they thought, is ‘‘too mighty to be joined by prayer, or to be sepa-
rated from by omitting to pray” (K 144). They thought that silent
patience in affliction was more suitable than prayer. One of the
leading Khurasanian ascetics and author of a book on renunciation
(Kitab az-zuhd), ‘Abdallah ibn Mubarak, said: “It is about fifty
years since I have prayed or wished anyone to pray for me” (Q 144).
Since everything is preordained, why pray? It would be better to
leave oneself to complete tawakkul and practice perfect content-
ment with whatever has been sent by God. Even Dhiv’n-Nin is re-
ported to have told a man who asked him for a prayer: “If some-
thing has been preordained by God for you, then many unspoken
prayers have already been heard; otherwise: what use has the drown-
ing person for shouting? Only that he is the sooner drowned, and
more water comes into his throat’? (N 126). However, this attitude
of perfect resignation cannot be regarded as typical for the Sufis in
general. Most of them firmly believed in the necessity and impor-
tance of prayer, since God Himself had ordered in the Koran:
“Pray, and I will answer!” (Stra 40:62
Mystical Dimensaions of Islam
Annemarie Schimmel