Sufi Thought and Practice

Sufi Thought and Practice

Important aspects:

                                                 The mystics drew their vocabulary largely from the Qurʾān, which for Muslims contains all divine wisdom and has to be interpreted with ever-increasing insight. In the Qurʾān, mystics found the threat of the Last Judgment, but they also found the statement that God “loves them and they love him,” which became the basis for love-mysticism. Strict obedience to the religious law and imitation of the Prophet were basic for the mystics. By rigid introspection and mental struggle, the mystic tried to purify his baser self from even the smallest signs of selfishness, thus attaining ikhlāṣ, absolute purity of intention and act. Tawakkul (trust in God) was sometimes practiced to such an extent that every thought of tomorrow was considered irreligious. “Little sleep, little talk, little food” were fundamental; fasting became one of the most important preparations for the spiritual life.

The central concern of the Sufis, as of every Muslim, was tawḥīd, the witness that “there is no deity but God.” This truth had to be realized in the existence of each individual, and so the expressions differ: early Sufism postulated the approach to God through love and voluntary suffering until a unity of will was reached; Junayd spoke of “recognizing God as He was before creation”; God is seen as the One and only actor; He alone “has the right to say ‘I’.” Later, tawḥīd came to mean the knowledge that there is nothing existent but God, or the ability to see God and creation as two aspects of one reality, reflecting each other and depending upon each other (waḥdat al-wujūd).

The mystics realized that beyond the knowledge of outward sciences intuitive knowledge was required in order to receive that illumination to which reason has no access. Dhawq, direct “tasting” of experience, was essential for them. But the inspirations and “unveilings” that God grants such mystics by special grace must never contradict the Qurʾān and tradition and are valid only for the person concerned. Even the Malāmatīs, who attracted public contempt upon themselves by outwardly acting against the law, in private life strictly followed the divine commands. Mystics who expressed in their poetry their disinterest in, and even contempt of, the traditional formal religions never forgot that Islam is the highest manifestation of divine wisdom.

The idea of the manifestation of divine wisdom was also connected with the person of the Prophet Muhammad. Though early Sufism had concentrated upon the relation between God and the soul, from 900 onward a strong Muhammad-mysticism developed. In the very early years, the alleged divine address to the Prophet—“If thou hadst not been I had not created the worlds”—was common among Sufis. Muhammad was said to be “Prophet when Adam was still between water and clay.” Muhammad is also described as light from light, and from his light all the prophets are created, constituting the different aspects of this light. In its fullness such light radiated from the historical Muhammad and is partaken of by his posterity and by the saints; for Muhammad has the aspect of sanctity in addition to that of prophecy. An apocryphal tradition makes even God attest: “I am Aḥmad (= Muhammad) without ‘m’ (i.e., Aḥad, ‘One’).”

A mystic may also be known as walī. By derivation the word walī (“saint”) means “one in close relation” or “friend.” The awlīyāʾ (plural of walī) are “friends of God who have no fear nor are they sad.” Later the term walī came to denote the Muslim mystics who had reached a certain stage of proximity to God, or those who had reached the highest mystical stages. They have their “seal” (i.e., the last and most perfect personality in the historical process; with this person, the evolution has found its end—as in Muhammad’s case), just as the prophets have. Female saints are found all over the Islamic world.

The invisible hierarchy of saints consists of the 40 abdāl (“substitutes”; for when any of them dies another is elected by God from the rank and file of the saints), seven awtād (“stakes,” or “props,” of faith), three nuqabāʾ (“leader”; “one who introduces people to his master”), headed by the quṭb (“axis, pole”), or ghawth (“help”)—titles claimed by many Sufi leaders. Saint worship is contrary to Islam, which does not admit of any mediating role for human beings between humanity and God; but the cult of living and even more of dead saints—visiting their tombs to take vows there—responded to the feeling of the masses, and thus a number of pre-Islamic customs were absorbed into Islam under the cover of mysticism. The advanced mystic was often granted the capacity of working miracles called karāmāt (charismata or “graces”), although not muʿjizāt (“that which men are unable to imitate”), like the miracles of the prophets. Among them are “cardiognosia” (knowledge of the heart), providing food from the unseen, presence in two places at the same time, and help for the disciples, be they near or far. In short, a saint is one “whose prayers are heard” and who has taṣarruf, the power of materializing in this world possibilities that still rest in the spiritual world. Many great saints, however, considered miracle working as a dangerous trap on the path that might distract the Sufi from his real goal.

The path

The path (ṭarīqah) begins with repentance. A mystical guide (shaykh or pīr) accepts the seeker as disciple (murīd), orders him to follow strict ascetic practices, and suggests certain formulas for meditation. It is said that the disciple should be in the hands of the master “like a corpse in the hand of the washer.” The master teaches him constant jihad, or struggle (the real “Holy War”), against the lower soul, often represented as a black dog, which should, however, not be killed but merely tamed and used in the way of God. The mystic dwells in a number of spiritual stations (maqām), which are described in varying sequence, and, after the initial repentance, comprise abstinence, renunciation, and poverty—according to Muhammad’s saying, “Poverty is my pride”; poverty was sometimes interpreted as having no interest in anything apart from God, the Rich One, but the concrete meaning of poverty prevailed, which is why the mystic is often denoted as “poor,” fakir or dervish. Patience and gratitude belong to higher stations of the path, and consent is the loving acceptance of every affliction.

On his way to illumination the mystic will undergo such changing spiritual states (ḥāl) as qabḍ and basṭ, constraint and happy spiritual expansion, fear and hope, and longing and intimacy, which are granted by God and last for longer or shorter periods of time, changing in intensity according to the station in which the mystic is abiding at the moment. The way culminates in maʿrifah (“interior knowledge,” “gnosis”) or in maḥabbah (“love”), the central subject of Sufism since the 9th century, which implies a union of lover and beloved, and was therefore violently rejected by the orthodox, for whom “love of God” meant simply obedience. The final goal is fanāʾ (“annihilation”), primarily an ethical concept of annihilating one’s own qualities, according to the prophetic saying “Take over the qualities of God,” but slowly developing into a complete extinction of the personality. Some mystics taught that behind this negative unity where the self is completely effaced, the baqāʾ, (“duration, life in God”) is found: the ecstatic experience, called intoxication, is followed by the “second sobriety”—i.e., the return of the completely transformed mystic into this world where he acts as a living witness of God or continues the “journey in God.” The mystic has reached ḥaqīqah (“realty”), after finishing the ṭarīqah (“path”), which is built upon the sharīʿah (“law”). Later, the disciple is led through fanāʾ fī ashshaykh (“annihilation in the master”) to fanāʾ fīar-Rasūl (“annihilation in the Prophet”) before reaching, if at all, fanāʾ fī-Allāh (“annihilation in God”).

One of the means used on the path is the ritual prayer, or dhikr (“remembrance”), derived from the Qurʾānic injunction “And remember God often” (sura [chapter] 62, verse 10). It consists of a repetition of either one or all of the most beautiful names of God, of the name Allah, or of a certain religious formula, such as shahādah (the profession of faith): “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” The rosary with 99 or 33 beads was in use as early as the 8th century for counting the thousands of repetitions. One’s whole being should eventually be transformed into remembrance of God.

In the mid-9th century some mystics introduced sessions with music and poetry recitals (samāʿ) in Baghdad in order to reach the ecstatic experience—and since then debates about the permissibility of samāʿ, filling many books, have been written. Narcotics were used in periods of degeneration, and coffee was employed by the “sober” mystics (first by the Shādhilīyyah after 1300).

Besides the wayfarers (sālik) on the path, Sufis who have no master but are attracted solely by divine grace are also found; they are called Uwaysī, after Uways al-Qaranī, the Yemenite contemporary of the Prophet who never saw him but firmly believed in him. There are also the so-called majdhūb (“attracted”) who are often persons generally agreed to be more or less mentally deranged.

Symbolism in Sufism

The divine truth was at times revealed to the mystic in visions, auditions, and dreams, in colours and sounds, but to convey these nonrational and ineffable experiences to others the mystic had to rely upon such terminology of worldly experience as that of love and intoxication—often objectionable from the orthodox viewpoint. The symbolism of wine, cup, and cupbearer, first expressed by Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī in the 9th century, became popular everywhere, whether in the verses of the Arab Ibn al-Fāriḍ, or the Persian ʿIrāqī, or the Turk Yunus Emre, and their followers. The hope for the union of the soul with the divine had to be expressed through images of human yearning and love. The love for lovely boys in which the divine beauty manifests itself—according to the alleged Hadith, “I saw my Lord in the shape of a youth with a cap awry”—was commonplace in Persian poetry. Union was described as the submersion of the drop in the ocean, the state of the iron in the fire, the vision of penetrating light, or the burning of the moth in the candle (first used by Ḥallāj). Worldly phenomena were seen as black tresses veiling the radiant beauty of the divine countenance. The mystery of unity and diversity was symbolized, for example, under the image of mirrors that reflect the different aspects of the divine, or as prisms colouring the pure light. Every aspect of nature was seen in relation to God. The symbol of the soul-bird—in which the human soul is likened to a flying bird—known everywhere, was the centre of ʿAṭṭar’s Manṭeq al-ṭeyr. The predilection of the mystical poets for the symbolism of the nightingale and rose (the red rose = God’s perfect beauty; nightingale = soul; first used by Baqli [died 1206]) stems from the soul-bird symbolism. For spiritual education, symbols taken from medicine (healing of the sick soul) and alchemy (changing of base matter into gold) were also used. Many descriptions that were originally applied to God as the goal of love were, in later times, used also for the Prophet, who is said to be like the “dawn between the darkness of the material world and the sun of Reality.”

Allusions to the Qurʾān were frequent, especially so to verses that seem to imply divine immanence (God’s presence in the world), such as “Whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God” (sura 2, verse 109), or that God is “closer than your neck vein” (sura 50, verse 8). Sura 7, verse 172—i.e., God’s address to the uncreated children of Adam (“Am I not your Lord” [alastu birabbikum])—came to denote the pre-eternal love relation between God and humanity. As for the prophets before Muhammad, the vision of Moses was considered still imperfect, for the mystic wants the actual vision of God, not his manifestation through a burning bush. Abraham, for whom fire turned into a rose garden, resembles the mystic in his afflictions; Joseph, in his perfect beauty, the mystical beloved after whom the mystic searches. The apocryphal traditions used by the mystics are numerous; such as “Heaven and earth do not contain me, but the heart of my faithful servant contains Me”; and the possibility of a relation between humanity and God is also explained by the traditional idea: “He (God) created Adam in His image.”

Theosophical Sufism

Sufism, in its beginnings a practical method of spiritual education and self-realization, grew slowly into a theosophical system by adopting traditions of Neoplatonism, the Hellenistic world, gnosticism (an ancient esoteric religiophilosophical movement that viewed matter as evil and spirit as good), and spiritual currents from Iran and various countries in the ancient agricultural lands from the eastern Mediterranean to Iraq. One master who contributed to this development was the Persian al-Suhrawardī, called al-Maqtūl (“the Killed”), executed in 1191 in Aleppo. To him is attributed the philosophy of ishrāq (“illumination”), and he claimed to unite the Persian (Zoroastrian) and Egyptian (Hermetic) traditions. His didactic and doctrinal works in Arabic taught, among other things, a complicated angelology (theory of angels); some of his smaller Persian treatises depict the journey of the soul across the cosmos; the “Orient” (East) is the world of pure lights and archangels, the “Occident” (West) that of darkness and matter; and human beings live in the “Western exile.”

At the time of Suhrawardī’s death, the greatest representative of theosophic Sufism was in his 20s: Ibn al-ʿArabī, born at Murcia, Spain, where speculative tendencies had been visible since Ibn Masarrah’s philosophy (died 931). Ibn al-ʿArabī was instructed in mysticism by two Spanish female saints. Performing the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, he met there an accomplished young Persian woman who represented for him the divine wisdom. This experience resulted in the charming poems of the Tarjumān al-ashwāq (“Interpreter of Yearning”), which the author later explained mystically. Ibn al-ʿArabī composed at least 150 volumes. His magnum opus is al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyyah (“The Meccan Revelations”) in 560 chapters, in which he expounds his theory of unity of being.

The substance of theosophic Sufism is as follows. According to the Hadith qudsī, or “holy tradition”—“I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known”—the absolute, or God, yearned in his loneliness for manifestation and created the world by effusing being upon the heavenly archetypes, a “theophany (a physical manifestation of deity) through God’s imaginative power.” The universe is annihilated and created every moment. Every divine name is reflected in a named one. The world and God are said to be like ice and water, or like two mirrors contemplating themselves in each other, joined by a sympathetic union. The Prophet Muhammad is the universal person, the perfect man, the total theophany of the divine names, the prototype of creation. Muhammad is the “word,” each particular dimension of which is identified with a prophet, and he is also the model for the spiritual realization of human possibilities. The mystic has to pass the stages of the Qurʾānic prophets as they are explained in the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam until he becomes united with the ḥaqīqa Muḥammadīyyah (the first individualization of the divine in the “Muhammadan Reality”). A human being can have vision only of the form of the faith he professes, and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oft-quoted verse, “I follow the religion of love wherever its camels turn,” with its seeming religious tolerance means, as the contemporary Islamic scholar Seyyid Hossein Nasr puts it, that “the form of God is for him no longer the form of this or that faith exclusive of all others but his own eternal form which he encounters.” The theories of the perfect man were elaborated by al-Jīlī (died c. 1424) in his compendium Al-insān al-kāmil (“The Perfect Man”) and became common throughout the Muslim world.

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s theosophy has been attacked by orthodox Muslims and mystics of the “sober” school as incongruent with Islam because “a thoroughly monistic system cannot take seriously the objective validity of moral standards.” Even the adversaries of the “greatest master” could not, however, help using part of his terminology. Innumerable mystics and poets propagated his ideas, though they only partly understood them, and this circumstance led also to a misinterpretation of the data of early Sufism in the light of existential monism. Later Persian poetry is permeated by the pantheistic feeling of hama ost (“everything is He”).

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s contemporary in Egypt, the poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ, is usually mentioned together with him; Ibn al-Fāriḍ, however, is not a systematic thinker but a full-fledged poet who used the imagery of classical Arabic poetry to describe the state of the lover in extremely artistic verses and has given, in his Tāʾiyat al-kubrā (“Poem of the Journey”), glimpses of the way of the mystic, using, as many poets before and after him did, for example, the image of the shadow play for the actions of the creatures who are dependent upon the divine playmaster. His unifying experience is personal and is not the expression of a theosophical system.