APPENDIX 1
LETTER SYMBOLISM IN SUFI LITERATURE
One aspect of Sufi imagery and symbolism that is extremely important for a proper understanding of many writings is the symbolism of letters, the emphasis laid on the mystical meaning of single letters and on the art of writing in general.1
Every Muslim admits the importance of the Arabic alphabet—those letters in which God’s eternal word was revealed. The Koran itself declares that, even if all the seas were ink and the trees pens, they would never be sufficient to write down the words of the Lord (Sūra 18:109). This Koranic statement was frequently repeated by the mystics in their attempts to describe the greatness, beauty, and perfection of the divine being. Learning the Arabic letters is incumbent upon everybody who embraces Islam, for they are the vessels of revelation; the divine names and attributes can be expressed only by means of these letters—and yet, the letters constitute something different from God; they are a veil of otherness that the mystic must penetrate, As long as he remains bound to the letters—as Niffarī put it—the mystic is in some sense fettered by idols; he commits idolatry instead of reaching the place in which there are no more letters and forms (W 363–65).
At a very early stage of Sufism the mystics detected the secret meaning hidden within the different letters, and the detached groups of letters found at the beginning of twenty-nine Koranic sūras inspired them to produce amazing allegorical explanations. Most of the great Sufis have dwelt upon the topic, and even in distant parts of the Muslim world, like Indonesia, manuscripts containing speculations about letter mysticism have come to light.2 Out of this mystical interpretation of the letters of the Arabic alphabet the Sufis developed secret languages in order to hide their thoughts from the common people. The so-called balabailān language, which has long attracted the interest of the orientalists, is a good example of this inventiveness.3 Even a highly sophisticated thinker like Suhrawardī Maqtūl speaks of his initiation into a secret alphabet in order to understand the deeper meaning of the Koranic word.4
Even in pre-Islamic times, the poets of Arabia had compared different parts of the body, or of their dwellings, with letters—comparisons that were inherited and elaborated upon by Islamic poets throughout the world. It is scarcely possible to fully understand and enjoy the poetry of the Muslim world, mainly of Iran and the neighboring countries, without a thorough knowledge of the meaning given to the letters.
The mystics felt that “there is no letter that does not praise God in a language” (W 165), as Shiblī said, and they tried, therefore, to reach deeper layers of understanding in order to interpret the divine words correctly. “When God created the letters, he kept their secret for Himself, and when He created Adam, He conveyed this secret to him, but did not convey it to any of the angels.”5 The Sufis not only played with the shapes and appearances of the letters but often indulged in cabalistic speculations. Such tendencies are visible in comparatively early times; they are fully developed in Ḥallāj’s poetry in the early tenth century.
The technique of jafr is thought to have been used first by Jaʿfar aṣ-Ṣādiq, the sixth Shia imām, whose role in early Sufi thought has been mentioned (W 164–66). Jafr is a speculation about events, present and future, from certain combinations of words; it has often deteriorated into a kind of prognostication.6 By counting the words on a page of the Koran and computing their numerical values—for every letter of the Arabic alphabet has a numerical value—one could figure out names and places, dates and events, in the same way as some Christian Cabalists detected historical events in the words and numbers of the Bible, mainly in Revelation.
This trend in Sufism and early Shia was developed by a Shia group known as the Ḥurūfī,7 “those who deal with the letters.” Their founder was Faḍlullāh Astarābādī, who was executed for his heretical ideas in 1398; he had followers among the Turkish and Persian poets and writers, among whom Nesīmī deserves special mention. This Turkish poet expressed the Ḥurūfī ideas—blended with extravagant Sufi teachings and an interesting imitation of Ḥallāj—in his highly enthusiastic poems and, like his master, was cruelly put to death in 1417.
For the Ḥurūfī, the word is the supreme manifestation of God himself; it is also revealed in the human face, which becomes the Koran par excellence, the writing through which God’s secrets were made visible. Faḍlullāh taught that Adam had been given nine letters; Abraham, fourteen; Muhammad, twenty-eight; and that he himself was honored with the knowledge of 32 letters (the four additional letters of the Persian version of the Arabic alphabet). In many cases it is difficult to decipher the correct meaning of his sayings, since his interpretation of the letters varies. His most interesting theory is that of the letters as reflected in the human face; alif forms the khaṭṭ-i istiwā, the equator that, like the nose, divides the human face and corresponds not, as usual, to Allah, but to ʿAlī; the b points to the fourteen innocent martyrs of Shia Islam and is manifested on the left side of the nose. A number of pictures, mostly used in the Bektashi convents, show a tendency toward representing the names of the imāms or similar combinations of sacred names in the shape of a human face (see BO, Supplement 2). Even in India it was said: “ʿAlī is written twice on the face.”8
The idea that the face of the beloved is like a marvelously written manuscript of the Koran is widely accepted even outside Hurūfī circles. The pretty face is a fine illuminated copy of the Holy Book. Man is the perfect copy of the Well-preserved Tablet, in which all wisdom and beauty take shape—a notion whose development shows the change in consciousness of a late poet like Bedil (d. 1721), whose contacts with Indian Sufi circles are well known; he describes man no longer as the copy of the heavenly Koran, but as “a manuscript of nothingness.”
On the whole, the poets would agree with a late Indo-Persian writer:
Your face is like a Koran copy, without correction and mistake,
which the pen of Fate has written exclusively from musk.
Your eyes and your mouth are verses and the dot for stopping, your
eyebrows the madda [for lengthening the alif],
the eyelashes the signs for declension, the mole and the down
letters and dots.9
The comparisons used here are familiar. The curved eyebrows were usually compared to a beautifully written ṭughrā, as found at the beginning of official letters. Shah Ismail, the Safawid ruler who wrote Turkish mystical poetry, likened them to the basmala, the formula “in the name of God.”10 The narrow, small mouth is constantly represented as a mīm, the narrowest ringlet in the alphabet 
: the eyes by the letters ṣād (according to their shape 
), or ʿayn 
(which means both “eye” and the name of the letter). Curls and tresses are the long, winding letters like dāl, or jīm. Every poet could write a whole poem on the letters as revealed in his beloved’s face. Among these puns are some that may be almost repulsive to modern taste. One of these is the comparison of the down on the upper lip with a dark line of writing; the word khaṭṭ has this twofold meaning, Even the greatest mystics have not hesitated to see in the black khaṭṭ of their beloved the divine writing; they may even claim that the beauty of this khaṭṭ, which appears on the cheek of the youthful beloved, is comparable to the Seal of Prophecy, which eliminates all writing that had been valid before his time (AD 283).
Rūmī once spoke of the Koran copy of the heart, the muṣḥaf-i dil. When the beloved looks once at this manuscript, “the signs for declension begin to dance, and the parts start stamping with their feet” (in ecstatic dance) (D 2282). This play with letters has produced some of the most charming verses in Islamic poetry, and the field is almost inexhaustible.
A central theme of Koranic mythology is the concept of the Iauḥ al-maḥfūẓ, the Well-preserved Tablet, on which the destinies of men have been engraved since the beginning of time; the Pen that has written these verdicts is often mentioned together with it. In fact, the primordial pen has become a standard expression in Islamic poetry in general and in Sufism in particular, for everything that happens is written with this instrument and cannot be changed, since, as the ḥadīth says, “the pen has already dried up.” The poet could imagine that the Pen had written the fate of the lovers in black (bakht-i siyāh, karabaht; “black luck” means, in Persian and Turkish respectively, “misfortune”). He might say that the Pen of Power had selected only the figure of the beloved from the anthology of beauties and drawn his shape in the lover’s heart at the very moment of creation.11 The poets would complain, in hundreds of variations, that the writing of their destiny was crooked, because the Pen was cut the wrong way.
It is from the idea that fate is written down forever on the Well-preserved Tablet that the Islamic expressions for “fate” are derived—maktūb, “written,” in Arabic; sarniwisht or alιn yazιsι, “what is written on the forehead,” in Persian and Turkish respectively. Fate is also seen as recorded on man’s face, and the Sufis have been credited in many a verse with the ability to read the book of a man’s fate from the title that is visible on his face. The lines engraved on the forehead gave an excellent illustration for this image. The poets might praise the beloved who could decipher the contents of the closed letter from the complicated lines on the forehead.
The true men of God are those
who already in this world
read the script of the heart
from the tablet of the forehead,12
said the Pathan warrior Khushḥāl Khān Khattak in a quatrain. This imagery is very widely used in eastern Islamic areas.
The Koran speaks not only of the Pen of Destiny and the Tablet, but also of man’s sinful deeds, which blacken the book that will be given into his hand on Doomsday. But there is one way to clean the record of one’s sins, and that is to weep: Oriental ink is soluble in water, and a page could easily be washed off, if necessary. The water of tears, so often praised by the ascetics and mystics, can, similarly, wash off all the ink of black sins; “God loves the weeping of human beings” (N 299). Repentance cleans the book of actions: that idea is repeated in different words by hundreds of pious poets in the Muslim world.
The feeling that nothing created is worth looking at once man has found God is expressed in the same image of “washing off the pages” by Niẓāmī, as quoted by Jāmī (N 608):
Whatever exists from the subtleties of the stars,
or the different hidden sciences—I read it, and searched every
paper:
When I found Thee, I washed off the pages.
To indulge in writing and reading nonreligious books, or even in the subtleties of intricate law cases or hairsplitting grammar, was, for the Sufis, to add to the blackness of the book of deeds; it was to sin.
The mystics have dwelt on another aspect of pen symbolism as well. There is a famous ḥadīth: “The heart of the faithful is between the two fingers of the All-compassionate, and He turns it wherever He wants.”
This ḥadīth suggests the activity of the writer with his reed pen, who produces intelligible or confused lines; the pen has no will of its own, but goes wherever the writer turns it. Rūmī told a story of some ants walking on a manuscript, looking at the writing, which resembled hyacinths and narcissus, until they slowly discovered that this writing was not done by the pen itself but by the hand, in fact, by the mind that set the pen in motion (M 4:3722–29)—an argument for divine activity, which is made manifest through secondary causes and then seems to become man’s own activity. Ghazzālī had put forth a similar argument. The ḥadīth of the pen has inspired the poets of Iran and other countries—they saw man as a pen that the master calligrapher uses to bring forth pictures and letters according to His design, which the pen cannot comprehend. Mirzā Ghālib, the great poet of Muslim India (d. 1869), opened his Urdu Dīwān with a line that expresses the complaint of the letters against their inventor, for “every letter has a paper shirt.”13 In traditional poetic language, that means that each letter wears the garment of a complainant at court. Since a letter becomes visible only after it is written on some solid medium, mainly paper, it wears, so to speak, a paper shirt and complains, so the poet thinks, about the inventiveness of the creator, who has combined it with ugly or meaningless letters, or has written it in an unusual way or on brittle or coarse paper.
The heart, like a pen, is bound to write every calligraphic style, to turn left and right without resistance. One of the qualities required in a pen is that its tongue, or even its head, be cut off: the pen becomes the symbol of the mystic who must not divulge the secret, who “speaks without tongue.” ʿAṭṭār, like many other mystical and nonmystical poets, dwelt upon this aspect of the pen, “turning on the tablet of annihilation with cut-off tongue” (AD 603).
When you say “I shall cut off your head,”
I shall run on my head like the pen out of joy.
(AD 508)
Other poets might compare themselves to a pen that, owing to its “black fate”—i.e., being immersed in black ink—weeps the whole day.
In one of ʿAṭṭār’s ghazals (AD 601) the pen, qalam, is connected with the letter nūn (n), alluding to the introductory words of Sūra 68: “nūn waʾl-qalam, N, and By the Pen!” The poet wants to walk with his head cut off and his hands and feet cast away like the rounded letter nūn. Nūn also means “fish,” and the relation between the several meanings, together with the mystical iriterpretation of the beginning of the sūra, has often occupied mystically minded writers. One of the most amusing versions is that by Rūmī:
I saw a Jonah sitting at the shore of the ocean of love.
I said to him: “How are you?” He answered in his own way
And said: “In the ocean I was the food of a fish,
then I became curved like the letter nūn, until I became
Dhūʾn-Nūn himself. (D 1247)
The mystic who, like the Prophet Jonah, has been swallowed by the “fish annihilation” (as Jāmī puts it) and is thrown back on the shore of separation feels, after his experience in the fish (nūn), like the letter nūn without head and tail and becomes, therefore, identical with Dhūʾn-Nūn, the leading mystic of medieval Egypt.
The detached letters at the beginning of twenty-nine sūras of the Koran have inspired the Sufis with many strange and amazing ideas—the a-l-m (alif lām mīm) at the beginning of Sūra 2 has particularly puzzled the interpreters. Read as one word, it means alam, “pain,” as the later poets would hold; but there are several ways of explaining the three letters in a mystical sense, e.g.: alif is Allah, m Muhammad, and I the symbol of Gabriel, the mediator through whom the Koran was brought down to the Prophet. “These letters a-l-m- and ḥ-m are like the rod of Moses,” says Rūmī (M 5:1316–30); they are filled with mysterious qualities for him who understands their secrets. The same can be said about the ṭāhā at the beginning of Sūra 20, which Sanāʾī interprets as follows:
He has seen from the ṭā all the purities [ṭahāra],
He has made from the hā all the buildings. (S 235)
The detached letters ṭā-sīn at the beginning of Sūra 27 point to purity and lordship, according to some mystics. They are incorporated in the title of one of the most intriguing books of early Sufism, Ḥallāj’s Kitābaṭ-ṭawāsīn (in the plural); the title has been imitated, in our time, by Muhammad Iqbal, who in his account of his spiritual journey, the Jāwīdnāme, invented the “ṭawāsīn of the Prophets,” dwelling places of the prophetic spirits in the Sphere of Moon.
While some of the mystics spoke about human activities as comparable to the movements of the pen, later Persian Sufis saw the mystery of all-embraeing unity revealed in the relation of the ink and the letters. Thus says Ḥaydar Amulī (as quoted by Toshihiko Izutsu):
Letters written with ink do not really exist qua letters. For the letters are but various forms to which meanings have been assigned through convention. What really and concretely exists is nothing but the ink. The existence of the letters is in truth no other than the existence of the ink which is the sole, unique reality that unfolds itself in many forms of self-modification. One has to cultivate, first of all, the eye to see the selfsame reality of ink in all letters, and then to see the letters as so many intrinsic modifications of the ink.14
Most of the meditations of the mystics were directed toward the letter alif, ā, the first letter of the alphabet, a slender vertical line (ǀ) often used as a comparison for the slender stature of the beloved.
There is on the tablet of the heart nothing but the alif of my
friend’s stature—
What shall I do?—My teacher gave me no other letter to memorize!
That is how Ḥāfiẓ expresses an idea common to all poets. And his verses can be interpreted mystically as well; for the alif, with the numerical value one, isolated and yet active, became the divine letter par excellence. To know the alif meant, for the Sufis, to know the divine unity and unicity; he who has remembered this simple letter need no longer remember any other letter or word. In the alif, all of creation is comprehended; it is as Sahl at-Tustarī says, “the first and most majestic letter and points to the ālif, i.e., Allah, who has connected (allafa) all things and is yet isolated from the things” (L 89). Before him Muḥāsibī had pointed out: “When God created the letters he incited them to obey. All letters were in the shape [ʿalā ṣūrat] of alif, but only the alif kept its form and image after which it has been created” (W 166), This idea was expanded by Niffarī, who saw all the letters except alif as ill (W 166). The expression “in the shape of” in Muḥāsibī’s dictum seems to allude to the tradition according to which God created Adam ʿalā ṣūratihi, “in his image”; alif was the divine letter, and the other letters were similar to it and lost their shape by disobedience, just as Adam, formed in God’s image, lost his original purity by disobedience.
ʿAṭṭār took up the idea and showed how the different numbers grew out of the alif with the value one and how the letters emerged from it: when it became crooked, a d (
) came into existence; then, with another kind of bend, an r (
), became visible; when its two ends were bent, a b 
came forth; and made into a horseshoe, the alif became like a nūn 
. In the same way, all the various created beings in the different shapes have emerged from the divine unity (V 95).
Alif is the letter of aḥadiyya, unity and unicity, and at the same time the letter of transcendence. Therefore,
The meaning of the four sacred books
is contained in a single alif. (Y 308)
There is scarcely a popular poet in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Indonesia, who has not elaborated this topic, attacking the bookish scholars who forget the true meaning of the most important letter and instead blacken the pages of their learned books. Far Rūzbihān Baqlī, the alif points to the absolute, uncreated unicity and informs the mystic about the ʿayn-i jamʿ, the perfect union (B 94). Since the alif is pure and free from qualification (M 5:3612), it can become the symbol of the spiritually free, the true mystics who have reached union with God—the erenler, the Turkish expression for advanced Sufis, are “like alifs, signs of witness” (Y 524).
Other interpretations of the alif are possible; it has even been regarded as the letter of Satan, because it has refused to prostrate itself before any but God. As Rūmī says:
Do not be an alif, wliich is stubborn,
Do not be a b with two heads—be like a jīm. (D 1744)
A particularly strange chapter on the meaning of alif, which is composed of three letters (the a, l, and f, which constitute its Arabic name), is found in a book on mystical love written in the mid-tenth century by Abūʾl-Ḥasan ad-Daylamī. Its very title clearly shows the role of letter symbolism: Kitāb ʿaṭf al-alif al-maʾ lūf ilāʾl-lām al-maʿṭūf, “The Book of the Inclination of the Tamed alif toward the Inclined l.”15 In paragraphs 38–40 the author proves that alif is both one and three, and that therefore Christian ideas of trinity are much closer to Sufism than dualist ideas as defended by the Iranians—a somewhat surprising result, which can, however, be understood, since Sufi terminology is very fond of threefold groupings or of proving the basic unity of lover, beloved, and love, or of him who recollects, the object recollected, and the recollection, etc.
Speculations of this kind have never lacked in Sufism. Suffice it to mention a modern expression of these interpretations of the alif by a Sindhi Shia author who has counted up the numerical values of the three letters that constitute the name of alif: a=1, l=30, f=80=111; these, in turn, point to the threefold allegiance of the pious Shia Muslim, which is expressed by the letters a=1, “Allah,” m=40, “Muhammad,” and ʿayn=70, “ʿAlī”, the sum of which is, once more, 111.16
These plays, which may seem strange to a modern Westerner, constitute an important aspect of Sufi poetry and can be studied even in comparatively modern mystical works; classical poetry abounds in them. Special importance is attributed to the connection lām-alif, l-ā, which, if read as one word, means lā, “no,” and is thus the first word of the profession of faith. The lām-alif, though combined of two letters, was often regarded as a single letter and endowed with special mystical meaning. It is most commonly a metaphor for the closely embracing lovers who are two and one at the same time. Because of its shape, the letters lām-alif or the word lā
has often been compared to a sword, particularly the dhūʾl-fiqār, ʿAlī’s famous two-edged sword, or to scissors: “I made mute the tongue of speaking with the scissors of lā” (B 196). The believer is expected to cut all but God with the sword of lā, i.e., with the first word of the shahāda, “there is no deity but God.” Whatever is created should be destroyed by the powerful sword of lā, “no.” That is, however, only the first step in the path of the Muslim mystic—he has to go upward (bā lā), to reach the illā, “save God,” which is achieved, in Arabic writing, by putting an alif before the lā
). Ghālib, who was not a mystic but was deeply influenced by the mystical traditions of the Subcontinent, speaks of the alif-i ṣayqal, the ”alif of polishing” (which is a specially high level of polishing steel): once man has polished the sword of lā so intensely that it shines with the alif-i ṣayqal, he has reached the positive value illā Allāh, “save God.” Puns of this kind are very frequent in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu literature both in mystical and nonmystical circles.
Another combination of which the Sufis were extremely fond, and which was mentioned briefly in the chapter on Prophetology, is the connection of alif and mīm:
Put a mīm into your soul,
and an alif in front of it,
says Shāh ʿAbduʾl-Laṭīf.17 The mīm points to Muhammad’s name, the alif, once more, to Allah. M, with the numerical value of forty, is, as a Punjabi Sufi had said, the “shawl of createdness” by which God manifests Himself through the person of the Prophet. A ḥadīth qudsī attests: Anā Aḥmad bilā mīm, “I am Aḥmad without m, namely Aḥad, One.” The letter mīm is the only barrier between God, the One, and Aḥmad, the Prophet Muhammad. It is understood as an expression of the forty grades of divine emanation from universal reason to man and back and of the forty days spent in seclusion, which are connected with the experience of the forty degrees. From ʿAṭṭār’s time on, the mystics have loved the Aḥmad bilā mīm tradition, and it has been repeated in high literature as much as in popular mystical poetry, be it among the Turkish Bektashis or among the mystical bards of Sind and the Punjab. The Bektashis practiced a special mīm duasι a prayer of the letter m, which is said to point to the manifestation of the light of Muhammad (BO 268). Aḥmad Sirhindī’s daring interpretation of the two ms in Muhammad’s name should not be forgotten.
The letter b, the second in the alphabet, is connected in mystical understanding with the created world. It symbolizes the first act of creation; the b stands at the beginning of the basmala, the formula “in the name of God,” which opens the Koran. Not only the b but the dot beneath it could be regarded as the point from which the movement of the created universe starts: it is the differentiating power after the perfect unity of the alif and has often been used as a symbol either of the Prophet or of ʿAlī, who claimed, as Shia tradition maintains, “I am the dot beneath the b.” Its shape shows that “when God created the letters, the b prostrated itself,’ as Sarī as-Saqaṭī thought. As the letter of creatureliness, it prostrates itself at the side of the unqualified divine unity of Allah.
Sanāʾī found a lovely explanation for the all-embracing greatness of the Koran: it begins with the letter b and ends with the letter s—that makes bas, “enough” (in Persian), and this word shows that the Koran is enough once and forever (SD 309).
Among the other letters, one may mention that the w—which also means “and”, symbolizes the relation between God and creation.18 It is the favorite letter of Turkish calligraphers, who even invented a Prophetic tradition, “Trust in the wāw’s.”
A special role is attributed to the h, the last letter of the word Allah and the beginning of huwa, “He.” According to Baqlī (B 95), the lām is the beloved, turned into a lover through its own love in its own love; here the symbolism of the word Allah, with its two ls, becomes even more poignant. Rūmī may have been thinking of speculations of this kind when he said, in a wonderfully simple image:
I made my sides empty from both worlds,
like the h I was seated beside the l of Allah. (D 1728)
It is typical of Sufism that Ibn ʿArabī, whose Kitāb al-mabādiʿ waʾl-ghāyāt deals with the mysteries of the letters, visualized the divine ipseity, huwiyya, in the shape of the letter h, in brilliant light, on a carpet of red, the two letters hu shining between the two arms of the h, which sends its rays in all four directions.19 Such a vision of the divine in the form of a letter is characteristic of a religion that prohibits representation, particularly representation of the divine. The letter is, in fact, the highest possible manifestation of the divine in Islamic thought. Ibn ʿArabī’s vision conforms, to a certain extent, to a description of the degrees of meditation by the eighteenth-century Naqshbandī Sufi Nāṣir Muhammad ʿAndālīb in Delhi:
He sees the blessed figure of the word Allah in the color of light written on the tablet of his heart and the mirror of his imagination. . . . Then he will understand himself opposite to this form or beneath it or at its right or left side, and he should strive to bring himself towards this light . . . . And whenever he finds himself in the middle of the rank of alif and lām, he must proceed and take his place between the two lāms, and then walk away from there, and bring himself between the lām and the h, and with high ambition he leaves this place too and sees Himself in the middle of the ringlet of the h. At the beginning he will find his head in this ringlet, but eventually he will find that his whole self has found repose in this house and will rest there free from all affliction and perilous calamities.20
Thus, the highest stage the mystic can reach is to be surrounded by the light of the letter h.
The mystics and poets have used a peculiar way of expressing their ideas by playing with the first letters of those concepts of which they wanted to convey the deeper meaning to their readers. When they speak, in early times, of the l of luṭf, “grace,” and the q of qakr, “wrath,” this type of allusion is still very primitive. But rather soon meaningful combinations were invented, like those with the letter q (qāf), the meaning of which is also “Mount Qāf,” the mythical mountain that surrounds the world, on which the Sīmurgh or ʿAnqā has its dwelling place. The q is mainly connected with the concept of qurb, “proximity,” and the qāf-i qurb, the “first letter,” or “Mount Qāf,” of proximity, becomes a rather common expression—especially since this mountain is regarded as the station at the end of the created world, the place where man can find true proximity, qurb, on his way toward God (who, since ʿAṭṭār, has sometimes been symbolized by the Sīmurgh). Another combination is that of q with qanāʿat, “contentment”: the perfect Sufi lives, like the mythological bird, in the Mount Qāf of qanāʿat. The letter ʿayn was used in similar ways; its meaning is manifold: “eye,” “source,” “essence”, the word ʿayn-i ʿafw means not only the letter ʿayn with which the word ʿafw, “forgiveness,” begins, but also “the essence of forgiveness.”
Such speculations and wordplays served the Sufis even in defending highly difficult mystical definitions and philosophical positions. It is said that Saʿduddīn Ḥamūya regarded wilāya, “saintship?” as superior to nubuwwa, “Prophetship,” because of the different ranks of the letters w and n with which the respective words begin.21 But Simnānī opposed this view, which was in contrast to the general Sufi attitude, again on the basis of a letter speculation. It became a custom to seek deep meaning in each letter of the words designating mystical states and stations.
If we can believe the sources, the tenth-century Sufi Abūʾl-Qāsim Ḥakīm Samarqandī liked this kind of interpretation and explained the word namāz, “ritual prayer,” as consisting of:
Later the Bektashis found secrets in the word ṭarīqat, “mystical Path”;
t=ṭalab-i ḥaqq ū ḥaqīqat, “seeking of Reality and Truth”
r=riyāḍat, “ascetic discipline”
i=yol u din kardeşi, “to be faithful in every respect toward ‘a brother of the way,”
q=qanāʿat, “contentment”
t=taslīm-i tāmm, “complete submission.”
(BO 100 ff.)
In the word ḥaqīqat, the q might mean qāʾim billāh, “subsistent through God,” and the t might point to tarbiya, “education”—it was unimportant to the simple Turkish dervishes if they confused Arabic and Turkish words and spellings.
It is not surprising to learn that the Sufis, chiefly the theosophists, found similar secrets in the divine names. The name ar-Raḥmān, “the Merciful,” points to God’s life, knowledge, power, will, hearing, seeing, and word—the seven basic qualities of Allah, as Jīlī had seen them and as they were usually accepted in later Sufism. The name Allāh was, of course, interpreted in a similar way:
alif: the Only Real,
l: His pure Knowledge of Himself,
l: His Knowledge of Himself through His all-embracingness,
which comprehends the illusionist appearances that seem
to be other than He,
the double l plus al is, then, the self-negation of every negation,
the h: huwa, the absolutely unmanifested Essence in His
Ipseity, and the vowelling u, the not-manifested world in the
Nonmanifestation of the Only Real.23
These are ideas elaborated by the school of Ibn ʿArabī. Much more attractive is the simple way in which Turkish friends explained to me the secret of the tulip and the crescent, both typical of Turkish Muslim culture: tulip, lāle, and crescent moon, hilāl, are formed from the same letters as the word Allāh (one alif, two lām, and one h) and have, like the divine name, the numerical value of 66.
Sometimes the mystics joked about the attempts to understand the real meaning of a word from the letters that made it up—g-l does not make a gul, “rose,” and the pain, dard, of true lovers is not expressed by d-r-d (S 330); nor is it love that is written ʿshq. These letters are nothing but a skin, a husk to veil the interior meaning from the human eye.
The same interest in the mystical meaning of letters that led to the strange explanations of mystical words and of divine names is evident in a poetical form known in Ancient Eastern literature and throughout the Muslim world, mainly in later times. This was the Golden Alphabet, in which each verse begins with the following letter of the Arabic alphabet. There is no rule for the verse form; the verses may be written in long or short meters, with two or five or any number of rhyming lines. Sometimes, when the poet chooses short verses, all the lines of a single verse may begin with the same letter.24 It was a form that could easily be memorized by anybody who tried to learn the alphabet itself, and that is why Turkish, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Pashto poets loved to explain their mystical doctrines and the mysteries of faith in the form of Golden Alphabets—the pupils would know forever that kh stands for khūdī, “selfishness,”s for sālik, “wayfarer,”ṣād for ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, “the straight path,” for Ṣūfī, and for ṣāfī, “pure.” Sometimes words beginning with the same letters were combined in a single verse, since alliteration was a frequently used poetical device, particularly in Sind. We may even find, in Muslim India, Golden Alphabets in honor of certain religious figures—a fine example is the A lif-name by the most skillful Persian poet at the Mogul court in the late sixteenth century, Maulānā Qāsim Kāhī (d. 1582). This poem is composed in honor of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and abounds in puns and witty combinations.25 In this kind of poetry, the imaginative power of religious and intellectual people found an outlet that, though sometimes appearing too playful, still conveys a feeling of very serious concern with the mystical and magical qualities of the Arabic letters.
The Sufis themselves, as much as they boasted of their disinterest in worldly affairs, were usually very fond of letter-writing. The letters of the great masters of old, collected by their disciples, form a valuable source for our knowledge of mystical thought and practice. Even today mystical instruction through letters is practiced by some Sufi leaders. Junayd’s letters are a famous example of the cryptic density of early Sufi writing. Of special interest are the letters written by Ḥallāj and received by him from his followers; they were beautifully written, as the tradition asserts, on precious material, illuminated and colored, not unlike the artistically decorated books of the Manichaeans in Central Asia. But Ḥallāj also knew that the true correspondence is spiritual, not by exchange of letters; he expressed that in his famous lines to his faithful friend Ibn ʿAṭāʾ:
I wrote [to you], but I did not write to you, but
I wrote to my spirit without letter.26
The imagery of letter-writing was used frequently by the Sufis—they wrote with the water of tears and the fire of the heart, and the tears washed off what the hand had written (L 249). These are the true letters that the knowing people understand; as Shiblī says:
My tears wrote lines on my cheeks,
which someone has read who does not read well. (L 50)
The language of tears is clearer than that of the written word; and the red tears—mixed with blood from constant weeping—form a commentary to the topic of “longing” on the parchmentlike yellow cheeks of the mystic.
The complaint about friends who do not write is commonplace in Persian and related poetry. Even in an environment in which illiteracy prevailed, particularly among women, the motif of letter-writing and waiting for letters is used with amazing frequency. In the folk poetry of Sind the heroines always complain that no letter from the beloved has reached them—these letters are symbols for the signs of grace that the longing soul of the lonely mystic expects from God, which inspire him with new hope for union. It is natural that, in a civilization in which pigeon post was widely used, allusions to birds as letter-carriers are often found: the pigeon that is supposed to bring the letter from the beloved is often connected with the pigeons that live in the central sanctuary in Mecca. Thus the connection of the letter with the prayer sent by the faithful in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca is understood, and the pigeon of the sanctuary may also convey the “letter” of divine grace to the patiently waiting Sufi. The traditional connection of the soul with the bird, and the designation of the mystical language as “language of the birds,” gives this imagery another overtone.
The Sufi influence can be seen clearly in the field of calligraphy. The mystics who loved to enter into the deeper levels of meaning when looking at the letters of the alphabet indulged in inventing surprising forms from letters that seemed to be particularly meaningful Arabic calligraphy is the typical expression of a culture that outlawed the representation of living beings, and the artists created very intricate patterns of floriated and lacelike plaited Kufi script on domes, minarets, and objects of minor art. In the later Middle Ages the calligraphers devised figures in which the verses of the Koran or words of mystical import were represented in a suitable form. They were written in mirror script, reflecting one central truth of the Koran twice or fourfold. Or the artist created animals—horses, amusing little birds—from the words of the basmala or the Throne verse (Sūra 2:256). In Turkey, the calligraphers—who were often members of the Mevlevi order—liked to shape the basmala as stork, a bird praised in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic folklore for its piety in performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. Sentences connected with ʿAlī, the “lion of God,” could be worked into the shape of a lion—a figure often found in Bektashi convents and all over the Shia world. A beautiful example of the living force of this mystical calligraphy may be seen in a recent painting by the young Pakistani artist Sadiquain, who has, in the course of his new calligraphic representation of the Koran, written the words kun fayakūn—“Bel and it becomes”—the words with which God created the world, in the shape of a spiral nebula of great spiritual power.
A thorough study of the relations between calligraphy and Sufi thought would doubtless yield interesting results and contribute to a better understanding of some of the basic Sufi ideas as well as of Islamic art.
Notes
1. See Ernst Kühnel, Islamische Schriftkunst (Berlin, 1942; reprint ed., Graz, 1972); Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden, 1970); Schimmel, “Schriftsymbolik im Islam,” in Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (Berlin, 1959).
2. Bibliothèque Nationale, Catalogue des mss. Indiens-Malais-Javanese (Paris, 1910), 65:191.
3. Edgard Blochet, Catalogue des mss. Persans de Ia bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1905 f.) 2: no. 1030. See Ignaz Goldziher, “Linguistisches aus der Literatur der muhammadanischen Mystik,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 26 (1872): 765. Alessandro Bausani, “About a Curious Mystical Language,” East and West 4, no. 4 (1958).
4. Suhrawardī Maqtūl, Oeuvres persanes (Paris, 1970), p. 216.
5. See Gustav Flügel, Die arabischen, persischen und tüirkischen Handschriften in der K. K. Hofbibliothek zu Wien (Vienna, 1865–67), 1:192.
6. Louis Massignon, Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane (Paris, 1928), pp. 37, 98.
7. Hellmut Ritter, “Die Anfänge der Hurufisekte,” Oriens 7 (1954).
8. Muḥammad Nāṣir, Nāla-yi ʿAndalīb (Bhopal, 1309 h./1891–92), 2:344.
9. Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Qāniʿ, Maqālāt ash-shuʿarāʾ, ed. Sayyid Hussamuddin Rashdi (Karachi, 1956), p. 44.
10. Quoted in Fakhrī Harawī, Rauḍat as-salāṭīn, ed. Sayyid Hussamuddin Rashdi (Hyderabad, Sind, 1968), p. 85.
11. Fuzuli, Divanι, ed. Abdulbâki Gölpιnarlι (Istanbul, 1948), no. 30, verse 6.
12. Khushḥāl Khān Khattak, Muntakhabāt (Peshawar, 1958), Rubāʿī no. 88.
13. Annemarie Schimmel, “Poetry and Calligraphy,” Pakistan Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1969).
14. 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. 66.
15. ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ad-Daylami, Kitāb ʿaṭf al-alif al-maʾlūf ilāʾl-lām al-maʿṭūf, ed. Jean-Claude Vadet (Cairo, 1962).
16. Makhzan Shāh ʿAbdul Laṭīf Bhitāʾī (Hyderabad, Sind, 1954), p. 63.
17. Shāh jō risālo; see Annemarie Schimmel, “Shah ʿAbdul Laṭīf’s Beschreibung des wahren Sufi,” in Festschrift für Fritz Meier (Wiesbaden, 1974).
18. Johann Karl Teufel, Eine Lebensbeschreibung des Scheichs ʿAlī-i Hamāḏānī (Leiden, 1962), p. 87n.
19. Henri Corbin, “Imagination créatrice et prière créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn Arabi,” Eranos-Jahrbuck 25 (1965):171.
20. Muhammad Nāṣir, Nāla-yi ʿAndalīb, 1:270.
21. Marijan Molé, “Les Kubrawiyya entre Sunnisme et Shiisme,” Revue des études islamiques, 1961, p. 100.
22. A. Tahir al-Khānqāhi, Guzīda dar akhlāq u taṣawwuf, ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran, 1347 sh./1968), p. 47; see ibid., p. 69, for ḥikmat.
23. Léon Schaya, La doctrine soufique de l’unité (Paris, 1962), pp. 47, 83.
24. A good Turkish example is Abdülbâki Gölpιnarlι, Melâmilik ve Melâmiler (Istanbul, 1931), p. 200. For Pashto, see H. G. Raverty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans (London, 1862), pp. 61 ff. Sindhi Golden Alphabets have been collected by Dr. Nabi Bakhsh Baloch in Tih akaryūn (Hyderabad, Sind, 1962).
25. Hadi Hasan, “Qasim-i-Kahi, His Life, Times and Works,” Islamic Culture 27 (1953): 99–131; 161–94; alif-name, pp. 186–89.
26. Louis Massignon, “Le diwan d’al-Ḥallāj, essai de reconstitution,” Journal asiatiq‘ue, January–July 1931, muqaṭṭaʿa no. 6.