Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam

The views on human embodiment I covered in the last chapter were concerned largely with the form of the generic human body as a component of the cosmos. The body’s place vis-à-vis the interior-exterior dichotomy demarcates its functions with respect to Sufi understandings of the purpose of existence. In this chapter I take the discussion one step further, by concentrating on intentional corporeal action that may lead to the fulfillment of religious goals. My main concern here is to provide a general picture of the range of observances and activities that go into the construction of saintly personas in Persianate Sufi literature. The materials I cover indicate practices that Sufis thought enabled them to overcome perceived inherent weaknesses of their bodies and turn the higher potential invested in them into reality.

This chapter is divided into three sections that aim to convey an umbrella picture of actions associated with the bodies of those who came to be regarded as great Sufi masters. I begin with Persianate Sufi views on Islamic legal precepts that constitute the most universal Islamic injunctions concerning the body. The body figures extensively in medieval jurisprudential discourse (fiqh) in such contexts as rules for purity, mandatory rituals, and the delimitation of legal and illegal foods. A vast majority of Sufis who concern me regarded strict adherence to the regimen of the shariʿa as a necessary first step on the Sufi path. The relevance of law is everywhere in evidence in Persianate Sufi literature, although many Sufi authors indicate dissatisfaction with the legal formalism associated with juridical discussions. Perceiving intricate arguments about minute details of all actions as casuistry, they sought to rationalize shariʿa injunctions through symbolic interpretation or sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature of the connection between corporeal action and spiritual attainment. I present examples of such rationalizations, followed by Sufi interpretations of some aspects of rules regarding ritual purity, the daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the hajj pilgrimage.

Extended hagiographic descriptions show that Sufi practices in the Persianate world extended beyond shariʿa regulations through the belief that some bodies are born with special religious power that matures through deliberate and systematic suppression of corporeal desire. The second section of this chapter illustrates this idea of differentiated potential of human bodies and its actualization through examples that pertain to key moments in the lives of famous Sufi masters. This theme is addressed in numerous places throughout this book, and my brief discussion in the context of this chapter is meant to indicate some general patterns in the consideration of the way Sufi masters’ bodily performances are implicated in the construction of their hagiographic images.

The last section of the chapter concentrates on zikr and samaʿ, rituals quintessentially associated with Sufi practice. Zikr means “remembrance” and involves repeating one of God’s names or a religious formula in conjunction with maintaining or moving the body in particular ways. My treatment here attends to the controversy surrounding proponents of silent versus vocal zikr that exercised many a Sufi in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The point of difference between the two sides on this score was the question of whether the body should be outwardly still while performing zikr or be allowed to speak and move in particular patterns. Both these ways of performing zikr implicated the body and held relationships with theories regarding the exterior-interior divide. The issue of how the body could represent internal states while acting in the exterior world is implicated in stories about great masters’ samaʿ (literally, “audition”) in which they reacted to music through dance. When performed with religious sanction, Sufi dance marked moving bodies as conduits between the interior world and the exterior cosmos filled with movement. Samaʿ was sometimes a controversial practice, and attending to arguments by practitioners and opponents illuminates a source of internal differentiation similar to the variance constituted by vocal and silent zikr.

Demarcating the rules of shariʿa law is one of the most elaborate and widespread discourses in the history of Islamic thought and is indeed one of the hallmarks of Islamic civilization. The extent to which shariʿa law can be shown to have mattered in the functioning of specific Muslim societies varies greatly in different geographical locations and time periods. However, there are very few instances one can point to in history where Muslims have not held up the shariʿa as a rhetorical ideal for the conduct of personal life and the management of societal affairs. In theory, the shariʿa provides principles to judge between right and wrong with regard to all actions undertaken by human beings. In history, however, the actual sphere of the shariʿa has been limited to issues Muslim have been interested in discussing on the basis of agreed upon sources and methodologies for argumentation. A historicizing view of shariʿa injunctions requires that we not only register scholarly discussions about the rules but also see how these were understood in the context of extrajuridical religious imperatives in particular sociohistorical settings.¹

To explicate Persianate Sufi efforts at interpreting the shariʿa, I will concentrate on works by authors who belonged to Khwajagani-Naqshbandi lineages.² The prominent master Bahaʾ ad-Din Naqshband (d. 1389) is reported to have described the relationship between the shariʿa and true reality (haqiqat) as being comparable to that between the protecting skin of an almond and its meat: if the skin becomes corrupted, the same must be true of what is underneath.³ Extending this understanding, Naqshband’s disciple Khwaja Muhammad Parsa provides a lengthy abstract justification for the primacy of following the rules of the shariʿa.⁴ He emphasizes the necessity of following the law in the context of a general discussion aimed at arguing that the Sufi path requires paying equal attention to corporeal and intellectual matters.

Parsa’s point of departure is the relative merit of different types of perception through which human beings become cognizant of their surroundings. He begins by acknowledging some would argue that intellectual perception has a higher value than sensory perception since the purview of the latter “is limited to the body. Intellectual perception [in contrast] knows things by their essences and detail; it sees both the hidden and the apparent aspects of things through their realities, and its purview includes the [whole] earth as well as the seven heavenly spheres.”⁵ Parsa accepts that the intellect has greater value when it comes to the depth of knowledge it provides, but he argues that sense perception is a more primary aspect of human existence since it saturates every cell of the body, the very basis for existence, and is nullified only through either actual death or the kind of voluntary death prized by Sufis that involves giving up all concern for material things. For Parsa, the all-pervasive and ever-present nature of sensory perception under the circumstances of normal existence means that human beings’ life trajectories are determined more by what they do with their bodies than by the disembodied knowledge that their intellects might make available to them during the course of their lives.

One of Parsa’s main proofs for arguing for the significance of sense perception is his contention that the shariʿa, God’s law for humanity, is addressed one half to sensory aspects of existence and the other to the intellect. The two types of perception have to work in tandem under the guidance of the shariʿa to reach the goals of human life. He illustrates the connection between the two through an analogy with the way a bird hatches out of the egg. Upon initial fertilization, the egg consists of a shell filled with liquid that has hidden potential to give rise to the bird’s body. The application of heat to the shell from the outside gradually turns the liquid inside into the bird, which eventually breaks out of the shell and flies away. Parsa writes that the eggshell is like the senses, and the liquid inside the egg like the intellect. Shariʿa rules that govern the body, and God’s direct epiphanies (tajalliyat) that come about as a result of Sufi endeavor, are like the heat that has to be applied to the egg to lead to its hatching. While the process is going on, both the shell/senses and liquid/intellect have to be kept intact. In the end, it is the liquid of intellect that transforms itself into the bird of the knowledge of God that comes out of the egg and flies to the heavens to reach God. But the bird can come into being only if the shell remains intact until the end, and if its surface bears the heat of God’s law and his self-manifestation in the form of epiphanies. Stringent attention to Islamic ritual practice is, therefore, an absolute necessity if one wishes to acquire intimate knowledge of God and, eventually, unite with him through mystical experience.

Parsa states that relatively few eggs laid by birds actually hatch into birds, and only a few hatchlings that come out of eggs live long enough to become fully grown birds. Similarly, only a small number of human beings make appropriate use of their senses and allow their intellects to acquire knowledge of God. Furthermore, among those who begin tasting this knowledge, relatively few actually put it into practice to reach the end of the path and become assimilated in God’s reality.⁶ According to this analogy, everyone must obey the shariʿa, but its impact on performers varies based on the potential inherent in individuals with different intellects and bodies. With this understanding, those destined to become great Sufis must be especially attentive to the regulations of the shariʿa in order to actualize their extraordinary potential.

The idea that persons who have the potential to reach the highest stations in Sufi terms would also be the ones most committed to the shariʿa can be observed throughout most of Persianate hagiographic literature. Parsa’s point regarding the shariʿa can be made more concrete by looking at metaphorical interpretations of a particular activity, the ablutions necessary before performing certain acts of worship. Virtually all Persianate Sufi descriptions of how one begins one’s journey on the path start with the requirement that the candidate cultivate an absolute dedication to following legal rules regarding purification and the performance of required rituals. Authors of these works see the state of purity as emblematic of a body concentrated on God. In the legal context alone, purity is necessary only when performing rituals, but many Sufi authors recommend that one be in a state of purity as much as possible throughout one’s day.

One prominent source describes the ablutions as a believer’s ultimate weapon against the corruptions of the world, implying that those who want to protect themselves must be armed with the state of ritual purity at all times.⁷ This author also cites his own master as having said that the shariʿa is particularly necessary for the Sufi because it helps to starve the body’s desires. When one has brought all the organs of the body under the control of the laws of shariʿa, the body becomes filled with light and all its organs begin acting in a way fundamentally different from their prior behavior.⁸ A body that is perpetually weeping (giryan) from the fear of God is described as being clothed with the possibility of meeting God, and the text implies that whatever causes one to weep, such as pain and suffering, is automatically of benefit to one’s journey on the path to God.⁹

A work by Yaʿqub Charkhi (d. 1447), a contemporary of Parsa and a disciple of Naqshband and his successor ʿAlaʾ ad-Din ʿAttar, provides an extensive interpretation of the question of legal purity in a work dedicated to masters of his lineage. Charkhi casts his work Kitab-i maqamat va silsila-yi Khwaja Naqshband (Book of the Stations and Lineage of Khwaja Naqshband) as a memoir of Naqshband’s greatness, which he had seen personally on display as his disciple. His purpose in writing the work was to make Naqshband’s teachings and personality available to later generations.¹⁰ Charkhi writes that one of Naqshband’s most emphatic recommendations was that a Sufi should attempt to retain the state of ritual purity at all times. This would, at a minimum, require very frequent ablutions, which he justifies through the hadith that God prefers those who clean themselves well. Charkhi’s appeal to physical cleanliness takes him beyond the legal requirement of ablutions, which is aimed solely at ritual purity.¹¹ This tendency becomes even more emphatic when he cites a hadith stating that sins associated with each part of the body subject to ablutions wash away as water is poured over them. He recommends also that the Sufi should always go to sleep in a state of ritual purity since that compels an angel to entreat God to forgive one. He maintains that the Sufi should avoid remaining in the kind of impurity that requires the full bath (sexual emission, menstruation, parturition) because a hadith states that someone who is in such a condition cannot enter paradise. Since one’s death can occur at any time, it is critical to avoid this particular state of impurity for the sake of salvation after earthly life.¹²

After emphasizing ritual requirements regarding the physical body, Charkhi moves to what he calls ablutions that pertain to the Sufi’s interior reality (batin). He equates these with establishing perfect sincerity of intention when one decides to become a Sufi. Such sincerity must precede all one’s actions on the Sufi path, much as the ablutions precede the required rituals. For Charkhi, the effects of these internal “ablutions of the heart” are immediately obvious in that they compel angels to aid one in one’s quest. Anyone who undertakes Sufi exercises without first establishing sincerity is subject to terrifying psychological experiences rather than any benefits.¹³ All of Charkhi’s comments on the significance of the state of ritual purity take the matter beyond a simple concern with formal legal requirements. His approach, which is quite typical of Persianate Sufis, is to interpret the laws by connecting them to other concerns such as actual physical cleanliness, the necessity of being ready for one’s death, and Muslims’ internal states, which are the true measure of their religious status. He takes for granted Muslims’ constant concern with states of ritual purity and impurity in daily life and ties this kind of corporeal awareness to larger themes in Sufi thought and practice.

Charkhi, Parsa, and many other masters validate the rules of the shariʿa by pointing to the larger purpose behind regulations that pertain to physical actions. Their efforts to rationalize the shariʿa or give metaphorical meaning to ritual acts leave the precise rules behind and emphasize, instead, either their functional significance (such as cleanliness) or the overall necessity of disciplining the body as much as the intellect for religious purposes.

Normative Islamic rituals constitute one major arena for shariʿa regulation, and over the centuries much jurisprudential ink has been spilt on discussing the exact ways in which to perform the so-called five pillars of Islam. According to a majority, these five pillars are profession of faith, ritual prayer (salat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (sawm), obligatory alms tax (zakat), and the pilgrimage to Mecca known as the hajj. Of these five pillars, ritual prayer, fasting, and the hajj are accomplished by following very specific rules involving the body, including, first of all, entering the state of ritual purity previously discussed.

Ritual prayers, performed multiple times during the day, form the backbone of daily corporeal submission from a legal standpoint. The kind of concentration in prayer Persianate Sufis sought in their practice is indicated in the story that states that the master Bahaʾ ad-Din ʿUmar (d. 1453) required one of his sons to stand next to him while he prayed in order to remind him of how many cycles he had gone through. Without this, he could go on performing the prayers endlessly because of the way they brought him close to God.¹⁴ Similarly, during his illness before death, Shaykh Safi ad-Din Ardabili (d. 1334) insisted on performing his prayers through all the standing and sitting phases despite the fact that he was too incapacitated to do this himself and had to have attendants present on both sides to make the body transition from one posture to the next.¹⁵

Ritual prayers require bringing the body into specific positions accompanied by the recitation of parts of the Quran and various religious formulas. A story from the Naqshbandi hagiography Rashahat-i ʿayn al-hayat exemplifies the degree to which one’s bodily comportment during prayer could index social acknowledgment of one’s religious status. Precisely because they wielded power over other people, Sufi masters were subject to minute surveillance by disciples seeking assurance regarding their religious credentials. The author states that one day as he was praying behind Shams ad-Din Muhammad Ruji (d. 1499), he noticed that that master was putting all his weight on the right foot, leaving the left one free, while he was in the sitting posture that comes at the end of the prayer cycle. This was contrary to the rules of prayer, since one’s weight is supposed to be distributed evenly across the feet. This seemingly minor observation was a serious enough issue that, after the prayer, the master divined the doubt occasioned in the author’s mind and addressed him directly, without being asked. He said that when he was young his father once took him to visit Shaykh Bahaʾ ad-Din ʿUmar. During the trip, his left foot was exposed to extreme cold while he was unable to cover it for fear of appearing rude to the great master. Even though the foot appeared to be devoid of any fault, he had been unable to put any weight on it while praying since that time. The “disobedience” of the foot was thus excused because its condition had come about while maintaining proper etiquette in front of a great master.¹⁶

Turning to the actual bodily movements required during prayer, full symbolic decoding of the various positions and actions is relatively scarce in Sufi literature.¹⁷ In the Persianate sphere, a rare example of such interpretation is found in the Hurufi sect mentioned in the previous chapter. The Hurufis held the radical view that they were living in the end times and the world was about to experience a cataclysmic apocalypse. They believed that they were the only righteous group to exist on the planet at this crucial cosmic moment and that, as a consequence of their status, God had revealed to them the precise meaning behind all ritual acts. Reflecting their general principle that all secrets of the cosmos could be deciphered by paying attention to the Arabo-Persian alphabet, they argued that the first three distinctive positions taken by the body during the ritual prayer corresponded with the shapes of the three letters alif, lam, and ha that combine to make the name of God (allah). These three letters were thought to represent the basis of all existence as well because their shapes—straight, bent, and rounded—encompass the shapes of all that exists in the world.

These two different associations of the three shapes taken by the body during prayer led to the idea that when humans pray they simultaneously articulate the name of God with their bodies and encompass the whole of the created world in their corporeal movements.¹⁸ All Muslims who had been performing the prayer from the beginning of Islam to the times in which the Hurufis lived had been rehearsing this underlying truth regarding the human body’s ability to unite God’s name with the form of the cosmos through ritual. Hurufis’ sense of their own special status derived from the fact that God had revealed this cosmic secret to Fazlallah Astarabadi, the prophetic figure after whose inspiration the Hurufi movement had been formed.

Just as daily life of observant Muslims revolves around the cycle of prayers, the ritual year is calibrated to two of the remaining five pillars: the month of Ramadan, when adult able-bodied individuals are supposed to fast from dawn to dusk, and the yearly hajj pilgrimage that takes place over the course of multiple days in the twelfth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The relationship between fasting and managing the body is obvious, and I will provide more details on this subject in chapter 6, which focuses on miracles relating to food. In the context of the present discussion, it is significant to mention that Persianate Sufis usually saw the fast in a similar vein as ablutions and prayer, emphasizing full execution of one’s ritual obligations during Ramadan and often recommending periodic fasts throughout the rest of the year. Great masters are shown to have had unlimited capacity for fasting according to legal rules, often subsisting on a bare minimum of nutrition even during the hours of the day in Ramadan when they were not expected to observe the fast.

Similarly, for those who had the opportunity to make the journey, the hajj was a significant moment in their lives. However, many great masters never performed the pilgrimage, and their hagiographers convey the sense that their disciples regarded the very abodes of these men as being equal to the shrine in Mecca. The author of an early Khwajagani work makes this explicit by stating that in the exterior world people follow the path of religion by going to Kaʿba, which is a beacon of God’s presence in the cosmos. No such path to a center is available directly in the interior world, the realm of higher religious experiences. In that world, only a Sufi guide, with whom one must develop an intimate relationship, can lead one toward ultimate religious goals.¹⁹

A specific illustration of this attitude is illustrated in an episode in a work devoted to Sayyid Amir Kulal (d. 1370/71). One day, this master was telling some companions about various activities involved in the hajj when a doubting person asked him how he knew all this, given that he had never been to Mecca. The master asked him to look up toward the sky, and he saw there the Kaʿba itself circling around the master. This vision caused the doubter to repent and become a firm devotee. Amir Kulal then admonished him to say that the ability to “see” something depends on the capacities to be found in one’s eyes and not on physical proximity.²⁰

Many more illustrations for Persianate Sufi interpretations of normative Islamic rituals can be added to what I have described in this section. While Sufis’ perspectives on law and ritual could vary considerably in their details, they had a common denominator in the idea that rules for purity and other ritual actions can be interpreted to divulge greater meanings. This shared characteristic had the effect of heightening the significance of the law beyond the formalistic concerns of the jurists. For Persianate Sufis, standard Islamic ritual actions were significant first steps in religious programs that went beyond what was mandated for all Muslims.

As I have remarked previously, Persianate Sufism was a heterogeneous milieu, and the evidence available to understand it presents interrelated but contrasting attitudes and practices. One particular arena that reflects this characteristic is the Sufi attitude toward practices involving asceticism or deliberate corporeal mortification. Great feats of sensory and nutritional deprivation are a regular feature of Persian hagiographic narratives, although, for a majority, asceticism seems to have been a prominent feature of their lives only in the years of early adulthood, when the body needed to be “tamed” most assiduously. Many great masters are depicted as living to old age in comfortable circumstances. However, a small but highly visible minority rejected all material comforts and cultivated a lifelong dedication to shunning ordinary life altogether. These masters wore their asceticism and rejection of society on their bodies through antinomian and socially radical practices. For the purposes of understanding asceticism as a general attitude in Sufi thought and practice, it is fruitful to focus on two questions that can enable us to differentiate between various types of Sufi ascetic acts and actors: 1. Why did medieval Sufis think that subjecting their bodies to ascetic practices aided in reaching religious goals? 2. Did acts deemed ascetic attempt to conform to or subvert the norms that dominated in the social context in which they were performed? Contrasting attitudes on these two questions allow us a textured view of the societies in question.

Important as it certainly was, living up to shariʿa regulations was only the beginning of the type of behavior that won Persianate Sufis the title of being a friend of God. As I will discuss in chapter 3, hagiographic narratives often portray saintly bodies as being special by nature. However, they also show masters exerting strenuous control over their bodies in their early years. The overall impression one gets is that the inherent sacral potential of certain bodies is evident to other masters who come in contact with them, but the individuals who actually are these bodies come to a realization of their natures in moments of grand revelations preceded by extensive corporeal work. The material basis of these bodies may be sacred from the beginning, but they have to ripen through corporeal effort to realize their full potential.

As we see them represented in hagiographic sources, a majority of prominent Persianate Sufi masters took poverty seriously as an ideal and undertook ascetic exercises in at least certain phases of their lives. Even when not actively seeking pain, most led and advocated a simple life in which the absence of material comforts was meant to act as a reminder of the idea that they were more concerned with their relationship to God and the interior realm than with worldly matters.

Asceticism is a common theme in the study of religions, although it is impossible to provide a universal definition for what it entails across traditions and time periods. What behavior can be deemed ascetic varies from context to context, depending on such factors as the intentions and self-understanding of the performer and the way particular actions contrast with the norms of a given society.²¹ The contrastive nature of Sufi asceticism in particular is evident in pictorial representations such as the examples in figures 2.1 and 2.2. The first of the two is the sole image in a manuscript of a Turkic work by Haydar Khwarazmi, completed in Tabriz in 1478. In the scene, the legendary Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna pays a visit to an ascetic and beseeches him to take up residence in his court, where he would be protected from natural hardships like cold weather. The dervish rejects the offer and challenges the ruler that he should worry about his own well-being since he had not made adequate preparations for his death. When the sultan responds angrily, asking how prepared the ascetic was himself, the man dies with a smile on his face since he held no relationships with the material world whose severing would cause him any remorse. The painting signifies the opposition between the religious and worldly sides through the nakedness and bare heads of the ascetics versus the sumptuous clothing, headdress, and servants and horses that belong to the king. Moreover, the background to the Sufi master’s image is left blank while the prince is pictured in a verdant landscape.²² In the second painting, dated to circa 1525 and attributed to the great master Kamal ad-Din Bihzad, the relative physical locations of the ascetic and the worldly man with respect to nature are inverted. The ascetic sits out in the open in a barren winter landscape, while the courtier stands behind a portal looking out. Nevertheless, the overall message of both paintings is the same at the level of drawing contrasts between Sufi and non-Sufi modes of life through variant contextualization of human forms. In both cases, architecturally elaborate doorways signify the separation between ascetic and worldly actors.²³

It is clear from hagiographic narratives that the general import of Sufis’ inclination to asceticism lay in causing a sense of deficiency or pain in the physical body by either denying essential corporeal urges, such as food, or actively seeking painful situations. Textual descriptions of such situations convey the sense of Sufis “struggling” with their bodies, where the tussle indexes their effort to disassociate from worldly desires and ambitions.²⁴ A story from the hagiography of ʿAli Hamadani illustrates this point well: we are told that when Hamadani first arrived in the company of the master Akhi ʿAli Dusti as a young man, the shaykh would make all his disciples move large stones from one part of his lodge to the other on a daily basis. Unable to see the point of this after a few days of hard labor, Hamadani questioned the master regarding the work’s benefit. In response, the master took off his shoe, hit Hamadani with it on the nape of his neck, and said: “The benefit is this: it forces unbelievers to come under the category of people of Islam.”²⁵ In the view of this master, then, becoming a Sufi equated to becoming a Muslim, and intense bodily effort was necessary to progress on the path irrespective of the actual product of such work.

In hagiographic accounts, the extent and severity of Sufis’ struggle against their bodies varies not only in reports about different individuals and groups, but also within the lifetimes of particular individuals. The harshest ascetic acts are almost universally limited to the great masters’ early adulthood, the period in which they had to prove their extraordinary religious potential. A particular emphasis on suppressing the body’s natural urges during this period makes sense in that this is when the body was thought to be most vigorous in its powers and demands; controlling it through ascetic measures at this time was a greater imperative in comparison with childhood or middle or old age. A number of masters in hagiographies are depicted as saying that their comfortable circumstances in old age were a reward for the fact that they had undergone severe hardships in early life.²⁶

After the decision to become a Sufi, Khwaja ʿUbaydallah Ahrar adopted a lifestyle of subsisting on the bare minimum of necessities and exerting himself in extraordinary ways for the sake of others. He is said to have worn the same fur robe and socks for a period of three years, to have taken care of patients with typhoid (including washing their soiled bed linen despite being feverish after having contracted the disease himself), and to have aided people bathing in heated public baths, without any remuneration and irrespective of their social and moral status. The experience of spending extended time in the heat during his early years affected him so much that he avoided baths as much as possible throughout the rest of his life.²⁷

The master Amin ad-Din Balyani is said to have subjected himself to severe discipline throughout his life. His hagiographer writes that he grew up extremely poor but would say that the deprivations he experienced in his early years were necessary for his spiritual progress. The poverty meant that even ordinary obligations were sources of considerable pain for him: he could not afford to heat water and had to take baths with cold water in winter after having had wet dreams. He abstained from eating meat because it connoted luxury and would not even eat broth if it had been made with meat. He also shunned water, usually for ten days at a time and sometimes even a month. Once an attendant brought a cup of cold water to him during warm weather; he stared at it for a while and then asked that it be taken away, saying that he could not drink it because it would extinguish the fire of love for God within his chest.²⁸ Exhibiting a similar concern, a man known as Master Morsel (Pir-i Luqma) came from India to settle in Herat and made it a practice to beg people for scraps that he would mash together with salt and feed himself while telling his carnal self, “This is your livelihood; eat it or ignore it as you wish.”²⁹

While Balyani put restrictions on his daily rations, Shah Niʿmatullah Vali (d. 1430) took it upon himself to live in the wilderness. Once, while he was in Samarqand, he resolved to go and spend the winter in snow-covered mountains outside the city. People tried to dissuade him, since that would mean certain death, but he insisted and departed alone. At the end of the winter people went to the mountains, thinking they would have to collect his dead body, but found that he had survived by just eating snow for many months.³⁰ He had such control over his body that he would do the ablutions and then pass a whole fortyday retreat without any flatulence or the use of the toilet that would make him exit the state of ritual purity. What made his feat particularly remarkable was the fact that he was able to do this despite eating and drinking heartily in the evening during the forty-day period.³¹

The master Hajji Nasir ad-Din ʿUmar Murshidi (d. 1423) is shown choosing a particularly dramatic path in the beginning of his career. His experience, as described in his hagiography, equates to the idea of Sufis acquiring new bodies through ascetic practice before being able to provide guidance to others. His hagiographer states that once he had chosen to become a Sufi he was greatly bothered by the fact that people would come and disturb his religious exercises. He therefore asked his father’s permission to go into the wild in order to be free from all social interactions. His father agreed, but asked what would happen if he fell sick or died. He replied that then it would be fine for his body to become food for wild animals and that his father could distribute the money for his funeral to charity. He was so intent on being alone that he even refused to let his father know the direction in which he was headed.³²

Armed with this high determination but no food or other provisions, he set off from home on a Tuesday evening. On the very first part of the way, he was struck with severe diarrhea, which completely emptied his body of any food and made him feel very slow and tired. He then decided to make his home in a cave near a waterway; the first three days he felt very tired and even had to perform some of his prayers sitting rather than standing, but then his strength returned. He stayed in this cave for a month without eating or drinking anything and then first moved to another cave and, eventually, to a small niche in a mountainside. Here he once felt very thirsty, but, since he did not have the strength to get water from afar, God caused a stream to flow out of the rocks to satisfy him. After a total period of seventy days, during which nothing passed out of his body, so that he was not required to do ablutions, he decided to return and made his way to farmland owned by his father. He is reported to have said:

I saw a man from afar and motioned him to come to me. When he got near, he hesitated to come all the way, given my condition. I had become so weak that it was impossible to lift even my eyebrows and I could not recognize anyone. That man said, “I am afraid because you do not seem even to be a human being.” Then God gave me the capacity to tell him who I was and ask about the news of the area. He said, “How odd is this, that you know everyone but I do not recognize you.” Then I told him that I was Hajji ʿUmar, the son of Daniyal, and that you are so and so. When he heard this he went and brought this news to my father.³³

His family then took care of him and he began to eat and drink so that he eventually regained all his earlier strength. In later life he lived quite normally and even took up the family profession and farmed his share of his father’s lands. The hagiographer who relates this story states that his own father, who was one of ʿUmar’s brothers, told him that the miraculous stream that sprouted near the master’s mountain hiding place continued to provide water for the fields at the time of the book’s writing in the year 846 AH (1442–43 CE).³⁴

While described internally as a matter of personal religious motivation, ascetic practices always derive from existing social practices by offering contrast with established norms. No practice can be termed ascetic in the abstract since all things deemed extraordinary presume the existence of an ordinary. In the context of Sufi asceticism, this issue is reflected in the division of Sufis between those who abided the law and the antinomians. The asceticism of a majority of Sufis meant a radicalization of practices that were accepted as normative by the larger population, represented most often by hyperattention to legal strictures and sensory assault or deprivation. Such Sufis deviated from the norm solely by being immoderate, as a person obsessed with cleaning deviates from the norm although he or she is fulfilling a normative imperative. In contrast, antinomian ascetics wished to challenge social norms by carrying out “mortifications” deemed contrary to the law. Reflecting a Dionysian spirit, the practices of such ascetics were a direct challenge to Muslims generally and to other Sufis in particular. Antinomian Sufi groups remained a small minority through Islamic history, although the late medieval period saw a considerable expansion in their numbers so that they were a regular feature of the social scene in the Persianate world. As Ahmet Karamustafa has argued, the upsurge was no accident since this was precisely the period in which normative Sufis acquired their greatest social prestige, which often implied modification of their religious programs for the sake of accommodating material interests. Antinomian asceticism was therefore an aspect of the internal Sufi reaction to developments in Sufi practice and thought during the late medieval period.³⁵ Antinomian actors were a source of fascination for contemporary society and are depicted in miniature paintings from the late medieval period. The image in figure 2.3 presents a man with hair shaven from his face and head and scant clothing made of leather and animal fur indicating separation from ordinary society.³⁶

Divided among groups known under the names of Qalandars, Haydaris, Abdals of Rum, etc., the antinomians actively cultivated a corporeal aspect meant to shock the sensibilities of the ordinary observer. Because they shunned society, the attitudes and practices of these Sufis were not recorded extensively in sympathetic written works. However, a versified Persian hagiography devoted to the antinomian master Jamal ad-Din Savi (d. ca. 1232) gives us a picture of such Sufis’ attitude toward Islamic law, asceticism, and the conduct of ordinary social life. While this master’s life falls earlier than the period that is my focus in this book, the text in question was composed around 1350 and reflects Sufi paradigms relevant to the present discussion.³⁷

Khatib Farsi, Savi’s hagiographer, writes that the master’s peculiarities included spending most of his time sitting naked in graveyards, shaving all hair from the body (including eyebrows and eyelashes), eating only that which was minimally necessary to keep the body alive, and avoiding speech and social contact as much as possible.³⁸ Despite his clear lack of desire for social contact, throughout his life Savi attracted followers who would often leave their ordinary existences to adopt his religious style. Such persons’ attraction to Savi and his attitude to the world are captured in an incident that the hagiographer describes in some detail.

Farsi relates that, toward the end of his life, Savi arrived in the Egyptian city of Damietta while trying to escape the large numbers of devotees that had started to congregate around him in his previous abode in a graveyard near Damascus. His peculiar appearance caused many in the local population to denounce him as unholy and dangerous, and some people informed the city’s judge that such a man had installed himself in the local graveyard. The judge went to visit him with the aim of asking him to either leave the environs or face punishment, but the sight of him made him realize that this was a genuinely exceptional religious man. The judge was able to tell this because he was himself inclined to Sufi pursuits and could, unlike the city’s ordinary people, appreciate Savi’s inner reality despite his reprehensible outward appearance. He approached Savi very respectfully and asked him why, despite his knowledge, he had chosen to take on this lifestyle. Savi replied that this was the most explicit way of affirming the Sufi maxim that one should die to the material world before one’s death. He treated his own body like a corpse that had no need for the comforts of ordinary life, and he spent his time sitting silently in graveyards because that provided the kind of solitude ordinarily available only after death.

The judge then asked him why he also did not observe the strictures of Islamic law or follow the example of the prophet Muhammad as all Muslims were commanded to do. He replied that no religious deficiency accrued to him from the way he had chosen to live because one’s outward form was a mere veil that was of no consequence according to his particular religious path. To prove that this was true, he told the judge that he could change to a normative appearance whenever he wanted in the blink of an eye. Following this, when the judge looked at him again he saw his face transformed, with regular eyebrows and other facial hair. But then he changed again in an instant, reverting to the antinomian form. The judge found the argument and Savi’s ability to transform himself quite convincing and immediately asked to become his disciple. Savi replied that this was not worthwhile since he was good at what he did and the conduct of the world required the presence of honest judges like him. The judge then left him to go back to his own normal life, although by then he had acquired an appreciation for the type of religious vocation Savi represented.³⁹

This story’s resolution affirms both the normative and the antinomian forms of Sufi practice, suggesting that it should be regarded as a way in which proponents of the high Sufi literary tradition attempted to co-opt the attraction of figures such as Savi while maintaining their own mainstream perspectives. The fact that the narrative is sympathetic to Savi, however, means that it can be regarded as at least somewhat close to the antinomians’ viewpoint.

The most crucial moment in this narrative is when Savi shows the judge how he can change forms without any trouble. The fact that he eventually changes once again to the antinomian affect underscores the point that he and other Sufis like him saw their bodies as canvases for proclaiming their religious choices. They quite literally wore their religions on their bodies, cultivating the image of an ascetic who had not only given up the cares of the world but who also actively manipulated the body to mock the convention-bound lives of ordinary people. Along with its internal justification, the antinomian mode of Sufi practice was meant to act as shock therapy; it was fairly well the opposite of the viewpoints of people like Khwaja Ahrar, Hajji ʿUmar, and others whose corporeal mortifications were only reminders to people to pay less attention to their material desires.⁴⁰ This function of antinomianism is acknowledged directly in normative Sufi works such as the hagiography of ʿAli Hamadani where the master criticizes groups such as the Qalandars by saying that the problem with them is that whatever they see in the interior world they want to show in the exterior.⁴¹ In other words, their practices threatened to eliminate the fundamental interior/exterior dichotomy that I have discussed in chapter 1. By attempting to live religious injunctions in a literal and uncompromising way, the antinomians went against the grain of the overall basis of Sufi thought. In addition to such critique by normative Sufis, the antinomian position was also inherently ironic: it proved that to try to escape the body one must dedicate one’s whole life to cultivating it in a particular form.

Zikr, or the effort to concentrate oneself on the remembrance of God, is traceable to the activities of the earliest Muslims who either called themselves Sufis or can, in hindsight, be recognized as the progenitors of Sufism as an Islamic perspective. In its origins zikr was a relatively straightforward meditation in which the practitioner’s aim was to achieve an extraordinary awareness of God through excluding the thought of anything else while repeating divine names or liturgical formulae.⁴² The practice underwent much evolution in later centuries as Sufis adopted various complex meditational techniques involving corporeal components such as breath control and moving the body repeatedly in set sequences with the aim of producing mental states. By the period with which I am concerned, the way a Sufi group performed zikr marked its communal identity and distinguished it from groups with variant practices. In the Persianate environment, zikr ran the entire gamut from a silent remembering of God to groups of individuals collectively doing elaborate dances to the accompaniment of music.

Amidst all this diversity about the ways of doing zikr, there were two points on which everyone seemed to have agreed: doing zikr regularly in some shape or form was essential to being a Sufi; and the way the body was used while performing zikr indicated one’s affiliation with a chain of Sufi authority that was seen to have transmitted a distinctive religious practice through the centuries. I will illustrate the major perspectives on zikr here by concentrating on camps that advocated, respectively, a silent zikr marked by the body’s stillness and a vocal zikr accompanied by vigorous bodily movement.

For a number of influential Sufi masters, the best way to perform zikr was to do it silently and without moving the body. Such a practice had the advantage that it could be done in the midst of other activities rather than being limited to the specific times when one was free from other chores of life. Moreover, the silent zikr avoided religious ostentation of any kind; it allowed one to practice the Sufi path without other people knowing about it and interpreting it in any way.

In the period that concerns me in this book, the silent zikr was advocated most strongly by Bahaʾ ad-Din Naqshband and his followers. Naqshband’s bestknown hagiographer reports that the shaykh indicated that zikr was effective only when a master specifically instructed a disciple to perform it. This meant that the method of zikr had to be conveyed through a human chain down the generations and that it had no effect, or could even be harmful, if one took it up solely on personal initiative. Naqshband was affiliated with a chain of Sufi authority known as the Khwajagan, in which the prominent masters from the past had varied between preferring silent or vocal zikr. Naqshband himself had been instructed in the silent zikr by a master and had chosen it over the vocal method because he considered it “stronger and better.”⁴³

The silent Naqshbandi zikr did not involve moving the tongue or the body, but descriptions of how it was done nonetheless convey the sense of intense attention to one’s corporeal demeanor. In versions attributed to Saʿd ad-Din Kashghari translated here, the zikr requires the practitioners to force internal energy into different parts within the body through concentrating the mind and regulating one’s breath. It consisted of repeating the Islamic profession of faith “there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God (la ilaha illa’llah, Muhammad rasul allah)” in the following way:

The master says in his heart “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” The disciple brings his heart to presence and places it in front of the master’s heart. He opens his eyes, purses his mouth, presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and places his teeth together. He gathers himself and obediently, with all his power, begins the zikr together with the master. He says this in his heart, not by the tongue, being patient and doing three iterations per each breath.⁴⁴

As the zikr formula gets repeated, the practitioner has to observe further specifics that correlate words to locations on the body: “The beginning of the word la is at the navel and its [eventual] seat is at the right breast; the letter alif [in the next word] begins from the seat in the right breast, going into the pineal heart [on the left] to form the word allah; and [the remaining formula] illa’llah Muhammad rasul allah is attached to the heart.”⁴⁵ This description offers a contrast between the body’s external stillness and the practitioner carrying something from one part of the body to the next in the inside.

The body’s outward passivity as it is depicted here did not stop a master from being able to tell the situation inside. In one instance, after Kashghari had taught a disciple the zikr, he observed him doing it and said that that was wrong because the man had not managed to keep his heart absolutely still.⁴⁶ Similarly, Kashghari’s disciple ʿAlaʾ ad-Din Abizi once instructed one of his disciples to inscribe the formula to be repeated during zikr on his heart and then stare at it. When the disciple failed to understand what this meant after being told twice, the master asked him to sit facing him. He then put his hands on his chest and, when he next looked down, he saw the formula imprinted on his heart. He was astonished to see this and became a firm devotee of the master.⁴⁷

A hagiography dedicated to Bahaʾ ad-Din Naqshband states that he placed special significance on the moment when a master instructed the disciple on how many times the formula “there is no god but God” had to be repeated during zikr. This “knowledge of numbers” (vuquf-i ʿadadi) represented the first level of an intuitive knowledge (ʿilm laduni) that God bestowed upon Sufis in consequence of their religious endeavors. When conveying the knowledge of numbers to his own disciples, Naqshband made a point of reciting the names of the transmitters through whose mediation he had acquired this knowledge. In one instance of doing this, he affirmed the superiority of the silent practice by referring to a conversation between Khwaja ʿAbd al-Khaliq Ghijduvani and his master Imam Sadr ad-Din, two early members of the chain to which Naqshband belonged. One day as he was working on interpreting the Quran with the master, Ghijduvani stopped on the verse “Call on your Lord, humbly and secretly; He does not love those who transgress” (7:55). He understood this to mean that the zikr was to be performed silently but thought that this led to a conundrum: if one were to use the tongue or the body to do zikr, it could not be kept secret since others could observe one’s actions. But if one did it solely inside oneself then it could be observed by the devil since Muhammad had said, “Satan flows in the veins of Adam’s descendants like blood.” Ghijduvani questioned Sadr ad-Din about this and was given the answer that he had to wait to come across a master who could impart to him the intuitive knowledge that would make this issue understandable. Ghijduvani did eventually learn the secret of the matter from a master, and it was this very understanding, denoted by the “knowledge of numbers,” that was conveyed to Naqshband through a chain stretching from Ghijduvani to his own times.⁴⁸

This story is, at one level, disappointing in that the text does not reveal the exact reason for Naqshband’s preference for the silent zikr, and we are not told the actual number of times the formula had to be performed because that is a secret. Naqshband’s choice thus appears largely an issue of adhering to a tradition that was transmitted through intimate personal contact. But Ghijduvani’s alleged puzzlement reveals something quite significant about this Sufi group’s view of the place of the body in Sufi practice. His formulation of the problem sets up an opposition between the body’s exterior (that which others can see) and its interior (veins susceptible to the presence of Satan), and his question points out that practice confined entirely to either side of the body is of doubtful value. Exterior practice risks ostentation, while purely interior practice is easily corruptible since it cannot be judged or corrected by someone with greater knowledge or authority. The solution to the problem lies in the link with a master who must be seen as the only appropriate audience for a person’s religious effort. The main point of Naqshband’s teaching is that one can expose one’s internal religious practice to the master without the fear that this will enmesh one in worldly concerns. And the master can preclude the presence of the devil in one’s veins by teaching the right interior method and guarding against corruption by judging the disciple while being in a sustained interpersonal relationship. The correct way to perform the “silent zikr” involves eschewing public performance by not using the tongue or the body, and being intimately involved with a master who first teaches how to move internally through the zikr and then keeps an eye on the practitioner’s progress with periodic face-to-face contact. The silent zikr is not marked by outward body movements, but it implicates movement within the mental image of the body as well as the crucial interface between the bodies of master and disciple.

The extensive Naqshbandi hagiography Rashahat-i ʿayn al-hayat puts particular stock in the performance of zikr according to the silent method advocated by the Naqshbandis as the marker of correct Sufi practice, showing those who do zikr vocally to have been subject to chastisement. Reports on this score provide useful windows onto the competition between different types of Sufi practitioners: in one case, someone who rejects the criticism of his vocal practice is told that his cow would die if he did not stop, and this is what comes to pass.⁴⁹ In another incident, the master Bahaʾ ad-Din ʿUmar ciriticizes the Naqshbandi practice of holding the breath during zikr, leading the Naqshbandi master Khwaja Yusuf ʿAttar to write to him that his criticism went against the practice established by Naqshband and his foremost disciples, which made ʿUmar retreat from his stance.⁵⁰ In a third case, the Naqshbandi master Shams ad-Din Ruji said that when he first decided to follow the Sufi path, a follower of Zayn ad-Din Khwafi in Herat was recommended to him as the master to whom he should attach himself. But, when he heard the din made by the master and his followers doing zikr, he was disinclined to join them. On the way back he came across an acquaintance who told him to visit a Naqshbandi shaykh instead, which he did, and was greatly impressed by the calm and stillness that reigned during silent zikr. He joined the Naqshbandi path based on this experience.⁵¹

Unlike the Naqshbandis and some of their predecessors, most Sufi groups in Persianate societies did not consider it a problem to use the tongue and the body during zikr. For them, the benefits of using corporeal techniques to reach desired states outweighed the danger of affecting ostentation and becoming ensnared in worldly concerns. Major chains of authority such as the Kubraviyya, the Yasaviyya, the Niʿmatullahiyya, and the Safaviyya had particular zikr practices involving bodily movements. As mentioned in a number of places in this book, performing zikr openly was a significant component of the hagiographic public personas of most masters belonging to these lineages.

A good case in point to show the use of bodily zikr is the practice of the Kubravi master ʿAli Hamadani (d. 1385), whose lifetime overlaps with that of Naqshband almost exactly. In a hagiography written by one of his disciples, the master traces his own initiation into Sufism to a pious man whom his maternal uncle had taken in for the sake of his young nephew’s education. Hamadani started paying attention to this teacher’s habits when he reached the age of twelve and noticed that he would go to a secluded place in the morning and the evening and would sit and move his head left to right continuously as a religious exercise. He asked him what this was and got the reply that this was zikr; he then asked if it was necessary to move the head in this way for zikr, and the old man responded yes, because this is what he had learned from his shaykh, the Kubravi master Mahmud Mazdaqani (d. 1364–65). He then asked the teacher to instruct him in the zikr, to which he agreed. Three days after starting the practice, Hamadani suddenly went into a trance (ghaybat) and saw Muhammad sitting high above on a rooftop. He expressed the desire to join the Prophet but got the reply that he could not come up there by himself and needed the aid of Mazdaqani. He then decided to travel to the place of this master and began practicing the zikr in his company.⁵²

Like Ghijduvani’s affirmation of the silent zikr, this story hinges on a question about the use of the body in zikr, asked by a man who is, in the long run, destined to be a great saint and a role model for other Sufis. In both cases the questioners adopt a recommended method of zikr as a tradition and have to wait to come into contact with masters to receive the full explanations of the practice. The actual modes of doing zikr are primary in both cases and establish the young disciples’ affiliation with particular Sufi paths. However, the full benefit of performing zikr materializes only when it is done under the guidance of masters who convey its true meaning after accepting the young men as personal disciples.

The Kubravi zikr that ʿAli Hamadani adopted in this story and conveyed to his disciples actually resembles the Naqshbandi practice, except for the crucial differences that the words of the religious formula are said out aloud and the body is moved externally rather than internally. The practice is known as the “four-beat” (chahar zarb) zikr:

[From the upright position, the Sufi] brings his head down to the level of the navel while saying the word la. Then he becomes upright while saying the word ilaha. Then he inclines the head toward the right breast and says illa, followed by inclining toward the heart, which is on the left side, while saying allah. The words have to be said connected to each other and in a single breath. Although some of God’s friends do the zikr while holding their breath, the honorable Sayyid [ʿAli Hamadani] taught me to do each cycle of zikr accompanied by a single breath.⁵³

This zikr could be performed alone or in the company of other Sufis. Citing statements from Muhammad, Hamadani’s hagiographer states emphatically that the vocal zikr as it was practiced and taught by Hamadani was not an improper “innovation” (bidʿat), one of the usual ways to proclaim a practice as being religiously deviant in Islamic thought.⁵⁴ To the contrary, the verbal invocations contained in zikr were expected to settle in all parts of the practitioners’ bodies and become like a natural sound within them.⁵⁵

Whether silent or vocal, the ultimate purpose of all types of zikr was to bring Sufis closer to God. All descriptions of progress along Sufi paths can be related to the practice of zikr, although the following description by the prominent master Zayn ad-Din Khwafi (d. 1435) provides a sense for its immediate results:

During the zikr, or after it has finished, a flash of lightning flickers from the cloud so that the veil is torn up and the light of the one who is recalled in zikr shines forth in the form of a special overseer and presence. It is necessary that, at this point, all parts of the individual person, both the inner and the outer, should be still as if dead, absent from the world as if annihilated. Observing this light relieves him from paying attention to the rest of his surroundings, although, eventually, these things crowd in to force the eye of his heart away from staring at the light.⁵⁶

The contrast between the body’s movements during zikr with its stillness afterward indexes the ritual’s function as a mediator between ordinary earthly experience and the direct communion with God sought by Sufis. The fact that practitioners can maintain the sacred condition only as long as they are immobile reinforces the notion that embodiment is a kind of entrapment from which one needs to escape as much as possible through religious exercises.

Comparing the two ways of zikr, it is easy to see that the body was at the center of this quintessential Sufi ritual irrespective of the production of movement or sound. This is obvious in the case of vocal zikr, but the silent version is also keyed very strongly to the practitioners’ consciousness of their bodies. Keeping still while holding the breath requires intense bodily work, and the way the zikr is described makes clear that practitioners projected their internal energies toward various parts of the image of their bodies that they held in their minds. Both types of zikr were also aimed at controlling the body and bringing its internal and external movements under the purview of one’s conscious control as much as possible. The effort to restrain the body temporarily in this way during ritual could be seen as a practice on a continuum with more stringent ascetic practices.

ʿAli Hamadani’s hagiographer states that in the very beginning of his journey he was unable to derive any benefit from zikr until he was able to prepare himself internally for the journey. Once zikr started to take effect, he got to the point where he would lose himself completely upon hearing vocal zikr, and his master forbade other disciples from performing it in his hearing lest his spirit completely leave the body. His overall reaction to the outside world then changed so drastically that he lost all consciousness of his surroundings and was kept in chains for three months and force-fed in order to keep him alive. Once out of this condition, he began to practice samaʿ or audition and would dance in the courtyard of the lodge twice a week. He later told his hagiographer that anyone who does not love audition in the beginning of the path is not going to produce great work later in life.⁵⁷ A work by Hamadani affirms this attitude through the remark that the ear is the bodily organ with the most sensitive connection to the heart. Unlike the eye and the mouth, which can be closed to stop seeing or talking, the ear can be precluded from sensing only if one removes oneself completely to a place where no sound is being made at all.⁵⁸

As can be seen in ideas attributed to ʿAli Hamadani, zikr and samaʿ are related but slightly different concepts: both are meant to carry a Sufi practitioner forward on the religious path, although zikr requires cultivation of actions in a particular sequence while samaʿ is a matter of reacting to outside stimuli. Also, zikr performed by one person can lead to samaʿ for someone who is listening, which makes it difficult to differentiate the two. In the present context, I would like to focus on samaʿ as a matter of reception since descriptions of Sufi masters’ reacting to music and poetry highlight a different aspect of their bodily practice than the orderly performance of zikr.⁵⁹

A particularly lively case for samaʿ is to be found in the extensive hagiography devoted to Shaykh Safi ad-Din Ardabili. His practice of samaʿ is described as being extraordinary in that not only was he greatly moved by audition, but the whole surrounding world seems to have moved with him. Once when he decided to participate in a gathering, observers saw that the lamps of the mosque where the event was taking place had started spinning in the same rhythm as his and the walls had picked themselves up to keep time. On another occasion he danced so energetically, and for so long, on top of some debris that people performing the exercise with him had bloody feet by the end. However, his own feet were protected by angels and he was also seen to rise into the air above the crowd when in complete ecstasy.⁶⁰

Once when Shaykh Safi himself had not participated in samaʿ for a whole year, he was sitting in a gathering where other Sufis suddenly began to dance. Since none of the regular singers (qavvalan) were around at the time, a certain Mawlana ʿAbd ar-Rahman Hafiz began to recite a verse from the Quran to aid the practitioners. Hearing this, Shaykh Safi went into ecstasy (vajd) and began crying profusely. Once the dance had come to an end, he told those present that he had started because he had had the vision of a man arriving there in the company of his master Shaykh Zahid Gilani. This man had beseeched him to do samaʿ with intercession from Shaykh Zahid, and he had had no choice but to follow the master’s wishes. On another occasion, Shaykh Safi had become very sick and lay on his bed completely weakened when he asked that a particular qavval named Farrukh be presented to him. The man came running when called, and the master asked him to recite something. As soon as he started, Shaykh Safi’s illness evaporated, and he sat up and shouted loudly before starting samaʿ.⁶¹

While hagiographic narratives depict the great masters in the throes of samaʿ, a short work by a certain Shams ad-Din Ibrahim Abarquhi written in the early fourteenth century provides an understanding for what could be seen to occur in samaʿ from a physiological perspective. Abarquhi first provides references from earlier authors to justify the practice, and then explains:

Know that samaʿ is an incoming element whose heat collides with the coldness of certainty (yaqin). If this gives birth to sadness (huzn), that warms the temperament (mizaj). And the same occurs if it gives birth to passionate yearning (shawq). But, if it gives birth to contrition (nadamat), it first warms the temperament and then cools it. When heat and cold meet each other in bodies’ cavities, it may happen that they instantiate the removal of moisture that flows out in drops from the fountain of the eye, which is known as weeping. Or it may happen that, by chance, they meet in the inner space of the heart, the effect of which appears in the body in the form of cringing. This is what is meant in the Honorable Speech by the verse: “The skins of those who revere their Lord cringe from it [i.e., when the Quran is recited]” (Quran, 39:23). Or it may be that they meet at the surface of the ocean of the spirit so that it rises up in a wave from the intensity of their collision, giving rise to a cry and perturbation in the manner of what happens in the ocean when the wind and water move rapidly.⁶²

This explanation presents the body like a prism for sounds capable of inducing samaʿ. The three possible reactions inside the body are keyed to the hierarchy of its internal elements, showing a progression from the body cavity itself to the heart and, eventually, to the surface of the spirit that interfaces with the material body. The internal reaction then surfaces externally in the form of weeping, cringing, or crying aloud. After explaining the basic principle in this form, the author goes on to say that the profound corporeal agitation caused by samaʿ further affects others who may be present around the person exhibiting the intense states. This leads to the creation of a cycle so that the scene encompasses multiple bodies reverberating with each other through the reception and production of sounds. The overall result of this is a scene of abandonment of ordinary bodily comportment that depends on the presence of appropriate instigating stimulation, such as music and recitation, as well as a group able to come together in the context of the ritual. Samaʿ involving dance is a common element in the depiction of Sufis in Persianate painting. Figure 2.4 contains a painting dated to around 1500 CE showing three Sufis performing samaʿ to the accompaniment of a group of musicians.

The direct exhortations and stories concerning normative rituals, asceticism, zikr and samaʿ that I have cited in this chapter have individual as well as social sides to them. On one level, actions of great Sufi masters pertain to the potential vested in them as extraordinary beings. On another level, their bodily performances act as advertisement for lesser Sufis to become attached to them. In the words of one author purporting to cite the famous early Sufi master Junayd of Baghdad, “Stories and traditions regarding the masters of the path … are akin to what can be said of the Truth, may He be praised. Through them, the Truth provides power to the broken hearts of disciples and seekers, and aids them.”⁶³ In hagiography’s internal logic, masters’ exemplary commitment to the shariʿa, their cultivation of asceticism, their assiduous performance of zikr, and their shows of abandonment in samaʿ are all matters that exemplify their dedication to their own paths and their special functions as exemplars for those who have not yet reached stations equal to their own. In the next chapter I investigate the social functions of Sufi masters’ religious performances in greater detail.