WHAT IS SUFISM?
First-Hand Western Accounts from the 1700s to the Early 1900s
What Is Sufism?
First-Hand Western Accounts from the 1700s to the Early 1900s
Between the 1700s and the early 1900s, a small number of Western scholars made their way into the interior of the Islamic world. Not as conquerors. Not as missionaries. As students.
They learned Arabic and Persian. They sat with teachers in cities that most Europeans had never seen. They read manuscripts that had not yet been translated into any Western language. And when they finally wrote about what they found, they wrote with an awe that is difficult to fake.
What they encountered was Sufism. And what they left behind are some of the clearest, most alive descriptions of Islamic mysticism ever recorded in the English language.
Most of it has been forgotten. The books are out of print. The men who wrote them are names in footnotes, if they appear at all.
This is their testimony.
Prologue
Margaret Smith
First woman to receive an Oxford doctorate in Oriental Studies
Before the Western scholars speak, it is worth hearing from the woman who spent her life assembling their testimony.
Margaret Smith was the first woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Oxford in Oriental Studies. Her two anthologies — The Sufi Path of Love and Readings from the Mystics of Islam — remain among the most careful and comprehensive collections of Western writing on Islamic mysticism ever published.
Mysticism is to be found as a vital element in many religious faiths and especially in the early religions of the East — in the Vedic literature, in the Buddhism of India and China, in Judaism, in Greece, in Christianity, and also in Islam, where it established itself at an early date and made itself felt in all Islamic countries, especially Egypt, Persia, Turkey and India.
Margaret Smith — Readings from the Mystics of Islam, Luzac & Co., London, 1950
This mysticism had its rise in a revolt of the soul, in those who were really spiritually minded, against formality in religion and also against indifference to religion. And further it was affected by the feeling that it is possible to establish a direct relation with God, Who is not to be regarded as a distant and All-Powerful Ruler of the destinies of mankind, but as a Friend and the Beloved of the soul. The mystics have desired to know God, so that they may love Him, and they have held that the soul can receive a revelation of God, by a direct religious experience — not through the senses or the intellect — and, by this means, enter into fellowship with Him.
Margaret Smith
They hold that if man can have this experience, there must be in him a share of the Divine Nature, that the soul is made to mirror the Splendour of God, and all things have a part in the Divine life. But the mystics all teach that no soul can have this direct experience of God, except by purification from self. The cleansing of the soul from self-love and from sensuality is essential for those who would attain to the Divine Wisdom and the Vision of God. For the perfection of Eternal Life, which they hold can be attained to here and now, is to see God in His Essence. Self can only be conquered by means of a greater love than self-love — and so the mystics have been the lovers of God, seeking the consummation of their love in Union with the Beloved.
Margaret Smith
Mysticism is not, however, theoretical but practical, teaching a Way of Life, to be followed by all who would win through to the goal. And this way is to be found following the same pattern, in East and West. There must first be the conversion of the mystic and discipline to get rid of the desires of the self, which will bring the external life into the form fitted for the seeker after God. After that comes the discipline of the inner life, bringing the thoughts and feeling and will into harmony with the eternal Will of God and making the mystic able to receive the Divine illumination. The soul is now able to attain to the life in God, that unitive state in which the soul shares, here and now, in eternal life.
Margaret Smith
The Sufis — the name being taken from the garments of white wool, suf, worn by the earliest ascetics — were those who devoted themselves to the life of self-renunciation, living in poverty and giving their time to prayer and meditation, who called themselves the friends of God, awliya allah, of whom a tradition says: Verily, the friends of God fear nothing and grieve for nothing. For they look upon the inner reality of this world, while other men look upon its outward appearance. Also they look forward to the end of this world, while others look to the immediate present here. They destroy in it what they fear may destroy them, and abandon what they know will abandon them. They are hostile to those things with which other men make peace, and bless the things which other men hate. To them, knowledge is guidance, by which they themselves gain knowledge. They do not put faith except in that for which they hope, nor fear anything except that which should be avoided.
Margaret Smith
The early Sufis were chiefly content with a way of Life, by which the carnal self, nafs, could be purified from its sins and weakness and the soul could enter on the path which led to God. On this path were certain stages, in which the soul could acquire qualities which would lead it onwards and upwards to yet higher stages. These stages and stations, with their resultant qualities, included repentance, tawba, patience, sabr, gratitude, shukr, hope, raja, and fear, khawf, poverty, faqr, asceticism or renunciation, zuhd, the merging of the personal will with the Will of God, tawhid, dependence on and trust in God, tawakkul, love, mahabba — including longing for God, shawq, fellowship with Him, uns, and satisfaction with all He desires, rida.
Margaret Smith
Of Love the Sufis have much to say — it is the wine of life, it leads to the ecstasy found in the immediate experience of God. This is pure love, free from all interested motive. One of these lovers was asked whence he came and whither he was going, and answered that he came from the Beloved and was going to Him. Asked what he sought, he said that he sought to meet with the Beloved. His food and drink were the remembrance of the Beloved and longing for Him. When they asked him wherewith he was clothed, he replied that it was with the veil of the Beloved and that his countenance was pale because of separation from Him. When at last, in impatience, his questioners asked him how long he was going to speak of the Beloved, the Beloved — he replied that he would so speak until he saw the Face of the Beloved.
Margaret Smith
These stages on the way led to the knowledge of God, gnosis, ma’rifa, His gift which enables the mystic to contemplate Him, to attain the achievement, tamkin, of the goal sought and to pass into the unitive life with Him, which is the end of the Path — the passing away of mortality, fana, and the entrance into immortality, baqa.
Margaret Smith
Towards the end of the ninth century of the Christian era and the beginning of the tenth, pantheistic ideas begin to appear in Sufism, of a spiritualistic type. These pantheistic mystics held that God, the One Reality, dwelling in solitude, desired to share His Reality with others, to manifest His Beauty to those whom He created. And this led to the doctrine of the Divine universality and of an absolute Unity, which maintained that the glory of God is to be found in all things, but in varying degrees. So the One Reality, God, was believed to dwell and manifest itself everywhere and not least in the human soul, while this world was held to be but the mirror in which True Being was reflected.
Margaret Smith
Music and song were used by the Sufis as a means of stirring up religious feeling and much of the purest and most typical teaching of Sufism is to be found in mystical poetry. Much of this is symbolical and expressed sometimes in sensuous form, as the best means of interpreting mystical experience. Love, in its effects, is compared to wine. While God is the Supreme Beauty, the ultimate Object of all true love, earthly love may be used as a type of the Divine love.
Margaret Smith
Because, to the Sufis, love was the real essence of all religion, most of them — but especially the later Sufis — were universalists, admitting all faiths to contain something of the truth and all worshippers, who were lovers of God, to be striving towards the same goal.
Margaret Smith
Sufism, therefore, came to be a school for saints. And the saint, in nearly every case, became a teacher and spiritual guide to a small or a large group of disciples. This led on to the formation of the great religious orders of Islam, which claimed as their founders the great Sufi saints — some of whom, like the saints of other faiths, were not only possessed of great spiritual gifts, but also of practical ability in administration and power in human affairs.
Margaret Smith
The Sufis have included many types of character, from the simple unlettered saint who had had no teacher, to the distinguished scholar with the best education of the day, who had travelled widely and come into contact with all those who could help him in the task of understanding Sufism — who in the end found that it was a matter of personal experience. All found alike that the soul must search after God, and the search, after the way had been traversed with patience and humility and always with the surrender of the soul to the Divine guidance, would lead to the attainment of the end sought — the life in God.
Margaret Smith
I. The Nature of God
Sir William Jones, 1746–1794
Orientalist, judge, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta in 1783 as a judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal. But his real work was elsewhere. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal the following year and spent his remaining decade learning Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian simultaneously, while producing the first scholarly comparison of the Indo-European language family. He died at forty-seven, still at his desk.
His observations on Sufism were made first-hand, among living practitioners, at a time when almost no Western scholarship on the subject existed.
The fundamental tenets of the Sufis are that nothing exists absolutely but God — that the human soul is an emanation from His essence, and though divided for a time from its heavenly source, will be finally reunited with it. That the highest possible happiness will arise from its reunion, and that the chief good of mankind in this transitory world consists in as perfect a union with the Eternal Spirit as the encumbrances of a mortal frame will allow. That for this purpose they should break all connection with extrinsic objects, and pass through life without attachments, as a swimmer in the ocean strikes freely without the impediment of clothes. That they should be straight and free as the cypress, whose fruit is hardly perceptible, and not sink under a load like fruit-trees attached to a trellis. That, if merely earthly charms have power to influence the soul, the idea of celestial beauty must overwhelm it in ecstatic delight. That, for want of apt words to express the divine perfections and the ardour of devotion, we must borrow such expressions as approach the nearest to our ideas, and speak of beauty and love in a transcendent and mystical sense. That, like a reed torn from its native brook, like wax separated from its delicious honey, the soul of man bewails its disunion with melancholy music, and sheds burning tears like the lighted taper, waiting passionately for the moment of its extinction, as a disengagement from earthly trammels, and the means of returning to its only beloved.
Sir William Jones — Works, Vol. IV, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1784
The Sufis concur in believing that the souls of men differ infinitely in degree, but not at all in kind, from the Divine Spirit, of which they are particles, and in which they will ultimately be absorbed. That the Spirit of God pervades the universe, always immediately present to His work — and consequently that He alone is always in substance, perfect Benevolence, perfect Truth, perfect Beauty. That the love of Him alone is real and genuine love, while that of all other objects is always absurd and illusory. That the beauties of Nature are faint resemblances, like images in a mirror, of the Divine charms. That from Eternity without beginning to Eternity without end the Supreme Benevolence is occupied in bestowing happiness or the means of attaining it. That men can only attain it by performing their part of the Primal Covenant between themselves and the Creator. That nothing has a pure, absolute existence but Mind and Spirit. That material substances, as the ignorant call them, are no more than gay pictures presented continually to our minds by the Sempiternal Artist. That we must beware of attachment to such phantoms and attach ourselves exclusively to God, Who truly exists in us, as we exist solely in Him. That we retain even in this forlorn state of separation from our Beloved, the idea of heavenly beauty, and the remembrance of our primeval vows. That sweet music, gentle breezes, fragrant flowers, perpetually renew the primary idea, refresh our fading memory and melt us with tender affections. That we must cherish those affections, and by abstracting our souls from vanity — that is, from all but God — approximate to His essence, in our final union with which will consist our supreme beatitude.
Sir William Jones
The Sufis suppose, with great sublimity both of thought and diction, an express contract, on the day of eternity without beginning, between the assemblage of created spirits and the supreme soul from which they were detached — when a celestial voice pronounced these words, addressed to each spirit separately: ‘Art thou not with thy Lord?’ And all the spirits answered with one voice: ‘Yes.’
Sir William Jones
The reed from its reed-bed. Jones is describing the opening image of Rumi’s Masnavi — writing from Bengal in 1784, forty years before any translation of that poem would reach Europe.
II. The World as Mirror
E. G. Browne, 1862–1926 & E. J. W. Gibb, 1857–1901
Persian scholar, Cambridge — Ottoman literary historian
Edward Granville Browne spent a year in Persia in 1887 and 1888, travelling by mule, sleeping in caravanserais, sitting with dervishes, learning the language from the street and the tekke. His four-volume Literary History of Persia remains a monument of Western Islamic scholarship.
The most probable derivation of the name is from suf, wool — according to which the Sufis received their name from the coarse woollen raiment worn by them as a symbol of their disregard of earthly pleasures and their renunciation of wealth and luxury.
E. G. Browne — A Literary History of Persia, Cambridge University Press, 1902
True Sufism, though as a rule associated with an outward profession of Islam, regards all religions as more or less perfect or imperfect shadowings forth of the great central truth which it seeks fully to comprehend — and consequently recognises all of them as good in proportion to the measure of truth which they contain.
E. G. Browne
The Sufi regards God as identical with Pure Being. Sufism is an idealist pantheism. To the Sufi everything speaks of God. There is nothing that does not celebrate His praise. He is everywhere and in everything — and hidden only because so evident.
E. G. Browne
The phenomenal world is the reflection of God in the mirror of Not-Being. So long as man is held captive by the illusion of self, he inevitably suffers from unsatisfied desire and unquenchable craving. He is a compound of the Real and the Unreal, the Good and Not-Good, the Light and the Darkness. If he looks away from God, what does he see? A dark shadow of unreality cast by himself, which dark shadow he takes for his true self. Let him learn the truth and look upward to the One. What does he then behold? The Light and nothing but the Light, the Good and nothing but the Good. God and nothing but God. This is the supreme happiness, the ultimate goal, the beatific vision. This, in a word, is Annihilation in God. The drop is merged in the Ocean. The pilgrim has reached the Shrine. The lover is united to the Beloved. Has he ceased to exist? No — he is one with Being. All that he ever was he is, and far more than that. All that he ever had he has, and infinitely more. But what he has and what he is, tongue cannot say, nor ear hear.
E. G. Browne
The Sufis say: God alone is, and we are but the waves which stir for a moment on the surface of the Ocean of Being. Shall we say that God’s creation is co-existent with Him? Then are we dualists, nay polytheists — for we associate the creature with the Creator. Can we say that the sun of Being was increased at the time when the Phenomenal World first appeared? Assuredly not — for that would be to regard the Being of God as a thing finite and conditioned, because capable of enlargement and expansion. What then can we say, except that even as God — Who alone is endowed with real existence — was in the Beginning and will be in the End, alone in His Infinite Splendour, so also, even now, He alone is, and all else is but as a vision which disturbs the night, a cloud which dims the Sun, or a ripple on the bosom of the Ocean.
E. G. Browne
To the metaphysical conception of God as Pure Being, and the ethical conception of God as the Eternally Holy, the Sufi superadds another conception which may be regarded as the keynote of all Mysticism. To him, above all else, God is the Eternally Beautiful — Janan-i-Haqiqi, the True Beloved. The renunciation of self is the great lesson to be learned. We love our fellow creatures because there is in them something of the Divine, some dim reflection of the True Beloved, reminding our souls of their origin, home, destination. From the love of the reflection we pass to the love of the light which casts it. And, loving the Light, we at length become one with It, losing the false self and gaining the True — therein attaining at length to happiness and rest, and becoming one with all that we have loved.
E. G. Browne
Edward John Wilkinson Gibb died at forty-three, leaving his six-volume History of Ottoman Poetry unfinished. He had spent his short adult life learning Ottoman Turkish to a depth no Western scholar of his generation had reached, driven by the conviction that the poetry embedded in that tradition contained something that would otherwise be permanently lost.
God, Whom Sufis and poets generally speak of as The Truth, is at once Absolute Being — the only Real Existence that ever has been or ever can be, therefore necessarily comprising within Himself all apparent existence whatsoever — and Absolute Good, therefore necessarily Absolute Beauty, Beauty being only one side or aspect of Good. Now, a marked characteristic of Beauty, whatever form it may assume, is an innate desire of self-manifestation. The phenomenal universe then results from this desire of self-manifestation on the part of Absolute Beauty.
E. J. W. Gibb — History of Ottoman Poetry, Luzac & Co., London, 1900
The opposite or negation of Absolute Being is necessarily Not-Being, Not-Beauty, Not-Good. But such can have no real existence, for all real existence is of necessity comprised in Absolute Being, of which this is the negation. Not-Being is then only a phantom evoked for a season and for a special purpose. Evil has therefore no real existence — it is but an illusion which the conditions of manifestation have rendered necessary for a while. When Not-Being became opposed to Being there appeared on the former, as in a mirror, a reflection or shadow of the latter. This reflection, which partakes of the nature of both Being and Not-Being, is called Contingent Being — and is none else than the phenomenal universe in which during this life we find ourselves, and of which we form part. The universe is thus the image of Absolute Being, that is of God. Thus is God revealed unto Himself and unto man. And thus moreover does man contain in himself the image of God — as that side of him which derives from Being is necessarily an emanation of Divinity, he is, so far, ultimately and essentially, one with God.
E. J. W. Gibb
But how is one to overcome the element of Not-Being? By conquering self. And how is self to be conquered? By Love. By Love and by Love alone can the dark shadow of Not-Being be done away. By Love and by Love alone can the soul of man win back to its Divine source and find its ultimate goal in reunion with The Truth. In the language of the mystic poets God is the Beloved, man the lover. The poets see the presence of God immanent in all beautiful things, but manifested most clearly and most fully in fair humanity. And even as it is God Who is mirrored in the fair face, it is God the poet feels Who looks through the lover’s eyes: God beholds and loves God, and the supreme miracle of Divine self-manifestation is accomplished.
E. J. W. Gibb
The real goal of the Sufi is absorption in the Deity. The highest happiness of any being consists in the most perfect realisation of itself. The human soul realises itself most perfectly in union with the Divine Soul — so therein lies its supreme felicity. This union is achieved through the state called ecstasy, Hal — and when in ecstasy the soul is transported to the Spirit World and beholds the mysteries. This state, which is not to be evoked at will, is attainable by the saints alone. And the whole Sufi life consists in training the soul to be capable of such attainment. The all-important factor in this work is Love — a Love which rises from the seen and temporal to the Unseen and Eternal. It is by this all-constraining Love that the soul is wrapt in the utter self-oblivion of ecstasy and borne aloft into the great heart of Being.
E. J. W. Gibb
Creation, in this telling, is not a mechanical event. It is a longing. God, as Absolute Beauty, desired to be seen — and the world appeared as a mirror for that seeing.
III. The Stages of the Path
Sir John Malcolm, 1769–1833 & T. P. Hughes, 1838–1911
Diplomat, soldier, historian of Persia — Lexicographer, Afghanistan
Sir John Malcolm joined the East India Company as a cadet at thirteen and rose to become one of the most powerful British figures in Persia and India. He negotiated three treaties with the Persian court, commanded armies, and governed Bombay — all while writing histories of Persia and India that remain primary sources today.
Traces of this doctrine exist, in some shape or other, in every region of the world. It is to be found in the most splendid theories of the ancient schools of Greece and of the modern philosophers of Europe. The Soofees represent themselves as devoted to the search of truth and incessantly occupied in adoring the Almighty, a union with Whom they desire with all the fervour of divine love. The Creator, according to their belief, is diffused over all His creation. The creation proceeded at once from the splendour of God, Who poured His spirit on the universe as the general diffusion of light is poured over the earth by the rising sun. And as the absence of that luminary creates total darkness, so the partial or total absence of the divine splendour or light causes partial or general annihilation. They compare the creation in its relation to the Creator to those small particles discernible in the rays of the sun, which are gone the moment it ceases to shine.
Sir John Malcolm — History of Persia, John Murray, London, 1815
He exists everywhere and in everything. They compare the emanations of His essence or spirit to the rays of the sun — which, they conceive, are continually darted forth and reabsorbed. It is for this reabsorption into the divine essence, to which their immortal part belongs, that they continually sigh. They believe that the soul of man, and the principle of life which exists throughout all nature, are not from God, but of God — hence these doctrines which their adversaries have held to be most profane, as establishing an equality of nature between the created and the Creator.
Sir John Malcolm
The Soofee doctrine teaches that there are four stages through which man must pass, before he can reach the highest — or that of divine beatitude — when, to use their own language, his corporeal veil will be removed, and his emancipated soul will mix again with the glorious essence from which it had been separated, but not divided. The first of these stages is that of humanity, nasoot, which supposes the disciple to live in obedience to the holy law, sherrah, and an observance of all the rites, customs, and precepts of the established religion. The second stage, in which the disciple attains power or force, jubroot, is termed the road, turrekat, or path. He may now abandon all observance of religious forms and ceremonies, as he exchanges practical for spiritual worship. But this stage cannot be obtained without great piety, virtue, and fortitude — for the mind cannot be trusted in the neglect of usages and rites necessary to restrain it when weak, till it hath acquired strength from habits of mental devotion, grounded on a proper knowledge of its own dignity, and of the divine nature. The third stage is that of knowledge, aruf, and the disciple who arrives at it is deemed to have attained supernatural knowledge — in other words, to be inspired. The fourth and last stage denotes his arrival at truth, luckeekat, which implies his complete union with the Divinity.
Sir John Malcolm
Thomas Patrick Hughes spent years in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier compiling his Dictionary of Islam — a reference work so thorough it is still consulted by scholars today.
The Sufis believe that God only exists. He is in all things, and all things in Him, and all created beings visible and invisible are an emanation from God and not really distinct from Him. That the soul of man existed before the body in which it is confined as in a cage. The great object of the Sufi being to escape from the trammels of humanity and to return to the bosom of divinity, whilst the teachings of their mystic creed are supposed to lead the soul onward, stage by stage, until it reaches the goal — perfect knowledge.
T. P. Hughes — Notes on Muhammedanism, W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1875
Having become a seeker after God, Talib, he enters the first stage of Ubudiyyat, service. When the Divine attraction has developed his inclination into the love of God, he is said to have reached the second stage of Ishq, love. This Divine love, expelling all worldly desires from his heart, he arrives at the third stage of Zuhd, seclusion. Occupying himself henceforward with contemplation and the investigations of the metaphysical theories concerning the nature, attributes and works of God, he reaches the fourth stage of Ma’rifat, knowledge. The fifth stage is called Wajd, ecstasy. During the next stage he is supposed to receive a revelation of the true nature of the Godhead — and to have reached the sixth stage of Haqiqat, truth. The next stage is that of Wasl, union with God, which is the highest stage to which he can go whilst in the body. But when death overtakes him, it is looked upon as a total reabsorption into the Deity, forming the consummation of his journey and the eighth and last stage of Fana, extinction.
T. P. Hughes
That stage in which the traveller is said to have attained to the love of God is the point from which the Sufi poets love to discuss the doctrines of their sect. The traveller is the Lover, Ashiq, and God is the Beloved One, Ma’shuq. This Divine Love is the theme of most of the Persian and Pushtu poems, which abound in Sufi expressions that are difficult of interpretation. Sharab, wine, expresses the domination of Divine love in the heart. Gis, a ringlet, the details of the mysteries of Divinity. Mai Khana, a tavern, a stage of the journey. Mirth, wantonness, and inebriation signify religious enthusiasm and abstraction from worldly things.
T. P. Hughes
Eight stations. From service to extinction. And at each threshold, what is shed is not something valuable — it is something that was never real.
IV. Knowledge and the Inner Light
R. A. Nicholson, 1868–1945 & E. H. Whinfield, 1836–1922
Cambridge Islamicist, translator of Rumi — Persian scholar, India
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson spent his entire career at Cambridge translating Persian Sufi poetry. His complete English translation of Rumi’s Masnavi — six volumes of text, six of commentary — remains the standard scholarly edition.
The oldest type of mysticism in Islam was ascetic and devotional rather than speculative. From the injunctions which they found in the Quran to think on God and trust in God, they developed the practice of dhikr, praise of God, and the doctrine of tawakkul, trust in God. Here, no doubt, they learned something from Christian asceticism. With the growing influence of Hellenistic ideas, Muslim asceticism became mystical — ascetic exercises begin to be regarded, not as having their end in future salvation or perdition, but rather as a means of purifying the soul so that it may know and love God and attain to union with Him.
R. A. Nicholson — Studies in Islamic Mysticism, Cambridge University Press, 1921
What the Sufis call ma’rifa, knowledge of God, resembles the gnosis of Hellenistic religion — it is an immediate experience in which the intellect has no share, an ecstatic contemplation of God by the divinely illuminated heart. Moreover, it involves the effacement of the individual self and the substitution of divine qualities for human. Yet all this is the act of God. Just as Saint Paul said to his Galatian converts, ‘Now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God’ — so the Sufi gnostic imputes all his knowledge to Him who, by revealing Himself, causes the veil of otherness and duality to disappear, and the knower to be one with the known. And when Sufis speak of the unity of God, they mean no less than this.
R. A. Nicholson
Sufis regard the Unity of God not as anything that can be apprehended by the intellect, but as a mystery that is revealed only to those whom God permits to realise it in their religious experience. Tawhid, unification, is defined as the absoluteness of the Divine nature realised in the passing-away of the human nature — so that the man’s last state reverts to his first state and he becomes even as he was before he existed. Should the mystic’s conscious self not be obliterated and swept away by the transcendent glory of Him who in a sudden gleam reveals Himself as ineffably near? Must not the distinction of subject and object vanish altogether? For here God is all, and there is naught beside Him.
R. A. Nicholson
Edward Henry Whinfield published English translations of Rumi’s Masnavi, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, and Jami’s Lawa’ih — three foundational texts of Persian Sufi literature. He was a civil servant in India who taught himself Persian in the margins of official life.
The Sufis identified the Allah of the Quran with the Neoplatonic Being — the One, the Necessary Being, the only Reality, The Truth, the Infinite, which includes all actual being. The world of phenomena and man — everything else but Allah — they identified with Not-Being. Not-Being is like a mirror which reflects Being, and by thus borrowing particles of Being rises to the rank of Contingent Being — a kind of being which, as Plato says, is and is not, and partakes both of existence and non-existence.
E. H. Whinfield — Lawa’ih of Jami, Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1906
Sense and reason cannot transcend phenomena or see the real Being which underlies them all — so sense and reason must be ignored and superseded in favour of the inner light, the inspiration of Divine illumination in the heart, which is the only faculty whereby men perceive the Infinite. Thus enlightened, men see that the whole external phenomenal world, including man’s self, is an illusion — non-existent in itself. Man’s only duty is to shake off this illusion, this clog of Not-Being, to efface and die to self, and to be united with and live eternally in the one real Being — The Truth. In this progress to union, external observances and outward forms profit little, because they keep alive the illusion of duality, of man’s self-righteousness, of his personal agency and personal merit. Whereas the true course is to ignore all reference to self — to be passive, that God may work. Then the Divine light and grace will enter the chamber of man’s heart and operate in him without impediment, and draw him to The Truth, and unite him with The One.
E. H. Whinfield
The inner light. Not a metaphor in Sufism — a technical description of a faculty that operates beyond the operations of ordinary mind.
V. Fanā — Extinction
I. Goldziher, 1850–1921 & John Hunt, 1812–1848 & John P. Brown, 1814–1872
Islamic scholar, Budapest — Comparative mystic — American diplomat, Constantinople
Ignaz Goldziher was one of the founding figures of modern Islamic studies. Born in Hungary, he travelled to Cairo and Damascus in 1873 and 1874 — the first Western scholar admitted to al-Azhar as a student.
The word fana appears across almost all of these accounts. Extinction. Annihilation. But what is being extinguished?
The Sufis endeavoured to approach the Heavenly by way of the emotions and hoped to establish religious life, not by empty formalities, but by getting near to the Eternal. A pantheistic system became developed. Starting from a mystic love of God, it arrived at the conviction that the knowledge of real existence is in God — neither is there any life but in God.
I. Goldziher — Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton University Press
In Sufism the final aim is fana, annihilation — the extinction of individual life. When the consciousness of Ego and of all his belongings is absent. When an individual is liberated from dependence on means which are capable of bringing him advantage or causing injury. When he has no aim, no will, but is entirely absorbed in the will of God. The Sufi does not sink into nothingness, but into omnipresence — into universal divinity. When that has happened the personal Ego is annihilated by absorption into the universal divinity. The individual is not annihilated, but becomes one with God — a drop in the bottomless sea, having no independent existence.
I. Goldziher
He in whom there is the perfect absence of separate personality, the submersion into absolute existence, who rises to the permanent reality of the soul — such a one has arrived at the stage of fana, the stage of annihilation. He becomes al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man. The perfection of fana is preceded by the tariqa which is reached by single stations on the road of ma’rifat, knowledge. One of the most important of the Sufi stations is that which is called Murakaba, meditation — the acquirement of its capacity and its permanency in one’s soul is considered the most important preparation for the annihilation of Ego and the absolute union with Him.
I. Goldziher
The perfect man. Not perfected by accumulation — by subtraction. What remains when everything that was never real has been removed.
John Hunt died at thirty-six, having already written extensively on comparative mysticism at a time when the field barely existed.
God is light and that light is all which is. The phenomenal world is mere illusion — a vision which the senses take to be a something, but which is nothing. We are come from God and we long to return to Him again, is their incessant cry. But while acknowledging a separation from God, which they regard as the worst of miseries, they yet deny that the soul of man has ever been divided from God.
John Hunt — Religious Thought in England, London, 1871
To be reabsorbed into the glorious essence of God is the great object of the Sufi. To attain this, he had to pass through four stages. The first is that of obedience to the laws of the prophet. The second is that state of spiritual struggling attained through this obedience, when he lives more in the spirit than in the letter. In the third he arrives at knowledge and is inspired. In the fourth he attains to truth, and is completely reunited with the Deity. In this state he loses all will and personality. He is no more creature but Creator. And when he worships God it is God worshipping Himself.
John Hunt
God worshipping Himself. This is not a paradox dressed as wisdom. It is a precise description of what the tradition calls fana fi’llah — extinction in God. The worshipper does not disappear. The separation disappears.
John Porter Brown served as dragoman and later chargé d’affaires at the American Legation in Constantinople for over three decades. He learned Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian in the field.
In Sufism, the idea of sanctification is carried so far as to declare that the spirit of man, when properly purified by contemplation, religious fervour and ecstatic love, becomes even that of God, from whom it is declared it is an emanation. The soul is a Divine emanation incorporated in a human form. It exists in five conditions — it is awake, it dreams, it is plunged in slumber, it fills a state of half-death, and finally is even perfectly separated from the body. During the third state it is reabsorbed already in the Divine Spirit.
John P. Brown — The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism, London, 1868
It is believed by the Sufis that the spirit of man communes directly with the Holy Spirit of God — and that the latter also communes with the former, not only in visions, but even in wakeful hours, always for good and never for evil. Holy and pious men hold frequent intercourse with God, by contemplation, meditation and prayer. By this intercourse with God men reach a superior and more sublime character — leading holy and, as it were, sinless lives, they become friends of God, and assume an intimate connection with Him, even in the present life. A man fully impressed with the possibility of attaining to such a position naturally regards all that is connected with the transient existence of this world as insignificant, and unworthy of any serious consideration and regard. The more destitute he is of worldly goods, the less his mind is connected with the ordinary cares of life, and he is left free to devote his entire existence to communion with the Creator and His Divine Spirit.
John P. Brown
The saints, the friends of Allah, are those who among men are the nearest united to God and who consequently enjoy His most intimate presence. Those who, having been the enemies of themselves in this life, become the friends of God in the other. They commenced their career before the beginning of time, and labour only for eternity. During their lives, they never left the portals of the sacred palace of the Divinity and finally enter therein. They discover and behold the spiritual secrets which God reveals to them, and maintain therein a religious silence. In this world the saint hears the will of God, and in the other he understands it.
John P. Brown
VI. The Language of the Poets
L. M. J. Garnett, 1849–1934
Ethnographer, Ottoman Turkey
Lucy Mary Jane Garnett spent years in Ottoman Turkey — unusual enough for any Western scholar of her era, extraordinary for a woman in the 1880s. Her studies of Turkish folk religion and Sufi practice were based on direct fieldwork. She learned the symbolic vocabulary of the Sufi poets from practitioners who still used it as a living language.
The Sufi poets wrote in a kind of code — not to conceal their meaning, but because the meaning exceeded ordinary language. Garnett decodes the lexicon.
The ghazals or odes of the Sufi poets are, to those who possess the key to their symbolic imagery, the fervent outpourings of hearts ecstasied — or, as they express it, intoxicated with spiritual love. For every word has its mystical signification. The Fair One, for whom Man the Lover sighs, is the Deity — as is also the Loved One whom he entreats to throw off the veil that conceals His perfect beauty from view. The Ruby Lip signifies the unspoken but heard and understood words of God. Nestling in the Fair One’s tresses denotes comprehension of the hidden attributes of the Divinity. The Embrace is the revelation to man of the divine mysteries. Separation or Absence from the Loved One is the non-attainment of oneness with the Deity. Wine is the Divine Love. The Cupbearer is the spiritual instructor, the giver of the goblet of celestial aspiration. The Libertine is the Saint who has become careless of human conventionalities. The Tavern is a place where one mortifies sensuality, and relinquishes his name and worldly fame. The Zephyr is the breathing of the Divine Spirit. The Taper is the heavenly light kindling the Torch, which is the heart of the Lover, Man. These ghazals breathe, indeed, in every line a spirit of ravishment and ecstasy — picturing the whole creation as filled by the Divine Love, by which the most humble plant is excited to seek the sublime object of its desires.
L. M. J. Garnett — Mysticism and Magic in Turkey, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, 1912
When Hafiz writes of wine and the tavern, he is not describing a night out. He is describing a state that has no other name. The tradition reaches for the most charged language it possesses, because nothing less intense is adequate to the subject.
VII. Love as the Central Force
T. J. de Boer, 1866–1942 & T. H. Weir, 1852–1920
Historian of Islamic philosophy — Scholar of Moroccan Sufism
Tjitze de Boer’s History of Philosophy in Islam was published in 1901 and remains a landmark study. He approached Sufism not as an exotic curiosity but as a philosophical tradition in serious dialogue with Neoplatonism and Aristotelian thought — and found, at its centre, something that philosophy alone could not account for.
For the most part, Mysticism kept within the pale of Orthodoxy, which was always sensible enough to allow a certain latitude to poets and enthusiasts. As regards the doctrine that God works in all, Dialecticians and Mystics were agreed. But extreme Mysticism propounded the farther doctrine that God is all in all. From this, a heterodox pantheism was developed, which made the world an empty show, and deified the human Ego. Thus the Unity of God becomes Universal Unity. His universal activity, Universal Existence. Besides God, there exist at the most only the attributes and conditions of the Sufi souls that are tending towards Him.
T. J. de Boer — The History of Philosophy in Islam, Luzac & Co., London, 1903
A psychology of feeling is developed by the Sufi teachers. In their view, while our conceptions come to the soul from without, and our exertions amount to the externalising of what is within, the true essence of our soul consists in certain states or feelings of inclination and disinclination. The most essential of all these is Love. It is neither fear nor hope, but Love that lifts us up to God. Blessedness is not a matter of knowing or of willing — it is union with the loved one. By the Mystics, the world was sacrificed to the illuminating, loving nature of the Divine Being. The confusing multiplicity of things, as that appears to sense and conception, is removed in a yearning after the One and Beloved being. Everything, both in Being and Thinking, is brought to one central point.
T. J. de Boer
T. H. Weir, writing at the turn of the century, puts it with the cleanest possible economy.
A Sufi is one who seeks to know God directly, not through a third person nor through a book. No person who is content with the theology of the schoolmen, or who is satisfied to accept his faith on the authority of others, will feel the need for anything higher. He who refuses to accept the popular faith on mere credit, and demands a personal knowledge of religious matters before they are anything to him, is called a mureed — one who wishes to know, an enquirer — or else a talib, seeker, student. He is represented as having set out upon a journey or path, the goal of which is the knowledge of the Truth — that is, of God.
T. H. Weir — The Shaikhs of Morocco, Edinburgh, 1904
The first care of the seeker after truth, who is setting out upon this journey, is to find a shaikh who will act as guide. Having found his shaikh, the disciple must cease to have any will or initiative of his own. His obedience must be absolute. The object aimed at is not to impart information, although that is implied, but to produce an elevated and semi-ecstatic condition of mind. And the knowledge of God which is hoped for is not so much a mental or sensuous perception as a sense of union of soul with God. Union with God, wisal, is the highest aim of the Mystic. And he who attains to a sense of it is said to know God.
T. H. Weir
In Sufi parlance, phenomenal existence is conceived of as a veil which conceals the Truth from man’s view. In the realm of dreams, too, it is possible for the soul to cast off this veil of existence, and to behold reality with unclouded eyes. Certain kinds of dreams are accepted as equivalent to visions or revelations.
T. H. Weir
VIII. Sufism as Universal
A. J. Arberry, 1905–1969 & L. Massignon, 1883–1962
Oxford Islamicist, translator — French scholar of al-Hallaj
Arthur John Arberry translated more primary texts of Islamic mysticism into English than any other Western scholar of his century. His book Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam introduced the tradition to a post-war generation of readers.
Sufism may be defined as the mystical movement of an uncompromising Monotheism. From the earliest days of Islam, the Prophet lacked not for faithful followers who sought to copy his example and live righteously and humbly in the sight of God and man. The uprightness of their conduct and the fullness of their piety were so pleasing to their Creator that of His Infinite Goodness He chose them to be His friends, awliya — a term which afterwards became more or less synonymous with the Christian saint. The Sufi, who desires earnestly to be admitted to like intimacy and privilege, is diligent in learning how these holy men conducted themselves publicly and in private, committing to mind and heart the words of wisdom and sanctity, the songs of devotion and heavenly love which were remembered of them.
A. J. Arberry — Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1950
Finally, in a life of sincere obedience to the Will of God, lived abstemiously and meditatively, guided by the Word of God, the Life of His Prophet, and the example of His saints, the Sufi is himself the recipient of such marks of favour as God may choose to vouchsafe him. Passing through the various states, ahwal, and stages, maqamat, of the spiritual pilgrimage, he encounters many proofs of the special relationship in which he stands to God. So guided and favoured, the Muslim mystic may hope even in this mortal life to win a glimpse of immortality by passing away from self, fana, into the consciousness of survival in God, baqa. After death and judgment, he aspires to dwell for ever with the angels and prophets, the saints and saved, in the near and blissful Presence of the Almighty.
A. J. Arberry
Passing away from self. Fana. Into the consciousness of survival in God. Baqa. These are not two sequential events — they are two faces of a single moment. The self drops away, and what remains has always been there.
Louis Massignon is perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the history of Western Islamic scholarship. He had a mystical experience in Iraq in 1908 that he described as a conversion — not from Islam to Christianity, but a deepening into both. He devoted the rest of his life to the study of al-Hallaj, the executed Sufi martyr of Baghdad.
It is plain that it is from the Quran, constantly recited, the subject of meditation, and its teaching practised in everyday life, that Islamic mysticism originated and developed as it did.
L. Massignon — Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, University of Notre Dame Press
It is thanks to its mysticism that Islam is a religion which is international and universal. It is international, because of the apostolic work of mystics who visited non-Muslim countries. It was the persuasive example of the Muslim ascetics and of the shaykhs of the religious orders — who learned the language spoken by the people and lived among them — which won over so many to Islam, rather than the tyrannical fanaticism of conquerors of a foreign tongue. It is universal, because it was the mystics who first understood the moral efficacy of orthodoxy, the fact of a rational monotheism innate to all men.
L. Massignon
Sufism, which has given new life to Islam, has been a method of whole-hearted self-examination, turning to account all the events of life, good fortune and bad — making those who pursued it to the end into physicians able to give help to others who were unfortunate. Sufism is a treatment which the physician has first tried on himself, in order to benefit others.
L. Massignon
The lasting force of Islamic mysticism lay in the superhuman desire of sacrifice for one’s fellows — in the transcendent ecstasy of the martyr, expressed by Hallaj: Forgive them, but do not forgive me.
L. Massignon
Al-Hallaj. Standing at his execution in Baghdad in 922 of the common era, asking God not for mercy for himself — but for his executioners. Massignon spent fifty years trying to understand what kind of love produces a sentence like that. He concluded that it was not a different kind of love from what we already know. Only the same love, taken to its furthest possible point.
These accounts span nearly two centuries. The men who wrote them came from different countries, worked in different disciplines, held different religious convictions. Some were soldiers. Some were civil servants. Some were academics who never left their libraries.
What they share is this. When they looked closely at what the Sufis were actually saying — not caricature, not secondhand summary, not polemic — they found a tradition of extraordinary coherence. A tradition that had mapped the interior life with the same precision that their own scientific revolution was mapping the exterior world.
The map is still here.
The question Sufism asks has not changed. It was asked before these men were born. It will be asked after us.
Alastu bi-rabbikum.
Am I not your Lord?
And all the spirits answered: Yes.
Bibliography
Margaret Smith — Readings from the Mystics of Islam, Luzac & Co., London, 1950 Margaret Smith — The Sufi Path of Love, Luzac & Co., London, 1954 Sir William Jones — Works, Vol. IV, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta Sir John Malcolm — History of Persia, John Murray, London, 1815 John P. Brown — The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism, London, 1868 E. H. Whinfield — Lawa’ih of Jami, Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1906 John Hunt — Religious Thought in England, London, 1871 T. P. Hughes — Notes on Muhammedanism, W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1875 I. Goldziher — Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton University Press E. J. W. Gibb — History of Ottoman Poetry, Luzac & Co., London, 1900 E. G. Browne — A Literary History of Persia, Cambridge University Press, 1902 T. J. de Boer — The History of Philosophy in Islam, Luzac & Co., London, 1903 T. H. Weir — The Shaikhs of Morocco, Edinburgh, 1904 L. M. J. Garnett — Mysticism and Magic in Turkey, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, 1912 R. A. Nicholson — Studies in Islamic Mysticism, Cambridge University Press, 1921 L. Massignon — Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, University of Notre Dame Press A. J. Arberry — Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1950
This essay accompanies the video of the same name on the SpiritualRelief YouTube channel. Watch on YouTube:
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James......because an invisible thread connects the consciousness of those aligned, you could not have posted this at a better time. As you worked on this, I too worked on something being posted today in which this gem will illuminate "those whom it will." I will link this. Jazakallah.