THE PERSIAN SUFIS
CYPRIAN RICE, O.P.
London
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN
LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
First published in 1964
George
Allen Unwin Ltd, 1964
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
in 10 on 11 point Old Style type
BY C. TINLING AND CO. LTD
LIVERPOOL, LONDON AND PRESCOT
CONTENTS
I |
Introductory |
page 9 |
II |
The Sufi Movement |
19 |
III |
The Way and Its Goal |
3i |
IV |
The Seven Stages |
39 |
V |
The Mystical States |
55 |
VI |
Homesickness (Firaq) |
67 |
VII |
Lost in God (Fana) |
76 |
VIII |
The Vision of God |
83 |
IX |
Two §ufi Practices |
88 |
ONE
The Sufi phenomenon is not easy to sum up or define.
The Sufis never set out to found a new religion, a mazhab or denomination
They were content tojiye and work within .the framework
of the Moslem religion, using texts from the Qoran
much’^^UhnsHan^ystics^Eave used the Bible to illustrate their tenets. Their aim
was to purify and spiritualize Islam from within, to give it a deeper, mystical
interpretation, and infuse into it a spirit of love and liberty. In the broader
sense, therefore, in which the word religion is used in our time, their
movement could well be called a religious one, one which did not aim at tying
men down with a new set of rules but rather at setting them free from external
rules and open to the movement of the spirit.
This
religion was disseminated mainly by poetry, it breathed in an atmosphere of
poetry and song. In it the place of great dogmatic treatises is taken by mystical
romances, such as Yusuf and Zuleikha or Leila and Majnun. Its one dogma, an
interpretation of the Moslem witness. ‘There is no god but God’, is that the
human heart must turn always, unreservedly, to the one, divine Beloved.
Who
was the first Sufi? Who started this astonishing flowering of spiritual love in
lyrical poetry and dedicated lives? No one knows.
Early
in the history of Islam, Moslem ascetics appeared who, from their habit of
wearing coarse garments of wool (stfL became known as Sufis. But what we
now know as Sufism ^roed unheral5ed, mystenously, in the ninth century of our
era and already m the tenth and eleventh had reached maturity. Among all its
exponents there is no single one who could be claimed as the initiator
or founder.
Sufism is like
that great oak-tree, standing in the middle of the meadow: no one witnessed its
planting, no one beheld its beginning, but now the flourishing tree speaks for
itself, is true to origins which it has forgotten, has taken for granted.
There is a
Sufi way, a Sufi doctrine, a form of spiritual knowledge known as ’İrfan or ma'rifat, Arabic words which
correspond to the Greek gnosis.
Sufism has its
great names, its poet-preachers, its ‘saints’, m the broad, iremcal sense in
which the word can be used. Names like Maulana Rumi, Ibn al ’Arabi, Jimi,
Mansiir al Hallij are household words in the whole Islamic world and even
beyond it.
Has it a
future? Perhaps we may say that if, in the past, its function was to
spiritualize Islam, its purpose in the future will be rather to make possible a
welding of religious thought between East and West, a vital, oecumenical
commingling and understanding, which will prove ultimately to be, in the truest
sense, on both sides, a return to origins, to the original unity.
When one speaks
of the Sufis as ‘mystics’, one does not necessarily mean to approve all their
teaching or all their methods, nor, indeed, admit the genuineness of the
mystical experiences of this or that individual. But whatever one’s preconceptions
or reservations, it is difficult, after a careful study of their lives and
writings, not to recognize a kinship between the Sufi spirit and vocabulary and
those of the Christian saints and mystics.
This book is
concerned mainly with the Persian mystics. Taken all in all, what goes by
the name of ‘Islamic mysticism’ is a Persian product. The mystical
flfe, as it spread rapidly over the broad world of Islam, found tinder in the
hearts of many who were not Persians: Egyptians like Dhu’l Nun, Andalucians
like Ibn’ul Arabi, Arabs like Rabi’a al ’Adawiyya. But Persia itself is the
homeland of mysticism in Isldm, It is true that many Islamic mystical
writers, whether Persian or not, wrote in Arabic, but this was because that
language was in common use throughout the Moslem world for the exposition of
religious and philosophical teaching. It could, indeed, be said that the
Persians themselves took up the Arabic language and forged from it the
magnificent instrument of precise philosophical and scientific expression
which it became, after having been used by the Arabs themselves almost
exclusively'for poetry. This was Persia’s revenge for the humiliating defeat
she suffered at the hands of the Arabs and the consequent imposition of the
Arabic language for all religious and juridical purposes. We might go on to
say that Persia’s revenge for the imposition of Islam and of the Arabic Qoran
was her bid for the utter transformation of the religious outlook of all the
Islamic peoples by the dissemination of the Sufi creed and the creation of a
body of mystical poetry which is almost as widely known as the Qoran itself.
The combination in Sufism of mystical love and passion with a daring challenge
to all forms of rigid and hypocritical formalism has had a bewitching and
breath-taking effect on successive Moslem generations in all countries, an
effect repeated m all those non-Moslem milieux, European or Asiatic, where
these doctrines, often interpreted by the most ravishmgly beautiful poetry,
have been discovered. In this way Persia has conquered a spiritual domain far
more extensive than any won by the arms of Cyrus and Darius, and one which is
still far from being a thing of the past. Indeed, one might say that through
this mystical lore, expressed m an incomparable poetical medium, Persia found
herself, discovered something like her true spiritual vocation among the
peoples of the world, and that her voice has now only to make itself heard to
win the delighted approval of all those seekers and connoisseurs whose souls
are attuned to perceive the message of the ustdd i azal (the eternal
master), to use Khoj& Hafiz’s phrase.
In
a sense, this bold transformation of Islam from within by the mystical mind of
Persia began already in the Prophet’s life-time with the part played in the
elaboration and interpretation of Mahomet’s message by the strange but
historic figure of Salman Farsi—Salman the Persian—to whom M. Massignon devoted
an indispensable monograph. But a similar influence revealed itself in the
rapid spiritualization of the person of ‘Ali and the parallel evolution of the
mystical significance of Mahomet, around the notion of the nur muhammadi—the
‘Mahomet-light’, which seems to amount to the introduction of a Logos doctrine
into the heart of Islam, viewed as an esoteric system. The influences, as they
worked themselves out, led, on the other hand, to the formation of the Shi’a,
involving the spiritual-mystical significance accorded to the Imdm. At the same
time, the teaching and outlook of Mahomet himself was progressively brought into
conformity with the §ufi model by the accumulation of a large body of ahadtih
(traditional sayings) fathered onto the Prophet by successive generations.
The
vigour of the Persian spiritual genius, however, is not a phenomenon which came
suddenly to light at the outset of Islam. It was there all the time, and there
are Persians whom I have known who claim that the stream of pure Persian
mysticism has pursued its course, now open, now hidden, right down the ages.
This is a claim which springs, maybe, more from the Persians’ own intuition
than from any positive documentation, but the assumption comes out clearly in
the writings of Suhravardi and the Ishriqi school. In any case, one cannot but
be struck by the atttraction exerted and the penetration achieved by Persian
religions, such as Mithraism and Manichaeism, as far afield as the farthest
frontiers of the Roman Empire, as well as in farthest Asia and who knows where
else. The Christian Church of Persia itself, which, as Mgr Duchesne has pointed
out, rivalled even the Church of Rome in the number of its martyrs, sent its
missionaries far and wide throughout Asia, into India, China and Japan. As to
the exploits of Christian missionaries from Persia in Japan, facts are only now
coining to light through the investigations of Prof. Sakae Ikeda. Japanese
writers have also traced deep influences of Persian Christianity in the
emergence of the Mahaydna type of Buddhism in China.
If
these facts are recorded here, it is merely in order to make it clear that the
universal radiation of the Persian spirit was not confined to the Islamic
world.
Words
like ma'rifat or irfdn used to designate Sufi teaching might lead
one to conclude that theirs was essentially a speculative movement. But one
must always bear in mind that it is fundamentally a practical scieriCe,
the teaching of a way of *_ life. This aspect of it was most
clearly marked, no doubt, in its "earlier period but it has remained as
ajiermanent feature of the Sufi system and all its professors are agreed that
those Who enter on the search for "perfection must ’ needs' undergo a rigorouscburse
ofTfsfiriing uriderawise spiritual father (Pit
u Mu^shid). In a great mystical writer like Jaldl-edDm Riimi, for instance,
the most sublime mystical descriptions are never entirely divorced from moral
exhortations. It is true that for Riimi the moral virtues are never ends in
themselves. They are seen as ways and means, creating the necessary conditions
for ffie attainment of closer union with the divine Beloved. But that does but
make his exhortations more pressing.
Some
readers may question the use of the term 'mystical’ in this field, or may ask
for it to be defined. In brief the reply shall be that the term is used here to
signify doctrines concerning the way to God or to perfection derived from inner
experience and inspiration rather than from deductive reasoning or positive
tradition. Something of what is meant can be found m Sheikh 'Attar’s words, in
his introduction to the Memoirs of the Saints. He recommends the study
of the sayings of the great mystics because, as he says, 'their utterances are
the result of spiritual enterprise and experience, not of mechanical learning
and repetition of what others have said. They spring from direct insight and
not from discursive reasoning, from supernatural sources of knowledge, not from
laborious personal acquisition. They gush forth as from the source and are not
painfully conveyed over man-made aqueducts. They come from the sphere of
"My Lord has educated me” and not from the sphere of "my father told
me”.’
The
lesser lights among Sufi poets have only too often repeated the images and
allegories used by their greater predecessors, making of them mere cliches,
hackneyed and hollow. Indeed, the bane of Persian mystical poetry is the
incalculable number of its mediocre practitioners.
Leaving
them aside, we do well to concentrate on the great masters, such as, among
poets, Jaldl-edDm Riimi, Farid edDin ’Attar, Maghnbi, Jimi, Hafiz, and among
prose-writers, Huj- vin, al-Sarraj, Najm-edDin Razi, and, once again, ’Attar,
with his indispensable Memoirs of the Saints. Nor should one exclude
from any enumeration of Persian mystics the name of Mansiir al-Halld], a native
of FArs, in the heart of old Irin, even though he wrote m Arabic (and with what
clarity, simplicity and force!). Without attempting a complete enumeration, one
cannot refrain from mentioning names like Hakim SanAi, Sha- bistari, author of
the Gulshan i Rdz, and Abu Said of Mihneh.
For
many centuries this abundant store of mystical wisdom was a closed book for the
West The medieval schoolmen came to know Persian philosophers such as Avicenna
(Ibn Sind) and el Gazel (Ghazali) through Hebrew and Latin translations but
there is no trace of their having suspected the existence of Persian mystical
writings It is possible, however, that an indirect influence was exercised by
Moslem mystical poems on the Troubadours.
In
this country, it was not until 1774 that Sir William Jones’ Latin Commentaries
on Asiatic Poetry opened the way to knowledge of the Persian writers but
the work, inevitably perhaps, created little stir and bore scarcely any fruit.
It
was in Germany, in the Romantic period, that the great iblouissement
came. Goethe’s West-dstlicher Diwan was the first consequence of it.
Ruckert, Herder and others set themselves with great zeal and application to
study Persian mystical verse and to make it the leaven of the new poetical and
philosophical movement in their country.
During
the present century German interest in Persian mysticism was revived by
Kazimzadeh Iranshahr, a Persian who settled m Berlin and published a number of
religious booklets based upon Sufi teachings.
Meanwhile,
in England the study of Persian literature was immensely forwarded by the
masterly and abundant work of Professor E. G. Browne of Cambridge. Browne,
moreover, had the good fortune to find in R. A. Nicholson, later to be his
successor in the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge, a scholar in whom the study of
Persian poetry kindled and fed an inborn affinity with mystical learning. The
result was his annotated edition of a selection of mystical odes from the Divdn
of Shams of Tabriz, by Jalalu’ ddin Rumi, in 1898.
Later
on, Nicholson contributed to the Gibb Senes his edition of Hujvm’s Kashful
Mahjub and then Sarraj’s Kitabul Luma', both of which are key works
for the study of Sufi doctnne.
Then
came his magnum opus, the great new edition of the text of Rumi's Mathnaviyi
Ma’navz, the 'bible of the Sufis', followed, within the next fifteen years,
by a translation of the whole work and finally by a full commentary, in which
Professor Nicholson revealed the full extent of his mastery of the subject.
He had,
moreover, in 1905, laid students still further under an obligation to him by
his critical edition, m two volumes, of Sheikh 'Attar's invaluable Tazkirat
ul Awhya, a collection of biographies of a number of well-known and
less-known Sufis and saints of the Moslem world.
_ „ gyyr— ■—
TE“any
final assessment, however, it would be difficult to give the late Professor
Louis Massignon, chiefly noted for his exposition of the mystic teaching of
al-Hallaj, any lower place. Both of them were so deeply penetrated by the Sufi
spirit that they would have shrunk with horror from any such competition.
Professor
A. J. Arberry, Nicholson’s successor in the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge, has
also rendered valuable services to the study of Islamic mysticism by his
edition of Kalabadhi’s treatise on Sufism, as well as by other books intended
to make Persian mvstira known to a wide public. In 1950 he
contributed to the series of 'Ethical and Religious Classicsof Eastand
WesVan account ot the mystics of Islam, can
be recommended as a clear, orderly and sympathetic account of the subject which
aims at leaving out none of the facts, writings and personalities that count in
a serious study of Islamic mysticism.
Thus
helped and stimulated, we have now to take up the legacy bequeathed to us and
ensure that these works shall be pored over as studiously as they deserve,
their lessons learnt and their indications followed up. A legacy of this kind
is, at the same time, a challenge, above all to those whose task or vocation it
is to bring about a reconciliation of East and West, or to prepare the ground
for religious agreement on a plane which transcends the bare statement of
controversial issues, led rather by the spirit of Juan de Segovia, whose motto
was Per viam pacts et dodnnae.
Perhaps,
too, the study of these mystics, who had to find their way through pathless
deserts without the sure guidance of an unerring authority, and who, nevertheless,
reached in the main a surprisingly convincing statement of mystical truth, may
have the further advantage of giving us pause and of inspiring us with
humility, when we realize what mystical treasures we ourselves may have let
slip through carelessness or dissipation.
If,
in this study, I have, in the main, used the language of Christian mysticism
this is partly because it has now become the custom of Western writers—not
least among whom we must count Don Miguel Asin Palacios—to do so. Then I consider
this custom justified by reason of the similar workings of God with souls in
every climate and the similar response human souls make to Him whatever be
their form of speech.
At
the same time, needless to say, I would not wish it to be thought that I am
therefore claiming that Billuart or Bossuet necessarily attached the same
meaning to the terms here used as would Riimi or Bistdmi. It is just a matter
of human interpretation, aiming at broad parallels rather than at precise
identification. Don Palacios has spoken of certain §ufi teachings as im
Isldm cristianizado. By doing so he clearly shows that, in his opinion, the
similarities just referred to go deeper than forms of language as such. Of Ibn
Abbdd of Ronda Don Palacios says that here is ‘a hispano Moslem precursor of St
John of the Cross*. He finds m him ‘a profoundly Christian attitude of
abandonment to the charismatic gifts (kanmdty.
Perhaps I may
be allowed to add that m taking this line with the Sufi mystics I conform to
the wish expressed so ardently by the late Pope John XXIII, in an address to a
general meeting of Benedictine Abbots in Rome. Settmg before them the ideal of
the union of souls, he exhorted them to consider, ‘not so much what divided
minds as what brings them together*.
As this modest
volume is to appear at the time of an Oecumenical Council in which relations
between the Church of East and West are expected to form one of the dominant
themes, the writer ventures to express the hope that a study of some of the
aspects of Islamic mysticism may contribute to a better understanding of the
inner life of the vast Mahometan populations of Asia and Africa. Under the
ample umbrella of Islam, with its one compendious dogma La ilaha Hid ’Udh—‘There
is no god but God’—a vast assortment of religious doctrines and devotional
practices shelter. Much of this originated in regions of western Asia where
Christianity had reached a notable expansion and where Christian monasticism
made a strong appeal to the religious sentiments of the various peoples who,
sooner or later, yielded to political or military pressure and ranged
themselves, willingly or unwillingly under the banner of Mahomet. The mystical
teachings of the early centuries were diffused throughout western Asia, not
least in Syria and Persia. There can be little doubt that much of that teaching
was passed on to subsequent generations after the Moslem conquest. The devout,
in their insatiable hunger for religious truth and experience, not only took up
the mystical teaching they found but in many ways made it their own, re-thought
it and developed it m original ways.
In the Divine
Comedy (Inferno, Canto 28) Dante pictures Mahomet and ’All among the
authors of schism, alongside a varied band of Italians. Such a view of the role
of Mahomet has its bearing on our theme. In any effort to bring about an
understanding between East and West, it would be unrealistic, to say the least,
to leave out of account the numerous Mahometan populations among whom Eastern
Christians live and move.
In
all fairness, too, one must add that Mahomet’s dream was not to foster, but
rather to heal the schism between minds, as he looked out upon the disputes of
the numerous Christian sects and rites on Arabian and near-Arabian soil It
would seem that he dreamt of reconciling all by proposing adhesion to a single
dogma on which all could agree: ‘There is no god but God’. It was of this
proclamation or ‘gospel’ that he was the Prophet.
TWO
Those then who, in Persia and
elsewhere in the world of Islam, devoted themselves to the practice and
dissemination of ascetical and mystical doctrine soon became known as 'Sufis',
a name given them because, as we saw, they chose to wear a, distinguishing
dress of coarse, undyed wool ($#/), a type of< dress "already
worn by in
the East. Later on,
this
habit was in general replaced by the khirqa, or patched
frock, which was given by the Pir or sheikh to the novice
whom he accepted as his disciple {murid).
^JThis
Sufi movement was not itself an order or a sect. Many confraternities,
based on Sufi principles and ideals, did arise in bourse bt time and, m a
number of cases, still survive, although the times are against them. Lacking
adequate religious control, these tariqas, as they are called, have, in
many cases, lost much of their original fervour and distinction. They were
suppressed by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and in Persia Riza Khan followed suit. In
Cairo they are still numerous and active. Beloved by the common people, they
are looked down upon by the better educated classes. It is to be hoped that,
when the rage for Western journalism and films has passed, the modem generation
in Persia will return to the treasures of the past and find in them a valid
message for our age.
In
the early years of the Moslem conquests, the §ufis constituted a powerful
reaction against worldliness and hypocrisy. Their reaction took the form, not
so much of sermonizing, as of the example they gave of a life of self-denial,
compunction, silence, poverty and detachment.
The
leaders of this ascetic campaign were drawn at first chiefly from among the
Arabs. But, as time went on and the reins of power passed more and more into
Persian hands after the setting up of the Abbasid Caliphate in a.d. 750, the Iranian genius for
mteriorization and abstraction began to prevail over the more external
preferences of the Semites.
It
was seen that the true cause of repentance lay in the overriding urgency of
loving God above all things, that human works, however good and virtuous,
needed to yield pride of place to divine, prevenient grace, that the external (zahir)
must yield to the interior (baton), the matter to the meaning, the
outward symbol to the inner reality, cold reason to inspired and fiery love,
self to the one Beloved. There were no limits to this way, once it had been
entered upon. And it was entered upon, and run, with immense and
reckless enthusiasm, even though it led at times to seeming antinomianism and
unbelief (kufr). All this m the name of and for the glory of the central
dogma of Islam, the unity of God, that tawhid which came, for the Sufi,
to signify a mystico monistic outlook on the universe. A hard-headed, matter of
fact Westerner is often put off or irritated by the wilfully extravagant shathiyyat
(jubilations, exclamations) of bold spirits such as al Hallaj or Bayazid
Bistami, when they cry: Ana’l Haqq (I am God) or Subham (Glory be
to Me alone!). Such things, however, are explained to us as having their origin
in the fact that these men had been led to transcend their own personalities
and to become conscious only of HIM (the pronoun commonly used by such mystics
in referring to God, considered as having, in the last resort, the exclusive
right to declare I AM). But what puzzles even more, perhaps, the student of the
Sufi phenomenon, is the undoubted fact that the great Persian ecstatics are
manifestly and overpoweringly mastered by a passionate and all-absorbing love
for the supreme, divine beloved. It is this recognition of God as the unique
object of love which is constantly borne upon one as the Sufi’s one and
only way, and the emergence of this current of mystical love does not seem to
have any discernible human or natural source. On the face of it, it might
almost seem to spring from a new revelation, or, at any rate, from an ancient
revelation, mysteriously and supematurally renewed. Here one is reminded of
Emile Dermenghem’s remark that The original revelation was mystical as well as
soteriologicaF.
But
the mystery remains as to what or who was the immediate cause of its
re-emergence.
A great deal
has been written as to the possible origins of the Sufi movement. Germs of
it are, of course, to be found in the Qoran itself. It has also tolSe
borne in mind that Islam had by this time spreaH over populations deeply
impregnated by Christian teaching or Hellenistic (Neo-platonic) speculation. In
Eastern Persia Buddhism had penetrated deeply, and as ‘the Persians’, according
to the Prophet’s well-known (and possibly apocryphal) saying, ‘would journey to
the Pleiades after knowledge’, it is only to be expected that they would have
had knowledge also of the Hindu sacred books. But when all this has been
granted as a likelihood, or a quasi-certainty, it remains that the Sufi
phenomenon presents itself as a new, spontaneous and original flowering of
religious feeling and intuition, and no one can put his finger on a single,
incontrovertible author or originator of it. There is no single poet or mystic
who can be said to be the prime mover in this revolution. The §ufis themselves
put it down to Mahomet himself, the divinely inspired embodiment of the perfect
man. In doing this they probably aim at establishing their teaching in the
heart of Mahometan orthodoxy. There are a certain number of passages in the Qoran
which are susceptible of a mystical interpretation and which are the
commonplaces of Islamic spiritual writers. A large number of other Qoranic
texts are given a mystical interpretation by such writers, often in defiance of
the plain, literal meaning of the passage quoted. In this respect, however, the
Qoran is treated much in the same way as the Judaeo-Christian scriptures are
treated by the early fathers and doctors. All take it for granted that the
literal meaning contains an unlimited number of spiritual or mystical meanings,
a mine which every spiritual man must penetrate and exploit for himself.
Although
Plotinus is never quoted by name by the Sufi writers, there cannbrbe the
tamtest doubt thatTns^ctrmes were known to them and came to be regarded
by them as having almost the value of revealed truth. Writers like
Sheikh NajmTedDm KazT(obiit A d.
1256), in his Mir sad ul "Ibdd, and Sheikh Muhammad Lahiji
Nurbakhshi (obiit a.d. 1472), in
his well-known Commentary on the Gulshan i Raz of Shabistari, devote
themselves at great length and with evident earnestness to expositions of the
emanationist theories of the Neo-Platonist philosophers. Wide as was the
diffusion of emanationist doctrines among the Sufis, however, their necessary
relation to the main §ufi theses and trends is never very clear. The Sufi is,
above all, a lover and a spiritual guide. Rumi is the supreme exponent of the
§ufi path, and his writings have only faint traces of emanationist speculation.
If
we considered precisely the main trends and preoccupations of the §ufis, we
should be justified in concluding that, among external influences on their
origins and development, Christianity, and especially Eastern Monasticism, was
the chief and the most dynamic. At the time of the Islamic invasion, not only
Syria but also Persia proper contained flourishing Christian communities. In
Persia alone, at this period, there were as many as ninety monastic
institutions. The Persian Church produced a number of remarkable teachers of theology
and of the mystical life. One of the greatest of these was Babai the Great (a.d. 569-628), a wealthy Persian who
had studied Persian (Pahlm) literature before coming to Nisibis to study
medicine. He became third abbot of the monastery on Mt Izla and was the
foremost divine and theologian of the Nestorian Church at the crisis of its
development. He wrote a commentary on the Centuries of Evagrius
Ponticus, as well as Rules for Novices and Canons for Monks. Evagrius
Ponticus himself, a pupil of Origen, Basil and Gregory, became a monk in the
Scete Desert of Egypt and there composed in lapidary form his spiritual and
mystical teaching. His works became the chief manual and the authoritative
exposition of the ascetico- mystical life for Persian monachism. One or two
quotations from his book The Centuries will serve to give some
indication of the form of teaching which, through Persian monachism, may well
have exercised a deep influence on the origins of §ufism.
rA pure soul, next to God is God/
'The
naked mind is one that is perfect m the vision of itself and is held worthy of
attaining to contemplation of the Holy Trinity?
'He
who has achieved pure prayer is God by grace?
Although there
can be no doubt that the loving, adoring, self-sacrificing figure of Jesus made
an immeasurable impression on the peoples of the Near East, it is difficult to
trace any scriptural or literary evidence of the propagation of Christian
mystical teachings in Islamic mystical writers. References to the Last Supper
and to the Crucifixion are not infrequent, but there is no sign of any precise
or recognizable transmission of texts from, say, the Gospel of St John or the
Epistles of St Paul. Any mystical influence of Christian origin seems to have
been due to the example of monastic life and to the impact of Christian
preoccupation with the pre-eminence of love in religion.
Buddhism, as
mentioned above, had long flourished in Eastern Persia. It is generally
assumed, both by European and Persian authors, that one of the predominant features
of §iffl mystical life, summed up in the word fana (see Chapter VII)
cameln through Buddhist influence,, This opinion is, no doubt, due^'^comparison
with the Buddhist doctrine of nirvdna. But, apart from the fact that it
is not certain that the concept of mrvdna has been properly understood
in the West, one must bear in mind that fana—i.e. a passing away or
transference of the personality—always aims at a state in which one lives in
and for a higher personality, whether one’s spiritual director or God Himself.
This concept of fana conforms more to the teaching of the mahaydna,
centred on the person of Amitabha, the saviour of the faithful, the Isvara who
hears and answers the prayers of the world. Mahometan insistence on the tran-
scendance of God seems to have guided the mam stream of Persian mysticism and
preserved it from mere subjectivism or Pantheism. Geographically as well as
philosophically, Persia stat tn medio.
However, the
personality and example of the Buddha exercised an undoubted attraction on the
Persian mind, and the story of one of the earliest §ufis, Ibrahim ibn Adham,
described as having been once King of Balkh, an Iranian outpost far out towards
the borders of India, seems to be a legend based on the story of the Buddha
himself. It is curious, too, that a very large number of notable §ufi leaders
arose in this north-eastern comer of Iran, now known as Khorasan, for it was in
this region that Buddhism had flourished—not to speak of the great prophet of
Ahura Mazda, Zoroaster. The north-eastern provinces, indeed, were the scene of
an intense cosmopolitan life in which Greek or Hellenized elements mingled with
Iranian and partially Iranified Central Asiatic elements. They represented, it
has been said, a central crucible between the West and India. Buddhism
certainly flourished in these regions, but it was chiefly m its newer form as mahayana,
the ‘Great Vehicle’, that it spread towards Iran. Ultimately, however, Irin set
a barrier to any further expansion of Buddhism towards the West. It set out,
therefore, towards the East, carrying with it certain notions borrowed from
Iran: its Messianic dreams, its paradise, its cult of the sun and of light, its
mystical cosmogony. The French excavations carried out in Afghanistan since
1920 have revealed plastic arts betokening Irano- buddhist inspiration.
All this
happened contemporaneously with the religious reform attempted in Iran by Mani.
Mini, a Persian by race, was bom at Babylon about a.d. 215. His aim was to found a comprehensive religion reconciling
the doctrines of Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus Christ. He inaugurated his public
life by a journey in India, at the time when the Sassanian Shahpur was
conducting a lightning campaign in the valley of the Indus. Some writers have
even stated that Mini took part in Shih- pur’s campaign, between a.d. 256 and 260, against Valerian, and
that he then met Plotinus, who was serving as a soldier in the Roman army.
I mention
these facts simply to give some idea of the extent to which Persia, m the
period preceding the Islamic invasion, had been subject to fertilization and
cross-fertilization by religions and philosophies which contained a strong
mystical element. If this was so, the reason is to be found in the attraction
which such doctrines possessed for the Persian mind and their keenness in
religious speculation.
One
consequence of these cross-fertilizations was that, many centuries later,
Indian gurus and swimis recognized in the Sufis and dervishes who came from
Persia m the wake of conquering Islamic armies co-religionists who had the same
mystical preoccupations as themselves. The Persian Ptr u Murshid fitted
easily into the spiritual scheme of things in India and would often be
consulted by Hindu inquirers.
In the years
following the Mahometan conquests, the newly- founded city of Kufa, in southern
Iraq, became, in its turn, a nursery-ground of idealist, Neo-Platonist and
Christian- Hellenic doctrines and tendencies and, at the same time, a
forcing-ground of the pro-’Ali Shi'a, closely allied to a specifically Persian
outlook. It is easy to understand, therefore, that Kufa also gave birth to some
of the earliest Sufis.
These early
Sufis, as we saw, had little concern for mystical themes as such. Their
dominant aim was to flee the deceitful and corrupting world and to devote
themselves m silence and solitude, to practices of austerity, fasting and other
forms of ascetical discipline. Their outlook was of that simple and elementary
sort which accords with the Arabo-Mahometan religion in which they had been
brought up.
The earliest
of these arose in the south of Iraq. Such were Hassan of Basrah and Abu Hashim
of Kufa, this latter, apparently the first to whom the soubriquet of Sufi was
given. This region had been worked over by Zoroastnan and then by Christian
influences during the epoch of the Sassanian monarchs. Basra also produced the
remarkable woman Saint and mystic, Rabi'a al 'Adawiyya, who died in A.D. 801.
But the
diffusion of ideas was very rapid in Islam which, in its early and expanding
centuries, was unhampered by strict national frontiers and bamers. Thus the
Sufi Movement soon spread like wildfire over the whole Islamic scene.
Gradually, too, it began to develop doctrinally and to be transformed from
within, by subtle but rapid stages, into a lofty and coherent mystical system.
When we speak
of 'diffusion’ here, we must not let ourselves imagine that such things happen
automatically. The diffusion of mystical doctrines in Isldm was the work of
certain great and influential individuals whose reputation drew inquirers to
them from afar.
These
inquirers, formed in the school of a great sheikh, a Pir u Murshid
(spiritual father and guide), propagated his teaching, became spiritual
Masters in their turn, formed other disciples, and so collaborated in the
formation of a spiritual chain (silsileh), the personages forming which are
often enumerated in detail. This living chain of religious teachers is an
essential feature in the Sufi scheme of things. Surviving links of these chains
must now be exceeding few, save perhaps where a surviving religious Order has
managed to ensure a continuance of doctrine. In the absence of notable
teachers, however, a far from negligible norm and witness of the traditional
teaching is provided by authoritative books such as the Masnavi, the Gulshan
i Raz and so forth. In many cases, too, witnesses to the continuity of
mystical teaching are to hand in the shape of later Commentators. One such, in
the case of the Gulshan i Raz, is the well-known Lahiji Nurbakhshi, who
wrote in a.d. 1472.
In
this study I wish to concentrate attention on the sounder elements of Persian
mystical teaching, but one need not therefore be blind to other elements which
may rightly be regarded as divagations and deformations, or, at any rate, as exaggerations
of a disconcerting or even repulsive nature. Such elements have not been
wanting in §ufism. The Sufi teaching does not, of right, possess within itself
a guarantee of infallibility. As a manifestation of spiritual life within the
Islamic community, it shares the weakness inherent in Islam itself, a weakness
inherited from its Mahometan source and due also to the lack of a living
infallible authority in the Islamic body. This lack of an external authority
has meant that the Sufis could look upon themselves as a law unto themselves.
Ghazali made a notable effort to establish Sufism solidly within the boundaries
of Moslem orthodoxy, whatever that may be. But the §ufi, at heart, does not
consider himself bound by the legislation of the ahi 1 zahir
(externalists). It is an accepted principle among them that Idfissufiyya
kalamun—‘there is no formal (scholastic) Rheology in Sufism’. Sufism, for
better or for worse, is a doctrine derived from inspiration, contemplation and
experience, and not a system deduced from positive Islamic theology. The §fifi
teacher willingly makes use of theological statements, but his treatment
and interpretation of them always . goes beyond them, in what he considers to
be the pure, spiritual sense. That, indeed, may be said to be the fundamental
preoccupation and purpose of Sufism. Sufi teachers express unbounded respect
for the utterances of the Prophet^but that is chiefly because they
assume him to have been the recipient of mystical communications as well as of
divine revelations granted to him as founder of a world religion. In a sense,
thejTshow a* deeper sense of responsibility towards the Moslem faith than do
the rmtakcdlimn (positive theologians), inasmuch as they are most
earnestly concerned to warn the faithful against the dangers of a merely
external performance of their religious duties and a merely parrot-like
repetition of what has been taught them. It is not surprising, therefore, that
it was above all in Persia that the principle of ijtihad, or duty of
individual investigation and interpretation of religious truth, was initiated
and maintained.
It
is clear, then, that the Sufis did not wish to originate a newT®^®"^ They
were not even concerned to take up any precise position towards the Sunni-Shi'a
controversy. Many of the early §ufis were actually *Sunnis. This may have been
because questions about external authority or legitimacy did not arouse their
interest. But they all shared in a quite distinct spiritual climate and had a
very genuine esprit de corps. There was no visible hierarchy among them,
although many believed in the existence of an invisible hierarchy, under whose
supreme head, the Qutb (pole or pivot), other Awliya (‘saints’),
in their different ranks and degrees, kept up the spiritual order of the
universe.
Whether
in the Ghaib (invisible world) or m the visible world, there was no formal
authority other than that of spiritual distinction and experience. Authority of
some kind however, there must be. The wayfarer who would take no advice and
submit to no training was condemned. The first essential was to place oneself
under the direction of a Pir u MursM and to obey him blindly and
implicitly. Some of the greatest mystics of the way served thus an exacting
apprenticeship over a long period of years. When certain inspired mystics had
consigned their teaching to writing, whether in prose or verse, their books
often served as manuals. For the Nf matullahis of Persia, Shabistan’s Gulshan
t Raz served (and perhaps still serves) as traditional manual for all those
men or women (instructed in separate groups) who came under their direction m a
kind of 'Third Order’, meeting once a week in the evening, that is, when their
daily avocations were finished. In the days before the Turks were expelled from
Crete, one could, from the courtyard of a Tekyeh watch the rhythmic
swaying of the white-robed members of the Mevlevi Confraternity into whose
circle, at last, the professional Mevlevi Dervish came to perform his own
central gyration, as a sun amid the planets, all (as a young supporter
whispered to the invited guests) having no other meaning than the love of God.
The
Sufi movement, indeed, was nothing if not a movement of self-abandonment to the
divine beloved. The founder of the Mevlevis, Jalalu* ddm Rumi, was a remarkable
soul, inspired if ever man was inspired, majdhub (drawn, attracted by grace) if
ever man was drawn in this way. But of his disciples, though a number, no
doubt, caught something of his fire and elan, many more found it easier to
repeat the movements than to recapture the first, fine, careless rapture.
Such,
for better or for worse, is the Sufi. It should be added —it will
appear cleariymevitable’ after what has been said— that he roundly condemned
high and dry intellectualism and the narrow Semitic formalism and rationalism
which was the bane of the Mahometan theological schools This contempt for
shortsighted 'reason’ often comes out in the poetry of the §ufi school. Hafiz
gives it its highest and most caustic expression. In one place he says: {Ay
ki az daftar i ’aql, etc.) 'Oh thou who art trying to learn the marvel of
love from the copybook of reason (taql), I am very much afraid that you
will never really see the point.’
So, too, in
another place Hafiz exclaims:
'Rub out everything you have copied into your exercise book,
if you would be my fellow-learner, for the science of love is not to be found
in books?
Beyond
dry-as-dust reason, then, the §ufi seeks, through a transformation of the heart
in love, to win a higher form of knowledge, a kind of direct vision of reality,
that divine reality which transcends the sphere of the senses and of concepts
based on sense perception. It is here, of course, that we begin to see his
approach to the Neo-Platonic outlook
By
a strange paradox, however, and, indeed, through the very necessity of the
case, the §ufi apostle makes use of the most vivid and abundant vocabulary of
symbolism drawn from the language of human love. His object was to make it
clear that the divine beloved deserved a love and a devotion at least as
fervent and passionate as could be those inspired by a human object. He
resorted to this method, too, because he aimed at winning over, not only the
learned, but the whole population, down to the least cultured among them. The
results of this can be seen in the Persian people to this day. A certain
mystical culture is common among them and all of them take a genuine pleasure
in discussing such themes. The westerner will often be astonished to find an
illiterate peasant making an apt quotation from a mystical poem. Thus, if the
Sufi made such abundant use of poetry, it was because he knew how sensitive
were the peoples of eastern Islamic countries to the influence of a poetical
medium. To express a truth in a telling poetical phrase was more than half the
battle.
There
were also other reasons for this use of poetry. One of these was the greater
security the Sufi mystic felt when he had clothed his teaching, which might
easily be liable to the accusation of heresy, in the ambiguous and, for the positive
theologian, usually undecipherable language of poetry and metaphor. It was a
form of hetman (deliberate concealment).
Then
again, the message of the Sufi was a message of love and divine passion, of
which poetry seems to be the natural expression. If he endeavoured to lend his
poetry eveiy possible charm and beauty, this was also with a view to rendering
it less unworthy of its real, divine Object. As an Arabic saying has it: ‘God
is beautiful and cannot but love beauty.’
While,
then, the Sufis made no attempt to appeal mainly to a philosophical dlite, as
was the tendency with the Neo- Platonists, nor to constitute a sort of esoteric
Inner Circle, like the ‘elect’ of the Manichees, it was inevitable that, as
time went on, a specialized vocabulary of mystical terms should be evolved.
There is nothing official about these terms, but most Sufis are agreed as to
their acceptation. Similarly, all the mystical poets share a common repertory
of apparently erotic expressions on whose interpretation, likewise, they are
agreed. Such are, for instance, the mole or beauty-spot of the beloved, her
dark tresses, her curls and so on. These expressions remind us at once of
similar ones often quoted from the Song of Songs by Christian mystics. There
are, too, traditional images of the seemingly hopeless love of a human heart
for the divine being, such as that of the love-sick Nightingale and the rose,
the moth and the candle, Majnun and Leila. Similar themes are illustrated by
comparison with Qoranic personages such as Joseph {Yusuf) and Zuleikha
(the name given in the Qoran to Potiphar’s wife), a pair commonly chosen to
represent an impossible love-romance, Joseph, in this case, standing for the
transcendant and unattainable beloved.
Figures
drawn from Iranian mythology, such as Shirin and Farhad, are less frequently
introduced as mystical symbols.
THREE
The Sufis spoke of themselves as travellers
or wayfarers, faring upon a way {rah,, tariqa) which was
staked~ouE7 but on which, nevertheless, a’guide, in the person of an
experienced spiritual man, a Pir u Murshid, was indispensable.
This way led the
traveller away from self—to begin with, from the. carnal, self-indulgent self,
and then, more and more, from any assertion of self or conscious regard
of self.
The goal or
destination is defined in varibusways^as ma’nfat, or gnosis, or as union
with God {uusul, visal, ittihad), as vision of Him, in His unveiled
beauty and glory, of again, as utter consumption in the fire of love, or,
simply, as perfection. The gist of the matter seems to be deliverance from self
by the alchemy of divine love, which takes a man out of himself and prompts him
to consider himself as the servant of all.
As Khoja Hafiz
says: 'Any qibla (i.e. any direction or intention of prayer or life) is
better than self-worship’.
For the great
mystics, however, if self-regard is the great enemy, it is because it is the
chief veil or film over the mirror of the soul, shutting out the vision of the
one, true beloved, who ought, even now, to fill the lover’s consciousness, so
that he can say, with Hafiz,
‘So full is my
soul’s horizon of the beloved,
‘All thought
of self has gone from my mind.'
In a later
chapter we shall see more in detail the implications of this ‘loss of self’ (fana).
Meanwhile, amid the painful stages of the Way, the pilgrim is still taken up
with the seemingly- endless task of escaping from and subjugating the ‘nafs’,
or carnal self, negotiating the purgative way before he can hope to climb to
the heights of illumination and the summit of union. A §tifi poet tells us:
t/1'On the hat of Poverty three renouncements are inscribed
rQuit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting.’
By
these last cryptic words is meant the need to cut off all ? reflection on, and
satisfaction in, the thought of having ' renounced anything. That would vitiate
renouncement, being a sign that the disciple, having put his hand to the
plough, is (looking back on himself, his own merits and achievements.
To
seek anything other than the one beloved, whether it be rewards or pleasures,
angels, houris, paradise, let alone honour and esteem in this world, is
idolatry and polytheism. Here the mystic is m full accord with the dominant
spirituality of the Qoran, interpreted with his own, subtle, psychological
insight.
It
is, therefore, the powerful attraction of the eternal beauty which, in the last
resort, draws the lover away from all else, including himself. But as the
traveller on this way finds himself faced by all kinds of difficulties, the
masters of the path have come to his help by designating an ordered series of
'stages’ {maqamat, marahil'), through which he must strive to pass, in
due order. The Kitab ul Luma of Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, in common with the
majority of writings on the subject, enumerates seven of these stages:
conversion or repentance; fear of the Lord; renunciation; poverty; endurance;
trust in God; contentment {rida}—the state of one who pleases God and is
. always pleased with Him and His ways.
These
seven stages are to be reached by the personal endeavours of the disciple,
although the constant need of divine grace is presupposed in each case. They
are said, therefore, to be acquired {kasbi, iktisabi) and are not
characterized, as are the ahwal, by purely supernatural infusion. They
are due to hashish (effort) and not to kashish (supernatural
attraction). They are in the line of mujahada (striving) and not of musha-
hada (contemplation). They represent what the Prophet, in a well-known
saying, referred to as the ‘major holy war’ {cd jihad al akbar), far
more important and meritorious, therefore, than merely fighting the infidel
outside. In the language of our own spiritual writers, these stages make up the
Viapurgativa. Their purpose is to set the disciple free from the
trammels of the self, to dispose the soul to self-denial, self-transcendance,
selfsurrender. From another angle they may be said to aim at a progressive
purification of the soul, a testing and trainmg in purity of intention zkhlas,
takhlis). In this way the salik learns to eliminate all gharad
(ulterior motives). God Himself helps in this by sending him mysterious
afflictions, manoeuvring him, as it were, into voluntary death (maut i
ikhtuwi). He learns thus to be perfectly supple and pliable in the hands of
God—one writer says: 'like a corpse’, anticipating St Ignatius.
By all these
methods the spiritual athlete wears down the veils or films which interfere
with the immediate play of the breath of divine grace. His efforts m this sense
cannot of themselves acquire supernatural graces of contemplation,but they
serve to lay his soul bare to such influences and attractions and are, as it
were, his own mute pleadings for them.
It is
interesting to trace, more especially in the earlier masters of the way, the
close connection they saw between the practice of self-denial and penance and
the attainment of the mystical goal. Sheikh 'Attar, m his Tazkirat al
’Awltya records the answers of a number of leading mystics to the question*
What is a Sufi?
One
of the earliest of these is Junayd of Baghdad (d. a.d. 910). He is known as one of the moderate type of Sufi,
a 'sober’ mystic as distinguished from an 'intoxicated’ one, like Bayazid
Bistami, of a previous generation.
Junayd says that
Sufism consists in this, that the Lord causes you to die to yourself and to
live m Him.
In another
place he writes: ‘The 'dnf (gnostic or contemplative) is one from the
depths of whose consciousness (sw) God speaks, while he himself is silent.
Again; ‘Sufism
is a steep ascent, allowing of no peace or rest.' Abu T Hussein Nuri said: 'The
§ufi is one who keeps hold of nothing and is held and bound by nothing.’
Abu Said of
Mihneh (d. 1049), one of the most original of the early Persian
mystics, once said: ‘To be a Sufi is to give up all worries and there is no
worse worry than your self (literally, your you-ness). When occupied with self,
you are separated from God. The way to God is but one step: the step out of
yourself. He that knows himself (i.e. as non-existent) knows his Lord1
(i.e. as the self-subsistent being).’
It
is not difficult, of course, to find similar teaching in the works of Christian
mystics Thus, in the Cloud of Unknowing (Ch. 43), we find:
‘Thou shalt understand that thou shalt not only in this work
forget aU other creatures than thyself ... but also thou shalt forget thyself.
For thou shalt find, when thou hast forgotten all other creatures and aU their
works—yea! and also all thine own works—that there shall remain yet after,
betwixt thee and thy God, a naked knowing and a feeling of thy own being, which
must always be destroyed if thou art to feel verily the perfection of this
work.’
So,
too, in the life of St Catherine of Siena it is recorded that Jesus once said
to her: T am He who is. Thou art she who is not.’
Shihab
ed Din Suhravardi, founder of the Suhravardia Order, in his Awarif al
Ma'arif (Mystical Scholars), begins by distinguishing the zahid
(ascete) and the faqir (mendicant, poverello) from the §ufi as such. The
Sufi includes, m an eminent way, the ascete and the faqir, but the converse is
not the case. After he has reviewed a large number of definitions of Sufism, as
given by leading mystics, his conclusion is that, taken all in all, Sufism is
worship of God based on love (rnahab- bat). The Sufi views the relation
between the Creator and the creature as that of a lover and the beloved. Here
we stumble across a difficulty of vocabulary. The terms favoured by §ufis
corresponding to ‘lover and beloved’ are Ashiq w Ma'shuq’, while
love, in this connection, is ’ishq. Now ’ishq, a word of Arabic
origin, of course, is more particularly used of Vamour passion. Hence
the Hanbalite theologian, Ibn al Jauzi, and others of his way of mind, take
objection to the word as applied to God, on the grounds that it can only
signify sexual
1 Reference to the well-known hadith. Man '<wafa
nafsahu, 'arafa rabbahu. (Who knows
himself, knows his Lord.) love
of a fleshly nature. We can see here, in the Moslem world, a counterpart to the
objection raised by Christian theologians to the Greek eros
or the Latin amor as equivalents to the Pauline agape.
In reality, of course, divine love transcends all human notions of love. If the
Sufis chose to use ishq rather than mahdbbat (a pity they didn’t think of mihr,
a pure Persian word!),"it was because they wished to stress the fact that
we must attribute to His love for the contemplative soul and to that soul’s
love for Him, at least as much fire and fervour as we are
accustomed to associate with passionate love between the sexes. The Sufis, in
their wayward, rapturous way, succeeded in imposing these terms, however
shocking they may have seemed to the old-fashioned, and no-one would ever now
dream of calling them in question.
The seven
stages (maqamat} defined by Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, enumerated
earlier in this chapter, repfeseritTEeascetical and moral demands
made upon any sincere seeker for truth and perfection. The thesis is, that each
of these stages must be attained in due order before proceeding to the next.
Much of what the Sufis write on the virtues for which the seeker should strive
would with us be considered to form part of a normal moral and religious
education, with no necessary bearing on mystical life. This fact reflects, no
doubt, some grave deficiencies which are apt to show themselves in the day to
day teaching of Isldm. At the same time, when we find ourselves disagreeably
affected by the free and easy utterances and conduct of some of the less
'sober’ of the Sufis, it is reassuring to note that the really responsible
Masters of the Sufi way inculcate so rigorous a moral and ascetical training
for those who aspire after the heights of contemplation. In this the writers do
but set down in black and white what was the invariable method of the Pir u
Mwrshid (spiritual director) under whom the disciple set out upon the Way
and to whom he had to vow the most perfect and unquestioning obedience.
The disciple (murid]
was expected to entertain towards his Murshid or Sheikh sentiments of
devotion amounting to a sort of cult. He was to merge his personality in that
of the Sheikh (fana fil-sheikh) who, for him, was the one mediator with
an
otherwise inaccessible divinity. In this the J?ufis depart
from th,e strict line of Islamic orthodoxy, which does not recognize any
mediation between jhe individual believer and his God. Nof even Mahomet (or
should we say“TffahometTeast of all?) claimed any such mediatorial role. In
spite of this, the evolution of Neo-Platonic thought in the~Sufi theosophy led
fo his being awardedapositibn iff the spiritual'Hierarchy of beings
pfacticahy~equivalent to that of the Logos. Under this aspect he is known as
the ‘Mahomet-Light’ and ranks among humans as the perfect man (al insdnul
kamil), the supreme exemplar and purpose of creation. The installation of
the Sheikh m his pivotal place in the §ufi system owes^great^deak,“almost certainly?
To the living example '^the “Christian monastic organiza^ East, at any rate" turns to a large
extent
on the spiritual authority of the saintly Father Abbot- Apa in Egypt. The
indispensable need of a spiritual father and director has always been insisted
on in the Greek Church. In the West this feature has tended to be replaced by
the cautionary safeguards of a fixed and approved rule.
The
Murshid or Sheikh, however, whatever the degree of his authority~anfim^ fir
stop^“td'suhmiphimself
to’^T’Sng^franimg^in
accordance with the principles of a mystico-ascetical path the outlines of
which became clearer and firmer as time went on. Only a very great personality
could raise a profitable originality above the wise normality of such a body of
doctrine.
The fixed maqdmat
and ahwal on the Sufi way are examples of this crystallization. Not that
all mystical writers conform inevitably to the positive standards of Abu Nasr
or of Hujviri. Thus a poet like Sheikh 'Attar, in his Mantiq utTair (Language
of Birds) enumerates the stages on the course of the birds to their mystical
goal as follows:
‘There are ^eyen. valleys on the way. When you have passed
through these seven valleys, you reach the Presence Chamber. ... The first
valley is questing and seeking. Next to it is the vale of Love; then the vale
of Knowledge (ma'rif at or gnosts). The fourth is detachment and liberty
of heart (tstoghna). The fifth pure unification (taw hid) The
sixth, grievous bewilderment. The seventh, Poverty and utter loss of self (Jana)*
After that valley there is no more deliberate advance, going is forgone,
henceforth one is drawn."
It
will be seen that Sheikh 'Attar here, with the freedom of the inspired mystic
and poet, submerges and mingles stages and states, replaces fear of the Lord
and renouncement by istighna (utter independence of created things) and
brackets together the stage of Poverty with the mystic depths oifana In
this he well illustrates the characteristic urgency of the inspired mystic,
eager to ensure the primacy of love and abandonment of self and impatient to
yield up human efforts to the immensely faster and more efficacious attractions
of supernatural grace. Other authors show a like urgency and impatience where
repentance is concerned. Should sms be called to mind? The answer is, that if
repentance is due to the stirrings of a sincere love of God, then this love
will submerge and blot out all remembrance of sin in favour of remembrance of
the one beloved.
In
like manner, where poverty is concerned, the Sufi masters at once begin to
effervesce with indignation at the thought that a true lover could ever be
content with renunciation of a few earthly belongings. No! If true love be
there, it will urge the lover to go out to the beloved beyond all created things,
not least his own self, beyond this world and the next.
We
must therefore bear in mind that the 'stages’, although by definition they lie
in the sphere of acquisition and effort, must constantly be interpreted in the
light of the mystic’s supreme concerns. Their materiality is constantly bathed
m effusions of grace and longing. Grace, which is their ultimate motive, cannot
be hindered by any scholastic formula from infiltrating into the bony structure
of asceticism. Once this is understood, it can be readily admitted that defined
'stages’ are a handy means of finding one’s way among the fluid intricacies of
the soul’s progress Are they rigorously confined to the seven enumerated by
al-Sarraj? Clearly not. Since we are dealing
with
human souls, with their infinite variety, the number might easily be multiplied
to seventy times seven. But, as with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, it is
a matter of practical convenience to assume that they are seven. Others,
however numerous, can group themselves under these heads.
FOUR
The first stage on the way, then, is tawba—repentance
or conversion. This, like any other spiritual blessing, is a sheer gift of
grace ('ata mahzY At the same time, unlike the ‘states’, it is put
witHmthe reach of every man or woman and involves his or her co-operation. It
means turning one’s back on worldly vanities, realizing that the world
is a ‘rotting carcase’ and that self is a fickle support So the soul,
awakened from its dream world of carelessness and neglect (ghiflafYT^egms
to advance towards God and perfection and away from the snares and
baits~oi created pleasures. The Qoran~itself is full of such instigations.
Books
like the Tazkirat al Awliya abound in stories of striking and miraculous
conversions. That of Bayazid Bistami may be related as an example Sheikh ‘Attar
tells how Baya- zid’s mother sent him to school at Bistam. One day the class
came to the sura Loqman in the Qoran (No. 31) and to the verse: ‘Be
thankful to me and to thy parents.’ The master explained the meaning of this
passage. As he listened, Bayazid felt his mind strongly worked upon. He put
down his slate and asked for permission to go home and say something to his
mother. Receiving the permission, he went home His mother cried: You little
vagabond, what brings you here? Have you had a present or been given a holiday?
He rephed: No I have come to a verse in the Qoran in which God bids me serve
Him and serve you. I can’t manage to serve m two houses at once. I can’t get
away from that verse. Either ask me from God so that I may be all yours, or put
me in the service of God so that I may be entirely with Him.
His
mother said: I put you in God’s service and set you free to do as you see fit.
Go and belong to God.
Bayazid
left Bistam and practised the ascetical life in Syria for thirty years.
The
penitent longs to make good his defects and satisfy his great needs, but, left
to himself, he knows not where to turn. He has then to seek out a teacher, a Ptr
u Murshid, who will tell him what to do and guide him on the way of
perfection. Thus he sets out on his great quest. God's grace is abounding, but
the condition for profiting by it is to seek it. Hafiz says: 'Love’s physician
has the healing breath of Jesus Himself and is full of compassion; but if He
find no pain in you, how will He administer a remedy?’ And regarding the spirit
of searching and seeking Maulana Rumi, in the third book of the Masnavi, says:
Tn
whatever state you may be, keep on the search!
'Thou
dry-lipped one, ever be on the search for Water!
'That
dry lip of thine is a sure token
'That
m the end it will find the source.
'This
seeking is a blessed restlessness,
'It
overcomes every obstacle and is the key to thy desires.
'Though thou have no vessel, fail not to seek:
'On the way of God no vessel is required.
'Whatever goods and skills you may possess
'Were they not, to begin with, a quest, a
thought?
'No, Sir, cease not one moment from thy search
'And you will find, oh wonder, whatever you desire. 'Sooner
or later he who seeks becomes he who finds, 'Since ever he is hastening to
serve.’
The
second stage which the convert must aim at and which is, as it were,
necessarily called for by the first, is warn’, which may be translated as 'fear
of the Lord’. A similaFposition is given to.it by S t Augustme
and St Thomas in their exposition of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
Bishr Hafi, a well-known ascetical writer, explains it as 'avoidance of
whatever has the least semblance or suspicion of wrong and a ceaseless watch x
over the heart'. In the case of this virtue, as with others, the Sufi
teachers contrast the fear of God shown by the M z zahir, or
externalists, with that felt by the ahi z dzl or men of enlightenment,
or again by the gnostic who enjoys union with God. The last-named, as Abu
Suleiman Darani says, detests whatever hinders the heart from attention to God.
In the same strain Hakim Sanai of Ghazna writes*
If a thing hold you back on the Way, what matter if it be
faith or infidelity?
If it keeps you far from the Friend, what matter if the image
be foul or fair?
Fear
of the Lord leads necessarily to the third stage, zuhd, which
can “be translated as HetacEment or renouncement of the world in
order to give oneself to God. The Sufi regards attachmentto this world as
the source of all sm and quitting the world asThe source of every good.
This detachment must not be a merel^reHernartKing. It must be a genuine
detachment of the heart. The Sufi warns against the danger of hypocrisy, of
becoming a worshipper of outward appearances (zahzdi zahirparast}.
This warning has bitten deep into the Persian soul. Through fear of hypocrisy
the educated classes hesitate to practise their religion in public and this
bashfulness has become almost an inhibition.
But
the zahzd whose actions are guided by the great principles of the Way
is one who ‘has passed through the seven cities of love beyond every
consideration of being and nonbeing'. He is detached evemfrornJusdiet^^
occupied with GodaloneTpays no heed to the world and its passing show.
This
feature of the path is, of course, found among Christians likewise. But in the
case of the Persians there is no doubt that they saw a strong inducement to
such a life of renouncement in the succession of shattering calamities which
ruined their country and jeopardized life and property. It is a feature of
Sufism
which commends itself less to Persians of today, who are anxious to encourage
thrift and enterprise. It certainly suits the circumstances of the Islamic
period of Persian history more than the grandeurs of the pure Persian
dynasties.
By
easy stages the salik (traveller, pilgrim) now reaches the
important stage of poverty (jfagr), which, it is easy to see, follows
logically upon those that preceded it, may, indeed, be looked upon as their
fuller flowering or explicitation.
Voluntary
poverty is the Sufi’s pride, as it was the pride of Mahomet not, of course,
IhaTtfiTinere absence of riches or worldly goods is of any value m itself. The
Sufi voluntarily dismisses these things in order to prove his independence of
them and his reliance on God alone—or rather, apart from wishing to prove
anything, he is lifted away from earthly possessions and attachments by the
purity and fervour of his love for God Among the earlier ascetes of
predominantly Arab stock, this eagerness to be nd of all beside God was, no
doubt, connected with a certain fanatical and exaggerated notion of
predestination and of the consequent vanity of human efforts and the
superfluousness of secondary causes But as Sufism grew to take on a more
mystical and ecstatic note, such notions were outpassed. Love became the
guiding motive and poverty was but the sign of the mystic’s absorption in and
care for the one beloved. Henceforth it was not the mere absence of riches that
mattered, but rather the loss of any desire for them or attachment to them The
vacant heart was more important than the vacant hand. A man might thus be a
faqir at heart even while living in the midst of affluence and m a position
of worldly dignity. Hafiz, referring clearly to Jalalud DinTSran- shah,
Vizir :)f Shah Shuja’, wrote:
7
humbly bow to the Asaph[1]
of the age
‘Who has the outward show of lordship and the inner spirit of
a dervish *
In fact, when
the true inwardness of the Sufi notion of poverty is ascertained, it is found
to be concerned rather with self-renouncement, or self-denial, in the
sense that the true fovef^arircrthought for himself, considers himself as nonexistent:
the being of the beloved is all that matters. When the bemg that might have
laid claim to ownership of worldly goods is no longer there, poverty is
transcended. So idhd tamma’l faqr, fahwallah.—cWhere poverty
is complete, there isjGodZ.--
This
utter detachment from created things produces a state of bewilderment
(tatoyjw), to use the customary term. The Sufi who has been drawn away {majdhub}
from all earthly cares is said to be bi sar u without head
or foot. In this state he may show signs of becoming indifferent to
human opinion or blame—a He
will even prefer to be blamed and
decried,
m order that his true mystical state may be concealed from the vulgar.
With his
selfhood thus renounced and outpassed, he no longer has any motive or desire
for choosing. He chooses neither poverty nor wealth. His one preference
is for what Gndsehd^FbStWsT'S^ too, he does not (as Suhravardi says) renounce
temporal things for the sake of something to_ be received in exchange (such
as the joyFof paradise, the company of houris, etc.), but for the sakeoFactual
states (ofe/aZ He is ibn waqtihi—that is, he lives in the present
moment, not for the future. As Rumi says, Tn the vocabulary of the Way you do
not find the word tomorrow'. It is by this token, above all, that the purity of
the Sufi's motives is tested and also the purity of his faith. To seek
something other than God is a form of godlessness or idolatry. For him, even
the ritual ablutions have value only insofar as they symbolize the worshipper’s
detachment from the least speck of created things.
The true
inwardness of poverty as a dominant feature in the §ufi mystical system is
excellently summed up by MoUa AbdurRahman Jami in the openmg pages of his
collection of §ufi biographies called Nafahdtul Uns (Perfumes of
Fellowship). Jami, both as a mystic and as a poet, writing in the fifteenth
century of our era, may be said himself to sum up the mystical and poetic
achievements of his predecessors The essential passages of his exposition are
here translated and somewhat abridged.
'As regards the “poor” (fuqaraj, they are those who
own none of the resources and riches of this world and, in their search for the
grace and good pleasure of God, have renounced everything. Their motive is one
of three things:
'(i) The hope of lightening the account they will have to
render and the fear of future punishment.
‘(2) Expectation of abundant merit and of an earlier entrance
into Heaven, since “the poor enter Paradise five hundred years before the
rich”.1
'(3) Finding assurance and tranquility of conscience owing to
their frequent performance of good deeds, to which they give undivided
attention.
'The faqir differs from the malamati (one who defies
opinion) and from the self-styled Sufi (mutasawmf) in that they seek for
paradise and their own souls' pleasure, whereas he seeks God alone and a closer
walk with Him. The Sufi, again, ranks higher than the faqir as such, since his
state includes and eminently surpasses what the faqir aims at. The Sufi jumps,
as one might say, all the requirements and conditions for entering the stage
of poverty. He takes to himself the rare bloom and lustre of every stage that
he outpasses and gives it the special tint of his own rank. In the Sufi,
poverty takes on a higher quality, in that he declines to attribute to his own
merits any of his actions, states and stages, lays no personal claim to them,
regards none of them as belonging to himself or exclusive to himself. He does
not regard himself at all. He no longer has any existence, essence or attributes.
He is utterly self-denied and self-effaced. This is the inner reality of
poverty. The rest is only the external mark or mode of it.
'The faqir is veiled (from God) by his choice of
poverty and by the resulting comfort he finds for his spirit, whereas the §ufi
has no particular desire. All his will and desire is swallowed up in the will
and desire of God.’ /
1 Saying
attributed to Mahomet. ’
THE SEVEN STAGES 45
The
stage that follows immediately and logically upon the stage of poverty is sabr,
which can be translated as patience, steadfastness or perseverance.
This virtue, without which the depths of poverty could not be borne, is said to
be the better part of faith, if not the whole of it. Where true love of God is
found and the sense of His providential ways understood, the ‘slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune' are not merely borne, but are accepted with ease and
pleasure, as manifesting the will of God. The secret of perfect patience is m
this, that the trials and afflictions of life are met, not merely tn God
and with God, but actually by means of God Himself.
Junayd
declared that ‘the perfection of patience isresigna- tion’ (iawakktd).
The
"seeker after God and perfection needs this virtue of patience in an
exceptional degree, since, in the hope of noble results, God will submit His
servant to severe testing [tmtthan). The life of one who seeks God alone
is usually marked by many afflictions and losses. It will be one mass of
ruins—the ruins of all earthly hopes and vanities. Even without these outward
devastations, the life of the mystic is an ocean of sorrow: and this sorrow he
would not exchange for all the world’s joys, since it springs from his acute
sense of separation from the true, divine beloved and from all that constitutes
the true happiness and peace of his heart. It is an incurable pain and, like
the mystic’s poverty, this too is his pride. Moreover, the afflictions of the
saint are a blessing in disguise, since it is by them that God conceals his
true glory from the eyes of the profane.
The
trial and testing of things is an essential part of the world-process, whether
in bodies or in souls. In the second book of the Masnavt, in a passage
headed ‘On making trial of everything, so that the good and evil which are in
it may be brought to view’, Jalalu’ ddin Rumi, after describing how the earth
is brought, by an alternation of kind treatment (spring and summer) and
harshness (autumn and winter), to show what treasures it has robbed and hidden,
says, regarding interior trials, ‘He that wages the warfare of the spirit now
enjoys expansion of heart, now endures oppression, pain and torment ... all for
the sake of the soul’s coin being brought into sight and use. Truth and
falsehood have been mingled and good and bad com have been poured into the
travelling-bag. Therefore they need a picked touchstone, one that has undergone
many tests in assaying realities.’
In
the fourth book of the Masnavi (w. 90-100) Rumi shows how the evil met
with in this world has the effect of turning men back to God: ‘The servant of
God complains to Him of pain and smart. God replies, “After all, gnef and pain
have made thee humbly entreatmg and righteous You should make complaint rather
of the bounty that befalls thee and removes thee far from my door and makes
thee an outcast.” He continues. “There is an animal called the porcupine It is
made stout and big by blows of the stick. The more you cudgel it, the more it thrives.
Assuredly the true believer’s soul is a porcupine, for it is made fat and stout
by the blows of tribulation For this reason the tribulation and abasement laid
upon the prophets is greater than that laid upon all other creatures in the
world, so that their souls became stouter. If then you will not mortify
yourself, accept at least the tribulations God gives you without choice on your
part, for affliction sent by the friend is the means of your purification”.’
The
gham i dust, or grieving for the absent beloved, is a note which often
recurs in Persian mystical poetry, and the one offering the lover can make, as
he lies prostrate at the threshold of the friend, is his heart’s blood,
betokened by the bitter tears he sheds. Thus Hafiz speaks of himself as 'Gharib
u 'dshiq u bidil...’—‘Forlorn lover, seeking his lost heart in poverty and
bewilderment.’ So, too, the journey to the beloved is described, not merely as
a stony and thorny road in the midst of the desert, but as a dangerous voyage
through a stormy sea. Thus in the first ode of his Divan (first, of
course, simply because the rhyme is in alif), liafiz has the line:
Dark is the night, fearsome the waves, cruel the whirlpool:
How should the light-hearted travellers on the shore know ought of how it fares
with us?
No
wonder, then, that the traveller on the spiritual Way is called upon to choose
a sure guide and to keep a stout heart!
If,
throughout the 'stages’, we have found that, although by definition they are
the results of human effort (mujahada), they are neverthelss interpreted
constantly by the §ufi teachers as fruits also of grace and of supernatural
surrender to its instigations, the penetration of a mystical spirit becomes
far more noticeable in the case of the last two stages, tawakkul and nda.
6.
'TAWAKKUL'—TRUST
OR SELF-SURRENDER
Tawakkul is the attitude of one
who entrusts himself and all hisjwaysJST a
spirit of complete and un-
reservedjrust.
This is an attitude which springs naturally from the fundamental Islamic
position. 'Islam' itself means selfsurrender to God and the Muslim is he who
has, once and for all, performed this act of submission and surrender. The
religion of Islam is deeply marked with the sense of God's transcend- ance and
man's insignificance and impotence. There has always been a tendency for
Muslims who take their religion very much m earnest and au pied de la
lettre, to push this principle of utter dependence on God to a point where
the efficacity of human effort seems to be called in question, and the use of asbab
(secondary causes) invalidated. As mystics are among those who take their
religion very much in earnest, it was only natural that, among the early Sufis,
many were found who seemed to push the principle of human reliance on God alone
to an imprudent degree. It will be seen later on how mystics such as Maulana
Rumi, with their supernatural gift of common sense, reacted effectively
against such exaggerations.
In
any case, tawakkul (self-surrender), in its precise position on the
mystic path, reveals itself as vitally linked with the ahwal
which are manifestations of grace. More and more, as we approach thelast of
the pfepafafofy'stages of the Way, the mounting current of grace tends to take
charge and to swing us past our carefully charted buoys and moorings. The very
word for grace most commonly used by Muslim theologians is fold, which
expresses an overflow of beneficence.
Tawakkul, say the Sufi
theologians, has its root and efficient cause in tawlyid, that
is, in profound belief m the divine unity ^under which term they
have in mind that which, in the divine Being, gathers up the threads of all
beings and doings. The great Sufi theologian, Ghazali (Algazel, as he was known
to the medieval scholastics) has, in the fourth Part of his Iky a 'ulum
ed-Din, a chapter entitled Taw hid wa Tawakkul, and he deals with
the same subject m his Persian work, the kirniyayi sa'adet (secret of
happiness).
In
the Ihyd., he says that those who belong to what he calls the ‘pith or
marrow’ of tawhid are those who live very close to God and who, by an
inner illumination of the divine light, are convinced that all things, however
numerous or varied, spring from one source. Those whom he calls the ‘pith of
the pith’ are those whose identity is completely swallowed up in the divine
unity (/ana).
However
valuable these explanations may be, they show us clearly that Ghazali here
presupposes that the mutawakkil has already moved out of the
sphere of unaided human striving into thaUofSupernatural
provenience. If this teaching was made into a logical whole, it would have to
admit a supernatural hal alongside each of the maqamdt—a mawhtba
(gift) backing up each mujahada.
The
fact is, that, at this stage, as at every stage, the genuine traveller on the
way of truth and perfection aims at losing sight of his own existence (wujud)
and at dispossessing himself of his achievements and acquisitions. We have an
illustration of this in the story of how Hussein b. Mansur Hallaj seeing
Ibrahim Khawwas on a journey, asked him what he was about. ‘I am travelling,’
replied Ibrahim, ‘in order to increase my trust in God and my well-being.’
Upon
this Ilallaj exclaimed: ‘You spend your whole life in cultivating your own
interior. Where, then, is this famous forgetfulness in the divine unity?’
Still
more striking, perhaps, is the story of Bayazid Bistami and the disciple of
Shaqiq of Balkh. This disciple was setting out on the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Shaqiq told him to begin by paying a visit to Bayazid. The disciple duly paid
his visit and was asked by the great man what manner of sheikh Shaqiq was. He
replied with an enthusiastic eulogy of his P^/s spirit of trust m God: even
were the heavens to turn to brass for years and the earth to cease to germmate,
Shaqiq’s trust would never fail *
Bayazid
exclaimed that this was shocking. If Shaqiq had said such a thing, he was no
better than a heretic and an infidel.
The
disciple, horrified and scandalized, renounced his pilgrimage and hastened
back to his master who, when he heard the cause of his alarm, sent him back to
Bayazid, telling him to ask how Bayazid himself was, what was his
spiritual position.
Bayazid
at first refused to answer. The disciple pressed him to give him some reply,
preferably in writing, that he could take back to his master. Bayazid then
wrote: Bismilldh irrah- mdn irralyim1'. that is Bayazid’.
He
made it plain in this way that a spiritual Master must be entirely lost (fdni)
in the divine Unity. He has no personal description He cannot be cabmed and
confined even by his own tawakkul.
However,
it is often a humble matter like daily bread which provides a handy test of a
person’s trust.
Bayazid
Bistami once assisted at the ritual prayer on a Friday. At the close of it the
prayer-leader (imam) entered into conversation with Bayazid. He said* T
can’t understand what you live on. You do not work for wages and you never ask
alms from anyone . .
On
this Bayazid cried: 'Wait! I must perform this prayer again! A prayer recited
behind an imam who does not know who gives us our daily bread cannot be valid.’
It
was related of Hatim Asamm that he once asked Ahmad Hanbal, the famous jurist,
if he sought for his daily bread. 'Of course I do,’ replied Hanbal.—'When do
you seek it, afterwards, beforehand or at the time?’
Hanbal
reflected that, if he replied 'Beforehand’, his
1 Tn the Name of God the merciful, the clement’—the
first words of the Qoran.
D questioner would ask why he wasted his time so. If he
replied ‘Afterwards’, he would be asked why he sought a thing he had already
obtained. If he replied ‘At the time’, the question would be, why he sought for
something which was on the point of being given him. So he was reduced to
silence.
A great
teacher remarked on this point that Hanbal ought to have written the following
reply: ‘Seeking my daily bread is neither an obligation nor a duty nor a custom
recommended by the example of the fathers. Why seek for something for which, as
the Prophet said, God Himself seeks on our behalf?’
Hatim’s answer
is: ‘It is our business to worship Him as He bade us. It is His business to
provide us with daily sustenance, as He promised us.’
Maulana Rumi,
who ‘saw hfe steadily and saw it whole’ has broader views as to the wisdom and
the limits of tawakkul. In the first book of the Masnavi he
recounts a debate between the beasts of the chase and the lion as to the
relative advantages of trust in God and self-exertion. One cannot but feel that
the fervour with which the aforesaid beasts recommend the lion to practise
trust in God arises m part from their fears as to the consequences were he to
launch out in their regard into a campaign of unrestrained activity. Still, in
the long run, it is in the mouth of the Eon that Rumi puts his most telling
arguments in favour of exertion and free will.
When the
beasts advise him to put aside precautions and put all his trust in God, the
lion replies: ‘Yes. But if trust in God is the true guide, use of the means too
is the Prophet’s rule (sunna). He said: Trust in God and tie your
camel’s leg. Remember (the tradition): The earner (kasib) is beloved of
God; through trusting in God, do not become neglectful of the ways and means (asbab).’
The beasts
return to their contention that it is better to resign oneself to God’s
decrees: often men flee from trouble only to fall into another trouble, they
recoil from the snake only to encounter the dragon. They go on: ‘Since our
sight is so defective.^, let your own sight pass away (Jana) in the
sight of thgfurcpd. His sight in place of ours: what a bargain! In His sigp$you
will find the whole object of your desire. He who gives rain from heaven is
also able, from His mercy, to give us bread ’
‘Yes/
said the lion, 'but the Lord has set a ladder before the feet of His servants.
Step by step must we climb towards the roof; to be a necessitarian here is to
indulge in foolish hopes. You have feet: why do you make yourself out to be
lame? When the master put a spade in the slave's hands, he understood, without
a word, what his intention was. Hand and spade alike are signs of His purpose.
Our power of reflecting on the end is equivalent to an encouragement from Him.
When you take His signs to heart, you will devote your life to fulfilling His
implied desires. Then He will give you many hints as to mysteries. If you take
up His burden, He will bear you aloft. If you accept His command, you will
become the spokesman thereof; if you seek union with Him, thereafter you will
be raised to union. To exercise freewill is, in effect, to thank God for His
beneficence. Your necessitarianism is the denial of that beneficence.
'Thanksgiving
for the power of acting freely increases your power, necessitarianism takes the
gift out of your hand. . . . If you are putting trust in God, trust Him with
your work*. sow the seed, then rely upon the Almighty?
The
beasts, in reply to this, reminded their opponent how little trust can be
reposed in human plans and doings, they 'gang aft agley'. And rightly so, since
they are usually prompted by covetousness or ambition. In any case, if human activities
aim at escaping from divine providence, they are doomed to disappointment.
'Yes?
said the lion, 'but remember also the exertions of the prophets and the true
believers God prospered their doings and sufferings: everything done by a good
man is good Their snares caught the heavenly bird, even their shortcomings
turned to gain. Endeavour is not a struggle with destiny, because destiny
itself has laid this task upon us.
'It
is true that plans for making worldly gains are worthless, but plans for renouncing
this world are divinely inspired. If a prisoner digs a hole in his prison, so
as to escape, that is a good plot. If he plans to block it up, that is a
foolish plot!
'The sceptic,
in his very act of denying freewill, exercises it and proves it/
After these
conclusive arguments, the other beasts are silent
The
last of the stages, following logically from tawakkul (submission), is rida.
This denotes a condition in which the spiritual traveller is always pleased
with whatever providence sends his way. Rida is akin to the Hebrew ratsa}
the verbal noun derived from wEEETsTrequently met with m the Psalms and is
usually translated by the Latin beneplactium, or 'good pleasure’. It
consists in a willing acceptance of whatever God sends, so that 'every wrinkle
is smoothed away from the wayfarer’s brow’, since he is intimately convinced
that 'on the path, whatever befalls the traveller is a blessing for him’. This
condition of the wayfarer is attributed to his being the object of God’s good
pleasure and is a sign of it. It is easy to see, therefore, that this stage on
the Way comes very close to a mystical state or gift of divine grace In fact, in
the third century of the Hijra, the mystical school which followed al-Muhasibi,
most of whose members belonged to Khorasan, held that rida, a state of
mutual satisfaction between God and the soul, was a hal, or infused
mystical state, a gift and not an acquisition. One who is m a 'stage’ {maqam}
is conscious of his own activity, whereas in the mystical state or hal,
self-consciousness disappears.
The School of
Iraq, on the other hand, held rida to be a maqam.
Hujvin, in his
Kashf-ul-Mahjub declares that rida begins as a^a^q^
and ends as a hal: it is, in fact, the pivot or Jummg point between
the 'stages’ ancHhe 'statesT
""This
state of quiet contentm^f vdffi God and all His ways, when the soul, convinced
that destiny (Qismet} is never at fault, and that 'the Creator’s pen
never slipped’, is always happy and well-pleased, is the fruit of perfect love
of God. In it, the wayfarer will never open his mouth to make a request for
destiny to be averted. If he makes petitions at all, it is solely in order to
conform with the Lord's wish, expressed in the Scriptures* ‘Ask of me and I
will grant you your desires'.1 So too, he regards always the present
moment, not the past or the future. His cheerful and optimistic outlook, his
freedom from all envy and avarice, his fervour and his liberty of heart spring
from the same source
In the third
book of the Masnam, Rumi has a passage for which he himself provides a
title:
‘Description of some saints who are content with the divine
ordinances and do not pray and beseech God to change this or that decree.'
‘Now listen to
a story of those travellers on the Way who have no objection in the world '
(The notion of an ‘objection' is taken from the language of scholastic
disputations )
‘Their mouths are closed to invocation. As they are possessed
by a spirit of utter contentment and abandon, it has become unlawful for them
to seek to avert destiny. God has revealed to their hearts such a good opinion
of Him that they never don the dark blue garb (of mourning).’
Immediately
after this passage, Rumi illustrates the spirit and the outlook of the ahl-i-ridd*
(those who are always satisfied with God) by means of a dialogue between
‘Buhlul and a certain dervish’.
‘Buhlul said to a certain dervish, ‘How art thou, O dervish?”
‘The dervish replied, ‘‘How should that one be, according to
whose desire the whole cosmic process goes on?—
‘ “According to whose desire the rivers and the torrents flow
and the stars hold on their courses . . adding much more.
‘Buhlul tells him he has spoken truly: that is manifest in
his spiritual radiance and glorious aspect. But he begs him to add some
explanation of the mystery, so that it may come within the range of all,
learned and unlearned.
‘The
dervish replies that it must be clear to all that “in
1 Qoran, s. 40, v. 62
all the earths and heavens not an atom moves a wing, not a
straw turns, save by God’s eternal and effectual command. When, therefore, His
predestination becomes the pleasure of His servant, he becomes a willing slave to
His decree. He no longer desires his life for himself, he lives for God’s sake,
not for riches, he dies for God’s sake, not from fear or pain. . . . The
servant of God who is thus disposed—does not the world move according to his
command and behest’” ’
FIVE
As
we have seen, the maqamat are the stages through which the wayfarer must
pass in his strivings after perfection and in his efforts to dispose himself
for the flooding in of mystical graces. Being moral and spiritual purifications
and rectifications which can and must be brought about by the disciple’s own
efforts, they are known as 'acquired' (tktosabi) and not 'infused', the
nearest word to which is, perhaps, ladunni. We come now to the ahwal
(pl. of A#Z), which, according to the customary §ufi interpretation, represent
mystical graces, sheer gifts of divine grace and generosity to a soul stripped
of all self-seeking and self-regard. Henceforth, it is not so much the earnest
striving and pressing forward of the pilgrim himself that is in the foreground,
as the victorious and irresistible attraction of the divine beloved (Janarij,
sweeping the traveller off his feet and carrying him along in a state of utter
bewilderment.
The word jgZ is
not easy to translate. Like a number of other Sufi terms, ifs“meanmg
is not necessarily that which would be givenTiTa dictionary. It is used m much
subtler ways, which can be learnt only by familiarity with their writings. By
its derivation it implies change, a changing state of soul. The qalb (heart)
in which these mystic changes take place, is also, by definition, a changing
thing, constantly turned this way and that by its divine transformer (muqallib').
Hence it could almost be translated by 'phase' or 'mood'.
Jurjani, in
his Book of Definitions, defines it thus:
'The dictionary meaning of hal is the end of the
past and the beginning of the futureJin other words, it is the
present moment). But among the people of God (i.e. the §ufis), it
is an experience of the soul (or heart), not artificially produced, not induced
or acquired, of joy or sorrow, contraction or expansion, and so on. It passes
away on the emergence of the attributes of the self. If it lasts and becomes a
habitus, or fixed quality, it is called a maqam [2]
Jurjani here
uses the word maqam, not as a transient stage but as a peimanent
mystical state. There was a marked diversion of opinion among the Sufi
teachers, as to whether a hal could ever be permanent. According to the
great teacher Junayd of Baghdad, who is followed in general by the School of
Iraq, the ahwal are essentially transitory. 'The states (ahwdl),’ he
says, 'are like flashes of lightning. If they last, that must be attributed to
a psychical abnormality.’ In another passage, where Junayd seems to derive the
word hal from the root Italia, to come down, he says. 'The states
(ahwal') resemble what the word itself implies: they come down into the
heart and disappear again.’
Abunasr
Sarraj, in his Kitab ul Luma* distinguishes the following ten mystical
phases or graces:
1.
Muraqaba (literally,
watching or observation, in this case, of one’s own inner consciousness).
2.
Qurb (or
realization of the nearness of God).
7.
Uns (a state of
loving familiarity with God).
8.
Itminan (a sense of
security and serene dependence).
It
must be admitted at once that, in the case of several, at least, of these ahwal,
the element of supernatural passivity is scarcely to be traced directly.
Indirectly, of course, the influence of grace, its attraction (kashish qt jazba), is always liable to make
itself felt, even in the maqdmat.
I. 'muraqaba' (watching)
Muraqaba, is defined by
Jurjani as 'the servant of God’s constant realization of the Lord’s awareness
of all his states’.
The
Sufi authors refer us to the traditional saying of the Prophet* 'Worship God as
if you saw Him. If you do not see Him, He, at any rate, sees you’.
Three
categories are distinguished of the ahi i muraqaba— those who find
themselves nr this 'state’:
(a) Those who, because of this knowledge of God's presence and
awareness, instinctively ward off all evil thoughts.
(b)
Those who are so
intensely aware of His presence that they become oblivious to all created
things.
As
an illustration of this state, a story is related of Shibh. He went to see the
well-known mystic Nun and found him in such an intense state of muraqaba
that not a hair of his body moved. He asked him, 'From whom did you learn this
deep concentration?’—'From a cat watching by a mouse’s hole. But his
concentration is much more intense than mine.’
A
similar story is told of Khafif, who went a long distance to visit two
well-known Sufis. They were so absorbed that they did not return his greeting.
Their example had such an influence on him that he remained with them three
days, neither eating nor drinking. When he pleaded with them to give him some
piece of advice before he left, one of them, at last, told him that their most
potent advice was that contained in their example.
(c)
Those who have abandoned
themselves and their state, whatever it is, to God as their trustee and
protector. These, then, forgoing the veil of selfhood, are alone with God
alone.
Someone
said to Junayd of Baghdad, 'You say, do you not, that there are three veils
(between the soul and God) • self, folk and world (nafs, khalq, dunya)’.
He replied, 'These are the veils of the common folk. The veils of God’s
intimates are: the sight of their good deeds, the sight of their merits, the
sight of their charism (keramd)’. He meant that one must stnve after a
stage where one loses sight of one’s own state of muraqaba, so entirely
and utterly has it taken possession of one’s whole being.
If,
however, the mirror of the human heart is to reflect the 'forms of the Unseen’,
the aspirant after divine knowledge must never cease polishing his heart. In
the fourth book of the Masnam,1 Maulana Rumi says:
'If thou wilt be observant and vigilant, thou wilt see at
every moment the response to thy action. ... Be observant if thou wouldst have
a pure heart, for something is bom to thee in consequence of every action. And
if thou hast an aspiration greater than this, if the enterprise goes beyond the
(spiritual rank of the) observant, then, though thou be dark-bodiedhke iron,
make a practice of polishing, polishing, polishing, that thy breast may
become a mirror full of images, with a lovely silver-breasted form reflected
therein on every side. If the earthen body is gross and dark, polish it—for it
is receptive to the polishing instrument—in order that the forms of the unseen
may appear in it, and that the reflection of houn and angel may dart into it.
'God hath given thee the polishing instrument, reason, to the
end that thereby the leaf (surface) of the heart may be made resplendent. Thou,
0 prayerless man, hast put the polisher in bonds and hast released the two
hands of sensuality. If bonds be put on sensuality, the hand of the polisher
will be untied. A piece of iron that became a mirror of the unseen—all the
forms (of the unseen) would be shot into it. But thou hast darkened thy heart
and let the rust into thy nature. Do it no more.’
2. QURB (‘NEARNESS’)
Qurb, the sense of
God’s nearness, is induced by practice of the state of muraqaba or
concentration. The $ufis often quote texts from the Qoran such as: ‘If
my worshippers ask thee about me, well, I am near’ (Sura 2, verse 182);
‘We
are nearer to him than his own neck-vein’ (Sura 50, v. 15); and ‘We are nearer
to Him than you, but you do not perceive’ (Sura 56, verse 84).
Sarraj
says that this state consists in beholding one’s nearness to God so that one
seeks ever to draw nearer to Him by
1 Prof Nicholson’s version.
means
of good deeds and constant remembrance (?»£/). He divides the ‘people of
nearness’ {ahi i qurb} into three categories:
(x)
Those whose efforts to draw nigh to Him are prompted by their knowledge that He
is all-knowing, that He is close to them and dominates them. (Clearly, these
are still in the realm of mujdhada and kasb, virtuous effort.)
(2)
Those deep investigators
who, whatever they see, see God nearer to it than they themselves.
(3)
Men of ultimates
(ultimate realizations, men who go the whole way). These are so completely lost
{fam} m Him that they are no longer conscious of their own state of
nearness (It is this third group that is touched by the mystical attraction.)
This
qurb, this nearness to God, is not, says Rumi, a nearness of time and
place:
'To be nigh unto God is not to go up or down. To be nigh unto
God is to escape from this prison of existence (i.e. self)
‘What room hath non-existence for “up” and "down”?
Non-existence hath no “soon” or “far” or "late”. . . .
‘The friends of God are so glad at the bottom of the pit that
they are afraid of the throne and the tiara.
‘Every place where the Beloved Himself is their companion is
above the sky, not below the earth.’1 [3]
Kuntu
kanzan makhfian . . .’, declares the Hadith, 'I was a hidden
treasure and I yearned to be known. I created the world in order to be known’.
Traces of Hun, of His beauty and love, are thus to be found m every created
being, not least in the human soul, in its loving nature and its attraction to
beautiful things. Mingled with intense longing for Him and a sweet sense of
being desired and called by Him is a piercing grief at being separated from Him
(ftraq) and a certain bewilderment (tahay- yur), almost despair,
resembling that of the moth dashing itself to death against the flame, or the
nightingale singing its heart out as it serenades the unattainable rose.
This
is the supreme passion, arising from the supreme intuition. It is not the
result of metaphysical reasoning.
On
the other hand it is the source and motive of all renouncements, above all the
renouncement of self (ww^d).
While
the wayfarer gets a glimpse of the divine in human beauty and love, he can
never stay there, he must always be passing beyond to the one who transcends
time, place and measurement. But
'Whether
it be of this world or of that,
'Thy
love will lead thee yonder at the last?
This
mysterious love is rightly put among the mystical, infused states. It cannot be
acquired at will. Its birth and growth are both the work of divine, prevenient
grace. Bayazid Bistami once said: 'I thought I loved Him but, on second
thoughts, I saw that His love preceded mine. ’ In another passage of his we
find: 'Lovers of God, whether asleep or awake, seek and are sought. Still, they
are not concerned with their own seeking and loving but are lost in
contemplation of the beloved, in rapt attention to Him. It is a crime in the
lover to regard his love and it is an outrage on love to regard one’s own
seeking while one is face to face with the sought (al MaMb).’ So, he
sings: 'His love came into my heart and drove out all else, so that it remained
single, as He is single.’ In a similar strain Rumi has:
'Love
came and gave up my soul to the beloved;
'The
beloved now gives me life from her (or his) own life.'
And
again:
'0 heart, as you go to that Sweetheart you must lose your
heart:
'Heedless go to the audience-chamber of Union.
‘When you have reached His door, hidden from every creature,
‘Leave yourself outside and then go in.’
Concerning
such a one Rumi sang:
‘Love came and like blood filled my veins and tissues,
'Emptied me of myself and filled me with the Friend.
‘The friend has taken possession of every atom of my being.
‘The name is all that I have left now: all the rest is He.’
In
an even earlier period Attar wrote these glowing words, which a devout client
of the Sacred Heart need not repudiate
‘Fiercer
than thine the fire within His breast,
‘His
Heart beats faster than that heart of thine.
‘Stay
within that burning Heart of His
‘And
thou’lt leam His Love is infinite.’
4. THE
FEAR OF THE LORD
Fear,
even when it is filial or reverential fear, plays but a minor rdle in the
spiritual doctrine of the Sufis. It enters far more into the lives and outlook
of the early school of Semitic pietists who, in this, were certainly more in
agreement with the dominant trend of the Qoran and the Moslem way of
life. With the Sufi or 'arif (‘gnostic’) of the third century of the
Hijra onwards, speculation of a more intellectualist kind transforms the
spiritual outlook and, above all, love, taking more and more to itself, 'casts
out fear’. Fear is not considered as a perfection m itself: it is but the
moderator of hope. The consummate mystic is independent of hope and fear
alike. He is illumined as to the way, its stages and its end or goal. ‘Light
has dawned’, as Mawlana Jalalu’ ddin Rumi says, ‘and the traveller has followed
the sun.’
5 THE
STATE OF HOPE
The
§ufi holds that to worship God in the hope of His grace and bounty is better
than to worship Him in fear of punishment But hope, as it exists in the heart
of the adept, is based neither on his own merits nor even on his conviction of
the infinite broadness of God’s mercy. It is concerned with God Himself and Him
alone:—hope in God—rv/a fillah—he asks from God nothing but Himself,
caring nothing for paradise and the houns, the fardayi zahid—the
devotee’s tomorrow. Thus Sheikh Ansari exclaims:
*0 Lord, I, this beggar, seek from Thee something, 'Seek from
Thee more than a thousand kings.
'Everyone comes to Thy door seeking something:
'Now
I have come and what I seek from Thee is Thyself.
The
sixth, seventh and eighth of the mystical states enumerated by Sarraj are Shauq
(longing), Uns (loving familiarity) and Itminan (trust or
confidence). As they are all fruits of loving resignation, there is nothing new
we can say of them here.
9. 'mushahada’ (contemplation)
Although
the ten mystical states are not necessarily arranged in progressive order of
importance or sequence in time, it is not for nothing that the great themes of
contemplation and yaqin (certainty) form the culmination of the series.
It is true that Sufi teaching is a practical training in the methods and
requirements of perfection, but this perfection, the goal of all spiritual
wayfarers, is conceived of by all Persian mystics as essentially a matter of
knowledge: not the knowledge acquired by reading books and studying
exercise-books, by disputation and reasoning, but that direct knowledge of God
Himself which is bestowed on hearts rightly disposed and duly prepared by an
act of sheer grace and bounty.
Thus
the very same impulse which aimed at enlivening and interiorizing Islam strove,
at the same time, to infuse into it a spirit of intelligence, of intellectual
curiosity, of original investigation and speculation, summed up in the term ijtihdd.
In this effort the Persian spiritual intelligentsia were but renewing the
rarely broken tradition of their country’s ancient function m the world. That
the Sufis should have welded so wonderfully into a consistent whole the purest
religious feeling with the most daring and uncompromising thought, and, in
addition, clothed the result in some of the loveliest and most winning poetry
that had ever been written, is but to say that, in their own age, they gave
supreme expression to the genius of their race.
There
is much evidence in the writings of the Persian mystics of the influence of the
Neo-Platonists, whose teachings, including the so-called 'theology of
Aristotle’, were widely disseminated in the Near East and in Persia. In Syria,
one of the most notable fruits of this Neo-Platonic fertilization on Christian
soil was the writings of Denis the (pseudo-) Areopagite, which, owing to a
misunderstanding as to their real origin, were treated with the utmost
attention and veneration by Christian theologians and spiritual writers,
including St Thomas Aquinas. Similar doctrines produced similarly startling
effects m Persia and, before long, in countries newly won to the Islamic faith.
There can be no doubt that the charm exercised by these doctrines, as also by
Buddhist teaching, was among the chief causes of the Persian mystical movement
in post- Islamic times.
In
earlier chapters we have studied the different stages on the way to the
mystical goal. These, however, are but means to an end, a form of training or
preparation. The end is the contemplation of God, the vision of the divine
beauty, unveiled. 'This borrowed life of mine, handed over to me by the friend/
cries Hafiz, T shall hand back to Him when at last I see His face/ All the Sufi
theologians are agreed in this, that the purpose of man’s creation was that he
should come to know God. Man is, we are told, the eye with which God surveys
Himself. Or he is the mirror which God holds up to Himself. One of the
traditions most often quoted by them is- Kuntu kmzan makh- fian . . .—*1
was a hidden treasure and I wanted to become known, so I created the world to
make myself known/ The shah&da itself (La ildha ilia 'llah}1
illustrates this great movement of going forth and return (min al mabda
zla'l ma’dd). The emanation of created things, things other (ghazr)
than God (ma szwd’llah), is shown by the words la zlaha (No God),
while their return to Him is indicated by illd’llah (but God). This is
the consummation of tawhid (unification), the reintegration of all
things in the one from whom they sprang.
Man is the
culmination of the movement out of God into the darkness of multiplicity But he
xs also the beginning of the arc of return. He is the mafia* ul fajr,
the dawn of day, a day whose high noon-tide is to be unclouded glory.
This ultimate
divine destiny set before man is the accomplishment of the original covenant (mithaq)
made between God and man on the yuz z
alast—the day of 'Am I not?’ (your Lord). This ruz z alast refers to
a passage (verse 171) in the Seventh sura of the Qoran, relating
ostensibly to the Jews, but understood in a universal sense by the mystics*
‘When thy Lord brought forth their descendants from the reins of the sons of
Adam and took them to witness against themselves, "Am I not/’ said He,
“your Lord?” They said, “Yes.” ’ The passage is interpreted by the Sufi mystics
as signifying a primal pact, entered into before Creation between God and His
creatures, the latter being represented by the pre-existent form (surat)
or archetypal idea of Adam, in which was prefigured the divine aspect of
humanity (nasuf). The reply Baby (Yea) is interpreted by
orthodox Mohammedan theologians as an acknowledgment of God’s right to judge
men’s actions and punish their sins. The Sufis for their part laid stress
rather on the love which here displayed itself and was responded to in the
state of pre-existence. All human souls heard the divine question a lastu bi
rabbzknmi and answered Baly, but each one’s confession had a
different value according to his nature and disposition. The elect (as-sabiqun),
enlightened by love, replied: ‘Yea; Thou art He whom we love and adore’. True
believers (ashabu’l maymana)', ‘Yea; Thou art the one Lord whom we
worship’. Hypocrites and infidels, whose hearts were veiled by
1 ‘There is no god but God ’
the
attributes of divine majesty and indignation, gave the response unwillingly,
like slaves under duress.
Those
happy souls, therefore, who enjoy mystical union in this life, are those who
were destined to it on that day of alasi. ‘The spirit of him who, at the
time of alasi, saw his Lord and became beside himself and intoxicated
with extatic love, that spirit knows the scent of the wine because he drank it
before’, says Maulana Rumi m the second book of the Masnavi. This doctrine
evidently represents a form of anamnesis. ‘Are there not signs, too, in your
own selves?’ asks the Qoran, and the mystical soul recognizes these
signs, whether in the frequent incidence of suffering and affliction or in the
interior attractions towards divine union which he experiences in himself.
10. ‘yaqin’ (certitude)
In
the enumeration found in the Kitab ul Luma of Sarraj, the state of
contemplation is followed by that of yaqin or certainty, the state of
one who has become firmly rooted in divine contemplation and the process of fana
and baqa. It may be said, therefore, to be the term or goal of all the
states or ahwal. In this state all doubt has vanished and ‘ joy over
good news’ takes its place. Yaqin, indeed, is not only the culmination,
but the pith and marrow of all the mystical states. It is defined by Jurjani (Ta’rifai)
as ‘clear vision through the power of faith, not by proof or demonstration’.
Even within this state one can advance from ’ain al yaqin (the essence
of certainty) to haqq al yaqin (the reality of certainty). This is a
development of a passage in the Qoran, sura 102, ‘The desire to surpass
one another in wealth distracts you Nay, if ye but knew with the knowledge of
certainty Qilm alyaqiri)\ Verily ye shall see Hellfire. I say again,
Venly ye shall see it with the vision of certainty Qayn al yaqin)’. The
passage is quoted by Rumi in the third book of the Masnavi, verse 4122.
In connection with it, he says:
‘Know that knowledge is a seeker of certainty, and certainty
is a seeker of vision and intuition.
‘Seek
this now in (the Sura beginning) Alhakum .. .
‘Knowledge leads to vision, 0 knowing one: if it became
certainty, they would see Hell.
‘Vision is immediately bom of certainty, just as fancy is bom
of opinion.
‘See
in Alhakum the explanation of this, that the knowledge of certainty
becomes the intuition of certainty.
‘I
am higher than opinion and certainty, and my head is not to be turned aside by
blame.
‘Since
my mouth ate of His sweetmeat, I have become clear-eyed and a seer of Him/
SIX
For the pilgrim, this life is a time of separation
from the beloved. He sighs perpetually after reunion with his eternal friend.
His complaint, in effect, in Rumi’s words, is:
' Murgh i bagh i
malakutam, nay am az ’dlam i khak . . . ’— ‘I am a bird of God’s
garden, I do not belong to this dusty world.
Tor a day or two they
have locked me up in the cage of my body.
'I did not come here of
myself, how should I return of myself?
'He who brought me must
take me back again to my own country.’
The poet reverts to this theme when he sings:
'That imprisoned nightingale called the soul—
'Has no power in himself to break open the cage.
'On that day when, at last, this business of reunion is
brought off,
'And this bird
flies off from its cage,
'My spirit,
having heard the King calling, Come back!
(irja’il),
Tn one great
flight, will go back to the King’s hand.’
The
call of the King from the invisible world lifts the soul away from all care for
the affairs of this world:
'You must know
that whoever hears God’s call
'Lays aside
all care for the business of this world.
'Whoever has
to do with God on high
‘Is
received in audience Yonder and gives up work here Below? (Rumi)
(There
is a play here on the words kar u bar.)
It
is, however, in the Poem to the Masnavi that Jalalu’ ddm Rumi gives
finest expression to the yearning of the soul for reunion with the One from
whom it has been tom: indeed, the poet seems to hint that this ‘wailing of the
reed* sums up the whole message of the Masnavt itself.
‘Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of
separations,
‘Saying, “Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my
lament has caused man and woman to moan.
‘It is only to a bosom tom by severance that I can unfold the
pain of love-desire.
‘Everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the
time when he was united with it
Tn every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with
the unhappy and with them that rejoice.
‘Everyone became my friend in his own opinion; none sought
out my secrets from within me
‘My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack
the light (whereby it can be apprehended).
‘Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet none can
see the soul
‘The wind that sounds in the reed is not wind but fire: whoso
hath not this fire, may he be naught!
‘ "Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ’tis the
fervour of Love that is in the wine. . . .
‘The reed tells of the Way full of blood and recounts stories
of the passion of Majnun ’ ’ ’
The
lament of the reed, tom from its reed-bed, the soul’s yearning for reunion with
its divine source, the griefs and glooms of this vale of severance set the
heart in a state of turmoil and bewilderment. Nothing created can satisfy it.
On the other hand, the divine beloved seems so sublime, so dissimilar, that a
human heart’s love for Him appears to resemble that of the nightingale for the
rose, or that of the moth for the candle. The pilgrim on the blood-stained path
stumbles along, 'poor, heart-sick, forlorn and bewildered*. He has 'suffered
the trials of fortune and the weals and bruises of separation*. But still he is
urged on by his ceaseless longing, drawn along, if the truth were known, by the
irresistible attraction of the eternal beauty. Dimly, but with supernatural
certainty, he knows that the sight of God is the one thing that can satisfy the
infinite yearnings of his finite heart. And where is he to look for Him? He
might wander round the whole world in vain. Yar dar khaneh—'The friend
is in our own home all the time* In order to know our Lord, we must first learn
to know ourselves. Man *arafa nafsahu, ’arafa Rabbahu is a traditional
proverb which is often on the lips or the pen of the mystic. The pilgrim on the
way to the presence must lay aside veil after veil of his carnal notions and
desires, must put aside all desire 'of this world and the next’, and come to
rest in the pure, unadulterated ground of his being, the 'heart* or the
'secret* (Sw or khafi) It is here that the divine image—or should we
say, the divine being Himself?—is to be found. As was to be expected, Islam has
not let itself be deprived of a 'tradition*, to the effect that God made man "ala
suratihi, in His image. Constantly, man must seek to discover in himself
the divine likeness. In the book Fihi mafihi, Jalalu’ ddm Rumi says ‘Man
is the astrolabe of God, but it needs an astronomer to understand the
astrolabe. "He that knows himself, knows his Lord.*’ Just as, by means of
an astrolabe, the astronomer observes the revolutions and discovers the state
of the heavenly bodies, so when man has received from God the gift of
self-knowledge by means of the astrolabe of his being, which is a divine
mirror, he continually beholds the manifestation of the divine beauty, without
attributes and beyond description; and of that beauty this mirror is never
void.’
To
say that God created man in His image is, therefore, to say that He created in
man, as the very root and spiritual core of his nature, the heart {d'bl
or qalb} and soul {jan, ruh, or, sometimes, nafs-i-ndtiqah}.
It is true that man has also been furnished with reason ('aql) or
understanding, but its functions
E*
are
limited to the sphere of created things and it cannot rise to knowledge of God
Himself. ‘Heart’ and ‘soul*, together with expressions like strr and khafi,
signify, at bottom, the same reality, but ‘heart’ (dil or qalb)
is almost invariably used where mystical knowledge is in question and swr
and khafi (secret) are used to reinforce the sense of an organ
exclusively ordered to divine contemplation. The ‘heart* is capable of knowing
the divine essence itself and, therefore, the true inwardness of all things.
When lit up by the light of faith, it becomes the mirror in which all divine
knowledge is manifested. According to a saying attributed to Mahomet, speaking
on behalf of God. ‘My earth and my heaven cannot contain me but the heart of my
believing servant contains me.’
The
state of purity and clarity needed for this mirroring is, however, in practice,
rarely attained Too often, the heart is veiled and obscured by negligence and
inattention, and material and sensual images soil and darken it.
The
heart, though capable of such heights of knowledge, is still a human organ. It
is disputed ground between the opposing forces of God and wisdom on the one
hand and the devil and evil passions on the other. Each side tries to invade
it. By one channel divine knowledge enters it, by another, the whisperings of
sensuality.
‘A strange composition indeed is man, made up of angel and
beast;
‘If he inclines to this, he falls lower than this, if he
inclines to that, he improves on that.*
As
a human organ, moreover, the heart is the living link between the spirit and
the animal soul (nafs): it receives the effusions of the spirit and, in
its turn, exerts an influence on the sphere of the senses and feelings.
Its
name in Arabic, qalb, often used by the Persians, is referred to the
root qaldba, meaning to turn or turn over. We are told that this word
well befits the heart, since it is constantly rotating or turning from divine
manifestations to created phenomena and vice versa.
To
keep the mirror of the heart m a high state of polish is the spiritual man’s
constant preoccupation, although, in the last resort, its perfect polish and
freedom from rust and dust is a gift of grace (tawfiq). (The mirrors
referred to by these early mystics were, of course, made of steel.) The chief
film on the inner mirror is the film of self. Says Rumi (Masntm, Bk. i):
Tike polished iron, lose the ferruginous colour; become in
thy ascetical discipline like a mirror without rust.
‘Make thyself pure from the attributes of selfhood, that thou
mayst behold thy own pure, untarnished essence, ‘And behold within thy heart all
the sciences of the prophets, without book and without preceptor and master.’
Rumi
then proceeds: ‘If you desire a parable of the hidden knowledge, I will relate
the story of the Greeks (Rumiyyan) and the Chinese.’ This story had been
related by Ghazali, in a slightly different form, in his Ihya (in, 22,
18). A king, desiring to have his palace decorated, called in a group of
Chinese artists and another of Anatolians. Each side claimed superiority in
their art. The king, to test them, gave them two rooms facing each other. A
curtain was drawn across the entrance. The Chinese called for a great variety
of paints. The Anatolians said they would do nothing but remove rust. Both
sides set to work, the Chinese painting, painting, the Anatolians burnishing
away. When the Chinese had finished, filled with joy and pride, they called the
king in to see their work. He was ravished at the sight. Then he visited the
Anatolians. They drew the curtain aside and the Chinese painting, reflected on
the burnished wall, seemed now transformed into something far more beautiful.
The
Anatolians, Rumi then says, are the Sufis. They are independent of study, books
and erudition, but they have burnished their breasts and made them pure from
greed and avarice and hatred. The purity of the mirror is, beyond doubt, the
heart which receives images innumerable. The mirror of the heart hath no bound.
Here the understanding is reduced to silence, or else it leads into error,
because the heart is with Him, or indeed the heart is HE. They that burnish
their hearts have escaped from scent and colour; they behold beauty at every
moment without tarrying. They have relinquished the outer form and husk of
knowledge, they have raised the banner of the essence of certainty. Thought is
gone and they have gained light, they have gained the land, and sea of gnosis.
They receive a hundred impressions from the empyrean and the starry sphere and
the void: what do I say, impressions? Nay, ’tis the very sight of God?
There
is, moreover, in the sixth book of the Masnavi, a passage in which Rumi
says that the perfect man is 'God Himself in the likeness of a reflection’.
In
this connection, one of Rumi’s commentators quotes the following lines from
Jami*
'If one regards only the state of the mwror, it is
impossible for him to see the vmage\
'And he whose eye is fixed on the image will find that the
mirror has vanished in the image.
'When the divine mystery is revealed to
the soul, there rises from it the cry ''Glory unto Me ’
Persian
poets designate this God-revealing mirror of the human heart by the term yam
i Jam, or 'Jamshid’s mirror (or cup)’. This legendary mirror, perhaps
thought of as a crystal globe, is thus associated with the mythical Shah of old
Iran, Jamshid, the fourth king of the world in the ancient Persian epic.
Jamshid, according to the Avesta (Vend, n) invented many arts and was
honoured with frequent colloquies with God. When he succumbed to the temptation
of pride and claimed to be an object of worship, he lost the aureole of majesty
(farr i izadi) and had to yield the kingdom to the Arab Dahak.
The
name of Jamshid was subsequently attached to Solomon or to Alexander the Great
and the world-revealing mirror (iam i jahan-numa) was said to have been
erected for him at Alexandria by Aristotle.
Poets
and mystics, however, always mean by the term the secret spiritual instrument
or organ of universal knowledge, which, like some Iranian Grail, dominated
their imagination. Khoja Hafiz of Shiraz wrote an ode in this connection which
has become famous. It begins. Salha dil talab zjdm * Jam az ma mikard
and, translated, runs as follows.
Tor years our heart has been seeking Jamshid’s glass of us,
'Begging from strangers what it already owned, ‘Seeking from lost men on the sea-shore
‘The pearl that is outside the confines of place and being
‘I took my difficulty to
the Magian priest yesterday, ‘So that, with his firm discernment, he might
solve the riddle. ‘I found him joyful and smiling, a goblet of wine in his
hand, ‘And in that mirror he was beholding a hundred sights.
‘He whose heart, like a rose-bud, hid the secret of Reality,
‘Noted the page of his mind from that copy.
‘I asked him* When did the sage give you this worldsurveying
mirror?
‘He answered: On that day when He created the blue vault of
heaven.
‘This forlorn man—God is with him at every turn, but he has
not seen him and, as from afar, cries: My God, my God! ‘That dear Comrade, said
he, on whose account even the gibbet raised its head,
‘His crime consisted in manifesting secret things.
‘If the grace of the Holy
Spirit vouchsafe help again, ‘Others too may do what the Christ did
‘I said to him. What
means the chain of the tresses of fair idols?
‘He replied: Hafiz is
complaining of the length of Christmas night!’
As Hafiz
deliberately chose, in this poem, an enigmatic form of speech, I venture to add
here some explanatory notes.
The ‘Magian
priest’ (Pw mughari), in such passages, stands either for a Magian or a
Christian priest, or even for a tavernkeeper, whose chief recommendation, for
the Sufi, lay in the fact that, outside or in contravention of the Moslem law,
such as he freely drank and dispensed wine, often choosing for the purpose
solitary rums (kharabat} outside the town. Wine, for the Sufi, stood for
the joys of divine ecstasy and self-forgetful- ne%, proscribed by the
narrow-minded Moslem moralists and theologians. What the Magian, therefore,
held in the cup of his burnished heart was the wine of divine inspiration and
ecstasy, m consequence of which, released from the trammels of self, he was
able to contemplate the mysteries of both worlds.
The
‘dear Comrade’ is Mansur al Hallaj, with his famous shathiyya of Ana'I
haqq (I am God), for which apparent blasphemy he suffered death on a cross.
In the next verse it seems to be suggested that grace might unite souls to the
Christ in such a way that they participated, not only in His states but in His
miraculous achievements. This, too, is clearly brought in as a supreme example
of self-denial and Godconsciousness.
The
‘dark tresses of the idols’ stand for created beauties and diversities which at
once veil and reveal the identity of the hidden, divine Creator. These
darknesses temper the radiance of the divine manifestation, just as the
mid-winter darkness of Christmas night cloaks the glory of the heavenly King’s
appearance on earth.
Often
the term shab i yalda. is misunderstood. Yalda is the Chaldean
word for the Nativity and was accordingly the word for Christmas with which
Persians were familiar. Dictionaries now usually explain it as ‘the darkest
night of winter’.
The
function of the ‘heart’ {dil) is, then, to mirror or reflect God and, in
Him and through Him, the whole of creation. The steel mirror does not
understand or love the object reflected m it. It is not razddr, as Rumi
puts it, not a real sharer in the secret which it unwittingly reveals, whereas
the heart of man is alive, aware, conscious, Godlike. If you would see God,
then, look into the mirror of your heart, and look in such a way as to forget
the mirror through absorption m the object it reflects and presents. In other
words, the contemplation of God is not reflection on an idea evolved from the
human mind. It is a gift of grace, granted to a heart that turns itself inwards
to seek Him and await His revelation.
The
interior experiences which accompany and bear witness to this divine work in
and on the soul are known under names such as hal, shtrb, jazba,fana>
all of which contain the sense of a delightful yielding to, or passing away
into the influx of the divinity, a happy oblivion of self, a willing
self-surrender to the adorable Invader. The mystic wayfarer, having yielded to
this divine attraction (jazba), becomes fani in God, disappears
in Him.
SEVEN
The term fana expresses a notion which is
fundamental in Persian mysticism. It may owe its origin to Indian sources, but
the Persians themselves are responsible for the subtle and enlightening
interpretations of fand which abound in their spiritual writings.
In
the West eyebrows have often been raised over fand (compare, for
instance, Fitzgerald's 'one moment in annihilation's waste', where, no doubt,
'annihilation' represents the author's understanding of the word fand.}
It is natural for right-minded men to shudder and protest at the idea of annihilation.
But there are no protests or shuddenngs when Walter Hilton or other Catholic
mystics call for the personality to be 'noughted', or urge its 'breakdown',
although the idea behind both terms would seem to be the same. We may go
further and suggest that when Our Lord called upon His followers to 'lose
themselves', or 'deny themselves', He was hinting at the same thing.
The
Arabic word fana, as a verb, means to^ disappear vanish or
perish, passaway.lhe Suh notion of therefore, seems fo bethatthe*
transient, evanescent side of a man must 'pass away’, in order that something
or someone lasting may reign supreme in him. 'My breast is so full of thought
of the beloved', sings IJafiz, 'that the thought of self has disappeared from
my consciousness'. In another passage of his Divan he has:
'Between
the lover and the beloved there must be no veil;
'Thou
thyself art thy own veil, Hafiz—get out of the way!’
When
God is realized to be all, there must and can no longer be any mention of ‘me
and thee'. Someone knocked and called out 'Who is there?' The Disciple, who had
at first replied 'It is becoming wiser, now replied: Thyself’* And the Sufi
thesis is that it is the divine being himself who speaks through the mouth of
Mansiir al Hall&j when, in his ecstasy of Godconsciousness and
self-forgetfulness, he cries: And’I Haqq (I anfGodpT^advert to self
would, for such a one, be a form of shirk or polytheism, a denial of the
fundamental dogma: There is no god but God
The
suppression, by-passing or transcendance of human notions, fancies, desires,
idiosyncrasies, is only the external and superficial aspect of this divine
transformation. Above all, it is one’s own self that has to be forgotten,
renounced, out- passed. Yet this supreme experience can only be brought about
by the Lord Himself, by an act of grace abounding, submerging^!!"conscious
traces of ~tha Jndividual self. This does not mean the elimination
or destruction of the human personality. Indeed, the human personality
survive if it isToHkeep up this never-ending act of adoration and
self- transc^aanceTIt survives”~one might say, rather as hydrogen or oxygen
survive in water, by a sort of virtual substantiality. Henceforth, the
life of the selfisTto live in and for another, m a sort of perpetual ecstasy or
inebriation. This is supreme liberation and exultation. All else is forgotten,
so wonderful is the sight that dawns on awakened eyes.
True,
while this life lasts, a state of soberness (sahw), when consciousness
of self returns, is bound to follow upon the stage of inebriation (sukr),
when one had been gloriously lost to self. But as the refining process
proceeds, the rhythm is speeded up. Bewilderment (tahayyur) and the
sense of estrangement from the world of limits and multiplicity increase. In
the perfection of fana, fana itself is no longer adverted to:
itjsthe_state~of fana ul /ima,the disappearance of disappearance.
The soul, going all out to God, no longer has any return upon itself. Very
often, but not necessarily always, this state of absorption in God is
accompanied by complete abstraction from the senseworld and utter
obliviousness to time and place.
So
great were the benefits, so wonderful the bliss of this state of abstraction
from self, that some of the Sufis, in their search for it, resorted to
practices deliberately aimed at inducing the state of trance. This was, of
course, a misguided deviation, witnessing to a confusion of values, a failure
to appreciate the autonomy and provenience of divine grace, as well as its
transcendance of every merely physical phenomenon. If the effects of grace can
be induced by artificial means, it is no longer grace but a form of man-made
magic. Better the harsh winds of 'sobriety* than the soft Lydian airs of such
selfinduced trances and exaltations. The greatest Persian mystics are, indeed,
at one with our own mystical teachers in holding that the real test of the
genuineness of a mystical experience is to be found in its effects on the soul,
the character: when there has been union with God, the soul will be filled with
light and benevolence, it will long to pour out its treasures of knowledge and
love upon hungry and thirsty souls.
There is another sense in which the doctrine of fana
is connected with the Sufi theory of divine contemplation and union. The Sufi
masters took over from Aristotle the position that knowledge of an object
demands a sort of proportion or adjustment in the knowing faculty and that the
knowledge of which anyone is capable is measured by the conditions of his
being. Hence, they concluded, if ji man is ta become capable of knowing
God, of attaining to or gnosis, he must be divesTe37oThis1mer3y hum^,cre^ be
losttohTs imiteserfTT)^^ bemg has filled the
room
left by™as ell-denying and self-surrendering human can such a one arrive at
true knowledge of Him.
Psychologically
speaking, moreover, it is the experience of mystics m every clime that with the
advent of a supernatural influx comes an increasing or total suspension of the
multiple and discursive activities of the mind. The intervention of grace has
the effect of putting purely natural functioning out of action—or, perhaps, it
is nearer the truth to say that the natural function is heightened to operate
on a higher plane.
Notable
evidence of this is to be found in the fact that those who have received a high
mystical grace are reduced to silence. The wonder of the experience defeats and
silences all human utterance. Thus the great mystic Junayd, of Baghdad,
declared: 'When a man comes to know God, his tongue is silent*. And Muhammad
ibn Wasi’: ‘As for him who learns to know God, his speech grows rare and his
bewilderment grows greater.'
In
this state of affairs the disciple does not remain utterly inactive. He still
has to do his part by detaching his heart from created things. And yet, even
here, when God sets His heart on a man, He Himself sets out to detach that man
in an efficacious way all His own.
The
more the heart and mind are purged of ghcwr (aught else) the more
strongly does a man feel the pull or attraction of the divine beloved, the Janan.
It
is then that the truth of Maghribi's Ode is realized, to wit, that
‘By his own powers no one can find the way that leads to Him;
‘Whoever walks towards Him walks with His foot.
‘Until the beam of His love shines out to guide the soul, ‘It
does not set out to behold the love of His Face.
‘My heart feels not the slightest attraction towards Him
‘Until an attraction comes from Him and works upon my heart.
‘Since I learnt that He longs for me, longing for Him never
leaves me for an instant.
‘So often has He set Himself opposite my sensitive heart that
it has taken on His very ways and temperament/
It
is this divine attraction, therefore, and not any human effort as such, that
effectively leads the soul to beatitude and salvation. Grace is subject to no
human laws or conditions. Hence, as the Sufi doctors point out, the study of
the mystical life is completely different from disciplines such as physics or
mathematics. Rumi, in the first book of the Masnavi, in a passage where
he comments on the Qoranic verse: ‘What God wills happens, what He does not
will does not happen/ declares:
Tn the last
resort
‘Without the
grace of God we are nought, nought.
‘Without
the favours of God and of His familiars
‘Even
an angel's page is smudged?
When
Sheikh Abu Said Abul Khair was asked: ‘When is the servant of God delivered
from his debts?', he replied: ‘When his Lord releases him. To attribute
spiritual deliverance to one's own efforts and not to sheer grace (tawfiq)
is idolatry or polytheism.’ In this state, says Abu Said Kharraz, if anyone
asks you: ‘Where are you from? And what do you want?’, the only answer you can
make to both questions is ‘God’.
So,
too, Shibli says that the Sufi life is ‘the disappearance of the merely human
and the appearance of the sheer divine’.
Sheikh
'Attar, in the Mantiq utTair, tells the wayfarer.
‘Be noughted, so that thy being may come to thee from Him.
While thou art, how can true being come to thee? Until thou art lost in
lowliness and fana (noughting), how will affirmation and permanence
reach thee from the Almighty?’
Maulana
Rumi, in the fifth book of the Masnavi, tells a tale of ‘the lover who
recounted before the beloved his loyal services, laid bare his helplessness and
finally asked if there were any other service he could perform’. On this the
beloved replied: ‘All this you have done but you have left undone the one thing
necessary: dying to self, abandonment of self. You have tackled the branches,
not the root. You are still alive, still living in yourself. Come, now, die if
you are a lover who lays down his life. Die, and you will find life in its
fulness.’
In
his Te%keret al Awliya Sheikh 'Attar illustrates one of the effects of
absorption in God by an incident in the life of Bayazid Bistami. Bayazid had a
disciple who had been with him for twenty years but whose name he could never
remember. The young man one day told him he was genuinely grieved that, after
twenty years, his master could still not remember his name. The sheikh replied:
‘I am not mocking you. His name has come to me and has shut out all
other names from my mind. I learn your name and soon forget it again!’
If there is
one point on which all Sufis are agreed, it is this need to get nd of self in
order to reach God. That old vintage mystic Abu Said said: ‘Wherever some
thought of yourself is, there is hell. Wherever you are not, there is heaven ’
And he added, on another occasion: The veil between the servant and his Lord is
neither heaven nor earth, neither throne nor threshold. The real veil is your
egotism, your thinking of yourself. Get rid of that and you reach God.
Another
occasional effect of mystical absorption is insensibility. Abul Khair Aqta’
had a diseased hand. The doctors decided the hand would have to be amputated.
As he would not consent to this, his disciples advised them to wait until the
Sheikh entered into prayer, when he became quite insensible They followed this
advice and it was only when he came out of prayer that he found that his hand
had been amputated
In the case of
a number of great mystics, this state of trance or insensibility was
interrupted when it was time to recite the namaz or ritual prayer. As soon as
this was finished, the mystic returned at once, involuntarily, into the state
of trance. This is recorded of Shibli and of Nuri, to mention but two. The
phenomenon is known as jam1 wa tafrtqa (union and
separation).
Mystical
knowledge of God may also have as a by-product the quality known as firasat,
or supernatural perspicacity extending to facts relating to created affairs. A
number of stories are told of this sort of second sight through which Sufis,
celebrated for their mystical absorption, were aware of what was happening to
people at a great distance.
More drastic,
however, were the claims made by some Sufis on the basis of the inner light
which illumined their hearts. Often, this ‘inner light’ moved them to conduct
at variance with received notions as to orthodoxy or propriety. Stricter
theologians found dangers in this recourse to an inner, personal criterion.
On the fringes
of this zone of inner light, in bright clusters or in dark writhing shapes, are
the khatarat wa vasams (good thoughts or bad). Sufis inclined to be ahi
i khatir—devotees of the first thought that enters the mind, as this is considered
to come direct from God and not as the result of reflection.
It is related
of Khair an-Nassaj that one day a thought came to him that Junayd was at the
door. He repelled the thought as a distraction. The same thought recurred, only
to be repelled again. At last he went to the door and opened it. There stood
Junayd.
EIGHT
In Christian theology vision of God is a reward, a
consummation, reserved for the next life. In this life 'no man has seen God at
any time'. The Sufis, on the contrary, reject this fardayi zahid
(devotee’s tomorrow), to use the expression of Hafiz. They are intent on the
here and now. The word mushahada itself contains the notion of direct
vision, shuhud. The soul, by the fact of its spiritual and intellectual
nature, is invited by God to behold Him and He will grant this favour to all
who serve Him sincerely and whole-heartedly. The necessary condition for the
divine revelation is not so much physical death as a mystical death, death to
self. Self is a veil, a hindrance to sight of Him. It must disappear if God is
to appear. God is, indeed, all that really exists. The rest is only appearance.
Appearance glows and fades on the unchanging background of Being. Still, in the
nature of things, God is free to reveal Himself or to conceal Himself. If He reveals
Himself to His servant, that will be a free gift of His grace. It follows,
then, that the preliminary disposition of Jana (disappearance of self)
is also an effect of grace, it cannot be achieved by a man’s own efforts.
Still, it could never be achieved at all did not man’s spiritual nature,
witnessed to by the Qoranic nafakhnd fihi min ruhind (we breathed into
him of our Spirit), possess already the root of the matter, setting no limit to
the scope of his Imowl- edge and spiritual experience. It is true that a great
mystic like ‘Attar can say:
‘The mind does not reach to the frontier of Thy perfection.
‘The soul does not reach of itself the Palace of Union (visa/).
‘Were
all the atoms of the world to become eyes,
‘They could
never comprehend Thy infinite Beauty.
And
‘This
reason of mine, which for long I made my guide,
‘I
have consumed in the effort to know God
‘My
whole life has been spent and with this weak reason
I
have learnt
‘This
much alone: that I still know Him not?
But
'At|ar is here speaking only of the unaided human reason (’aql) and,
moreover, he is thinking of the infinite nature of the divine object, which
will always, necessarily, transcend the powers of a finite mind. Lahiji
compares the discursive reason to the stick of a blind man. He needs,
nevertheless, to be guided by one who sees, and this kind of sight is peculiar
to prophets, saints and mystics, granted only in reward for an obedience and
devotion involving body, mind, heart and spirit. The vision of God is granted
to a heart in love with Him and constantly seeking Him 'Attar has also the
following quatrain:
‘The
heart is in love with Thy face with a sincere faith,
‘The soul has been seeking union with Thee from the very
first.
‘One who did not seek union with Thee found nothing.
‘He who found Thee, seeks nothing else.’
As
another writer puts it: Nagah my dyad vali bar dil i dgdh miyayad (He
comes unheralded, but He comes to none but an awakened heart).
Men
are divided up into various great groups in accordance with the use they make
of their faculties. Apart from those who let their sensual faculties
predominate, there are many who choose a life in which the reasoning and
discursive faculties take the lion’s share and who are content to restrict
their field of action to the things of sense and to win their successes there.
Quite a number of these, indeed, refuse to admit the existence of any objects
or values beyond this material field, open to exact measurement, and shut their
minds, on principle, against any divine illumination or extracorporeal
experience. The remaining category consists of those who subordinate temporal
things to the search for spiritual and eternal things. These are the ahi i
dil (men of heart), God's sincere and trusted friends. It is upon these
that He pours out gifts of the spirit, including mystical knowledge,
resignation and unbounded trust in God.
Men of this
kind are not long content to worship God blindly and undiscemingly. Their love
of God urges them to seek an increasingly intimate and delicate knowledge of
Him. Thus of *Ah (to whom Persian mystics trace back the living chain—(silsileh)—of
spiritual tradition) it was asked: ‘Do you see God?' and he replied: T do not
worship a God whom I do not see.’
This intimate,
infused knowledge of God, then, is not arrived at by any process of discursive
thought, by the elucidation of rational proofs. God’s beauty is rendered
visible to hearts that love Him by the diffusion in them of His own essential
light. In a well-known line of his Masnavi, Rumi says that the sun is
its own evidence. Aftab amad dalil i aftab. And so Nun, asked what is
the proof of God, replied: ‘God’ He added that ‘whenever the Lord conceals
Himself from someone, such a one is entirely deprived of proof or knowledge of
Him’. (Jtwm, Nafahat ul Uns.) If God (in the Surat an Nur[4])
is compared to the light in a lamp set in a niche, the niche, we must know, is
the believing and loving heart. From this source springs, not dry-as-dust
knowledge ('Um, science) but that intimate knowledge gained in contact
with a kindred spirit, a living personality. Hence it is called 'Um ladunni—knowledge
derived from the divine Presence Itself. This is Hal (mystical
experience), not qdl (hearsay), not ‘what my dad told me’ but ‘what my
Lord showed me’.
One who has
thus soared beyond the dust and reached the realm of undimmed sunlight can no
longer be said to walk by faith. So Rumi, in the first book of the Masnavi,
declares:
‘One whose mihrab (the prayer comer turned towards
Mecca) has become the divine essence itself
‘Would be
wrong to go plodding on in the way of faith.
‘One who has become the King’s Privy Chamberlain ‘Could only
lose by engaging in trade on the King’s behalf.’
In his Divan i Shams Tabriz the same poet asks:-
‘When the sun shines out, where is the dusk of doubt, or, for
the matter of that, where is the lamp of belief? Faith says: Come on, and doubt
says: Go back. But when the soul with undimmed radiance lights up the body, “forward”
and “backward” no longer make sense.’
To
have been granted the favour of this vision of God in the heart is an
incomparable blessing. San Saqati is quoted in the Kashf ul Maty fib
(Zhukovski’s edition, p. 137) as follows:
‘O my God, send me any torment or affliction you will, except
that of being deprived of the contemplation of Thy face, for when I behold Thy
beauty I am able to bear any suffering, whereas, when I am deprived of it, even
Thy kindnesses and mercies are hard for me to bear. The most painful torment of
hell is to be shut out from the sight of Thee. In Paradise no bliss is to be
compared with the revelation of Thy Face. To be veiled from Thee is no better
than rum and damnation. So (Sari continues) God’s way is to give His servant’s
heart the grace of beholding Him, whatever the vicissitudes through which his
soul is passing, in order that he may be able to endure all torments and trials
and penitential practices by reason of the sweetness of that delicious taste (shirty*
It
was told of Bayazid Bistami that, when asked how old he was, he replied: ‘Four
years.’ ‘How is that?’ ‘For seventy years I lived under the veil of this world.
For only four years I have been seeing Him. Those veiled years I do not count
as part of my life.’
Bayazid
also said: ‘So long as one knows it is God (that one is seeing), the revelation
is not entire. When it is entire, one can no longer reflect on it consciously.’
This state may
arise, says Hujvin[5]
either from the fulness of certainty (yaqin) or from the conquering
power of love. Thus when Muhammad ibn Wasi’ said: ‘I never saw anything
without seeing God in it’, it was from fulness of faith and certainty. When
Shibli said" ‘I saw nothing at all but God’, he was carried away by the
impetuosity of love, by the divine jazba or attraction.
NINE
Having now studied, all too briefly, the chief motives
of the §ufi quest and the chief heads of their doctrine, before bidding them
farewell, it would complete our knowledge of them to view them engaged upon two
of their favourite practices, one, distinctly serious, the ?ikr, the
other, apparently more frivolous, sama’.
I. ZIKR
It
is not easy to find a single English term for the word zikr. In itself
it means 'remembrance’. As used by the mystics, it denotes the devout
invocation and repetition of the holy Name of God, either alone or enshrined in
some formula
-
The zikr par excellence is the shahadeh, or, at any rate, that
part of which relates to God alone. ‘There is no god but God’—La ilaha tlla
'llah. This formula is often recited by the devout while they sway gently
from side to side.
A
number of religious confraternities [tariqas') have their own form of zikr,
constituting the service performed by the brethren, grouped together, often on
a Thursday evening (eve of the sacred day of Friday, shab i jum’a). A
may, however, and often is, gone through in private by single individuals.
The
words should be repeated a great many times, with as great a degree of intense
concentration as can be summoned up. Attention should be centred more and more
on the meaning or spiritual reality of what is said, until the zdktr
(remembrancer) is not so much busied with the zikr (remembrance) as with
the mazktir (the one invoked or remembered).
If
the Sufi masters attached so much importance to the practice of zikr, in
the sense explained, it was because they held it to be the best way to impress
the mind and to set „ up the conditions for the achievement of close attention
and. the concentration of the soul's powers on that which is the very purpose
of the mystical journey. This combmation of meditation and invocation produces
a climate of confidence and. certainty in the soul and prepares it for the
state of cdntemplation, which is the wayfarer’s goal and object." Ghazali,
in his Persian work, the Kmiyayi Sa'adat (‘Philosopher’s stone of
Happiness’), as well as m his great work m Arabic, the Ihya. 'Ulum ed Din,
enters into great detail as to the nature and the advantages of this practice.
The first degree in it, ‘Common Invocation’, even though it may amount simply
to the external invocation of the holy name, is of value, ‘since it denotes
that the state of carelessness and indifference has been set aside’. Indeed,
one who has dismissed carelessness (ghiflat) is already a zakir,
even if his tongue be silent.
A
higher degree comes when the zakir ‘tears off the veil of rdSSdtf and
with his whole heart fixes his attention on the Lbtd’. The highest degree of
all is that of the ?akir who becomes fam (lost) in truth—that is
God. At first the adept Has constantly to take pains lest his soul drift back
into its natural state of carelessness and inattention. But as he acquires
greater mastery, the zikr takes such a hold on him that it can with
difficulty be driven out by any other thought or fancy. The supreme degree,
however, comes when the one invoked takes possession of the heart, for, as
Ghazali says, there is a great difference between one who loves the invoked one
and one who loves the invocation. Perfection lies in this, that the invocation
and all consciousness of it vanish from the heart and Uewho is invoked
aloneremams there ^TEis, however, is not in the power of the disciple, however
earnestly he strives. It is a pure gift of grace to which he can do no more
than offer himself. That is no excuse for failing to do one’s part, for, as
Rumi says m the sixth Book of the Masnavi,
F
The root of the matter is a divine attraction and yet, dear
fellow,
'Do what you
can and do not put a stop to that attraction/
In another passage
of the Masnavi, book three, w. 180 and onwards, Rumi relates that God
most high told Moses: Call upon me with a mouth with which thou has not sinned.
Moses replied that he had not such a mouth. 'Call unto me then by the mouth of
others . . . Act in such wise that their mouths may pray for thee in the nights
and days/ The poet goes on; 'Praise of God is pure: when purity comes, defilement
packs up and goes out. When the holy name (the Persian word pak
signifies both pure and holy) comes into the mouth, neither impurity remains
nor any sorrow/
In the
subsequent passage, Rumi, as is his wont, lifts the whole subject of the zikr
onto a higher plane. It is headed, 'Showing that the supplicant’s invocation of
God is essentially the same thing as God’s reponse to him’.
'One night a
certain man was crying "Allah” till his lips were growing sweet with
praise of Him.
'The Devil
said, "Prithee, 0 garrulous one, where is the response 'Here am I’ to all
this 'Allah’?”
'Broken-hearted,
the man laid down his head to sleep. In a dream he saw Khadir (legendary figure
of a saint who stood also for the perfect spiritual director) amid the verdure.
'Khadir said
to him, "Hark, you have ceased praising God: how is it that you repent of
having called upon Him?”
'He replied,
"No 'Here am I’ (Ar. 'labbaika, the customary response of the
faithful when they hear the Muezzin’s call to prayer) comes to me in response,
so I fear lest I be a reprobate, turned away from His door.”
'Said Khadir,
"(God saith), That 'Allah’ of thine is my 'Here am I’, and that
supplication and grief and ardour of thine is my messenger to thee. . . .
Beneath every '0 Lord’ of thine is many a 'Here am I’ (from me)”/
The name of
some saint or of some beloved person may be so intimately and inseparably
linked with that of God in the mind and heart of an invoker that it may take
the place of the holy name itself. Thus we are told that Sheikh Abu’l Qasim
Gurgani invoked God under the name of the revered saint Oveis. Maulana Rumi
tells how Zuleikha called everything ‘Joseph’, in order thus to enjoy hearing
often the beloved name. The poet goes on: ‘The common people call constantly on
the holy name, when holy love is wanting, such action has little effect. When
the soul is united with Truth, to invoke one is to invoke the other. If Jesus
spoke of God as he did, that was because being empty of self, he was full of
love for the Friend. A jug can pour forth only what it contains.’
One of the
most valuable treasure-houses of Persian spiritual and mystical wisdom is the Mirsdd
ul ''Ibdd (The Broad Way of the Servants of God) of Sheikh Najmeddin Razi,
known as Daya. This work was completed at Sivas in Anatolia, whither the sheikh
had fled from the advancing and devastating Mongol invasion in 1223. His own
spiritual Director, Najmeddin Kubra, had penshed in the storming of Khwarazm
(the modem Khiva) by Jenghiz Khan in 1221. Jenghiz had heard of this remarkable
saint and thaumaturgus and offered him his life, but the sheikh refused to
ingratiate himself with the bloodstained tyrant and penshed with hundreds of
thousands of other victims. Najmeddin Daya himself died in a h. 654 (a.d. 1256).
It is devoutly
to be wished that some scholar would edit and translate the Mirsad: it
would be worth a dozen Western works on Persian mysticism, however
well-informed and well- intentioned.
The third part
of the work is concerned with the vanous elements contributing to the spiritual
development of man, in his psycho-physical nature: the Prophets (m the broad,
Islamic sense of the word), the Law, the spiritual discipline of the mystical
Way (Tariqat), including the function of the sheikh or spiritual guide,
the place of zikr, the need of solitude, the part played in man’s
perfection by supernatural revelations, visions and so forth, and, finally,
his attaining to union with God ‘without identification and without separation’.
It
is worth while studying in some detail what Daya has to teach the Moslem
disciple of the Path regarding the performance of the zikr, in the sense
we have already seen
As
is his wont, he begins by reference to the fundamental Qoramc texts relating to
the matter, such as ‘Remember me and I will remember you’ (Surat al Baqara)
and ‘Call God often to mind, that it may be well with you' (Surat al Jum’a).
Then he quotes the hadith (traditional saying) of the Prophet Mahomet.
‘The noblest zikr is La ilaha ilia’ llah (There is no god but God)/
He
then points out that zikr or remembrance centred on the repetition of
some devout formula, is opposed to msyan, forgetfulness. In the Surat
al Kahf[6]
we read: ‘Remember me when you have forgotten’—meaning, as Daya declares, ‘when
you have forgotten all else but Me’, since only thus will a man’s zikr
be pure. When, in remembering God, a man also remembers himself, the act is
tainted with virtual idolatry or duality When our mind is filled with the
remembrance of created things, it falls short of the pure remembrance of God
alone and, in the last resort, forgets God altogether, whereupon Almighty God
forgets us, lets us escape from the remembrance of His mercy. ‘They forgot God
and He forgot them’ (Surat at-Tawba).[7]
This spiritual disease is cured by its contrary. Hence, from the dispensary of
the Qoran He gave them this medicine: ‘Remember God often’, so that by
much remembrance they might be delivered from the films and incrustations of
great forgetfulness and from the affliction of that malady. (‘That you may
prosper.’)
Such
benefits accrue particularly from the use of La ilaha ilia’ llah which
is ‘the good utterance which rises to Him’ (Surat al Fahr)[8]
On the positive side its medicinal property is attributed to the Prophet’s
recommendation On the side of its essence and meaning, the value comes from its
contents: both negation (la ilaha, there is no god) and affirmation (illallah,—save
God alone). Thus, by inculcating the remembrance of God alone, the %ikr
is stripped of the clothing of letters and forms and in the glory of the light
of the sublime deity, the property of Kullu shayin hdhkun ilia,
wajhahu (All passes away except His face) is made manifest.
The human
spirit and its very remembrance is swallowed up in the ocean of ‘Remember me’
and by the power and grace of ‘I will remember you’, zikr, zakir and mazkur
(the remembrance, the one who remembers and the One remembered) are merged in
one, banishing all polytheism. Joseph Hussein Razi’s remark is here borne out,
that ‘None said God but God’. Daya then quotes a couplet:
'Hamstring the whole of creation with the knife of la
ilaha,
Tn order that the whole world may make room for the Prince of
Illd.’ lldh.’
The sheikh
then turns to what he calls the ‘nature, proper conditions and good manners’ of
the %ikr. In expounding this part of His theme he bases himself on two
Qoranic texts: ‘The Lord said: Remember God as you do your own parents, or even
more vividly’ [Surat al Baqara) and again: ‘Remember your Lord in
yourself with compunction and awe’ [Surat Al 'Imran).
Hence a
fervent disciple must found his practice of zikr on a sincere repentance
for all his sms, betokened, if possible, by a ritual bath or at least the
complete ablutions (wu?u’) .. . Let him put on clean clothes, true
cleanliness consisting of freedom from dirt, from injustice, from any
prohibition (e.g. clothes of silk) and from extravagance—i.e. they should be
not flowing but brief.
Having
prepared a room which is empty, dark and clean, m which he will, for
preference, bum some sweet-scented incense, let him sit there, cross-legged,
facing the qibla (direction of Mekka). Laying his hands on his thighs,
let him stir up his heart to wakefulness, keeping a guard on his eyes. Then
with profound veneration he should say aloud La ilaha ilia’ lldh. The la
ilaha should be fetched from the root of the navel and the ilia lldh
drawn into the heart, so that the powerful effects of the zikr may make
themselves felt in all the limbs and organs. But let him not raise his voice
too loud. He should strive, as far as possible, to damp and lower it, according
to the words ‘Invoke thy Lord in thyself humbly and with compunction, without
publicity of speech’ {Surat al A ’raf).
After
this fashion, then, he will utter the zikr frequently and intently, thinking
in his heart on the meaning of it and banishing every distraction. When he
thinks of la ilaha, he should tell himself: I want nothing, seek
nothing, love nothing ilia’ llah—but God. Thus, with la ilaha he
denies and excludes all competing objects and with ilia’ llah he affirms
and posits the divine Majesty as the sole object loved, sought and aimed at.
In
each zikr his heart should be aware and present {hazir) from
start to finish, with denial and affirmation If he finds in his heart something
to which he is attached, let him not regard it but give his attention to the
divine Majesty, seeking the grace of help from the holy patronage of his
spiritual Father. With the negation la ilaha let him wipe out that
attachment, uprooting the love of that thing from his heart, and with ilia’
llah let him set up m its place the love of Truth (God). By perseverance
and assiduity in this practice he will slowly but surely wean his heart from
all (created) loves and affections.
You
should know, says Daya, that the heart (or soul) is the secret presence-chamber
of God, since {hadith): ‘My earth cannot contain me nor my heaven. Only
the heart of my believing servant can contain me’, and as long as the throng of
Others is found in the Audience Chamber of the heart, His Majesty will not
appear. Only when the Sergeant at Anns of la ilaha clears the Presence
Chamber of this throng of others can we expect the glory of King IllaUdh
to draw nigh.
‘Clean
the place out, the King will come unawares.
‘Only
when it is empty does the King enter His pavilion.’
Daya
then explains the importance of learning the zikr from the teaching and
example of a perfect spiritual teacher. He begins by distinguishing between two
kinds of zikr: taqlidi and tahqiqi—that is, one that is simply
repetition and one that is charged with original investigation or exploration.
It is, of course, this second type of zikr that the Master desires. It
falls into the prepared soil of a disciple's heart through the action and
inspiration of a holy teacher, a fruit of his holy intimacy {ms) with
God, just as the master himself received the sacred deposit from another saint
and fostered it m his heart under the ram and sunshine of his Father's
blessing, so that it grew in its turn into a tree of holiness, bringing forth
the fruits of invocation from the blossoms of T will remember you'. Then, in
the perfect ripeness of the rank of master (sheikh), he sowed a seed in the
soil of the disciple's heart. Constantly cultivated, it grows day by day, till
great branches shoot forth and the tree of mystical knowledge is reared.
Before the
inauguration of his training, the disciple should fast for three days, during
which time he should strive to be always purified by ablution and constantly
occupied in devout ejaculations, even when moving about. He should mix little
with men and speak only as much as is strictly necessary. He should be very
sparing at table and watch longer hours in prayer and silent intercession by
night. After those three days, under the Sheikh’s directions, let him take a
ritual bath, formmg the intention of undergoing the baptism of Islam, just as
happened to each one in the beginning, when he first sought religion: I mean
that first of all he received the baptism of Islam and then learnt the lesson
of the word {La ilaha, etc.) from the master so now he should take the
baptism of Islam in its spiritual reality. As the water is poured over him, let
him say: Oh Lord, I have taken this outward cleansing with water. With the
regard of Thy grace and mercy do Thou purify my heart which is the scene of Thy
operation.
When the bath
is finished, after night prayers, he should present himself to the sheikh who
will set him facing the qibla while he himself remains with his back to
the qibla. He will sit kneeling at the sheikh's service, hands folded,
heart alert. The sheikh gives him some appropriate exhortation and says a few
words as to the secrets of the zikr and the method of inculcating it, so
that the disciple may become sufficiently recollected. The latter, withdrawing
his heart from all else, keeps it facing the sheikh’s heart, in a gesture of
deep yearning and unbounded expectation. Then the sheikh says once, in a loud,
strong voice, La ilaha ilia’ lldh. The novice then says, La ilaha,
etc. in the same tone and voice as the sheikh. Then twice more in the same way.
Finally the sheikh pronounces a blessing to which the novice answers Amen. He
then goes back to his hermitage and sitting there cross-legged, facing the qibla,
he starts fostering the seed of zikr.
The word (La
ilaha, etc.) is ‘like a good tree, whose roots are firm and whose branches
reach out to heaven’ (Qoran, Surat Ibrahim'). The learner should
therefore strive to bring it about that the roots of this mystical tree should reach
all his limbs and every particle of his being. When the zikr has been
thus firmly rooted in the soil of the soul, it begins to draw the heart upwards
towards heaven. In this phase, the heart (i.e. soul) takes up the zikr
from the tongue. When the heart begins to recite, the tongue should stop. When
the heart stops, the tongue must go to it. Thus the zikr develops and
pushes upwards to the heights until it reaches its perfection and its end,
which is in the presence of the divine Majesty, for ‘unto Him rises the good
word’ (Sura of the Angels).
When the tree
reaches the fullness of perfection, the blossoms of contemplation appear on
the tips of the branches and from these gradually emerge the fruits of
revelations and supernatural visions. One of these fruits is the station of
unity (tawhid). This is a great secret, containing the purpose of
creation and the sum of the secrets of the world invisible.
I have
translated these sections of the Mirsad in full, omitting only a few
needless longueurs and repetitions, in order that the reader may have
before him an example of a $ufi instruction, unaltered and without modification
of any kind. In them we can see the devout Moslem, faithful to scriptural
tradition—which, indeed he interprets at times with the latitude of a Sufi
mystic concerned as much with the seventy-seven inner meanings as with the
literal sense— and to the traditional practice of the Tariqa, with its
somewhat naif realism, while ready, at any moment, to let himself be carried
off by the gales of lyrical fervour. In Daya we have a good example of the
prudent and responsible middle way, which, on the whole, constitutes the solid
framework of the Sufi mystical system.
2. SAMA1 (AUDITION)
The
other method much favoured by the §ufis, m the wake of the great ecstatic Jalal
ed Din Rumi, with a view to encouraging and reinforcing ecstasy and trance, is
known as sama', literally ‘listening* or audition.
It
must be remembered that all Persian poetry, the mystical sort not least, is
intended to be chanted, either to a regular tune or in free musical
improvisation. Each type of poem has its own appropriate chant. The best
performers combine a formal chant with occasional outbursts of improvisation.
The best known chant of this kind, as might have been expected, is that to
which the Masnavi of Maulana Rumi is sung. The Persians are very
sensitive to the influence of music and song. The strict Arabic Moslems of the
primitive school are, on the contrary, rather puritanical m this respect and
frown upon music, song and dance, which are never inculcated in the Qoran.
When the Sufis began to introduce mystical concerts and dances into their
regime they were roundly reproached and condemned by the old orthodox school.
This did not stop them. Rumi and his followers gave themselves up without
compunction to the ecstasy caused
AW ?■»«*** * *
oy
the sama (audition) of instrumental music or of songs which, on the face
of it* often expressed profane love. Dancing was also pressed into the service
of the mystical spirit. Rumi composed some of his most wonderful lyrics and
couplets while gyrating endlessly round a column in his convent (khanegah). Indeed
the principal zikr of the Order of Mevlevi dervishes which he founded
may be said to have consisted in the planetary round where the brethren, in a
white-robed circle, recited the zikr in a form which became more and
more simplified, as they swayed up and down, awaiting the entrance of the chief
performer who spun round, arms extended, in their midst for an incredibly long
time. This figure is thought to have represented the solar system and recalled,
perhaps, the deep-rooted mystical belief in the music of the spheres, of which
earthly music and rhythm are ecstasy-causing reminders {anamnesis}.
To the
Christian—or perhaps, rather to the Westerner— such practices may well appear
extravagant and dangerous. The Sufis themselves were not unaware of this
possible danger * and pointed out that the scma' bore good fruit only
with those * who appxoadieijt in Jthe right dispositions. But it may
welP be that the use of music and song m the Christian liturgy itself was
originally intended to induce a sort of religious enthusiasm or ecstasy Rightly
listened to, the liturgical chant would set up a tendency to trance. We can see
something similar in the life of St Theresa—the fact that she was a Spaniard
may not be altogether unconnected with it. Frequently she passed into ecstasy
when one of her daughters sang in recreation an impassioned mystical love-song
to Jesus.
The Sufis held
that the continuous, steady rhythms of music had the effect of disposing the
soul for contemplation, whereas violent and discordant noises have the opposite
effect. In his monograph on music, Avicenna declares that 'all the old tunes of
Khorasan and Persia are m continuous rhythms, which help to regularise and
pacify the soul’. Music, in fact, like any other manifestation of beauty, has
the effect of leading the soul up to, and plunging it in the source of beauty.
Conversely, one who is habitually drawn to God {majzub) hears His lauds
and praises in every lovely melody. The true mystic, however, passes rapidly
through the 'heard melodies’ to 'those unheard’. Outward forms fade from his
consciousness and his soul becomes absorbed in the inner meaning and reality of
that which is hinted at by outward signs. To be glued to the outward forms
would be unworthy of him and, indeed, the consummate mystic has no further use
for such crutches. Still, the unity of the human system is such that every
spiritual state, however profoundly seated, tends to translate itself m bodily
forms of expression, in song or dance. The awkward dichotomy of the
self-conscious Westener is unknown to the complete, emancipated §ufi. Similar
outbursts of mystical exultation and jubilation have been recorded in the lives
of a number of Christian Saints. There is no need to suppose that all high
mystical states immobilize the body. Did not the Psalmist sing' ‘My heart and
my flesh have exulted in the living God’? It could not be otherwise
for thoSe who have the ‘hearing ear’, for those who, in the words of Mullah
Hadi Sabzevari, ‘have, like Moses, an ear that discerns mysteries’. These are
moved to ecstatic yearning and desire, not merely by the chant of the Qoran
or the call of the Muezzin, but by the song of a peasant wafted across the
fields, by the wailing of the violin or the song of birds: all can be, are
destined to be, hatifu’l ghaib, a messenger from the invisible world.
On this
account—because music is a ‘burnisher of the soul’ and brings it into a^state
of equilibrium, clarity, tenderness and delicacy, thus contributing to its
perfection, all the $ufis, with the exception of a few jejune and narrow-minded
sects, like the Naqshbandis, followers of Baha edDm Naqsh- band of Bukhara,
give themselves up without compunction to these sacred concerts.
Maulana Rumi,
in the fourth book of the Masnavi, singing of Ibrahim son of Adham, who
abandoned his kingdom of Khorasan in order to devote himself to heavenly
experience, says (m Professor Nicholson’s translation):
‘His object in listening to the sound of the rebeck was, like
that of ardent lovers of God, to bring to his mind the phantasy of that divine
allocution. . . . Hence philosophers have said that we received these
harmonies from the revolution of the celestial sphere. But true believers say
that the influences of Paradise made every unpleasant sound to be beautiful
‘We have all been parts of Adam, we have heard those melodies
in Paradise.
‘Although the water and earth of our bodies have caused a
doubt to fall upon us, something of those melodies comes back to our memory
‘Therefore sama' (music) is the food of lovers (of
God), since therein is the phantasy of composure the fire of love is kindled by
melodies?
In the same
strain, Sheikh Sa’ad edDin Hamavi, one of the companions of Najmeddin Kubra,
and himself a notable mystic of the seventh century of the hi^ra, wrote these
lines:
'When music is heard, the soul scents the perfume of the
Beloved; melody, like a mystic barque, transports it to the shores of the
Friend.’
The' following
story, related in the life of Abu Said of Milina, composed by Muhammad b
Munavvar, throws an amusing light upon the diversity of views prevailing here
and there in the Muslim world as to the lawfulness or otherwise of music and
song It relates that, wh^n the sheikh was at Qain, a notable Imam of that
place, the Imam Muhammad Qaini, came to greet him and thenceforward became his
constant companion and admirer, going with him even to exercises of mystical
song. On one of these occasions our sheikh passed into a state of ecstasy which
communicated itself to the entire company. The time was passing pleasantly thus
when the Muezzin’s call for the midday prayer made itself heard. The sheikh and
his followers continued their ecstatic dance, interspersed with shouts and
groans. In the midst of all this, the Imam Muhammad called out: ‘Prayers,
prayers!’ To this the sheikh replied: ‘We are at prayer!’ and went on
dancing. The Imam left them and went off to perform his ritual devotions like a
good Moslem.
A further
reason for the Sufis’ devotion to music and song lay in this, that their
outlook on life was fundamentally one of open-hearted joy and exultation, so
impetuous as to surge over the dark barrier of death. Sheikh Salah-eddin
Zarkub, the successor of Jalalu’ ddin Rumi as head of the Mevlevi Order, laid
it down m his will that there should be no mourning at his funeral, but that,
since he had been delivered from this world’s house of gnef, and had been
admitted to the joy of eternal life, he should be committed to the earth with
music and song, ‘so that’ (as Sultan Walad, Rumi’s son, put it m a poem):
‘So that men
may know that God’s chosen ones
‘Go out to the
meeting with joy and laughter.
‘Their death
is a festival of repicing,
'Their
dwelling is ajnid the houris in Paradise.’
And
so it was done.
A
sound, middle-of-the-way view of the effects of ‘audition’ is expressed by the
poet Saadi in the following verses:
‘I
will not say, my brother, what sama' is
‘Before
I know who the listener is.
‘If the bird has flown from the dove-cote of meaning, ‘Even
an angel will fall short of its achievement.
‘If the listener is a frivolous and flippant man,
‘The devil in his bAin is but strengthened by it.
‘Flowers are scattered by the morning breeze,
‘Wood no: the axe alone can split that.’
In
another passage the same poet justifies the Sufi dance in the following way.
‘Do
not blame the bewildered dervish:
‘If he waves his hands and feet, the reason is that he is
drowning . . .
‘The dance opens a door in the soul to divine influences,
‘It spreads wide the hands to all things created.
‘The dance is good when it arises from remembrance of the
Beloved.
‘Then each waving sleeve has a soul in it.
‘If you set out bravely to swim,
* You can best shake arms and legs when divested of clothing;
'Strip off the robes of earthly honour and of hypocrisy:
'A drowning man is hampered by his clothes?
References
to 'doffing' or 'tearing up' one's robe or dervish’s habit (muraqqa' or khirqa)—as
in the last two verses of Saadi’s poem, just quoted—are frequent in Sufi
literature and describe the custom of many dervishes, who, when beside
themselves with mystical effervescence, threw their habit, or scraps of it, to
the singers or to others who might be present, these shreds and tatters being
then looked upon as precious relics. Such practices, at least in a metaphorical
sense, were, of course, dear to the heart of Hafiz of Shiraz.
The
importance attached by many Stiffs to music and the dance has some relation to
their cult of beauty. Since all earthly beauty is a revelation and a symbol of
the heavenly beauty which is its cause and exemplar, to pay due court to it
must help men to pass over to spiritual and absolute beauty and perfection*
'The allegorical is the bridge to the reality.’ Leaders along this way were men
like Ahmad Ghazzali, brother of the famous theologian, Fakhreddm 'Iraqi and
Awhadeddm Kermani. For them the love of beauty is the chief guide on the way of
perfection. * They held that our nature makes it impossible for us to reach the
formless beauty save through created forms, which, in accordance with their
habit of defying Pharisees and Philistines, they often refer to as 'idols’ (but
an). The homage paid to an 'idol’ is, m reality, directed to the One it
represents and symbolizes. Kermani:
'If
my bodily eye gazes on created forms of beauty,
'That is because outward forms bear the impress of the inner
meaning.
'We live in a world of forms and images
'And we cannot behold realities otherwise than through images
and forms.’
This
view was at the origin of the specialized meaning of the word shahid. It
has come to mean 'beloved' or 'charmer' because a lovely being was considered
to be a 'witness’ of tjie divine beauty.
Unregenerate
nature, however, needs a great deal of ascetic and moral training before the
mind can safely find its way through physical beauty to the divine. This
entrancing vision, as the Beatitudes remind us, is reserved for the pure in
heart.
INDEX
Abu Hashim, 25
AbU’l Khair Aqta’, 81 •
Abti Sa’idibn Abi’l
Khayr, 14, 33, 80, 100
Aba Sa’id Kharraz, 80
Alexander, 72
’Aliibn Abi Talib, 85
Ansari, 'Abdullah, 62
Arberry, A. J , 15
Asin Palacios, Don Miguel, 16
Ataturk, K., 19
'Attar, Fariduddin, 13, 14, 37, 61,
80, 83, 84
Augustine, St, 40
Avicenna, 98
Awhadeddin Kermam, 102
Babai the Great, 22
Baptism of Islam, 95
Basrah, 25
Bayazid Bistami, 20, 39,
48, 49, 60, 80, 86
Bishr Hafi, 40
Browne, E G., 14
Buddhism, 23, 24
Buhlfil, 53, 54
Caliphate (Abbasid), 20
Catharine of Siena, 34
Centuries, The, 22
Cloud of Unknowing, 34
Church (Persian), 12, 22
Council, Ecumenical, 17
Dante Alighieri, 17
Daram, 41
Dermenghen, E, 20
Dionisius Pseudo-Areopagita, 63
Divina Commedia, 17
Diwan of Sana’i, 41
Diwan i Shamsi Tabriz, 14
Duchesne, 12
Evagrius Ponticus, 22
Fakhru’ddm Iraqi, 102
Fihi ma fihi, 69
al-Ghazah, 26, 48
Ghazali, Ahmad, 102
Goethe, 14
Gulshan 1 Raz, 26, 28
Hadiqa of Sanai,
Hafiz Shirazi, 11, 13,
28, 29, 31, 40* 42, 46, 63, 73, 76
al-Hallaj, 14, 20, 48, 77
Hanbal, 49
Hasan of Basrah, 25
Herder, 14
Hilton, Walter, 76
Hujwiri, 13, 52, 87
Ibn 'Abbadu’llah, 16
Ibnu’l Jauzi, 34
Ibn Wasi, 79
Ibrahim ibn Adham, 24
Ibrahim Khawwas, 48
Ijtihad, 27
Ikeda, Sakae, 12
Ishraqi, 12
Jamshid, 72
Jami, 13, 43, 44
Jesns, 23, 91
Jenghiz Khan, 91
John, St, 23
Joseph, 30
Jones, Sir W, 14
Juan de Segovia, 16
Junayd, 33, 56, 57, 78, 82
Jurjani, 55, 56
Kazimzadeh, 14
Ketman, 29
Khafif, 57
Khairu'nnassaj, 82
Khirqa’, 19
Khorasan, 24
Kufa, 25
Lahiji, 22, 26
Layla and Majntin, 30
Maghnbi, 13, 79
Mahayana, 12, 24
Mani, 24
Mansur (vide Hallaj),
Ma’nfat, 10
Masnavi, 45, 46, 50, 53, 58, 65
Massignon, L , n, 15
Mirsadu’l *Ibad, 21, 91
Muhammad, 18, 21, 36 al-Muhasibi, 52
Nafahatu’l Uns, 43, 44,
85
Najmu’ddm Razi, 13, 21,
91
Naqshbandi, 99
Neoplatonists, 63
Nicholson, R, 14
Ni’matullahis, 28
Nuri, 33, 85
Nur Mu^ammadi, 11
Origen, 22
Pir u Murshid, 25
Plotinus, 21, 24
Qaim, Imam Muhammad, 100
Qor’an, 21 et passim
Rabi’a, 25
Riza Khan Pahlevi, 19
Ruckert, 14
Rumi, Maulana, 13, 28,
40, 43, 53, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 79, 80, 85^86, 90, 99» 100
Sabzevan, 99
Salman Farsi, n
Sana’i 14, 41
Sa’di, 101, 102
Sa’du’ddin Hamavi, 100
San Saqati, 86
al-Sarra], Abu Nasr, 13, 32, 56, 58
Shabistan, 14
Shaqiq, 49
Shi’a, 27
Suhravardi, 12, 34
Sultan Walad, 101
Tazkiratu’l Awliya, 15, 33
Ta’nfat, 55, 56
Thomas Aquinas, St, 40
Zarkub Salahu’ddm, 101
Zoroaster, 24
Zuleikha, 30
[1] Asaph was the Vizir of King Solomon
[2] Ta'rifat, Cairo edition, p. 36.
[3] ‘mahabba’:
the ‘hal’, or mystical state, of love Love, consummated in vision or in
union, as it is the final goal of the wayfarer, is likewise the propelling and
sustaining power of his life and journey. To that extent, all other stages are
but preludes or consequences and effects of Love.
For the §ufi God is the
one beloved, the Jlnfri, the supremely beautiful and desirable object of
the Soul’s passionate love, as it staves with unutterable longing to reach Him
and lose itself in Him. In reality, it is the supreme beloved who draws the
soul towards Himself with compulsive magnetism, whether by His own incomparable
love or by His scarcely concealed beauty {Jamal}.
1 Mafnam, Book 3, verses
4510-4515.
[4] Sura 24 of Qoran.
[5] Op. cit., p. 47.
[6] Sura 18 of
Qordn
[7] Sura 9 of Qordn
[8] Sura 35, v io
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