Much in the manner of developed Christianity, the preaching of Islam drew a sharp distinction between this world and its values and that other world that is both the Hereafter and the abode of God.
Know that the life of this world is only a frolic and a mummery, an ornamentation, boasting and bragging among yourselves, and lust for multiplying wealth and children. It is like rain so pleasing to the cultivator for his vegetation which sprouts and swells, and then begins to wither, and you see it turn to yellow and reduced to chaff. There is severe punishment in the Hereafter, but also forgiveness from God and acceptance. As for the life of this world, it is no more than the merchandise of vanity. (Quran 57:20)
Al-Mustawrid ibn Shaddad told that he heard God’s Messenger say, “I swear by God that this world in comparison to the world to come is just like one of you putting your finger in the sea. Let him consider what he brings out on it.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.1.1)
Abu Hurayra reported God’s Messenger as saying, “The world is the believer’s prison and the infidel’s Paradise.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.1.1)
Abu Hurayra reported God’s Messenger as saying, “The world is accursed and what it contains is accursed, except remembrance of God and what He likes, a learned man or a learner.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.1.1)
Ibn Mas‘ud told that God’s Messenger slept on a reed mat and got up with the marks of it on his body, so Ibn Mas‘ud said, “Messenger of God, I wish you would order us to spread something out for you and make something (on which you might rest).” He replied, “What do I have to do with the world? In relation to the world I am just like a rider who shades himself under a tree, and then goes off and leaves it.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.1.2)
Ibn Umar told that God’s Messenger caught hold of him and said, “Be in the world as though you were a stranger and a wayfarer, and reckon yourself to be among the inhabitants of the grave.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.2.1)
There are echoes too of “Blessed are the poor …”
Usama ibn Zayd reported God’s Messenger as saying, “I stood at the gate of Paradise, and the majority of those who entered it were poor, the rich being held back, except that those who were to go to Hell were ordered to be sent there. I stood at the gate of Hell, and the majority of those who entered it were women.” This tradition is reported by Bukhari and Muslim. (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.2.1)
Anas told that the Prophet said: “O God, grant me life as a poor man, cause me to die as a poor man and resurrect me in the company of the poor.” Aisha asked him why he said this, and he replied, “Because they will enter Paradise forty years before the rich. Do not turn away a poor man, Aisha, even if all you can give him is half a date. If you love the poor and bring them near you, Aisha, God will bring you near Him on the day of resurrection.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.2.2)
Amr ibn al-Awf reported God’s Messenger as saying, “I swear by God that it is not poverty I fear for you, but I fear that worldly goods may be given to you as lavishly as they were to your (pagan) ancestors, that you may vie with one another in desiring them as they did, and that they may destroy you as they destroyed them.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 25.1.1)
A belief in this Other World of God meant of course embracing its values. The classical collections of Prophetic traditions are filled with reported sayings of the Prophet on the virtues of prayer and fasting, not merely the canonically prescribed prayers and the equally obligatory fast of Ramadan, but the supererogatory performance of these spiritual exercises, though with cautious awareness that any practice attributed to the Prophet might be construed as a precedent for an additional obligation upon all Muslims.
Abu Hurayra and Abu Sa‘id reported God’s Messenger as saying, “People will not sit remembering God without angels surrounding them, mercy covering them, peace descending upon them, and God mentioning them among those who are with Him.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masibih 9.2.1)
Abu al-Darda reported God’s Messenger as saying, “Would you like me to tell you the best and purest of your deeds in the estimation of your King, those which raise your degrees highest, those which are better for you than spending gold and silver, and better for you than that you should meet your enemy and cut off one another’s head?” On receiving a reply in the affirmative, he said, “It is remembering God.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 9.2.2)
Abdullah ibn Busr told of a desert Arab coming to the Prophet and asking who was the best among men, to which he replied, “Happy is he whose life is long and whose deeds are good.” He asked God’s Messenger what deed was most excellent, and he replied, “That you should leave the world with the mention of God fresh on your tongue.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 9.2.2)
Abu Sa‘id said God’s Messenger was asked who would be the most excellent and most exalted in degree in God’s estimation on the day of resurrection, and he replied, “The men and women who make frequent mention of God.” He was asked if they would be superior even to the man who had fought in the path of God, and he replied, “Even though he plied his sword among infidels and polytheists till it was broken and smeared with blood, the one who made mention of God would have a more excellent degree than he.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 9.2.3)
Mu‘adh ibn Jabal said, “A man does nothing more calculated to rescue him from God’s punishment than making mention of God.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 9.2.3)
Abu Hurayra reported God’s Messenger as stating that God says, “I am with My servant when he remembers Me and his lips move making mention of Me.”
Abdullah ibn Shaqiq said that when he asked Aisha whether the Prophet used to fast the whole month of Ramadan, she replied, “I never knew him to fast a whole month except Ramadan, nor to refrain from fasting some part of every month until he died.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 7.7.1)
Aisha said that God’s Messenger used to fast on Mondays and Thursdays. Abu Hurayra reported God’s Messenger as saying, “Men’s deeds are presented to God on Mondays and Thursdays, and I like mine to be presented when I am fasting.” (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 7.7.2)
Abu Hurayra reported God’s Messenger as saying, “There is an almsgiving that is applicable to everything, and the almsgiving of the body is fasting. (Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabih 7.7.3)
Many of the early names to which the title of “Sufi” is attached in Muslim hagiography are little more than that, names alone. Hasan al-Basri is a firmly historical witness, however, and he stands close to the top of the page in every attempt, medieval and modern, to get back to the beginnings of the spiritual discipline that the Muslims call Sufism. He is an important authority for the Spanish philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406 C.E.), who, as he did with Islamic jurisprudence (chapter 4 above), provides in his Prolegomenon to History a schematic view of the origins of Sufism.
The Science of Sufism. This science belongs to the sciences of religious law that originated in Islam. Sufism is based on the assumption that the method of those people (who later came to be called Sufis) had always been considered by the important early Muslims, the men around Muhammad and the men of the second generation, as well as those who came after them, as the path of true and right guidance. Their approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to the false splendor of the world, abstinence from pleasure, property and position to which the great mass aspires, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship. These things were general among the men around Muhammad and the early Muslims. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.10) [ibn khaldun 1967: 3:76]
The habit of a simple and unworldly life, if not actually the practice of what a later generation understood as asceticism, was traced back, then, to the earliest generation of Muslims, and even to the most eminent and powerful of them, as this account by the early Sufi author al-Kharraz (d. 890 C.E.) illustrates.
When Abu Bakr [Caliph, 632–634 C.E.] succeeded to the leadership, and the world in its entirety came to him in abasement, he did not lift up his head on that account, or make any pretensions; he wore a single garment, which he used to pin together, so that he was known as “the man of the two pins.” Umar ibn al-Khattab [Caliph, 634–644 C.E.], who also ruled the world in its entirety, lived on bread and olive-oil; his clothes were patched in a dozen places, some of the patches being of leather; yet there were opened to him the treasures of Khusraw and Caesar. As for Uthman [Caliph, 644–656 C.E.], he was like one of his slaves in appearance; of him it is related that he was seen coming out of one of the gardens with a faggot of firewood on his shoulders, and when questioned on the matter, he said, “I wanted to see whether my soul would refuse.” Ali [Caliph, 656–661 C.E.] bought a waistband for four dirhams and a shirt for five dirhams; finding the sleeve of his garment too long, he went to a cobbler and taking his knife, he cut off the sleeve level with the tips of his fingers; yet this same man divided the world right and left. (Kharraz) [Cited by ARBERRY 1950: 32]
It was at that point, at the death of Ali and the accession of the dynasty called the Umayyads, that there occurred a turning in the spiritual direction of Islam, according to what later became a commonly held view of the community’s history. Ibn Khaldun resumes:
Then worldly aspirations increased in the second century [= eighth century C.E.] and after. People now inclined towards worldly affairs. At that time, the special name of “Sufis” was given to those who aspired to divine worship…. The most obvious etymology (of the term Sufi), if one uses one, is that which connects the word with al-suf, because Sufis as a rule were characterized by the fact that they wore woolen garments. They were opposed to people wearing gorgeous garments, and, therefore, they chose to wear wool.
Ibn Khaldun then passes to the transition within the still young Sufi movement from asceticism to mysticism, the latter here characterized by its possession of a “particular kind of perception.”
The Sufis came to represent asceticism, retirement from the world and devotion to divine worship. Then, they developed a particular kind of perception which comes about through ecstatic experience. This comes about as follows. Man, as man, is distinguished from all the other animals by his ability to perceive. His perception is of two kinds. He can perceive sciences and matters of knowledge, and these may be certain, hypothetical, doubtful or imaginary. Also, he can perceive “states” persisting in himself, such as joy and grief, anxiety and relaxation, satisfaction, anger, patience, gratefulness and similar things. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [ibn khaldun 1967: 3:76–78]
These “states” of self-awareness referred to by Ibn Khaldun represent stages in the Sufi’s training, as we shall see, and lead eventually to the mystical experience. All of this had been worked out in great detail by Ibn Khaldun’s day. But the road to that point was a long one; the Sufi had to make a place for himself in the Islamic experience, a process that was accompanied by opposition, rejection, suffering, and even on occasion death.
By all accounts the earliest Muslims to bear the name “Sufi” were ascetics, Muslims whose rejection of “this world” bore all the signs of a religious conversion. Such was certainly the case for the early and much celebrated holy man Ibrahim ibn Adham, a prince of Balkh in eastern Iran who died sometime about 777 C.E.
My father was of Balkh, Ibrahim ibn Adham is reported to have said, and he was one of the kings of Khurasan. He was a man of wealth and taught me to love hunting. One day I was out riding with my dog, when a hare or a fox started. I spurred on my horse; then I heard a voice behind me saying, “It was not for this that you were created. It was not this you were charged to do.” I stopped and looked right and left, but I saw no one; and I said, “God curse the devil!” Then I spurred on my horse again; and I heard a voice clearer than before, “O Ibrahim! It was not for this that you were created; it was not this you were charged to do.” I stopped once more and looked right and left, but still I saw no one. And I repeated, “God curse the devil!” Then I spurred on my horse once again; and I heard a voice from the bow of my saddle, “O Ibrahim, it was not for this that you were created. It was not this that you were charged to do.” I stopped and said, “I have been roused! I have been roused! A warning has come to me from the Lord of the Worlds. Truly, I will not disobey God from this day on, so long as the Lord shall preserve me.” Then I returned to my people, and abandoned my horse. I came to one of my father’s shepherds, and took his robe and cloak, and put my raiment upon him. Then I went towards Iraq, wandering from land to land. (Abu Nu‘aym, The Ornaments of the Saints 7.368) [Cited by arberry 1950: 36]
Or, in the manner of the holy in every religion, the saint is marked as such from birth. The following is told, with an interesting prologue, of Rabi‘a, a famous holy woman of Basra in Iraq who died in 752 or 801 C.E.
If anyone asks, “Why have you included Rabi‘a in the rank of men?” my answer is that the Prophet himself said, “God does not regard your outward forms.” The root of the matter is not form, but intention, as the Prophet said, “Mankind will be raised up according to their intentions.” Moreover, if it is proper to derive two-thirds of our religion from Aisha [referring to the great bulk of Prophetic traditions reported on the authority of the Prophet’s wife Aisha], surely it is permissible to take religious instruction from a handmaiden of Aisha. When a woman becomes a “man” in the path of God, she is a man and one cannot any more call her a woman.
The night when Rabi‘a came to earth, there was nothing whatsoever in her father’s house; for her father lived in very poor circumstances. He did not possess even one drop of oil to anoint her navel; there was no lamp, and not a rag to swaddle her in. He already had three daughters, and Rabi‘a was his fourth, which is why she was called Rabi‘a, “the fourth.”
“Go to our neighbor So and So and beg him for a drop of oil so I can light the lamp,” his wife said to him. Now the man had entered into a covenant that he would never ask any mortal for anything…. The poor woman wept bitterly. In that anxious state the man placed his head on his knees and went to sleep. He dreamed that he saw the Prophet.
“Be not sorrowful,” the Prophet bade him. “The girl child who has just come to earth is a queen among women, who shall be the intercessor for seventy thousand of my community….”
When Rabi‘a had become a little older, and her mother and father were dead, a famine came upon Basra, and her sisters were scattered. Rabi‘a ventured out and was seen by a wicked man who seized her and sold her for six dirhams. Her purchaser put her to hard labor.
One day when she was passing along the road a stranger approached her. She fled and, as she ran, she fell headlong and her hand was dislocated. “Lord God,” she cried, bowing her face to the ground, “I am a stranger, orphaned of mother and father, a helpless prisoner fallen into captivity, my hand broken. Yet for all this I do not grieve; all I need is Your good pleasure, to know whether You are well pleased or not.” “Do not grieve,” she heard a voice say, “Tomorrow a station will be yours such that the cherubim in heaven will envy you.”
So Rabi‘a returned to her master’s house. By day she continually fasted and by night she worshiped standing until day.
Her owner one night sees Rabi‘a at her prayers, a lantern suspended without chain above her head, and whose light fills the house. He is moved and chastened and gives her her freedom.
She left the house and went into the desert. From the desert she proceeded to a hermitage where she served God for a while. Then she determined to perform the pilgrimage and set her face toward the desert (road from Basra to Mecca). She bound her bundle of possessions on a donkey. In the middle of the desert her donkey died…. “O God,” she cried, lifting her head, “do kings so treat the powerless? You have invited me to Your House, then in the midst of the way, You have suffered my donkey to die, leaving me alone in the desert.”
Hardly had she completed her prayer when her donkey stirred and rose up. Rabi‘a placed her load on its back and continued on her way.… She travelled on through the desert for some days, then she halted. “O God,” she cried, “my heart is weary. Where am I going? I am a lump of clay and Your house is a stone! I need You here.”
God spoke unmediated in her heart. “Rabi‘a, you are travelling in the life-blood of eighteen thousand worlds. Have you not seen how Moses prayed for the vision of Me? And I cast a few motes of revelation upon the mountain, and the mountain shivered into forty pieces. Be content here in My name!” (Attar, Recollections of the Saints 1.73) [ATTAR 1966: 40–43]
The long process of experience and meditation upon that experience that constituted the beginnings of the Sufi path in Islam is largely concealed from our eyes. But as occurred in Christianity, the “path” eventually became a broad and well-posted highway whose every turning had been charted by those who had gone before. By the time the philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun came to write his Prolegomenon in 1377 C.E., there was already an extensive body of Sufi literature, much of it highly theoretical in nature. Indeed, Sufism constituted a well-defined discipline with its own somewhat ambivalent place in the hierarchy of Muslim religious disciplines, as Ibn Khaldun explains.
Thus the Sufis had their special discipline, which is not discussed by other representatives of the religious law. As a consequence, the science of the religious law came to consist of two kinds. One is the special field of jurists and muftis. It is concerned with the general laws governing the acts of divine worship, customary action and mutual dealings. The other is the special field of the “people” [that is, the Sufis]. It is concerned with pious exertion, self-scrutiny with regard to it, discussion of the different kinds of mystical and ecstatic experience occurring in the course of it, the mode of ascent from one mystical experience to another, and the interpretation of the technical terminology of mysticism in use among them.
When the sciences were written down systematically, and when the jurisprudents wrote works on jurisprudence and the principles of jurisprudence, on speculative theology, Quran interpretation and other subjects, the Sufis too wrote on their subject. Some Sufis wrote on the laws governing asceticism and self-scrutiny, how to act and not act in imitation of model (saints). That was done by Muhasibi [ca. 781–825 C.E.] in his Consideration of the Truths of God. Other Sufi authors wrote on the behavior of Sufis and their different kinds of mystical and ecstatic experiences in the “states.” Al-Qushayri [986–1072 C.E.] in his Letter and Suhrawardi [1145–1234 C.E.] in his Connoisseurs of Wisdom, as well as others did this. Al-Ghazali combined the two matters in his book called The Revivification. In it he dealt systematically with the laws governing asceticism and the imitation of models. Then he explained the behavior and customs of the Sufis and commented on their technical vocabulary. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:79–80]
All these authors regarded by Ibn Khaldun as critical in the formulation of the canons of Sufism are known to us, and one could easily compose a history of Sufism, particularly of its more moderate type, from their theoretical writings on the subject. Let us turn instead to personal statements by two very different men who experienced the Sufi life and left us their recollections: Abu Sa‘id ibn Abi al-Khayr (967–1049 C.E.) and al-Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.).
Whatever else it might eventually become, Sufism began, and to some extent always remained, an exercise in the same kind of self-restraint and even self-chastisement that was present in the early Christian tradition. The annals of Christianity, particularly as that faith was understood and practiced in Syria, are filled with tales of the most extraordinarily severe asceticism, and while Islamic piety rarely indulged in such extremes of self-abasement, physical and psychological severity were not entirely alien to it, as witnessed by this account of the early days of Abu Sa‘id ibn Abi al-Khayr. The narrator at the outset is his father, who was curious about the doings of his son and one night followed him.
My son walked on till he reached the Old Cloister. He entered it and shut the gate behind him, while I went up on the roof. I saw him go into a chapel which was in the convent and close the door. Looking through the chapel window, I waited to see what would happen. There was a stick lying on the floor, and it had a rope fastened to it. He took up the stick and tied the end of the rope to his foot. Then, laying the stick across the top of a pit that was in a corner of the chapel, he slung himself head downwards, and began to recite the Quran. He remained in that posture until daybreak, when, having recited the whole Quran, he raised himself from the pit, replaced the stick where he found it, opened the door, came out from the chapel, and commenced to perform his ablution in the middle of the convent. I descended from the roof, hastened home and slept till he came in. (Abu Sa‘id, The Secrets of Oneness 32.4) [Cited by NICHOLSON 1921: 13–14]
Here it is Abu Sa‘id himself who explains his manner of life in those earliest days of his career as a Sufi, and incidentally provides an explanation of why he recited the Quran hanging upside down.
When I was a novice, I bound myself to do eighteen things: I fasted continually; I abstained from unlawful food; I practiced recollection of the name of God uninterruptedly; I kept awake at night; I never reclined on the ground; I never slept but in a sitting posture; I always sat facing the Ka‘ba; I never leaned against anything; I never looked at a handsome youth or a woman whom it would have been unlawful for me to see unveiled; I did not beg; I was content and resigned to God’s will; I always sat in the mosque and did not go into the market because the Prophet said that the market is the filthiest of places and the mosque the cleanest. In all my acts I was a follower of the Prophet. Every twenty-four hours I completed a recitation of the Quran.
In my seeing I was blind, in my hearing deaf, in my speaking dumb. For a whole year I conversed with no one. People called me a lunatic, and I allowed them to give me that name, relying on the Tradition that a man’s faith is not made perfect until he is supposed to be mad. I performed everything I had read or heard of as having been done or commended by the Prophet. Having read that when he was wounded in the foot at the battle of Uhud, he stood on his toes in order to perform his devotions—for he could not set the sole of his foot on the ground—I resolved to imitate him, and standing on tiptoe I performed a prayer of forty genuflections. I modeled my actions, outward and inward, upon the Custom of the Prophet, so that habit at last became nature.
Whatever I had heard or found in books concerning the acts of worship performed by the angels, I performed the same. I had heard and seen in writing that some angels worship God on their heads. Therefore I placed my head on the ground and bade the blessed mother of Abu Tahir tie my toe with a cord and fasten the cord to a peg and then shut the door behind her. Being left alone, I said “O Lord! I do not want myself; let me escape from myself!” and I began a recitation of the entire Quran. When I came to the verse, “God shall suffice you against them, for He hears and knows all” (Quran 2:131), blood poured from my eyes and I was no longer conscious of myself.
At that point began Abu Sa‘id’s conversion from mere asceticism to the life of a mystic saint. As he himself tells us, what had previously been simply his efforts were now transformed into God’s spiritual gifts, the “graces” and “blessings” with which Sufi literature is filled.
Then things changed. Ascetic experiences passed over me of a kind that cannot be described in words, and God strengthened and aided me therein, but I had fancied that all these acts were done by me. The grace of God became manifest and showed me this was not so, and that these acts were acts of divine favor and grace. I repented of my belief and realized that it was mere self-conceit. Now if you say that you will not tread this path because it is self-conceit, I reply that your refusal to tread it is likewise self-conceit, and until you undergo all this, its self-conceit will not be revealed to you. Self-conceit appears only when you fulfill the Law, for self-conceit lies in religion and religion is of the Law. To refrain from religious acts is unbelief, but to perform such acts self consciously is dualism, because if “you” exists and “He” exists, then two exist, and that is dualism. You must put your self away altogether.
I had a cell in which I sat, and sitting there I was enamored of passing-away from myself. A light flashed upon me, which utterly destroyed the darkness of my being. God Almighty revealed to me that I was neither that nor this: that this was His grace even as that was His gift.
Abu Sa‘id was well aware of the sudden adulation that accompanied Sufi “celebrity” in medieval Islam, and the equally swift reversal to which all such celebrity is subject.
Then the people began to regard me with great approval. Disciples gathered round me and converted to Sufism. My neighbors too showed their respect for me by ceasing to drink wine. This proceeded so far that a melon-skin I had thrown away was bought for twenty pieces of gold. One day when I was riding on horseback, my horse dropped dung. Eager to gain a blessing, the people came and picked up the dung and smeared their heads and faces with it.
After a time it was revealed to me that I was not the real object of their veneration. A voice cried from the corner of the mosque, “Is not your Lord enough for you?” (Quran 41:53). A light gleamed in my breast and most veils were removed. The people who had honored me now rejected me, and even went before the judge to bear witness that I was an infidel. The inhabitants of every place that I entered declared that their crops would not grow on account of my wickedness. Once, while I was seated in a mosque, a woman went up on to the roof and bespattered me with filth; and still I heard a voice saying, “Is not your Lord enough for you?” The congregation desisted from their prayers, saying, “We will not pray together so long as this madman is in the mosque….”
This joyous transport was followed by a painful contraction of spirit. I opened the Quran and my eye fell on the verse, “We will prove you with evil and with good, to try you; and to Us shall you return” (Quran 21:36), as though God said to me, “All this which I put in your way is a trial. If it is good, it is a trial, and if it is evil, it is a trial. Do not stoop to good or to evil but swell in Me!” Once more my self vanished and His grace was all in all. (Abu Sa‘id, The Secrets of Oneness 37.8) [Cited by NICHOLSON 1921: 15–17]
What affected people’s attitude toward Ibn Abi al-Khayr were changes in his own external behavior. From a severe asceticism he turned to what appeared to be a profligate life-style, luxurious feasts and splendid entertainments filled with song and dance. This caused another ambitious but somewhat naive Sufi to think that perhaps the famous Abu Sa‘id had been overrated, a serious miscalculation. He approached the Master.
O Shaykh (he said), I have come in order to challenge you to a forty days’ fast. The poor man was ignorant of the Shaykh’s novitiate and of his forty years of austerities: he fancied that the Shaykh had always lived in this same manner. He thought to himself, “I will chasten him with hunger and put him to shame in the eyes of the people, and I shall be the object of their regard.” On hearing this challenge, the Shaykh said, “May it be blessed!” and spread his prayer rug. His adversary did the like, and they both sat down side by side.
While the ascetic, in accordance with the practice of those who keep a fast of forty days, was eating a certain amount of food, the Shaykh Abu Sa‘id ate nothing; and though he never once broke his fast, every morning he was stronger and fatter and his complexion grew more and more ruddy. All the time, by his orders and under his eyes, his dervishes feasted luxuriously and indulged in spiritual concerts, and he himself danced with them. His state was not changed for the worse in any respect. The ascetic, on the other hand, was daily becoming feebler and thinner and paler, and the sight of the delicious viands which were served to the Sufis in his presence worked more and more upon him. At length he grew so weak that he could scarcely rise to perform the obligatory prayers. He repented of his presumption and confessed his ignorance.
When the forty days were finished the Shaykh Abu Sa‘id said, “I have complied with your request: now you must do as I say.” The ascetic acknowledged this and said, “It is for the Shaykh to command.” Abu Sa‘id said, “We have sat for forty days and eaten nothing and gone to the privy; now let us sit another forty and eat nothing but never go to the privy.” His adversary had no choice but to accept the challenge, though he thought to himself that it was impossible for any human to do such a thing. (Abu Sa‘id, The Secrets of Oneness 160.18) [Cited by NICHOLSON 1921: 71–72]
The man ended, of course, by becoming the disciple of Abu Sa‘id ibn Abi al-Khayr.
Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.), whose distinguished intellectual career spanned philosophy, theology, and law, was a Sufi as well, and it was chiefly his moderate and sympathetic writing on the subject of Sufism that made the Islamic world a safer place for the sometimes extravagant likes of Ibn Abi al-Khayr. There is an extended treatment of Sufism in his Revivification of the Sciences of Religion. Ghazali gives a personal but still highly schematic and intellectualized sketch of his own search for certitude in the autobiographical Deliverer from Error. After experimenting with the other disciplines, Ghazali tells us, he came at length to Sufism.
When I had finished with those sciences, I next turned with set purpose to the method of Sufism. I knew the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists of getting rid of obstacles in the self and stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
Ghazali, ever the intellectual, begins by reading the Sufi classics.
… I thus comprehended their fundamental teachings on the intellectual side, and progressed, as far as is possible by study and oral instruction, in the knowledge of Sufism. It became clear to me, however, that what is most distinctive of Sufism is something which cannot be apprehended by study, but only by tasting, by ecstasy and by moral change…. From the sciences I had labored at and the paths I had traversed in my investigation of the revelational and revealed sciences, there had come to me a sure faith in God Most High, in prophethood and the Last Day. These three credal principles were firmly rooted in my being, not through any carefully argued proofs, but by reason of various causes, coincidences and experiences which are not capable of being stated in detail.
It has already become clear to me that I had no hope of the bliss of the world to come save through a God-fearing life and the withdrawal of myself from vain desire. It was clear to me too that the key to all this was to sever the attachment of the heart to worldly things by leaving the mansion of deception and returning to that of eternity.
Next Ghazali, the distinguished professor on the faculty of Islamic law at the university of Baghdad, takes stock of his life.
I considered the circumstances of my life, and realized that I was caught in a veritable thicket of attachments. I also considered my activities, of which the best was my teaching and lecturing, and realized that in them I was dealing with sciences that were unimportant and contributed nothing to the attainment of eternal life. After that I examined my motive in my work of teaching, and realized that it was not a pure desire for the things of God, but that the impulse moving me was the desire for an influential position and public recognition. I saw for certain that I was on the brink of a crumbling bank of sand and in imminent danger of hell-fire unless I set about to mend my ways….
For nearly six months beginning in July 1095 I was continuously tossed about between the attractions of worldly desires and the impulses towards eternal life. In that month the matter ceased to be one of choice and became one of compulsion. God caused my tongue to dry up so that I was prevented from lecturing. One particular day I would make an effort to lecture to gratify the hearts of my following, but my tongue would not utter a single word nor could I accomplish anything at all.
Now in the full grip of spiritual impotence, Ghazali quits Baghdad, his family, and his post there and disappears into a ten-year seclusion, some of it spent in Jerusalem, some on pilgrimage to Mecca, and two years on spiritual retreat in Damascus.
In due course I entered Damascus and there I remained for nearly two years with no other occupation than the cultivation of retirement and solitude, together with religious and ascetic exercises, as I busied myself purifying my soul, improving my character and cleansing my heart for the constant recollection of God Most High, as I had learnt from my study of Sufism. I used to go into retreat for a period in the mosque of Damascus, going up the minaret of the mosque for the whole day and shutting myself in so as to be alone….
I continued at this stage for the space of ten years, and during these periods of solitude there were revealed to me things innumerable and unfathomable. This much I shall say about that in order that others may be helped: I learnt with certainty that it is above all the Sufis who walk on the road of God; their life is the best life, their method the soundest method, their character the purest character; indeed, were the intellect of the intellectuals and the learning of the learned and the scholarship of the scholars, who are versed in the profundity of revealed truth, brought together in the attempt to improve the life and character of the Sufis, they would find no way of doing so; for to the Sufis all movement and all rest, whether external or internal, brings illumination from the lamp of prophetic revelation; and behind the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received. (Ghazali, Deliverer 122–132) [GHAZALI 1953: 54–60]
Christian monks in the Near East were to some extent characterized by their association with a woolen cloak—their version of the “religious habit” of Western Christendom—an association that at least suggests that “Sufism” owed more than a passing resemblance to Christian monastic practices on the Syrian steppe. Monks and monasticism are in fact mentioned in the Quran. In two of the citations it is not so much a question of the institution of monasticism as of praise for monks who “are not proud” (5:82) or the condemnation of those Christian monks “who devour the wealth of mankind wantonly” or “hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the way of God” (9:34). If this were the end of it, one would assume that Muhammad neither admired nor condemned Christian monasticism as such. But there is another, somewhat longer passage on the subject that is far more problematic. It occurs in the midst of the now familiar history of God’s revelation.
We sent Noah and Abraham, and We gave prophethood to their progeny and the Book, and some of them were well-directed, but many of them were disobedient. Then in their train we sent Our apostles, and succeeding them Jesus, son of Mary, and gave him the Gospel, and put into the hearts of his followers and caused Our messengers, God declares, to follow in their [that is, Noah and Abraham and their seed] footsteps; and We caused Jesus, son of Mary, to follow, and gave him the Gospel, and in the hearts of those who followed him we placed compassion and kindness. And monasticism, they created it, which had not been prescribed for them by Us except for seeking the pleasure of God; yet they did not observe it as it should have been rightly observed. (Quran 57:27)
And monasticism …: The meaning, and so the translation, of this bit of the verse is by no means certain. Is “monasticism” in parallel with “compassion and kindness,” a virtuous practice begun by the Christians of their own volition, or is “monasticism” contrasted with what immediately precedes, a blameworthy human innovation? In Arabic the verse yields both meanings, and its inherent ambiguity is reflected in early Muslim comments upon it, as in this example from Muhasibi (d. 837 C.E.).
God blamed those among the Israelites [that is, the Christians] who, having instituted the monastic life to which He had not previously obliged them, did not observe it in an exact fashion. And He said “this monastic life which they instituted; We ordained it not for them….”
There is disagreement on this verse. Mujahid interprets it as “We have not ordained it for them only to make them desire to conform themselves to the divine pleasure,” that is to say, “We have prescribed it…. God placed in them, for their own good, the seeds of the monastic life, and then reprimanded them for abandoning it.” But Abu Imama al-Bahili and others comment upon it as follows: “We have not prescribed, that is to say, it was not We who ordained this. They instituted it only to please God and even so God blamed them for abandoning it.” This latter opinion is the more probable and one which embraces most of the scholars of the community. [MASSIGNON 1968: 149]
We cannot say which in fact is the more probable interpretation, but Muhasibi is certainly correct in maintaining that the reading of the verse in a pejorative sense—namely, that monasticism is a Christian innovation, unrequired, even undesired, by God—became the common interpretation of this verse among Muslims. It is no surprise then that there soon began to circulate a tradition on the subject attributed to Muhammad himself. “No monasticism in Islam,” the Prophet is reported to have said.
There was in fact no monasticism in Islam, not in the Christian sense of individuals or groups removing themselves from the world and society and living under perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But the spirituality of Muslims and Christians often took parallel and very similar paths, and both the similarities and the differences appear in this advice given to the aspiring Sufi novice by one of the great masters, Ibn al-Arabi (1164–1240 C.E.) of Murcia.
Among the things you must possess, my brother, is (the grace) not to live at the expense of other people, to be a burden to no one, to accept no support from man either for yourself or anyone else, but to practice your own trade and be abstemious in the matter of your living expenses. (Exercise restraint) also in your words and glances on all occasions, whether you are moving about or are stationary. Be not extravagant in matters of housing or dress or food, for what is lawful (therein) is but little and leaves no room for lavishness….
Among the things you must possess, my friend, is (the grace of doing with but) little food, for (abstinence) in this and cheerfulness in obedience drives away laziness. You must be careful to apportion out your time by day and by night. As for the hours when the religious law summons you to stand before God, they are the five prayer periods for the canonical prayers. But beyond them are the other times consecrated by the custom of the Prophet. So if you are a craftsman, labor diligently to make enough in one day to provide your needs for several days. If you are a business man, do not hasten away from your place of prayer after the dawn prayer until the sun has risen, nor after the afternoon prayer until the sun has set…. Do not sleep until you are quite overcome by slumber. Do not eat save what is needful, nor dress save as is necessary to guard against heat and cold, with the intention of covering the genitals and removing a peremptory impediment to the worship of God….
Among the things you must possess is (the grace of) having an accounting with yourself, a seasonable examination of your innermost thoughts, putting a shamefacedness before God as the raiment on your heart, for if you possess a true feeling of shame before God you will prevent your heart from harboring fancies which God would find blameworthy, or from being moved by emotions with which God Most High would not be pleased. We ourselves used formerly to have a master who was accustomed to record his emotional states during the day in a book that he had, and when night came he would set the pages in front of him and have an accounting with himself for what was written therein….
Take care to be continent. That is, avoid everything that would leave an impression on your soul…. If you live in that state of continence which is the foundation of religion and the path to God, your works will thrive and your undertakings be successful, your condition in life will prosper, supernatural blessings will hasten toward you, and you will be guided by divine care in all your affairs. We have no doubt about it. But whenever you turn aside from the path of continence and go straying in every valley (of desire), God departs from you and leaves you to yourself, so that Satan gets the mastery of you. (Ibn al-Arabi, A Treatise on What the Novice Must Possess) [JEFFERY 1962: 643–645, 653]
At times even the externals of the two types of spiritual endeavor, that of the monk and that of the Sufi, bore remarkable similarities, as one Muslim had occasion to observe. The era is the eleventh century, the Latin Crusader century in Palestine, and it is a community of Christian monks that first attracts the attention of Usama.
I visited the tomb of John [the Baptist], the son of Zachariah—God’s blessing on both of them—in the village of Sebaste in the province of Nablus [that is, the biblical Samaria]. After I said my prayers, I went into the square that was bounded on one side by the holy precinct (where the tomb was located). I found a half-closed gate, opened it and entered a church. Inside were about ten old men, their bare heads as white as combed cotton. They were facing eastward, and wore [embroidered?] on their breasts staffs ending in crossbars turned up like the rear of a saddle [that is, some form of a cross, as Usama likely knew very well]. They swore their oaths on this sign, and gave hospitality to those who needed it. The sight of their piety touched my heart, but at the same time it displeased and saddened me, for I had never seen such zeal and devotion among the Muslims.
I brooded on this experience for some time, until one day, as Mu‘in al-Din and I were passing the Peacock House, he said to me. “I want to dismount here and visit the shaykhs.” “Certainly,” I said, and so we dismounted and went into a long building set at an angle to the road. At first I thought that there was no one there. Then I saw about a hundred prayer-mats and on each one of them a Sufi, his face expressing a peaceful serenity, and his body humble devotion. This was a reassuring sight, and I gave thanks to Almighty God that there were among Muslims men of even more zealous devotion than those Christian priests. Before this I had never seen Sufis in their convent and so was ignorant of the way they lived. (Usama, Book of the Staff 528–529)
A century later, in 1183 C.E., the Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr likewise had occasion to note communities of ascetics, now in Damascus, and he too was impressed and edified.
Ribats for Sufis, which are here called khanaqas, are numerous. They are adorned residences; water flows through all of them and they present the most delicious prospect imaginable. The members of this type of Sufi organization live like kings here since God had provided for them even beyond the necessities and so freed their minds from any concern for earning a living, and thus they can devote themselves entirely to His service. He has lodged them in halls which give them a foretaste of those of Paradise. So these fortunate men, the most favored of the Sufis, enjoy by God’s favor the blessings of both this world and the next. They follow a praiseworthy vocation and their life in common is conducted in an admirable fashion.
Ibn Jubayr observed, and obviously approved of, something else new and unusual about the Sufi life, their manner of prayer.
Their manner of worship is peculiar to them. Their custom of assembling for highly charged musical recitals is most pleasant. Sometimes, so carried away are some of these rapt ascetics when they are under the influence of this condition, that they can scarcely be thought of as belonging to this world at all. (Ibn Jubayr, Travels 284)
Ibn Jubayr has a name for the Sufis’ common lodging, ribat, a familiar term to him, though in Damascus, he explains, they are called by the less familiar khanaqa. This latter, a Sufi cloister or convent, was the third, and in the end the most common, of a trio of institutions that served the needs and ends of ascetics and mystics in Islam.
The oldest of the three was, as Ibn Jubayr intimates, the ribat. By tradition this was originally a fortified keep to protect the lands and coasts of Islam, but in the course of time it had evolved into a kind of cloistered hospice for Muslims who for reasons of need—widows were often housed in them—or by preference chose to separate themselves from the world. In the end the ribat became totally identified with Sufism, though it had neither the personal stamp of the shrine-tomb (zawiya) nor the official character and internal organization of what seems very akin to a Christian monastery—the text of Usama already suggests the comparison—the khanaqa.
If the Sufi convent had some of the features of the Christian monastery, the shrine-tomb corresponded to another development in Christian spirituality. The earliest Christian holy men attracted others to themselves and provided both a model and an ideal for those admirers to follow. The shaykh of the Islamic tradition had much the same effect: his sanctity drew others to himself and so his quarters, perhaps enlarged to permit others to lodge there as well became a very loosely organized school, a “way” (tariqa), as the Muslims called it.
Most Sufis passed across the terrain of asceticism and spiritual exercises in the company of an accomplished master (murshid, pir). At first that elder may have been simply a skilled and experienced director of souls, but eventually that ideal was replaced, as it was in Christianity, by the notion of a charismatic guide, a “spiritual father” who possessed the gift of divine grace (baraka). It was the murshid, in any event, who introduced the novice into two of the most common practices of Sufism, the “recollection” (dhikr) and the “hearing” (sama‘). The dhikr has its spiritual, internal sense of recollecting God’s blessings, but its more visible form in Sufism is the repetition of set formulas, notably the Muslim profession of faith or the ninety-nine names of Allah. The repetition was rhythmical and often accompanied, as was the “Jesus-prayer” used to the same end in Christianity, by controlled breathing. The ecstatic state of “annihilation” (fana), which was for the Sufi a natural antecedent of union with the Divine, was often accompanied by an elaborate ritual of singing and dancing within which the dhikr might be commingled. This latter, sama‘ or “spiritual concert,” as it has been called, though highly characteristic of certain Sufi associations such as the whirling dervishes, was not everywhere approved or accepted in Islam. Why some more sober Muslims might be scandalized becomes apparent in Edward Lane’s account of dhikrs of the more extravagant type that he witnessed in Cairo in 1825 and described in chapter 24 of his Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.
At the shaykh’s death he was often buried in the place where he had lived, and so in the final stage of its evolution the zawiya was both a shrine and a tomb, and not always on a modest scale. Ibn Battuta describes a tomb-shrine he visited near Wasit in Iraq in 1327 C.E.
This gave me the opportunity of visiting the grave of the saint Abu al-Abbas Ahmad al-Rifa‘i [d. 1182 C.E.], which is set at a village called Umm Ubayda, one day’s journey from Wasit…. It is a vast convent in which there are thousands of poor brethren…. When the afternoon prayers have been said, drums and kettle drums were beaten and the poor brethren began to dance. After this they prayed the sunset prayer and brought in the repast, consisting of rice-bread, fish, milk and dates.
After the meal there begins the community “recollection” (dhikr), the widespread form of Sufi devotion already noted by Ibn Jubayr; it is performed in this instance under the direction of the master of the tomb-shrine together with his adepts. Shaykh Ahmad, it is noted, was a lineal descendant of the saint buried there. Finally, the “Rifa‘i” version of a “spiritual concert” was considered notorious even in its own day.
When all had eaten and prayed the first night prayer, they began to recite their “recollection,” with the shaykh Ahmad sitting on the prayer-carpet of his ancestor above mentioned, when they began the musical recital. They had prepared loads of fire-wood which they kindled into a flame, and went dancing into the midst of it; some of them rolled in the fire, and others ate it in their mouths, until finally they extinguished it entirely. This is their regular custom, and it is the peculiar characteristic of this corporation of Ahmadi brethren. Some of them will take a large snake and bite its head with their teeth until they bite it clean through. [IBN BATTUTA 1959–1962: 273–274]
The community resident within one of these convents or tomb-shrines might be formal or informal, loosely or tightly structured, made up of permanent members or with transient “sojourners.” Where the life and the community was more formal, it was associated with a “way,” practices and blessings modeled on and derived from a saintly master.
Spiritual attraction and spiritual authority came together to form the Sufi “orders,” also called tariqas or “ways.” These “orders,” which were generally neither monastic nor enclosed, and so somewhat different from the Christian religious orders, had an immense popular appeal in Islam—not least because they were a social and spiritual reaction to the increasingly clerical and legal character of what had come to be official Islam, which was dominated by a rabbinate with powerful economic, social, and political connections. More, the Islamic tariqa was far more charismatic and had a greater orientation toward a master-novice relationship than its Christian, and particularly its Western Christian, counterpart. In the Sufi reception and training of postulants, for example, we can observe both the similarities to and differences from Christian practice. Ibn Battuta describes the arrival of a postulant, who has already had some training, at the gates of a Cairo convent.
When a new arrival makes his appearance, he has to take up his stand at the gateway of the convent, girded about the middle, with a prayer-rug slung over his back, his staff in his right hand, and his ablution-jug in his left. The gatekeeper informs the steward who goes out and ascertains from what country he has come, what convents he has resided in during his journey (or earlier training), and who was his initiator. If he is satisfied with the truth of his replies, he brings him into the convent, arranges a suitable place for him to spread out his prayer-mat, and shows him the washroom. The postulant then restores himself to a state of ritual cleanliness, goes to his mat, ungirds himself, and prays two prostrations. After this he clasps the hands of the shaykh [that is, the murshid or spiritual master] and of those who are present and takes his seat among them. (Ibn Battuta, Travels 1.20)
The postulant has become a novice and is set upon the course of his spiritual training.
The Sufi masters observe the following rule. When a novice joins them with the purpose of renouncing the world, they subject him to a spiritual training for the space of three years. If he fulfills the requirements of this discipline, well and good; otherwise they declare that he cannot be admitted to the Path. The first year is devoted to the service of the people, the second year to service of God, and the third year to watching over his own heart.
At the end of his three-year training and probation, the novice is ready for investiture with the patched Sufi cloak, the “religious habit” of this way of life.
The adept, then, who has attained the perfection of saintship takes the right course when he invests the novice with the Sufi cloak after a period of three years during which he has educated him in the necessary discipline. In respect of the qualifications which it demands, the Sufi cloak is comparable to a winding sheet: the wearer must resign all his hopes of the pleasures of life, and purge his heart of all sensual delights, and devote his life entirely to the service of God. (Hujwiri, The Unveiling) [HUJWIRI 1911: 54–55]
Sufi convent life evolved over a long period of time in Islam, from the most informal, almost anarchical arrangements, to institutions that rivaled Christendom’s orderly monasteries. The first example here is from Muqaddasi, a professional traveler roaming the “Abode of Islam” sometime before 980 C.E., when Sufi congregations were still grasping for a sense of themselves.
When I entered Sus [a town in southwestern Iran] I went to the main mosque to seek out a shaykh whom I might question concerning certain points of Prophetic tradition. It happened that I was wearing a cloak of Cypriot wool and a Basran waist-wrapper and so I was directed to a congregation of Sufis. As I approached they assumed that I too was a Sufi and welcomed me with open arms. They settled me among them and began questioning me. Then they sent a man with food. I felt uneasy about taking the food since I had had nothing to do with such (Sufi) congregations before this. They expressed surprise at my reluctance and my not joining in their rituals. But I felt drawn to associate myself with this congregation and find out about their method, and learn the true nature of Sufism. I said to myself, “This is your chance, here where nobody knows you.”
I cast off all restraint in their regard…. At one time I joined in their antiphonal singing, on another occasion I shouted with them, and on another recited poems with them. I went with them to visit hospices and to engage in religious recitals, with the result that I won a remarkably high place in the affections of both the Sufis and the people there. I gained a great reputation; I was visited for my virtue and was sent presents of clothes and money, which I accepted but straightway handed over untouched to the Sufis, since I was well off. I spent every day in my considerable devotions, and they imagined that I did it out of piety. People began touching me and spreading reports of my fame, saying that they had never seen a more excellent ascetic. So it continued until, when the time came that I had penetrated into their secrets and learned all that I wished, I just ran away from them in the middle of the night and by the morning I was well away. (Muqaddasi 415)
Three and a half centuries later, when Ibn Battuta is describing the convents of Cairo ca. 1355 C.E., the institutional landscape looks very different.
Each convent in Cairo is affected to the use of a separate congregation of ascetics [here in Arabic, a fakir; the Persian equivalent is a dervish] most of whom are Persians, men of good education and adepts in the “way” of Sufism. Each has a shaykh and a warden, and the organization of their affairs is admirable. It is one of their customs in the matter of their food that the steward of the house comes in the morning to the dervishes, each of whom then specifies what food he desires. When they assemble for meals, each person is given his bread and soup in a separate dish, none sharing with another. They eat twice a day. They receive winter clothing and summer clothing and a monthly allowance varying from 20 to 30 dirhams each. Every Thursday evening they are given sugar cakes, soap to wash their clothes, the price of admission to the bath house and oil to feed their lamps. These men are celibate; the married men have separate convents. Among the stipulations required of them are attendance at the five daily prayers, spending the night in the khanaqa and assembly in mass in a chapel within the convent. [IBN BATTUTA 1959–1962: 44]
Or here, in even broader strokes, of Damascus of the same era:
The people of Damascus vie with one another in the building and endowment of mosques, religious houses, colleges and shrines…. Every man who comes to the end of his resources in any district of Damascus finds without exception some means of livelihood opened to him, either as a prayer-leader in a mosque, or as a reciter in a law school or by occupation [of a cell] in a mosque, where his daily requirements are supplied to him, or by recitation of the Quran, or employment as a keeper at one of the blessed sanctuaries, or else he may be included in the company of Sufis who live in the convent, in receipt of a regular allowance for upkeep money and clothing. Anyone who is a stranger there living on charity is always protected from [having to earn it at] the expense of his self-respect and dignity. Those who are manual workers or in domestic service find other means of livelihood, for example as guardian of an orchard or intendant of a mill or in charge of children, going with them in the morning to their lessons and coming back with them in the evening, and anyone who wishes to pursue a course of studies or devote himself to the religious life receives every aid to the execution of his purpose. [IBN BATTUTA 1959–1962: 149–150]
Asceticism is a life-style, a process, and though in both Christianity and Islam the way of life it characterized was understood to have its own merits and its own rewards, eventually in both traditions it came to be regarded as the preparatory means to an even higher, and far rarer, state, the experience of the divine: the devout Sufi might also aspire to be a mystic.
The scriptural accounts of Moses on Sinai and Jesus on Tabor served, when and where needed, as Jewish and Christian paradigms of the vision of God. The Muslim had no such straightforward narrative text in the Quran to certify Muhammad for the same purpose, and so the mystics of Islam turned instead for their inspiration to the famous “Light Verse.”
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
The semblance of His Light is that of the niche in which is a lamp, the flame within the glass, the glass as it were a glittering star, lit with the oil of a blessed tree, the olive, neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil appears to light up even though fire touches it not—light upon light.
God guides to His Light whom He will.
So does God advance precepts [or “allegories”] for men,
For God has knowledge of every thing.
(Quran 24:35)
The last sentence in the verse reads like an open invitation to allegorical exegesis, and so it was generally interpreted, here from the work entitled The Pure in the Interpretation of the Quran by the Shi‘ite scholar al-Kashi (d. 1505 C.E.). His interpretation, which is overtly Shi‘ite in intent, goes back, as he tells us, to another, much earlier eminence in that tradition, Ibn Babuya al-Qummi (d. 939 C.E.). And Qummi’s authorities are no less than the fifth and sixth Shi‘ite Imams, Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 731 C.E.) and Ja‘far al-Sadiq (d. 756 C.E.).
In The Oneness (of al-Qummi) it is reported, on the authority of al-Sadiq: What is at question here is a simile that God has fashioned for us.
God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth: Just so, said al-Sadiq.
His Light: al-Sadiq said: This refers to Muhammad.
That of a niche: al-Sadiq said that what is meant here is Muhammad’s breast.
In which is a lamp: al-Sadiq said: In which is the light of knowledge, that is, of prophecy.
The flame within the glass: al-Sadiq said: The knowledge of the Messenger of God went forth from the latter into the heart of Ali.
… neither of the East nor the West: According to al-Sadiq these words refer to the Commander of the Believers, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was neither a Jew nor a Christian.
Whose oil appears to light up even though fire touches it not: al-Sadiq said: The knowledge would issue forth from the mouth of the knowing one of the family of Muhammad [that is, Ali] even if Muhammad had not spoken it.
Light upon light: al-Sadiq said that this means from one Imam to the next.
Then Kashi turns to another Shi‘ite commentator, al-Tabarsi (d. 1153 C.E.) for a somewhat more general interpretation of the same verse.
It is said … (by Tabarsi) from the Imam al-Baqir in a Tradition that the verse “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth” means: “I [that is, God] am the rightly guided director of the heavens and the earth. The knowledge that I have given, namely, My light through which the guidance results, ‘is like a niche wherein is a lamp.’ The niche is the heart of Muhammad, and the lamp is his light, wherein lies knowledge.” Further, God’s words “the flame in a glass” mean: “I [that is, God] want to lay hold of you and what is with you so that I might manifest the Executor [a standard Shi‘ite designation for Ali] like the flame in the glass, ‘as it were a glittering star.’ Then will I give men news of the excellence of the Executor.”
Lit with the oil of a blessed tree: The root of that blessed tree is Abraham. This is referred to in God’s words: “The mercy of God and His blessings be upon you, O people of the House. Surely he [that is, Abraham] is worthy of praise and glory” (Quran 11:76)….
That is neither of the East nor the West means: You are neither Jews, so that you would perform the prayer facing toward the west [that is, Jerusalem] nor Christians, so that you would face toward the east. Rather you follow the creed of Abraham, of whom God has said: “No, in truth Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a hanif who had submitted to God. Certainly he was never one of the idolaters” (Quran 3:60). (Kashi ad. loc.)
In section 4 of this chapter we followed the jurist and theologian Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.) on his voyage of discovery of Sufism as he described it in his Deliverer from Error. At the end of his quest he attempts to define what he has found, beginning with a comparison with the ablution that purifies a Muslim for prayer.
In general, then, how is the mystic way described? The purifying which is the first condition of it is the purification of the heart completely from what is other than God Most High; the key to it, which corresponds to the opening act of adoration in prayer, is the sinking of the heart completely in the recollection of God; and the end of it is complete annihilation in God. At least this is its end relative to those first steps which almost come within the sphere of choice and personal responsibility; but in reality in the actual “way” it is the first step, what comes before it being, as it were, the antechamber for those who are journeying towards it.
With this first stage of the “way” there begin the revelations and visions. The mystics in their waking state now behold angels and the spirits of the prophets; they hear these speaking to them and are instructed by them. Later, a higher stage is reached; instead of beholding forms and figures, they come to stages in the “way” which it is hard to describe in language; if a man attempts to express these, his words inevitably contain what is clearly erroneous.
In general what the mystics manage to attain is nearness to God; some, however, would conceive of this as “infusion,” some as “union,” and some as “identity” (with God). All that is erroneous. He who has attained the mystic state need do no more than say that “Of the things I do not remember, what was, was; think it good; do not ask an account of it.” …
In general, the man to whom He has granted no immediate experience at all, apprehends no more of what prophetic revelation really is than the name alone. The miraculous graces given to the saints are in truth the beginnings of the prophecy, and that was the first “state” of the Messenger of God (peace be upon him) when he went out to Mount Hira, and was given up entirely to his Lord, and worshiped Him so that the bedouin said, “He loves his Lord passionately.”
Now this is a mystical “state” which is realized in immediate experience by those who walk in the way leading to it. Those to whom it is not granted to have the immediate experience can become assured of it by trial [that is, observation of Sufis] and by hearsay, if they have sufficiently numerous opportunities of associating with mystics to understand that [that is, the mystical experience] with certainty by means of what accompanies the states. Whoever sits in their company derives from them this faith; and no one who sits in their company is pained. (Ghazali, Deliverer 132–135) [GHAZALI 1953: 60–62]
Ibn Khaldun too attempts to explain the Sufi experience, though now not through the sensibilities of one who had himself traveled the path but from the perspective of the cultural historian.
Mystical exertion, retirement, and the recollection exercise are as a rule followed by the removal of the veil of sensual perception. The Sufi beholds divine worlds which a person subject to the senses cannot. The spirit belongs to those worlds. The reason for the removal of the veil is the following. When the spirit turns from external sense perception to inner perception, the senses weaken and the spirit grows strong. It gains predominance and a new growth. The recollection exercise helps to bring that about. It is like food to make the spirit grow. The spirit continues to grow. It had been knowledge; now it becomes vision. The veil of sensual perception is removed, and the soul realizes its essential existence. This is identical with perception. The spirit now is ready for the holy gifts, for the sciences of divine presence, and for the outpouring of the Deity. Its essence realizes its own true character and draws close to the highest sphere, the sphere of the angels.
The removal of the veil often happens to people who exert themselves in mystical exercise. They perceive the realities of existence as no one else does. They also perceive many future happenings in advance. With the help of their minds and psychic powers they are active among the lower existents, which thus become obedient to their will. The great Sufis do not think much of the removal of the veil and of activity among the lower existents. They give no information about the reality of anything they have not been ordered to discuss. They consider it a tribulation when things of that sort occur to them, and try to escape them whenever they afflict them.
By the “great Sufis” Ibn Khaldun means the earliest generation of Muslims, beginning with the men of Muhammad’s own generation. Though they received abundant visitations of the divine grace, they paid little attention to such manifestations. The self-conscious pursuit of such experiences set in only at a later date, among more recent mystics.
Recent mystics have turned their attention to the removal of the veil and the discussion of perceptions beyond sensual perception. Their ways of mystical exercise in this respect differ. They have taught different methods of mortifying the sensual perception and nourishing the reasoning spirit with recollection exercises, so that the soul might fully grow and attain its own essential perception. When this happens they believe that the whole of existence is encompassed by the perceptions of the soul, that the essences of existence are revealed to them, and that they perceive the reality of all the essences from the divine throne to light rain. This was said by al-Ghazali in the Revivification, after he had mentioned the forms of spiritual exercises….
The recent Sufis who have occupied themselves with this kind of removal of the veil talk about the real character of the higher and lower existents and about the real character of the kingdom, the spirit, the throne, the seat, and similar things. Those who did not share their approach were not able to understand their mystical and ecstatic experiences in this respect. The muftis partly approve of these Sufis and partly accept them. Arguments and proofs are of no use in deciding whether the Sufi approach should be rejected or accepted, since it belongs to intuitive experience. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:81–83]
It is not always easy to understand where Ibn Khaldun is drawing his systematic line between the “earlier” and “later Sufis,” but the Sufi Junayd (d. 910 C.E.) certainly falls in the very heart of the earlier category. A Baghdad master, he stands midway between the Sufi pioneer Muhasibi (d. 837 C.E.) and his erstwhile disciple, the far more extreme Hallaj, executed at Baghdad in 922 C.E.
Like Muhasibi and most of the other “sober” Sufis, Junayd was a skilled director of souls, as this brief analysis indicates.
There are three types of people: the man who seeks and searches, the man who reaches the door and stays there, and the man who enters and remains.
As for the man who seeks God, he goes toward Him guided by a knowledge of the religious precepts and duties (of Islam), concentrating on the performance of all external observances toward God. Regarding the man who reaches the doorway and stays there, he finds his way there by means of his internal purity, from which he derives his strength. He acts toward God with internal concentration. Finally, as for the man who enters into God’s presence with his whole heart and remains before Him, he excludes the vision of anything other than God, noting God’s every sign to him, and ready for whatever his Lord may command. This readiness is characteristic of the man who recognizes the Oneness of God. [JUNAYD 1962: 176]
This last perception of the “Oneness of God,” an expression that in Arabic also does service as “Oneness with God,” was for Junayd and his ninth-century Baghdad contemporaries both the touchstone and the climax of the mystical experience. It was not an easy notion either to grasp or to describe. Although Junayd defined the “Oneness of/with God” in typically aphoristic fashion as “the separation of the Eternal from the contingent”—a phrase not uncommonly offered by his successors as a definition of Sufism, or rather of mysticism purely and simply—he also addressed the central concept of Oneness in a somewhat fuller fashion.
Know that the first condition of the worship of God—may He be exalted and magnified—is the knowledge of God, and the basis of the knowledge of God is the recognition of His being One, and that His Oneness precludes the possibility of describing God in terms of responses to the questions “How?” or “Where?” or “When?” …
God’s Oneness connotes belief in Him. From belief follows confirmation which in turn leads to knowledge of Him. Knowledge of Him implies obedience to His commands, obedience carries with it the ascent towards Him, which leads ultimately to reaching Him.
This apparent success in the mystical quest leads only to a further paradox, however.
When God is attained His manifestation can be expounded, but from His manifestation there also follows bewilderment which is so overwhelming that it inhibits the possibility of the exposition of God, and as a result of losing this manifestation of God the elected worshiper is unable to describe God. And there, when the worshiper is unable to describe God, he finds the true nature of his existing for God. And from this comes the vision of God, together with the loss of his individuality. And with the loss of his individuality he achieves absolute purity … he has lost his personal attributes: … he is wholly present in God … wholly lost to self.
But then there is an inevitable return to a more normal condition, though not without permanent alterations in spiritual temperament.
He is existent in both himself and in God after having been existent in God and non-existent in himself. This is because he has left the drunkenness of God’s overwhelming and come to the clarity of sobriety. Contemplation is once again restored to him, so that he can put everything in its right place and assess it correctly. Once more he assumes his individual attributes, after the “obliteration” his personal qualities persist in him and in his actions in this world, when he has reached the height of spiritual perfection granted by God, he becomes a pattern for his fellow men. [JUNAYD 1962: 171–172]
Know that this sense of the Oneness of God exists in people in four different ways. The first is the sense of Oneness possessed by ordinary people. Then there is the sense shared by those well versed in formal religious knowledge. The other two types are experienced by the elect who have esoteric knowledge. [JUNAYD 1962: 176]
God’s Oneness is in fact the cornerstone of Islam—every Muslim’s profession of faith begins with the statement that “There is no god by the God …”—and Junayd bases his analysis on its simple assertion.
As for the sense of Oneness possessed by ordinary people, it consists in the assertion of God’s Oneness, in the disappearance of any notion of gods, opposites, equals or likenesses to God, but with the persistence of hopes and fears in forces other than God. This level of Oneness has a certain degree of efficacy since the simple assertion of God’s Oneness does in fact persist.
As for the conception of Oneness shared by those who are well versed in religious knowledge, it consists not only in the assertion of God’s Oneness, in the disappearance of any conception of gods, opposites, equals or likenesses to God, but also in the performance of the positive commands (of religion) and the avoidance of that which is forbidden, so far as external action is concerned, all of this being the result of their hopes, fears and desires. This level of Oneness likewise possesses a degree of efficacy since there is a public demonstration of the Oneness of God.
As for the first type of esoteric Oneness, it consists in the assertion of the Oneness of God, the disappearance of the conception of things referred to, combined with the performance of God’s command externally and internally, and the removal of hopes and fears in forces other than God, all of this the result of ideas that conform with the adept’s awareness of God’s presence with him, with God’s call to him and his answer to God.
A second type of esoteric Oneness consists in existing without individuality before God with no intermediary between, becoming a figure over which His decrees pass in accordance with His omnipotence, a soul sunk in the flooding sea of His Oneness, all sense lost of himself, God’s call to him and his response to God. It is a stage wherein the devotee has achieved a true realization of the Oneness of God in true nearness to Him. He is lost to both sense and action because God fulfills in him what He has willed of him…. His existence now is like it was before he had existence. This, then, is the highest stage of the true realization of the Oneness of God in which the worshiper who sustains this Oneness loses his own individuality. [JUNAYD 1962: 176–178]
Obliteration, the loss of one’s personal or individual characteristics before God, is also the key to attaining that same state. It is both the method and the goal of the mystic’s pursuit, as Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.) explains in his great work of spiritual renewal, The Revivification of the Sciences of Religion.
Whoever looks upon the world only because it is God’s work, and knows it because it is God’s work, and loves it because it is God’s work, does not look except to God and knows nothing except God, and loves naught except God—he is the true One-maker who does not see anything but God, indeed, he does not regard even himself for his own sake but because he is God’s servant, and of such a person it is said that he is annihilated in Oneness and he is annihilated from himself. (Ghazali, Revivification 4.276)
According to Junayd, the first step on the path to self-annihilation consists in training the will.
The obliteration of attributes, characteristics and natural inclinations in your motives when you carry out your religious duties, making great efforts and doing the opposite of what you may desire, and compelling yourself to do the things which you do not wish to do.
Nor must asceticism be neglected.
The obliteration of your pursuit of pleasure and even the sensation of pleasure in obedience to God’s commands; so that you are exclusively His, without intermediary means of contact.
Finally, the mystic achieves true obliteration, a complete loss of self-awareness, and with it, a higher level of existence.
The obliteration of the consciousness of having attained the vision of God at the final stage of ecstasy when God’s victory over you is complete. At this stage you are obliterated and have eternal life with God, and you exist only in the existence of God because you have been obliterated. Your physical being continues but your individuality has departed. [JUNAYD 1962: 81]
Sufi theoreticians on the one hand cut their definitions of annihilation of self and Oneness with God exceedingly fine, while ecstatics on the other, the “drunken Sufis” who did not share Junayd’s measured sobriety, followed whither their fevered experience and expressions led them. The result was, not unpredictably, a conservative reaction, or at least a degree of caution, and in the first instance on the part of certain Sufi masters themselves. One such was al-Sarraj (d. 988 C.E.), whose great systematic treatise on Sufism ends with a kind of syllabus of errors directed at Sufi theory and practice.
Some mystics of Baghdad have erred in their doctrine that, when they pass away from their qualities, they enter into the qualities of God. This involves infusion (hulul) or leads to the Christian belief concerning Jesus. The doctrine in question has been attributed to some of the earlier (Muslim) mystics, but its true understanding is this: when a man goes forth from his own qualities and enters into the qualities of God, he goes forth from his own will, which is a gift to him from God, and enters into the Will of God, knowing that his will has been given to him by God, and that by virtue of this gift he can stop regarding himself and become entirely devoted to God. This is one of the stages of those who seek after Oneness. Those who have erred in this teaching are the ones who have failed to note that the qualities of God are not the same as God. To make God identical with His qualities is to be guilty of infidelity, because God does not descend into the heart but what does descend into the heart is faith in God and belief in His Oneness and reverence for the thought of him. (Sarraj, The Splendor of Sufism 432) [Cited in JUNAYD 1962: 84]
Some have abstained from food and drink because they fancy that, when a man’s body is weakened, it is possible that he may lose his humanity and be invested with the attributes of divinity. The ignorant persons who hold this doctrine cannot distinguish between humanity and the innate qualities of humanity. Humanity does not depart from a man any more than blackness departs from that which is black or whiteness from that which is white, but the innate qualities of humanity are changed and transmuted by the all-powerful radiance that is shed upon them from the Divine Realities. The attributes of humanity are not the essence of humanity. Those who speak of the doctrine of obliteration mean the cessation of our regarding our own actions and works of devotion through continuously regarding God as the doer of those acts on behalf of His servants. (Sarraj, The Splendor of Sufism 426) [Cited in JUNAYD 1962: 84–85]
Sarraj was willing to exonerate Junayd from his charges, but far more culpable was the tenth century’s—and all of Sufism’s—best-known example of extravagant utterance, al-Hallaj.
We have already seen Ghazali’s reflections on his spiritual career. But these are thoughts recollected and reshaped in tranquillity. Indeed, some Sufi lives may have been tranquil, but certainly not that of Islam’s most notorious seeker after God, the Baghdad saint and mystic Husayn ibn Mansur, surnamed al-Hallaj, “the carder,” who was put to death, a martyr of esoteric Sufism, in the capital of the Islamic empire in 922 C.E. Hallaj had earlier studied with Junayd, then broke with his master and eventually installed himself, his family, and a number of disciples in Baghdad. But he did not rest there for long. His life was full of restless wandering, and on this occasion he set out for the “land of idolatry,” India and Turkestan. And, his son adds in a memoir, “the gossip about him increased after this journey.”
He departed again after that and made a third pilgrimage, including a two year spiritual retreat in Mecca. He returned this time very changed from what he had been before. He purchased property in Baghdad and built a house. He began to preach in public a doctrine only half of which I understood. In the end (the lawyer) Muhammad Dawud rose against him, together with a whole group of ulama; and they took their accusations against his views to (the Caliph) al-Mu‘tadid…. Some people said: he is a sorcerer. Others: he is a madman. Still others: he performs miracles and his prayer is granted (by God). And tongues wrangled over his case up to the moment when the government arrested and imprisoned him.
At that time (the Grand Chamberlain) Nasr Qushuri went to the Caliph, who authorized him to build my father a separate cell in prison. Then a little house was constructed for him adjoining the prison; the outside door to the building was walled up, the building itself was surrounded by a wall, and a door was made opening into the interior of the prison. For about a year he received visits from people there. Then that was forbidden him, and he went for five months without anyone being able to see him…. At that time I was spending my night with my maternal family outside, and staying during the day near my father. Then they imprisoned me with him for a period of two months. At that time I was eighteen years old.
And when the night came in which my father was to be taken, at dawn, from his cell (for execution), he stood up for the prayer, of which he performed one of two prostrations. Then, with this prayer completed, he continued repeating over and over again the word “illusion … illusion,” until the night was almost over. Then for a long time he was silent, when suddenly he cried out “truth … truth.” He stood up again, put on his head cloak and wrapped himself in his coat, extended his hands, turned toward the prayer-direction and went into ecstatic prayer….
When the morning came, they led him from the prison, and I saw him walking proudly in his chains…. They led him then (to the esplanade) where they cut off his hands and feet, after having flogged him with 500 lashes of the whip. Then he was hoisted up onto the cross, and I heard him on the gibbet talking ecstatically with God: “O my God, here I am in the dwelling place of my desires, where I contemplate Your marvels. O my God, since You witness friendship even to whoever does You wrong, how is it You do not witness it to this one to whom wrong is done because of You?” …
At the time of the evening prayer, the authorization by the Caliph to decapitate Hallaj came. But it was declared: “It is too late; we shall put it off until tomorrow.” When morning came, they took him down from the gibbet and dragged him forth to behead him. I heard him cry out then, saying in a very high voice: “All that matters for the ecstatic is that his Only One bring him to his Oneness.” Then he recited this verse: “Those who do not believe in the Final Hour call for its coming; but those who believe in it await it with loving shyness, knowing that this will be (the coming of) God” (Quran 42:17). These were his last words.
His head was cut off, then his trunk was rolled up in a straw mat, doused with fuel and burned. Later his ashes were carried to Lighthouse Point (on the Tigris) to disperse them to the wind. [MASSIGNON 1982: 10–18]
Hallaj’s son’s account of his father’s life and death makes no mention of his trial, which had to do with the examination of Hallaj’s views on the pilgrimage. This apparent attack on Islamic ritual may indeed have merited Hallaj the death sentence in 922 C.E., but it was by no means his only, or perhaps even his most scandalous, departure from Islamic religious teaching. What attracted even more attention in later generations was another remark let he drop, in what appears to be utter simplicity, to Junayd.
It is related that Hallaj met Junayd one day, and said to him, “I am the Truth.” “No,” Junayd answered him, “it is by means of the Truth that you are! What gibbet will you stain with your blood!” [MASSIGNON 1982: 127]
That appears to be the full extent of the incident and the exchange. But there is little doubt as to how Hallaj intended the expression “I am the Truth” (or, as it has been translated, “My ‘I’ is God”) or how Junayd understood it: “the Truth” is a title of God and Hallaj was arrogating it to himself; and not, it is noted, in a state of ecstatic “intoxication,” but in its aftermath, the believer’s normal state of “sobriety,” a distinction that meant little to Hallaj but was of crucial importance to Junayd. Our source is the Persian Sufi Hujwiri (fl. 1057 C.E.).
I have read … that when Husayn ibn Mansur, in a sort of trance, broke with Amr al-Makki and came over to Junayd, the latter said: “Why did you come?”
“To live in community with you as a master.”
“I do not live in community with madmen; community life requires balance, otherwise what happened to you with Sahl Tustari and Amr occurs.”
“O master, sobriety and intoxication are only the two human aspects of the mystic, who remains separated from his Lord as long as these two aspects are not both annihilated.”
“O Ibn Mansur, you are wrong in your definition of those states, sobriety and intoxication; the first means the state of normal equilibrium of the faithful before God; it is not a qualification of the faithful that he may get it through his own effort as a creature; likewise the second, which signifies extremes of desire and love. O Ibn Mansur, I see in your language an indiscreet curiosity and some expressions that are useless.” (Hujwiri, The Unveiling 235) [Cited by MASSIGNON 1982: 125–126]
What Junayd tactfully characterized as “some expressions that are useless” many other Muslims called “ecstatic utterances,” cries like Hallaj’s “I am the Truth” or Bistami’s “Glory be to Me,” uttered in a moment of mystical transport—valid for the Muslim “Gnostics” or “knowers,” as they are called here, no doubt, but the cause of some disturbance, and even scandal, to the ordinary believer. Both Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun tried to put the best face upon what was admittedly a difficult subject.
Those Gnostics, when they return from their ascent into the heaven of Reality, confess with one voice that they saw no existent there save the One Real Being. Some of them arrived at this scientifically, others experimentally and subjectively. For these last the plurality of things entirely fell away; they were drowned in the absolute Oneness, and their intelligences were lost in Its abyss…. They became like persons struck dumb, and they had no power within them except to recall God, not even the power to recall themselves. So there remained with them nothing save God. They became drunk with a drunkenness wherein the sense of their own intelligence disappeared, so that one cried out “I am the Truth,” and another “Glory be to Me! How great is My Glory!” and still another “Within this robe is nothing but God!” … But the words of lovers passionate in their intoxication and ecstasy must be hidden away and not spoken of. (Ghazali, Niche for Lights)
There are the suspect expressions which the Sufis call “ecstatic utterances” and which provoke the censure of orthodox Muslims. As to them, it should be known that the attitude that would be fair to the Sufis is that they are people who are removed from sense perception. Inspiration grips them. Eventually, they say things about their inspiration that they do not intend to say. A person who is removed from sense perception cannot be spoken to. More, he who is forced to act is excused. Sufis who are known for their excellence and exemplary character are considered to act in good faith in this and similar respects. It is difficult to express ecstatic experiences, because there are no conventional ways of expressing them. This was the experience of Abu Yazid al-Bistami and others like him. However, Sufis whose excellence is not known and famous deserve censure for utterances of this kind, since the (data) that might cause us to interpret their statements (so as to remove any suspicion attached to them) are not clear to us. Furthermore, any Sufis who are not removed from sense perception and are not in the grip of a (mystical) state when they make such utterances, also deserve censure. Therefore the jurists and the great Sufis decided that al-Hallaj was to be killed, because he spoke (ecstatically) while not removed from sense perception but in control of his state. And God knows better. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:102]
Ghazali’s moderating influence won for Sufism a respected if always somewhat suspect place in the Sunni household. But as the Sufi movement continued to develop, instances of what Juyawni would doubtless have considered “indiscreet curiosity” and “useless expressions” continued to occur in Sufi circles, and even the fate of Hallaj did nothing to dampen the adventuresome thought of some Sufi masters. When accompanied by continuing vigil on the part of the Sunni authorities, however, awareness of Hallaj’s end may have counseled some mystics to resort to the somewhat safer ground of allegory or inference.
One of the more prolonged and celebrated of the Sufi allegories is a long poem in Persian, The Conference of the Birds, written by Farid al-Din Attar in 1177 C.E. Its premise is that the birds of the world collect to go in search of an ideal king. In the end they discover him, but not before they tell and have told to them a great number of stories illustrative of the Sufi life, whose path they are themselves in fact allegorically tracing.
Attar’s allegorical birds finally reach their goal, the abode of a mythical king called Simorgh, whose Persian name derives etymologically from si = “thirty” and morgh = birds.
A world of birds set out, and there remained
But thirty when the promised goal was gained,
Thirty exhausted, wretched, broken things,
With hopeless hearts and tattered, trailing wings….
The king’s herald counsels them to turn back:
The herald said: “The blaze of Majesty
Reduces souls to unreality,
And if your souls are burnt, then all the pain
That you have suffered will have been in vain.”
They answered: “How can a moth flee fire
When fire contains its ultimate desire?
And if we do not join Him, yet we’ll burn,
And it is for this that our spirits yearn—
It is not union for which we hope;
We know that goal remains beyond our scope.” …
Though grief engulfed the ragged group, love made
The birds impetuous and unafraid;
The herald’s self-possession was unmoved,
But their resilience was not reproved—
Now gently he unlocked the guarded door;
A hundred doors drew back, and there before
The birds’ incredulous, bewildered sight
Shone the unveiled, the inmost Light of Light.
He led them to a noble throne, a place
Of intimacy, dignity and grace,
Then gave them all a written page and said
That when its contents had been duly read
The meaning that their journey had concealed,
And of the stage they’d reached, would be revealed….
The thirty birds read through the fateful page
And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,
Their lives, their actions, set out one by one—
All their souls had ever been or done….
The chastened spirits of these birds became
Like crumbled powder, and they shrank with shame.
Then, as by shame their spirits were refined
Of all the world’s weight, they began to find
A new life flow toward them from that bright
Celestial and ever-living Light—
Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close and insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh—at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one,
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meanings of these mysteries that confound
Their puzzled ignorance—how is it true
That “we” are not distinguished here from “You”?
And silently their shining Lord replies:
“I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendor see
Themselves, their own unique reality.”
(Attar, Parliament of Birds) [ATTAR 1984: 214–219]
The image of the face in the mirror was not original with Attar. It had appeared in one of its most striking forms in the writings of the dominant figure in all of Islamic mysticism, the Spaniard Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240 C.E.). It is introduced at the very beginning of his Bezels of Wisdom, in the expression of one of his fundamental themes: the ultimate and primordial unity of Reality or Being, polarized into the God and the Cosmos only after and because of the Reality’s desire to experience itself in another.
The Reality wanted to see the essences of His Most Beautiful Names, or, to put it another way, to see His own Essence in an all-inclusive object encompassing the whole (divine) Command, which, qualified by existence, would reveal to Him His own mystery. For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror; for it appears to itself in a form that is invested by the location of the vision by that which would only appear to it given the existence of the location and its [that is, the location’s] self-disclosure to it.
The reality gave existence to the whole Cosmos (at first) as an undifferentiated thing without anything of the spirit in it, so that it was like an unpolished mirror. It is in the nature of the divine determination that He does not set out a location except to receive a divine spirit, which is also called “the breathing into him” (Quran 21:91). The latter is nothing other than the coming into operation of the undifferentiated form’s (innate) disposition to receive the inexhaustible overflowing of Self-Revelation, which has always been and will ever be….
Thus the (divine) Command required (by its very nature) the reflective characteristic of the mirror of the Cosmos, and Adam was the very principle of reflection for that mirror and the spirit of that form. (Ibn al-Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom, “Adam”) [IBN AL-ARABI 1980: 50–51]
Here the image is turned around, and it is God who is the mirror.
If you are a believer, you will know that God will manifest Himself on the Day of Resurrection, initially in a recognizable form, then in a form unacceptable (to ordinary belief), He alone being the Self-manifesting One in every form, although it is obvious that one form is not the same as another.
It is as if the single Essence were a mirror, so that when the observer sees in it the form of his belief about God, he recognizes and confirms it, but if he should see it in the doctrinal formulation of someone of another creed, he will reject it, as if he were seeing in the mirror His form and then that of another. The mirror is single, while the forms (it reveals) are various in the eye of the observer.
None of the forms are in the mirror wholly, although a mirror has an effect on the forms in one way and not in another. For instance, it may make the form look smaller, larger, taller or broader. Thus it has an effect on their proportions, which is attributable to it, although such changes occur only due to the different proportions of the mirrors themselves. Look, then, into just one mirror, without considering mirrors in general, for it is the same as your beholding (Him) as being one Essence, albeit that He is beyond all need of the worlds. Insofar as He is Divine Names, on the other hand, He is like (many) mirrors. In which Divine Name have you beheld yourself, or who is the one who beholds? It is only the reality of the Name that is manifest in the beholder. Thus it is, if you will but understand. (Ibn al-Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, “Elias”) [IBN AL-ARABI 1980: 232–233]
Ibn al-Arabi returns to the relationship of the Reality and the Cosmos, now in terms of light and shadow.
Know that what is “other than the Reality,” which is called the Cosmos, is, in relation to the Reality, as a shadow is to what casts the shadow, for it is the shadow of God, this being the same as the relationship between Being and the Cosmos, since the shadow is, without doubt, something sensible. What is provided there is something on which the shadow may appear, since if it were that that whereon it appears should cease to be, the shadow would be an intelligible and not something sensible, and would exist potentially in the very thing that casts the shadow.
The thing on which this divine shadow, called the Cosmos, appears is the (eternally latent) essences of contingent beings. The shadow is spread out over them, and the (identity of the) shadow is known to the extent that the Being of the (original) Essence is extended upon it. It is by His Name, the Light, that it is perceived. This shadow extends over the essences of contingent being in the form of the unknown Unseen. Have you not observed that shadows tend to be black, which indicates their imperceptibility (as regards content) by reason of the remote relationship between them and their origins? If the source of the shadow is white, the shadow itself is still so [that is, black].
This is how the universe exists; Ibn al-Arabi then begins to move from its existence to our way of knowing both this world of ours called the Cosmos and its source.
No more is known of the Cosmos than is known from a shadow, and no more is known of the Reality than one knows of the origin of a shadow. Insofar as He has a shadow, He is known, but insofar as the form of the one casting the shadow is not perceived in the shadow, the Reality is not known. For this reason we say that the Reality is known to us in one sense and unknown in another.
We are, then, seriously misled about the “real existence” of the sensible universe.
If what we say is true, the Cosmos is but a fantasy without any real existence, which is another meaning of the Imagination. That is to say, you imagine that it [that is, the universe] is something separate and self-sufficient, outside the Reality, while the truth is that it is not so. Have you not observed (in the case of the shadow) that it is connected to the one who casts it, and would not its becoming unconnected be absurd, since nothing can be disconnected from itself?
It is, Ibn al-Arabi immediately continues, in the mirror we should look.
Therefore know truly your own self [that is, your own essence], who you are, what is your identity and what your relationship with the Reality. Consider well in what way you are real and in what way (part of) the Cosmos, as being separate, other, and so on.
Thus God is seen in many different modes: in one way—“green”—by the ordinary believer relying on the givens of Scripture, in another—“colorless”—by the theologian with his refined deductive portrait. And they are both correct, and, of course, both wildly wrong.
The Reality is, in relation to a particular shadow, small or large, pure or purer, as light in relationship to the glass that separates it from the beholder to whom the light has the color of the glass, while the light itself has no particular color. This is the relationship between your reality and your Lord; for, if you were to say that the light is green because of the green glass, you would be right as viewing the situation through your senses, and if you were to say it is not green, indeed it is colorless, by deduction, you would also be right as viewing the situation through sound intellectual reasoning. That which is seen may be said to be a light projected from a shadow, which is the glass, or a luminous shadow, according to its purity. Thus, he of us who has realized in himself the Reality manifests the form of the Reality to a greater extent than he who has not….
God created shadows lying prostrate to right and left only as clues for yourself in knowing yourself and Him, that you might know who you are, your relationship with Him, and His with you, and so you might understand how or according to which divine truth all that is other than God is described as being completely dependent on Him, as being (also) mutually independent. Also that you might know how and by what truth God is described as utterly independent of men and all worlds, and how the Cosmos is described as both mutually independent with respect to its parts and mutually dependent. (Ibn al-Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, “Joseph”) [IBN AL-ARABI 1980: 123–126]
Sufism from Ibn al-Arabi onward developed a repertory of esoteric learning that was as vast and at times as impenetrable as the Kabbala. This was theosophy pure and simple, an arcane and transcendental way of looking at this world in terms of a higher reality, a blend of knowing and doing, of gnosis and theurgy, with strong derivative roots in the late Platonic tradition of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. One of the central themes of this world view was the theory of the “Perfect Man,” a figure who simultaneously embraces the Holy Spirit, the Word, Adam, Muhammad, and the fully enlightened mystic himself. Ibn al-Arabi was one of the pioneers in the development of this motif, but it found its classic expression in the treatise called The Perfect Man by Abd al-Karim al-Jili (d. ca. 1410 C.E.).
God created the angel called Spirit from His own light, and from him He created the world and made him His organ of vision in the world. One of his names is the Word of God. He is the noblest and most exalted of all existent beings. The Spirit exercises a Divine guardianship, created in him by God, over the whole universe. He manifests himself in his perfection in the Ideal Muhammad: therefore the Prophet is the most excellent of all mankind. While God manifests Himself in His attributes to all other created beings, He manifests Himself in His essence to this angel [that is, the Spirit] alone. Accordingly, the Spirit is the Pole of the present world and the world to come. He does not make himself known to any creature of God but to the Perfect Man. When the saint knows him [that is, the Perfect Man] and truly understands the things which the Spirit teaches him, then he too becomes a Pole around which the entire universe revolves. But Poleship belongs fundamentally to the Spirit, and if others hold it, they are only his delegates. (Jili, The Perfect Man 2.12) [Cited by NICHOLSON 1921: 110–111]
The Perfect Man is the Pole on which the spheres of existence revolve from first to last, and since things came into being he is one for ever and ever. He has various guises and appears in diverse bodily tabernacles: in respect of some of these his name is given to him, while in respect to others it is not given to him. His original name is Muhammad, his name of honor is Abu al-Qasim [that is, “father of Qasim,” the latter the name of Muhammad’s first son], his description Abdullah [that is, “servant of God”], and his title is Shams al-Din [that is, “the sun of religion”]. In every age he bears a name suitable to his guide in that age. I once met him [that is, the Perfect Man, Muhammad] in the form of my Shaykh, Sharaf al-Din Isma‘il al-Jabarti, but I did not know that he [that is, the Shaykh] was the Prophet, though I knew the Prophet was the Shaykh…. The real meaning of this matter is that the Prophet has the power of assuming every form. When the adept sees him in the form of Muhammad which he wore during his life, he names him by that name, but when he sees him in another form but knows him to be Muhammad, he names him by the name of the form in which he appears. The name Muhammad is not applied except to the Real Muhammad…. If you perceive mystically that the Reality of Muhammad is displayed in any human form, you must bestow upon the Reality of Muhammad the name of that form and regard its owner with no less reverence than you would show our Lord Muhammad, and after having seen him therein you may not behave towards it in the same manner as before.
This appearance of the Real Muhammad in the form of another could be misconstrued as the condemned doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and so al-Jili hastens to disassociate the two.
Do not imagine that my words contain any tincture of the doctrine of metempsychosis. God forbid! I mean that the Prophet is able to assume whatever form he wishes, and the Tradition declares that in every age he assumes the form of the most perfect men (of that age) in order to exalt their dignity and correct their deviation: they are his caliphs externally and he is their reality inwardly.
The Perfect Man in himself is identified with all the individualizations of existence. With his spirituality he stands with the higher individualizations, in his corporeality with the lower. His heart is identified with the Throne of God, his mind with the Pen, his soul with the Well Guarded Tablet, his nature with the elements, his capability of receiving form with matter…. He stands with the angels with his good thoughts, with the demons and the devils with the doubts that beset him, with the beasts in his animality….
You must know that the Perfect Man is a copy of God, according to the saying of the Prophet, “God created Adam in the image of the Merciful,” and in another tradition, “God created Adam in His own image.” … Further, you must know that the Essential names and the Divine attributes belong to the Perfect Man by fundamental and sovereign right in virtue of a necessity inherent in his essence, for it is he whose “reality” is signified by these expressions and whose spirituality is indicated by these symbols: they have no other subject in existence (to which they might be attached) except the Perfect Man.
Once again the figure of the mirror is adduced, and in a manner familiar from Ibn al-Arabi: man, and in particular the Perfect Man, is the mirror in which God sees and recognizes and admires Himself, as does man.
As a mirror in which a person sees the form of himself, and cannot see it without the mirror, such is the relation of God to the Perfect Man, who cannot possibly see his own form but in the mirror of the name “God.” And he is also a mirror to God, for God laid upon Himself the necessity that His names and attributes should not be seen save in the Perfect Man. (Jili, The Perfect Man 2.58) [Cited by NICHOLSON 1921: 105–107]
Ibn Khaldun had all these developments before him, from the earliest Muslim ascetics, through the “ecstatic utterances” of Bistami and Hallaj, to the daring “existential monism” of Ibn al-Arabi and the theosophical speculation of his successors, when he composed his thoughts on Sufism for the Prolegomenon to History. He was well aware of the strong current of disapproval, or at least of reservation, that many in the Islamic legal establishment had expressed on the subject of Sufis and Sufism. For his part, however, Ibn Khaldun attempts to isolate the dubious areas in Sufi speculation, in the first instance by laying out the topics with which Sufis generally concerned themselves.
Many jurists and muftis have undertaken to refute these … recent Sufis. They summarily disapproved of everything they came across in the Sufi “path.” The truth is that discussion with the Sufis requires making a distinction. The Sufis discuss four topics. (1) Firstly, they discuss pious exertions, the resulting mystical and ecstatic experiences, and self-scrutiny concerning one’s actions. They discuss these things in order to obtain mystical experience, which then becomes a station from which one progresses to the next higher one…. (2) Secondly, they discuss the removal of the veil and the perceivable supernatural realities, such as the divine attributes, the throne, the seat, the angels, revelation, prophecy, the spirit, and the realities of everything in existence, be it supernatural or visible; furthermore, they discuss the order of created things, how they issue from the Creator Who brings them into being.…(3) The third topic is concerned with activities in the various worlds and among the various created things connected with the different kinds of divine grace. (4) The fourth topic is concerned with expressions which are suspect if understood in their plain meaning. Such expressions have been uttered by most Sufi leaders. In Sufi technical terminology they are called “ecstatic utterances.” Their plain meaning is difficult to understand. They may be something that is disapproved of, or something that can be approved, or something that requires interpretation.
Now that the territory has been charted, Ibn Khaldun can proceed to his critique. First, on the matter that by all accounts constituted the mainstream of Sufism and which had won, at least since the time of Ghazali, a recognized place among acceptable Islamic practices and experiences:
As for their discussion of pious exertions and stations, of the mystical and ecstatic experiences that result, and of self-scrutiny with regard to shortcomings in the things that cause these experiences, this is something that nobody ought to reject. These mystical experiences are sound ones. Their realization is the very essence of happiness.
Ibn Khaldun then reverses the second and third points he had established above, treating first the Sufis’ perceptions about the operation of divine grace, which he is inclined to accept, and their description, after the “removal of the veil,” of that other, higher world where God and His angels and the other higher realities have their being, about which he is much less certain.
As for their discussion of the acts of divine grace experienced by the Sufis, the information they give about supernatural things, and their activity among created things, these are sound and cannot be disapproved of, even though some religious scholars tend to disapprove … since they might be confused with prophetic miracles.
There is no problem here. The scholastic apparatus of theology had its distinctions well in order.
Competent orthodox scholars have made a distinction between (miracles and acts of divine grace) by referring to “the challenge (in advance),” that is, the claim made (by the prophet in advance) that the miracle would occur in agreement with the prophetic revelation. It is not possible, they said, that a miracle could happen in agreement with the claim of a liar. Logic requires that a miracle indicate truthfulness. By definition a miracle is something that can be verified. If it were performed by a liar it could not be verified and thus would have changed its character, which is absurd. In addition, the world of existence attests the occurrence of many such acts of divine grace. Disapproval of them would be a kind of negative approach. Many such acts of divine grace were experienced by the men around Muhammad and the great early Muslims. This is a well-known and famous fact.
The Sufis’ charting of the higher realities, on the other hand, might appear to constitute a kind of private, intuitive and so unverifiable revelation. In this case Ibn Khaldun recommends a kind of circumspect neglect.
Most of the Sufi discussion about the removal of the veil of the reception of the realities of the higher things, and of the order in which the created things issue, falls, in a way, under the category of ambiguous statements. It is based upon the intuitive experience of the Sufis, and those who lack such intuitive experience cannot have the mystical experience that the Sufis receive from it. No language can express what the Sufis want to say in this connection, because languages have been invented only for the expression of commonly accepted concepts, most of which apply to sensible reality. Therefore, we must not bother with the Sufi discussion of those matters. We ought merely to leave it alone, just as we leave alone the ambiguous statements in the Quran and the Prophetic custom. Those to whom God grants some understanding of these mystical utterances in a way that agrees with the plain meaning of the religious law do, indeed, enjoy happiness. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:99–101]
Ibn Khaldun then turns his attention to trends that began to develop in Sufism after its heroic period. In his reading of Sufi history it was the Shi‘ites who led Islamic mysticism astray.
The ancient Sufis did not go into anything concerning the Mahdi [that is, the expected Muslim Messiah]. All they discussed was their mystic activity and exertion and the resulting ecstatic experiences and states. It was the Imamite and extremist Shi‘a who discussed the preferred status of Ali, the matter of his Imamate, the claim made on his behalf to have received the Imamate through the last will of the Prophet, and the rejection of the two Shaykhs [that is, Abu Bakr and Umar]….Among the later Sufis, the removal of the veil and matters beyond the veil of sense perception came to be discussed. A great many Sufis came to speak of incarnation and oneness. This gave them something in common with the Imamites and the extremist Shi‘a who believed in the divinity of the Imams and the incarnation of the deity in them. The Sufis also came to believe in the “Pole” and in “saints.” This belief looked like an imitation of the opinions of the extremist Shi‘a concerning the Imam and the Alid “chiefs.”
Ibn Khaldun will return to the Shi‘a-Sufi theory of “Poles” and “saints.” He continues:
The Sufis thus became saturated with Shi‘a theories. Shi‘atheories entered so deeply into their religious ideas that they based their practice of using a cloak on the fact that Ali clothed al-Hasan al-Basri in such a cloak and caused him to agree solemnly that he would adhere to the mystic path. This tradition (begun by Ali) was continued, according to the Sufis, through al-Junayd, one of the Sufi shaykhs.
However, it is not known for a certainty whether Ali did any such thing. The mystic path was not reserved to Ali, but all men around Muhammad were models of the various paths of religion. The fact that the Sufis restrict precedence in mysticism to Ali smells strongly of pro-Shi‘a sentiments. This and other afore-mentioned Sufi ideas show that the Sufis have adopted pro-Shi‘a sentiments and have become enmeshed in them. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 3.51) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 2:186–187]
And so, on Ibn Khaldun’s view as a Sunni historian, the chief tenets of the “recent Sufis” that show the influence of Shi‘ism are their discussions of the Godhead’s becoming incarnate in certain chosen souls and their insistence on the Divine Oneness to the extent that it became in effect pantheism.
Tradition scholars and jurists who discuss the articles of faith often mention that God is separate from His creatures. The speculative theologians say that He is neither separate nor connected. The philosophers say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. The recent Sufis say that He is one with the creatures in the sense that He is incarnate in them or in the sense that He is identical with them and there exists nothing but Himself either in the whole or in any part of it….
A number of recent Sufis who consider intuitive perceptions to be scientific and logical hold the opinion that the Creator is one with His creatures in His identity, His existence and His attributes. They often assume that this was the position of philosophers before Aristotle, such as Plato and Socrates…. The Oneness assumed by the Sufis is identical with the incarnation the Christians claim for the Messiah. It is even stranger, in that it is the incarnation of something primeval in something created and the Oneness of the former with the latter.
The Oneness assumed by the Sufis is also identical with the stated opinion of the Imamite Shi‘a concerning their Imams. In their discussions, the Shi‘a consider the ways in which the oneness of the Deity with the Imams is achieved. (1) The essence of the primeval Deity is hidden in all created things, both sensible and intelligible, and is one with them in both kinds of perception. All of them are manifestations of it, and it has control over them—that is, it controls their existence in the sense that, without it, they would not exist. Such is the opinion of the people who believe in incarnation.
(2) There is the approach of those who believe in absolute Oneness. It seems as if in the exposition of those who believe in incarnation, they have sensed the existence of an (implicit) differentiation contradicting the concept of Oneness. Therefore, they disavowed the (existence of any differentiation) between the primeval Deity and the creatures in essence, existence, and attributes. In order to explain the difference in manifestations perceived by the senses and the intellect, they used the specious argument that those things were human perceptions that are imaginary. By imaginary … they mean that all those things do not exist in reality and exist only in human perception. Only the primeval Deity has real existence and nothing else, either inwardly or outwardly. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:83–86]
Ibn Khaldun has no doubts about whence these notions derived, or about their essential falsehood.
The recent Sufis who speak about the removal of the veil and supersensory perception have delved deeply into these subjects. Many of them have turned to the theory of incarnation and oneness, as we have indicated. They have filled many pages with it. That was done, for instance, by al-Harawi [ca. 1010–1089 C.E.] in the Book of Stations and by others. They were followed by Ibn al-Arabi [1165–1240 C.E.] and Ibn Sab‘in [1226–1271 C.E.] and their pupils, and then by Ibn Afif [ca. 1260–1289], Ibn al-Farid [d. 1235 C.E.] and Najm al-Din al-Isra’ili [1206–1278 C.E.] in the poems they composed.
The early Sufis had had contact with the Neo-Isma‘ili Shi‘ite extremists who also believed in incarnation and in the divinity of the Imams, a theory not known to the early Isma‘ilis. Each group came to be imbued with the dogmatics of the other. Their theories and beliefs merged and were assimilated. In Sufi discussion there appeared the theory of the “Pole,” meaning the chief gnostic. The Sufis assumed that no one can reach his station in gnosis until God takes him to Himself and gives his station to another gnostic….
The theory of successive “Poles” is not, however, confirmed by logical arguments or evidence from the religious law. It is a sort of rhetorical figure of speech. It is identical with the theory of the extremist Shi‘a about the succession of the Imams through inheritance. Clearly, mysticism has plagiarized this idea from the extremist Shi‘a and come to believe in it.
The Sufis furthermore speak about the order of existence of the “saints” who come after the “Pole,” exactly as the Shi‘a speak of their “representatives.” They go so far (in the identification of their own concepts with those of the Shi‘a) that when they construed a chain of transmitters for the wearing of the Sufi cloak as a basic requirement of the mystic way and practice, they made it go back to Ali. This points in the same direction. Among the men around Muhammad, Ali was not distinguished by any particular practice or way of dressing or by any special condition. Abu Bakr and Umar were the most ascetic and pious people after the Messenger of God. Yet, none of these men was distinguished by the possession of any particular religious practice peculiar to him. In fact, all the men around Muhammad were models of religion, austerity, asceticism, and pious exertion. This is attested by their way of life and history. Indeed, with the help of these stories, the Shi‘a try to suggest that Ali is distinguished from the other men around Muhammad by being in possession of certain virtues, in conformity with well-known Shi‘a beliefs. (Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima 6.16) [IBN KHALDUN 1967: 3:92–93]
There are clear parallels between the Gnostic current in Islamic Sufism and the developing ideology of Sufism. Though the wedding of the two strains was not officially consummated until the creation of the Safavid state in Iran in the sixteenth century, the liaison was being prepared much earlier. It is not certain when the affinities between Shi‘ism and Sufism first developed, but they were already present when Shi‘ism elaborated its theory of the Imam as a charismatic figure who possessed an authoritative spiritual knowledge and imparted it to adepts. The distance between the Shi‘ite Imam and the Sufi saint, particularly the archetypical saint, the “Pole” around whom the saints of each generation revolved, was not great. From the twelfth century onward the distance grew even smaller with the evolution of what has been called “theosophical Sufism” or “Illuminationism.” The wisdom (hikma) of the Shi‘ites was quite simply the mystics’ gnosis (ma‘rifa).