THIS IS THE legend of Layla and Majnun.
Once, a boy of exceeding beauty was born into the family of a noble Shaykh. He was named Kais, and as he matured it became obvious to all that he would one day become a source of great pride to his family and tribe. Even from a young age, his knowledge, his diligence, his learning, and his speech outshone that of all his peers. When he spoke, his tongue scattered pearls, and when he smiled, his cheeks were violet tulips awakening to the sun.
One day, Kais met a girl so lovely that he was instantly struck with a yearning he could not understand. Her name was Layla, meaning “night,” and like the night, she was both dark and luminous. Her eyes were those of a gazelle, her lips two moist rose petals.
Layla too felt an emotion for Kais she could not comprehend. The two children were drowning in love, though in their youth they knew not what love was. It was as though love were a wine-bearer, fill ing the cups of their hearts to the brim; they drank whatever was poured for them and grew drunk without understanding why.
Kais and Layla kept their feelings secret as they roamed the alleyways and passages of the city’s markets, close enough to steal a furtive glance and share a giggle, far enough not to arouse gossip. But a secret such as this cannot be contained, and a whisper is all it takes to topple a kingdom. “Kais and Layla are in love!” someone said on the street.
Layla’s tribe was furious. Her father removed her from school and banned her from leaving her tent; her brothers vowed to ensnare Kais if he ever came near. But one cannot keep the baying hound away from the new moon.
Separated from his beloved, Kais wandered from stall to stall, from tent to tent, as if in a trance. Everywhere he went he sang of Layla’s beauty, extolling her virtues to whoever crossed his path. The longer he went without seeing Layla, the more his love gave way to madness, so that soon people began pointing him out on the streets, saying, “Here comes the madman! Here comes the majnun!”
Kais was mad, it is true. But what is madness? Is it to be consumed by the flames of love? Is the moth mad to immolate itself in the fires of its desire? If so, then yes, Kais was mad. Kais was Majnun.
Clad in rags and stripped of his sanity, Majnun left the city and wandered aimlessly through the mountains and wastelands of the Hijaz, composing mournful odes to his absent beloved. He was homeless and tribeless, an exile from the land of happiness. Good and evil, right and wrong, no longer had any meaning for him. He was a lover; he knew nothing but love. He abandoned reason and lived as an outcast in the desert, his hair filthy and matted, his clothes tattered.
In his madness, Majnun came to the Ka‘ba. Pushing through the crowd of pilgrims, he rushed at the sanctuary and hammered upon its doors, shouting, “O Lord, let my love grow! Let it blossom to perfection and endure. Let me drink from the wellspring of love until my thirst is quenched. Love is all I have, all I am, and all I ever want to be!”
The pilgrims were appalled. They watched as he fell to the ground, heaping dust on his head, cursing himself for the weakness of his passions.
Majnun’s actions shamed his family and tribe, but he himself knew no shame. When he heard of Layla’s arranged marriage to a man of untold wealth named Ibn Salam, Majnun lost all sense and reason. Tearing off his clothes, he crawled naked through the wilderness like an animal. He slept in ravines with the beasts of the desert, eating wild plants and drinking rainwater. He grew famous for his love. People from all over the land sought him out, sometimes sitting with him for hours as he spoke of his beloved Layla.
One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: “Layla” and “Majnun.” As the crowd watched, Majnun tore the paper in half. The half on which was written “Layla” he crumpled into a ball and threw over his shoulder; the half with his own name he kept for himself.
“What does this mean?” someone asked.
“Do you not realize that one name is better than two?” Majnun replied. “If only you knew the reality of love, you would see that when you scratch a lover, you find his beloved.”
“But why throw away Layla’s name and not your own?” asked another.
Majnun glowered at the man. “The name is a shell and nothing more. It is what the shell hides that counts. I am the shell and Layla is the pearl; I am the veil and she is the face beneath it.”
The crowd, though they knew not the meaning of his words, were amazed by the sweetness of his tongue.
Meanwhile, trapped by the restrictions of her tribe and forced to marry a man she did not love, Layla was plunged into a lonely darkness. She suffered as deeply as Majnun but did not have his freedom. She too wanted to live with the beasts of the desert, to declare her love for Majnun from the tops of the mountains. But she was a prisoner in her own tent, and in her own heart. When one morning a traveling merchant brought her news of Majnun, Layla felt like a reed swaying in the wind, hollow and weightless.
“Without your radiance,” the old man told her, “Majnun’s soul is like the ocean in a winter’s night, whipped up by a thousand storms. Like a man possessed, he roams the mountainside, screaming and shouting. And there is but one word on his lips: ‘Layla.’ ”
“The blame is all mine,” Layla cried, flinging curses on herself. “I am the one who has set fire to my lover’s heart and reduced his being to ashes.” Desperate, she removed the jewels from her earrings and handed them to the old merchant. “These are for you. Now go to Majnun and bring him here. I only want to see him, to look upon his face for a little while, to bathe in the light of his countenance for but a moment.”
The old man agreed. For days he searched the desert for Majnun. When he finally found him, he relayed Layla’s message. “Could you not bring yourself to break your vows of separation from the world to look upon her tearful face, just for a second?” he pleaded.
“Little does anyone understand me,” Majnun thought. “Do they not realize that their idea of happiness is not mine? Do they not see that while it may be possible for them to have their wishes granted in this life, my longing is something else entirely, something that cannot be fulfilled while I remain in this transient world?”
But Majnun could not resist the opportunity to look upon the face of his beloved. Putting on a cloak, he followed the merchant to a palm grove and hid there while the old man left to fetch Layla.
As the merchant led her by the hand to the grove, to Majnun, Layla’s entire body trembled. When no more than twenty paces separated her from her lover, she froze. The old man tugged on her arm, but Layla could not move.
“Noble sir,” she pleaded, “this far but no farther. Even now I am like a burning candle; one step closer to the fire and I shall be consumed completely.”
The old man left her and went to Majnun. Pulling him out of the palm grove, he brought the boy—his face drained of color, his eyes glass—under the moonlight and pointed him toward Layla. Majnun stumbled forward. Light from the stars peeked through the tops of the palm trees. There was a movement in the darkness, and suddenly, under the dome of heaven, Layla and Majnun faced each other.
It was only a moment: a rush of blood to the cheeks. The two lovers stared at one another, drunk with the wine of love. Yet though they were now close enough to touch, they knew that such wine could be tasted only in paradise. A breath, a sigh, a stifled cry, and Majnun turned and ran from the grove back into the desert, vanishing like a shadow into the night.
Years passed. The leaves on the palm trees lost their color. The flowers shed their petals in mourning. As the countryside turned yellow and wan and the gardens slowly withered, so did Layla. The light in her eyes dimmed, and with her final breath she breathed her lover’s name.
When Majnun heard of the death of his beloved, he rushed back home and writhed in the dust of her grave. He lay down and pressed his body to the earth as though in prayer, but his parched lips could utter only one word: “Layla.” Finally, he was released from his pain and longing. His soul broke free and he was no more.
Some say Majnun’s body lay on top of Layla’s grave for months; others say years. No one dared approach, for the grave was guarded night and day by the beasts of the desert. Even the vultures that swooped above the tomb would not touch Majnun. Eventually, all that remained of him was dust and bones. Only then did the animals abandon their master to lope back into the wilderness.
After the animals had gone and the dust of Majnun was swept away by the wind, a new headstone was fashioned for Layla’s tomb. It read:
Two lovers lie in this one tomb
United forever in death’s dark womb.
Faithful in separation; true in love:
May one tent house them in heaven above.
Sufism—the term given to Islam’s immensely complex and infinitely diverse mystical tradition—is, as Reynold Nicholson long ago observed, fundamentally indefinable. Even the word Sufi provides little help in classifying this movement. The term tasawwuf, meaning “the state of being a Sufi,” is without significance, referring as it probably does to the coarse wool garments, or suf, which the first Sufis wore as an emblem of their poverty and detachment from the world. Indeed, as a descriptive term, the word Sufi is practically interchangeable with the words darvish or faqir, meaning “mendicant” or “poor.” Some have argued that Sufi is derived from the Arabic word safwe, meaning “elected,” or suffa, meaning “purity,” though both of these must be rejected on etymological grounds. Others have suggested that Sufi is a corruption of the Greek word sophia: “wisdom.” This is also unlikely, though there is a tempting symbolic connection between the two words. For if sophia is to be understood in its Aristotelian sense as “knowledge of ultimate things,” then it is very much related to the term Sufi, just not linguistically.
As a religious movement, Sufism is characterized by a medley of divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an empty caldron into which have been poured the principles of Christian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islamic Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi‘ism, Manichaeism, and Central Asian shamanism thrown in for good measure. Such a hodgepodge of influences may frustrate scholarly analysis, but it also indicates how Sufism may have formed in its earliest stages.
The first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individuals who traveled throughout the Muslim Empire seeking intimate knowledge of God. As these “wandering darvishes” grew in number, temporary boardinghouses were constructed in high traffic areas like Baghdad and Khurasan where the mendicants could gather together and share what they had learned during their spiritual journeys. By the eleventh century—around the same time that the Abbasids were actively persecuting the Shi‘ah for their heterodox behavior—these boarding houses had become permanent structures resembling cloisters, a few of which gradually evolved into sophisticated schools, or Orders, of mysticism.
The Sufi Orders centered on a spiritual master who had withdrawn permanently from the Ummah to pursue the path of self-purification and inner enlightenment. Called Shaykhs in Arabic and Pirs in Persian (both of which mean “old man”), these Sufi masters were themselves the disciples of earlier, legendary masters whose unsystematic teachings they had collected so as to pass on to a new generation of disciples. As each disciple reached a level of spiritual maturity, he would then be charged with transmitting his master’s words to his own pupils, and so on. It is therefore easy to see why Sufism appears like an eclectic recipe whose ingredients have been collected from a variety of sources over a long period of time. Of course, as the Sufi master Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri teaches, “there is a big difference between merely collecting recipes and actually cooking and eating.”
Like Shi‘ism, Sufism began as a reactionary movement against both the Imperial Islam of the Muslim Dynasties and the rigid formalism of Islam’s “orthodox” learned class, the Ulama. Both Shi‘ism and Sufism vigorously employed ta’wil to uncover the hidden meaning of the Quran, both concentrated their spiritual activities on devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, and both developed cults of personality around saintly characters—whether Imams or Pirs.
But while the Shi‘ah and Sufis existed in the same spiritual dimension and most certainly influenced each other, Sufism represents a rare anti-intellectual strain within Islam dedicated solely to esotericism and devotionalism. Also, unlike the Shi‘ah, the Sufis were not interested in political power. Although they eventually entered the political realm, especially in the Indian subcontinent, the Sufi Pirs initially eschewed all temporal authority and completely removed themselves from the political and theological infighting that pervaded the Muslim community during its formative period. Instead, the Sufis strove toward asceticism and detachment from the Ummah and its worldly trappings through a life of simplicity and poverty. “If you cannot change the kings,” the Sufis argued, “then change yourself.”
In their rituals and practices, the Sufis sought the annihilation of the ego. And while this goal may be common to all mystical movements, there are a few important differences between Sufism and traditional ideals of mysticism. First, there exists in Islam a stringent anti-monasticism that permeates all aspects of the believer’s life. Put simply, Islam is a communal religion. It abhors radical and reclusive individualism. One could argue that a Muslim who rejects the Ummah is like a Roman Catholic who denies the Apostolic Church: both are deliberately separating themselves from the source of their salvation. Although most Sufi masters withdrew from society, they were not monks; their disciples were artisans, chemists, and merchants who lived and worked in the real world. A true Sufi, Shaykh Haeri writes, “does not separate the inner from the outer,” for when you “start by purifying your inner self, you end up being concerned with the outer and with society.”
Secondly, the Quran categorically derides celibacy—another common tradition in mysticism—as being against the command of God to “be fruitful and multiply.” A significant portion of the Revelation is dedicated to the strengthening and preservation of the family, which in Islam is considered to be the model for the Ummah and a microcosm of all creation. In fact, the Quran repeatedly equates filial loyalty with fidelity to God (2:83; 4:36; 6:151; 31:14). So, while there were a few notable Sufi celibates—like the famed Rabia of Basra, who despite her legendary beauty rebuffed all suitors in order to give herself completely to God—celibacy never became a widespread phenomenon in Sufism.
But perhaps the most important difference between Sufism and traditional religious mysticism is that the latter tends to remain permanently attached to its “parent” religion, while Sufism, though born from Islam, treats its parent as a shell that must be cast off if one is to experience direct knowledge of God. Put another way, the formal religion of Islam is the prelude to Sufism, rather than its prominent motif. Islam, like all religions, can only claim to point humanity to God, whereas Sufism’s goal is to thrust humanity toward God.
This does not mean that Sufism rejects Islam and its religious and legal requirements altogether. Despite the occasionally violent Shi‘ite and Sunni accusations to the contrary, Sufis are Muslims. They pray as Muslims. They worship as Muslims. They use Muslim symbols and metaphors and follow Muslim creeds and rituals. To quote the esteemed Sufi Shaykh of the Rifa’i Order in Jerusalem, Muhammad ash-Shadhili, “If you want to walk in … the Way of the Prophet, you must be a real Muslim … one who gives everything to his God to be His slave.”
That said, Sufis consider all orthodoxy, all traditional teachings, the law, theology, and the Five Pillars inadequate for attaining true knowledge of God. Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?
Just as all journeys must have a beginning, so the Sufi path only originates with the “outer shell” of Islam. As the Sufi passes from one stage to another on the way to “self-annihilation” and unity with the Divine, that shell must be gradually discarded, for, as Majnun said, “It is what the shell hides that counts.” Sufis believe that reason and theology, creed and ritual, law and its commandments, all must be replaced in the soul of the enlightened person with the supreme virtue: love.
It is not surprising that most Muslims have historically regarded Sufism with suspicion. The Sufi assertion that human reason cannot fathom the Divine, that such knowledge can come only from intuitive perception of ultimate reality, naturally infuriated the religious authorities. It did not help matters that the Sufis rejected the Shariah as inapplicable to their search for the secret knowledge of the inner world. As noted, Islamic law is concerned with the external (zahir) nature of faith: it is quantitative; it can be regulated. But the internal (batin) cannot, and therefore represents a grave threat to the religious authorities. Worse, by detaching themselves from the Muslim community, the Sufis appeared to be creating their own Ummah, in which the Pirs replaced the Ulama as the sole religious authorities.
In rejecting the rigidity of the Shariah and its traditional interpretations, Sufism eagerly absorbed all manner of local beliefs and customs, and became immensely popular throughout those areas of the Muslim Empire that were not dominated by Arab majorities. In India, Sufism spread like fire as it enthusiastically syncretized anti-caste Muslim values with traditional Indian practices such as controlled breathing, sitting postures, and meditation. In Central Asia, a cadre of Persian Sufis developed a wholly new scriptural canon characterized by a rich panoply of poetry, songs, and Sufi literature, which, unlike the Quran, was written in the vernacular language and easily disseminated throughout the Empire.
This brief outline of Sufism’s origins may clarify how the movement arose and spread, but it in no way explains what Sufism is. Nor could it. That is because Sufism is a religious movement that can only be described; it cannot be defined.
Consider the following parable originally composed by the greatest of all Sufi poets, Jalal ad-Din Rumi (d. 1273) and recounted by Idris Shah, the Grand Shaykh of Sardana:
A Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek were traveling to a distant land when they began arguing over how to spend the single coin they possessed among themselves. All four craved food, but the Persian wanted to spend the coin on angur; the Turk, on uzum; the Arab, on inab; and the Greek, on stafil. The argument became heated as each man insisted on having what he desired.
A linguist passing by overheard their quarrel. “Give the coin to me,” he said. “I undertake to satisfy the desires of all of you.”
Taking the coin, the linguist went to a nearby shop and bought four small bunches of grapes. He then returned to the men and gave them each a bunch.
“This is my angur!” cried the Persian.
“But this is what I call uzum,” replied the Turk.
“You have brought me my inab,” the Arab said.
“No! This in my language is stafil,” said the Greek.
All of a sudden, the men realized that what each of them had desired was in fact the same thing, only they did not know how to express themselves to each other.
The four travelers represent humanity in its search for an inner spiritual need it cannot define and which it expresses in different ways. The linguist is the Sufi, who enlightens humanity to the fact that what it seeks (its religions), though called by different names, are in reality one identical thing. However—and this is the most important aspect of the parable—the linguist can offer the travelers only the grapes and nothing more. He cannot offer them wine, which is the essence of the fruit. In other words, human beings cannot be given the secret of ultimate reality, for such knowledge cannot be shared, but must be experienced through an arduous inner journey toward self-annihilation. As the transcendent Iranian poet, Saadi of Shiraz, wrote,
I am a dreamer who is mute,
And the people are deaf.
I am unable to say,
And they are unable to hear.
What is Sufism? It is the love of Majnun for Layla. It is “numberless waves, lapping and momentarily reflecting the sun—all from the same sea,” according to the Sufi master Halki. It is the practice of “adopting every higher quality and leaving every lower quality,” in the words of the “Patriarch of Sufism,” Ibn Junayd (d. 910). The Sufi is “not Christian or Jew or Muslim,” Rumi wrote. He is not of “any religion or cultural system … not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all … not an entity of this world or the next.” He is, in Ishan Kaiser’s description, “the actual temple of the fire worshipper; the priest of the Magian; the inner reality of the crossed-legged Brahmin meditating; the brush and the color of the artist.”
Drunk without wine, sated without food, a king beneath a humble cloak, a treasure within a ruin, Sufism is to Islam what the heart is to the human being: its vital center, the seat of its essence. It is, in Majnun’s words, “the pearl hidden in the shell, the face beneath the veil.” Sufism is the secret, subtle reality concealed at the very depths of the Muslim faith, and only by mining those depths can one gain any understanding of this enigmatic sect.
ONE SPRING MORNING in tenth-century Baghdad, the frenetic but scrupulously controlled markets of the capital city were thrown into a state of agitation when a raggedly dressed man named Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj—one of the earliest and most renowned Sufi masters—burst onto the crowded square and exclaimed at the top of his voice, Ana al-Haqq! “I am the Truth!” by which he meant, “I am God!”
The market authorities were scandalized. They immediately arrested al-Hallaj and handed him over to the Ulama for judgment. The Ulama in Baghdad were already familiar with this controversial Sufi master. Although born a Zoroastrian into a priestly (Magian) family in southern Iran, al-Hallaj had converted to Islam and moved to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad at a fairly young age. An early disciple of the legendary Sufi Pir, Tustari (d. 896), he had matured into a charismatic preacher known for performing miraculous deeds and making outrageous statements. Called “the Nourisher” by his disciples, al-Hallaj first gained notoriety, not to mention the ire of the religious authorities, by claiming that the Hajj was an internal pilgrimage that a person of pure heart could perform anywhere. He further alienated the Ulama by focusing the bulk of his teachings on Jesus, whom he considered to be a “Hidden Sufi.” For these declarations, he was condemned as a fanatic and a “secret Christian.” But it was his intolerably heretical claim to have achieved unity with the Divine that made al-Hallaj the most famous, though by no means the only, Sufi martyr in history.
Although given numerous chances to recant during his eight years of imprisonment, al-Hallaj refused. Finally, the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir, under pressure from the religious authorities, sentenced him to death. As a demonstration of the severity of his heresy, the Caliph had al-Hallaj tortured, flogged, mutilated, and crucified; his corpse was decapitated, his body dismembered, his remains burned, and the ashes scattered in the Tigris River.
What did al-Hallaj mean? Was he actually claiming to be God? If so, how can we reconcile Sufism as a legitimate sect of such a radically monotheistic and fervently iconoclastic religion as Islam?
Many prominent Sufis roundly condemned al-Hallaj. Al-Ghazali, perhaps the most important Muslim mystic in the history of Islam, referred to al-Hallaj in his eleventh-century masterpiece, The Alchemy of Happiness, as a “foolish babbler” whose death was “a greater benefit to the cause of true religion.” Al-Ghazali did not criticize al-Hallaj for claiming to have achieved a level of spiritual unification with God in which his essence had merged with the essence of the Divine. What he and others objected to was the fact that al-Hallaj had publicly disclosed what was meant to be a secret.
Having spent his life striving to harmonize Islamic mysticism with Islamic orthodoxy (he was, incredibly, both a Sufi and a Traditionalist Ash‘arite), al-Ghazali understood better than anyone that such esoteric knowledge must be revealed slowly and in stages. Just as “a child has no real knowledge of the attainments of an adult,” and an unlettered adult “cannot understand the attainments of a learned man,” so, al-Ghazali wrote in Revival of the Religious Sciences, not even a learned man can understand “the experiences of enlightened saints.”
Al-Hallaj’s offense was not the sacrilege of his startling declaration, but its imprudent disclosure to those who could not possibly understand what he meant. Sufi teaching can never be revealed to the unprepared or the spiritually immature. As al-Hujwiri (d. 1075) argued, it is all too easy for the uninitiated to “mistake the [Sufi’s] intention, and repudiate not his real meaning, but a notion which they formed for themselves.” Even al-Hallaj admitted that his experience of unity with God came after a long journey of inward reflection. “Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little,” he wrote of God in his Diwan, “by turns, through reunions and abandons. And now I am Yourself. Your existence is my own, and it is also my will.”
To understand where al-Hallaj ended on this inward journey, one must look back to where he began: at the first station on the long and arduous path of spiritual self-reflection that Sufis call the tariqah: the Way. The tariqah is the mystical journey that leads the Sufi away from the external reality of religion and toward the divine reality—the only reality—of God. As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the summit—some better than others. But because every path eventually leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant. All that matters is to be on a path, to be constantly moving toward the top—one measured, controlled, and strictly supervised step at a time—passing diligently through specific “abodes and stations” along the Way, each of which is marked by an ineffable experience of spiritual evolution, until one finally reaches the end of the journey: that moment of enlightenment in which the veil of reality is stripped away, the ego obliterated, and the self utterly consumed by God.
By far the most famous parable describing the Sufi Way and the stations that a disciple must pass through on the journey toward self-annihilation was composed by the twelfth-century Iranian perfumer and alchemist Farid ad-Din Attar (d. 1230). In Attar’s epic masterpiece, The Conference of the Birds, the birds of the world have gathered around the hoopoe (a mythical bird), who has been chosen by lot to guide them on a journey to see the Simurgh: King of the Birds. Before they can begin the journey, however, the birds must first declare their absolute obedience to the hoopoe, promising that
The oath is necessary, the hoopoe explains, because the journey will be perilous and fraught with physical and emotional adversity, and only he knows the Way. Consequently, he must be followed without question, regardless of what he demands.
To reach the Simurgh, the birds will have to traverse seven treacherous valleys, each representing a station along the Way. The first is the Valley of the Quest, in which the birds must “renounce the world” and repent of their sins. This is followed by the Valley of Love, where each bird will be plunged into seas of fire “until his very being is enflamed.” Next is the Valley of Mystery, where every bird must take a different path, for “There are so many roads, and each is fit / For that pilgrim who must follow it.” In the Valley of Detachment, “all claims, all lust for meaning disappear,” while in the Valley of Unity, the many are merged into one: “The oneness of diversity / Not oneness locked in singularity.”
Upon reaching the sixth valley, the Valley of Bewilderment, the birds—weary and perplexed—break through the veil of traditional dualities and are suddenly confronted with the emptiness of their being. “I have no certain knowledge anymore,” they weep in confusion.
I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure
I love, but who is it for whom I sigh?
Not Muslim, yet not heathen; who am I?
Finally, at the end of the journey, the birds arrive at the Valley of Nothingness, in which, stripped of their egos, they “put on the cloak that signifies oblivion” and become consumed by the spirit of the universe. Only when all seven valleys have been traversed, when the birds have learned to “destroy the mountain of the Self” and “give up the intellect for love,” are they allowed to continue to the throne of the Simurgh.
Of the thousands of birds who began the journey with the hoopoe, only thirty make it to the end. With “hopeless hearts and tattered, trailing wings,” these thirty birds are led into the presence of the Simurgh. Yet when they finally set their eyes upon him, they are astonished to see not the King of Birds they had expected, but rather themselves. Simurgh is the Persian word for “thirty birds”; and it is here, at the end of the Way, that the birds are confronted with the reality that although they have “struggled, wandered, traveled far,” it is “themselves they sought” and “themselves they are.” “I am the mirror set before your eyes,” the Simurgh says. “And all who come before my splendor see / Themselves, their own unique reality.”
Attar was a Sufi master who developed through his poetry and teachings the concept of “spiritual alchemy,” in which the soul was treated like a transmutable base metal that must be rid of impurities before it can be restored to its original, pristine—one could say golden—state. Like most Sufis, Attar considered all souls to be receptacles for God’s message. At the same time, he believed there exist varying degrees of receptivity in every individual depending on where he or she is on the Way.
During the first stages of the Way (where the great majority of humanity find themselves), the nafs, which is the self, the ego, the psyche, the “I”—however one chooses to define the “sum of individual egocentric tendencies”—remains the sole reality. As the disciple moves along the Way, he encounters the ruh, or Universal Spirit. The Quran refers to the ruh as “the breath of God” blown into Adam to give life to his body (15:29). In this sense, the ruh is equated with the divine, eternal, animating spirit that permeates creation—that is itself the essence of creation. The ruh is Pure Being. It is that which Hindus call prana and Taoists call ch’i; it is the ethereal force underlying the universe that Christian mystics refer to when they speak of the Holy Spirit.
In traditional Sufi doctrine, the ruh, or spirit of God, is locked in an eternal battle with the nafs, or the self, for possession of the heart—the qalb—which is not the seat of emotion (emotions, in most Muslim cultures, reside in the gut), but rather the vital center of human existence—“the seat of an essence that transcends individual form,” in the words of Titus Burckhardt. In more familiar terms, the qalb is equivalent to the traditional Western notion of the soul as the driving force of the intellect.
An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to absorb the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicating self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. It is here, at the end of the journey, when the individual has been stripped of his ego, that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit and achieves unity with the Divine.
Although the actual number of stations along the Way varies depending on the tradition (Attar’s Order, for instance, acknowledged seven of them), Sufis are adamant that the steps must be taken one at a time. As Rumi wrote, “Before you can drink the fifth cup, you must have drunk the first four, each of them delicious.” Furthermore, each station must be completed under the strict supervision of a Pir; only someone who has himself finished the journey can lead others along the path. “Do not travel through these stations without the company of a perfect master,” warned the glorious Sufi poet Hafiz. “There is darkness. Beware of the danger of getting lost!”
The Pir is the “Sublime Elixir,” the one who transmutes “the copper of seekers’ hearts into pure gold, and cleanses their being,” to quote the Sufi scholar Javad Nurbakhsh. Like the hoopoe, the Pir demands perfect submission from his disciples, who pledge him their loyalty in the form of a bay’ah, the oath of allegiance traditionally given to a Shaykh or a Caliph. Yet the Pir enjoys far greater authority than any Shaykh or Caliph ever could, for he is “the friend of God.” The Pir is not just a spiritual guide; he is “the eyes through which God regards the world.” In much of Sufi poetry the Pir is referred to as “the cosmic pole,” or qutb: the axis around which the spiritual energy of the universe rotates. This concept is brought vividly to life by the famed Turkish Sufi Order of “Whirling Darvishes,” who perform a spiritual, trance-inducing dance in which disciples mimic the movement of the cosmos by spinning in place, sometimes for hours at a time, while simultaneously orbiting the Pir, who becomes the center of their constructed universe.
As those who have completed the Way, Sufi Pirs are venerated as saints. The anniversaries of their deaths are holy days (termed urs, Persian for “weddings,” because in dying and leaving this world, the Pir is finally united with God). Their tombs are pilgrimage sites—especially for impoverished Muslims for whom the Hajj is unfeasible—where devotees gather with their oaths, petitions, and appeals for intercession. So great is the Pir’s spiritual power—his baraka—that merely touching his tomb can heal a sick man of his illness or impart fertility to a barren woman. As with the majority of Sufi activities, these tombs are completely egalitarian with regard to sex, ethnicity, and even faith. Particularly in the Indian subcontinent, it is not unusual for Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims to congregate in nearly equal numbers inside the mausoleums of Sufi saints.
By the sheer power of their spiritual charisma, the Pirs gather disciples in order to impart to them the esoteric knowledge Sufis call erfan. Like the Greek term gnosis, erfan refers to a heightened level of knowing in which one is able to intuit ultimate reality. However, erfan is a nonintellectual, nonrational knowing that, in the words of Shah Angha, the forty-second Pir of the Oveyssi Order, can be achieved only “through self-discipline and purification, in which case there is no need to become involved in the method of reasoning.” Because the intellect cannot fathom the divine mystery, the Sufis believe that true understanding of the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it can be achieved only when reason has been abandoned for love.
Of all the principles that the Sufi disciple must integrate into his life, none is more important than the principle of love. Love is the foundation of Sufism. It is the language through which Sufism is most perfectly expressed and the sole avenue through which its ideals can be understood. The experience of love represents the most universal station on the Sufi Way, for it is love—not theology and certainly not the law—that engenders knowledge of God.
According to the Sufis, God’s very essence—God’s substance—is love. Love is the agent of creation. Sufism does not allow for the concept of creation ex nihilo because, before there was anything, there was love: that is, God loving God’s self in a primordial state of unity. It was only when God desired to express this love to an “other” that humanity was created in the image of the Divine. Humanity, then, is God made manifest; it is God objectified through love.
When Sufis speak of their love for God, they are not referring to the traditional Christian concept of agape, or spiritual love; quite the opposite. This is a passionate, all-consuming, humiliating, self-denying love. As with Majnun’s love for Layla, Sufi love requires the unconditional surrender to the Beloved’s will, with no regard for one’s own well-being. This is love to the point of utter self-annihilation; indeed, that is its very purpose. Love, according to Attar, is the fire that obliterates the ego and purifies the soul, and the lover is he who “flares and burns …”
Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,
Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send
A hundred worlds toward their blazing end,
Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,
Who has no time for doubt or certainty,
To whom both good and evil are the same,
And who is neither, but a living flame.
Like most mystics, Sufis strive to eliminate the dichotomy between subject and object in their worship. The goal is to create an inseparable union between the individual and the Divine. In Sufism, this union is most often expressed through the most vivid, most explicit sexual imagery. Thus Hafiz wrote of God, “The scent of Your hair fulfills my life, and the sweetness of Your lips has no counterpart.”
Some of the most captivating use of sexual imagery in Sufism can be found in the writings of the aforementioned Rabia of Basra (717–801). Orphaned at a young age, Rabia became a slave and the sexual property of her master. Yet, she longed throughout her life to experience mystical union with God, sometimes going without sleep for weeks at a time in order to fast, pray, and meditate on the movement of the universe. It was during one of these nightly meditations that her master first noticed a blinding nimbus of light shining above her head, illuminating the entire house. Terrified, he immediately set Rabia free, allowing her to go into the desert to pursue the Way. There, in the wilderness, Rabia achieved fana, or self-annihilation, becoming the first, though not the only, female Sufi master: a woman in whose presence the venerable scholar Hasan al-Basra admitted to feeling spiritually bankrupt.
Like her Christian counterpart, Teresa of Avila, Rabia’s poetry betrays a profoundly intimate encounter with God:
You are my breath,
My hope,
My companion,
My craving,
My abundant wealth.
Without You—my Life, my Love—
I would never have wandered across these endless countries …
I look everywhere for Your love—
Then I am suddenly filled with it.
O Captain of my Heart,
Radiant Eye of Yearning in my breast,
I will never be free from You
As long as I live.
Be satisfied with me, Love,
And I am satisfied.
This intense longing for the Beloved, so prevalent in Rabia’s verses, betrays an important aspect of the Sufi conception of love. Above all else, this is a love that must remain unfulfilled, as Majnun discovered in the palm orchard. After all, as Attar’s birds realized on their journey to the Simurgh, one cannot begin the Way expecting to complete it; only a handful of individuals will reach the final destination and achieve unity with God. For this reason, the Sufi is often compared to the bride who sits on her marriage bed, “roses strewn on the cushions,” yearning for the arrival of the Bridegroom, though she knows he may never come. And yet, the bride waits; she will wait forever, “dying from love,” aching for the beloved, crying out with every breath, “Come to me! Come to me!” until she ceases to exist as a separate entity and becomes nothing more than a lover loving the Beloved in perfect union. As al-Hallaj wrote of his experience of unity with the Divine:
If, then, the perfect love is unrequited love—the kind of love that expects nothing in return—then the perfect lover and the paradigm of love for Sufis is Iblis, or Satan, who began his existence as an angel in “the Way of devotion to the service of God,” but who was cast out of God’s presence for refusing to bow before Adam. Rumi illustrates in his “Apology of Iblis” that this refusal to obey God “arose from love of God, not from disobedience.” After all, “all envy arises from love, for fear lest another become the companion of the Beloved.”
Though cast into hell, never to see the face of God again, Iblis continues to yearn for his Beloved, who “rocked my cradle” and “found milk for me in my infancy.” He will pine for God forever, crying out from the depths of hell, “I am mated by Him, mated by Him, mated by Him!”
If this somewhat flattering impression of the Devil is shocking to most Muslims, it is important to remember that that is precisely the point. As Attar claimed, “Love knows of neither faith nor blasphemy.” Only by breaking through the veil of traditional dualities, which human beings have constructed in order to categorize proper moral and religious behavior, can one achieve fana. The Sufi knows no dualities, only unity. There is no good and evil, no light and dark; there is only God. This notion should not be confused with the Hindu principle of maya (the illusion of reality), or the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata (the emptiness of all things). For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God. “Whichever way one turns, there is God,” the Quran says; “God is all-pervading and all-knowing” (2:115). And because the doctrine of tawhid insists God is One, the Sufis argue, reality must also be One.
The atom, the sun, the galaxies, and the universe,
Are surely but names, images, and forms.
One they are in reality, and only one.
In traditional Western philosophy this concept of radical unity is often called monism: the notion that all things, despite their variety, can be reduced to a single unified “thing” in either space, time, essence, or quality. However, it is perhaps more appropriate to refer to the Sufi ideal of radical unity as ahadiyyah, or “oneness,” to emphasize the theistic quality of this monistic ideal: al-Ahad, “the One,” being the first and most important of God’s ninety-nine beautiful names.
It is precisely this theistic monism that leads Sufis to reject traditional dualities, not because they eschew morally correct behavior, but because they accept only “the Existence of Oneness”: that is, Divine Unity. Admittedly, this concept has led to a great deal of confusion about the true teachings of Sufism, especially in light of the actions of the so-called Drunken Sufis who blatantly violated Islamic law by publicly drinking, gambling, and womanizing as a means of overcoming the external aspects of religion. The nonexistence of traditional dualities is, however, usually demonstrated through metaphor. And the most common metaphor for doing so is that of drunkenness and debauchery, both of which have become dominant symbols in Sufi poetry for this self-annihilating and intoxicating love.
“I will take one hundred barrels of wine tonight,” wrote Omar Khayyám in his superb Rubáiyát. “I will leave all reason and religion behind, and take the maidenhead of wine for mine.” Khayyám’s wine is spiritual wine—it represents “the grace of the Lord of the World”—and the Sufi is he who has rejected the traditional ideals of religious piety and moral behavior, who has fled “reason and the tangled web of the intellect,” in order to fill the cup of his heart with the intoxicating wine of God’s love. So says Hafiz: “Piety and moral goodness have naught to do with ecstasy; stain your prayer rug with wine!”
Once the veil of traditional dualities has been lifted, the ego obliterated, and the ruh allowed to absorb the qalb, the disciple finally achieves fana, which, as mentioned, is best translated as “ecstatic self-annihilation.” It is here, at the end of the Way, that the truth of the Divine Unity of all creation is revealed and the Sufi realizes that, in the words of Shah Angha, “the brook, the river, the drop, the sea, the bubble, all in one voice say: Water we are, water.”
By discarding his own qualities and attributes through a radical act of self-annihilation, the Sufi enters fully into the qualities and attributes of God. He does not become God, as fana is so often misunderstood by Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims; rather, the Sufi is drowned in God, so that Creator and creation become one. This concept of Divine Unity is most keenly expressed by the great mystic and scholar Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), who reformulated the traditional Muslim profession of faith (shahadah) from “There is no god but God” to “There is no Being other than the Being of God; there is no Reality other than the Reality of God.”
In Ibn al-Arabi’s school of thought—a school so influential to the development of Sufism that this entire chapter could be devoted to it—humanity and the cosmos, as two separate but intimately connected constructions of the Universal Spirit, are like two mirrors reflecting one another. By employing ta’wil, Ibn al-Arabi reinterpreted the Quran’s statement that God created humanity “from a single soul” (4:1) to mean that the universe itself is “as a single being.” For al-Arabi, human beings are thus “an abridgment of the great cosmic book,” and those few individuals who have “fully realized [their] essential oneness with the Divine Being,” to quote Reynold Nicholson, are transformed into what al-Arabi terms “the Perfect Man” (also called “the Universal Man”).
The Perfect Man is he for whom individuality is merely an external form, but whose inward reality conforms to the universe itself. He is “the copy of God,” in the words of al-Arabi’s greatest disciple, Abdul Karim al-Jili: he is the mirror in which the divine attributes are perfectly reflected; the medium through which God is made manifest.
Although Sufism considers all prophets and messengers, as well as the Imams and the Pirs, to be representatives of the Perfect Man, for Sufis the paradigm of this unique being is none other than the Prophet Muhammad himself. All Muslims look to the example of the Prophet (the Imitatio Muhammadi, if you will) to guide them on the straight path to God. But for the Sufi, Muhammad is more than just the “beautiful model” that the Quran calls him (33:21). Muhammad is the primordial light: the first of God’s creations.
The concept of “the light of Muhammad” (nur Muhammad) reveals Sufism’s deep Gnostic influences. In short, the Sufis understand Muhammad in the same way that many Christian Gnostics understood Jesus: as the eternal logos. Thus, Muhammad is, like Jesus in the words of John’s Gospel, “the light shining in the darkness, though the darkness does not overcome it” (John 1:5); or to quote the Gospel of Thomas, he is “the light which is before all things.”
Yet unlike Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels of John and Thomas, Muhammad is not to be understood as “God made flesh.” “God is the light of the heavens and the earth,” the Quran exclaims (24:35), meaning, as al-Ghazali argues in his Niche of Lights, that the nur Muhammad is, in reality, nothing more than the reflection of God’s light. Indeed, Sufism often describes the relationship between God and Muhammad in terms of the relationship between the sun and the moon, in that the latter merely reflects the light of the former. The sun expresses power; it is creative. The moon expresses beauty; it is responsive. Thus, according to Inayat Khan, “the one who gives [God’s] Message gives God’s Knowledge, not his own.… Just [as] the moon’s light is not its own.” It is this unique impression of Muhammad that has led Sufis to refer to the Prophet not just as Rasul Allah, but also as Dhikr Allah: “the remembrance of God,” though the term dhikr has many meanings in Sufism.
As one would expect, Sufi beliefs often resulted in bitter, sometimes violent persecution of their adherents at the hands of the religious authorities, who were deeply troubled by its antilaw, antiestablishment ideals. The Sufis were rarely welcomed in the mosques and so were forced to develop their own rituals and practices to assist them in breaking down the separation between the individual and the Divine. As a result, dhikr, as the physical act of remembering God, has become the central ritual activity for all Sufis, though the actual form and function of the dhikr varies drastically depending on the Order.
The most common form of dhikr is known as the “vocal dhikr,” made popular through the rituals of the Qadiri Order, which exists primarily in Syria, Turkey, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. The Qadiri, who likely represent the first formally recognized tariqah in Sufism, center their dhikr activities on rhythmic and repetitive invocations of the shahadah or some other religious phrase. Often accompanied by strenuous breathing exercises and rapid movements of the head and torso (the disciples are usually sitting in a circle), these invocations are pronounced faster and faster until the phrase breaks down into meaningless, monosyllabic exhalations of breath, which naturally come to resemble the Arabic word hu! or “He,” meaning God. By repeatedly invoking God through this physical act of remembrance, the disciple gradually strips himself of his ego so that he may be clothed instead in the attributes of God. In this way, the Qadiri claim, “the rememberer becomes the remembered.”
Alongside the “vocal dhikr” of the Qadiri is the so-called “silent dhikr” popularized by the Order of the Naqshbandi. Considered the most traditional of the Sufi Orders, the Naqshbandi primarily comprised politically active pietists who traced their lineage back to Abu Bakr and who maintained strict adherence to the Shariah. The Naqshbandi’s traditionalist brand of Sufism led them to reject music and dance in favor of more sober ritual activities like the silent dhikr, in which the names of God are repeated inwardly in an act of meditation, rather than aloud in an act of communion.
The silent dhikr does not exactly correspond to the meditation rituals found in, for example, Theravada Buddhism. However, the Naqshbandi, as well as a few other contemplative Sufi Orders, do practice something called fikr, which Ian Richard Netton correctly translates as “contemplation resulting in certitude of the divine.” In any case, like the Qadiri, the Naqshbandi have only one goal in pursuing either dhikr or fikr: union with God.
Not all dhikrs involve recitation, either vocal or silent. In fact, the most widely recognized form of dhikr is the spiritual dance of Turkey’s Mevlevi Order, founded by Rumi, and popularly known as the Whirling Darvishes. Some Sufis use the art of calligraphy as a form of dhikr, while in the Caucasus, where Sufism inherited many of the shamanistic practices of the ancient Indo-Europeans, dhikr tends to focus not so much on recitation or meditation, but rather on physical pain as a means to shock the disciple into a state of ecstasy. The Rifa’i Order in Macedonia, for example, is famous for its public acts of self-mutilation, in which disciples pierce themselves with spikes while in a trancelike state. In certain parts of Morocco, there are Sufis who practice dhikr through great feats of strength and stamina meant to separate them from the false reality of the material world.
There is another popular form of dhikr, primarily employed by the Chisti Order, who dominate the Indian subcontinent. The Chistis specialize in the use of music in their spiritual exercises. Their “remembrance of God” is best expressed through rapturous spiritual concerts called sama‘, which Bruce Lawrence describes as “a dynamic dialogue between a human lover and the Divine Beloved.”
Of course, music and dance—both of which tend to be frowned upon in traditional Islamic worship—have a long history in the Indian subcontinent, and part of the reason for the rapid spread of Sufism in India was the ease with which it appropriated both into its worship ceremonies. In fact, early Chisti evangelists would often enter a town playing flutes or beating drums so as to gather a crowd, before launching into the tales of their Pirs. So the sama’ is not only a means by which the Chistis experience the suprasensible world, it is also a valuable evangelical tool. And it is not unusual for the sama’ to function as a political rally. Indeed, unlike most Sufi orders, which tend toward political quietism, Sufism in India has always been intertwined with the social and political machinations of the state, especially during the reign of the Mughal emperors (1526–1858), when, in exchange for providing spiritual prosperity and moral legitimacy to the Empire, a select number of Sufis enjoyed enormous influence over the government.
Perhaps the most influential of these “political Sufis” was the eighteenth-century writer and philosopher Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762). A fervent disciple of the traditionalist Naqshbandi Order, Wali Allah strove in his books and lectures to strip Sufism of its “foreign” influences (e.g., Neoplatonism, Persian mysticism, Hindu Vedantism) in order to restore it to what he considered to be an older, unadulterated form of Islamic mysticism, one inextricably bound to traditionalist Sunni orthodoxy. However, Wali Allah was far more interested in reasserting fundamental Islamic values in the social and economic spheres of the state than in merely purifying Sufism. As a result, his theo-political ideology, though interpreted in widely divergent ways, had a profound effect on succeeding generations of Muslim theologians and philosophers.
On the one hand, Wali Allah’s emphasis on the resurgence of the Islamic sciences and his enlightened socioeconomic theories influenced Islamic modernists like Sayyid Ahmed Khan to form his Aligarh movement, an intellectual society dedicated not only to establishing a European educational system in India, but also to encouraging Muslim cooperation with the British colonialists who were just then beginning to take a more aggressive role in the political affairs of the Subcontinent.
On the other hand, Wali Allah’s emphasis on orthodoxy sparked a number of so-called “puritan” movements in India, the most famous of which is the Deobandi School, whose students—taliban in Arabic—played an active role in opposing the British occupation of India, and whose ethnic Pashtun contingent would eventually seize control of Afghanistan in order to impose their radically orthodox theo-political philosophy upon the state (though that story must be reserved for another chapter).
Considering the tragic effects of the colonialist experience in India, it should be obvious which vision of Shah Wali Allah’s theo-political views most successfully captured the imaginations of India’s oppressed Muslim population. As will become apparent, throughout the colonized lands of the Middle East and North Africa, the voice of modernism and integration with the Enlightenment ideals of the European colonialists was consistently drowned out by the far louder and more aggressive voice of traditionalism and resistance to the insufferable yoke of imperialism. Thus, a new generation of Indian Muslims, born into a country that had become the exclusive financial property of the British Empire, no longer shared the popular Sufi sentiment that “if the world does not agree with you, you agree with the world.” They instead preferred the version offered by the great mystical poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938)—a disciple of the Qadiri Order and a devotee of Wali Allah—who exclaimed, “If the world does not agree with you, arise against it!”