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The ‘Sheikh al-Akbar’, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (d. 638 AH) says (in Chapter 178— ‘The Station of Love’—of his magnum opus, The Meccan Openings):
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‘Know—may God give you success—that love is a divine station, for He ascribed it to Himself, and called Himself ‘the Loving’ (Al-Wadud).... This station has four names:
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there is hubb (‘love’), which means its pure presence in the heart, purified from the turbidity of distractions, so that one seeks nothing and desires nothing from his beloved.
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Since the perfume spreads from flowers, whenever one of the sincerely devoted kept them company, his heart was enlightened and his breast expanded. Their followers multiplied, their hearts were illumined by the lights of Holiness,
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and they were far removed from self-centeredness. This led to the development of a sincere, worshipful, and mindful [Sufi] community.
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The mysteries were disclosed to them, so supernatural marvels and charismatic wonders manifested. People were transported from the murky darkness of fantasies to the radiant lights of certainties,
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Literalism may satisfy children, but the mature mind and the heart have rights which Islam, as a religion grounded in the radiant heart of the Prophet himself, has proved admirably able to satisfy.
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The inner reality, which is Prophecy, came to an end with his death, but the Prophet's wilaya, his spiritual rank, remains an inspiration to which Muslim attention is constantly called.
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For it is the Antichrist who sees with only one eye. An unbalanced preoccupation with either the outward or the inward aspect of religion may be expected in times of ignorance and sedition.
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I remember many years ago I was invigilating an examination in Cairo University and, because the annual exams take place at the hottest time of the year, they were held in a huge marquee by the Nile.
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Several hundred students were sitting at their desks, their whole future depending on what they wrote upon those terrible blank sheets of paper before them. A strange tension built up, almost palpable; one student after another put his or her pen down, staring into space.
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I expected a storm to clear the air. Suddenly one student raised his head and shouted: lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh. A sound filled the marquee, something between a sigh and a sob, and there was a ripple of laughter.
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What I have said might suggest a rare—even rarified— minority interest of little concern to the mass of believers, so it is important to emphasise that Sufism has penetrated the whole body of Islam.
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A Sufi brotherhood is called a tariqah (its plural is turuq), meaning “path” or “way”. Whereas in Christianity mysticism has been largely confined to the monasteries, the turuq have played an important role in Islamic history.
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In the main it was Sufis who converted the Turks to Islam (with tremendous historical repercussions) and also the Indonesians (who make up the largest Islamic nation today).
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Those who follow this way believe that Sufism—not the name, but the thing itself—derives directly from the Prophet Muhammad. The name came later, to describe something implicit in the religion from the very start.
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And that’s an important point, because many Western orientalists have tried to attribute the development of Sufism to foreign influences, “borrowings”—Neoplatonism, Hindu Vedanta and so on. It’s an understandable misconception.
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Early Islamic mysticism was, in a sense, inarticulate; it was there, but it did not pos sess the technical terms by which to define itself. Neoplatonism in particular offered a convenient terminology—so why not use it?
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[Qur'ān 95:4] Verily We created man in the best of forms.
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Man is Adam. In other words: “I created Adam in the most beautiful form and chose him out from among all the creatures.
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I wrote the inscription of love on him and made him worthy of My carpet. I made apparent in his frame the elements of sense perception, the pearls of holiness, and the sources of intimacy.
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[Qur'ān 1:6] Guide us upon the straight path.
Guide us to the straight path, in other words, fix us upon [the path of] guidance and empower us to remain upright along the path of oneness, that is, the path of those favoured [by You]
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Guide us to the straight path, in other words, fix us upon [the path of] guidance and empower us to remain upright along the path of oneness, that is, the path of those favoured [by You]
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with the special favour pertaining to [Your] Mercifulness (raḥīmiyya), which is gnosis, love and guidance, such as the prophets, the martyrs, the truthful and the friends (awliyāÌ) who have witnessed Him as the First and the Last,
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and as the Manifest and the Hidden, and who through the witnessing of the rise of His abiding countenance, became absent from the existence of ephemeral shadow.
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[Qur'ān 24:35] God is the light of the heavens and the earth...
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That is, the One who has adorned the heavens and earth with lights. The likeness of his light means the likeness of the light of Muḥammad.
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Ḥasan al-Baṣrī said, ‘He intended by this the heart of the believer and the luminescence (ḍiyāʾ) of professing the divine oneness (tawḥīd), for the hearts of the prophets are far too brilliant in their light to be described in terms of the likeness of these lights.
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A dervish was asked, “What is the evidence for God's being?”
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He replied, “Morning takes away the need for a lamp.” When the sun rises, a lamp is not required. The whole cosmos is the evidence, it needs someone to look. The whole cosmos is fragrant herbs, it needs someone to smell.
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The whole cosmos is the antidote, it needs someone bitten by a snake. The whole cosmos is the signs and banners of His power, the marks and denotations of His wisdom, the proof of His unity and solitariness.
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Sacred maternity is not understood in our culture, which instead medicalises it. Hence motherhood in general is sidelined, except for those who sell baby goods.
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The resolution of every film comprises physical love, not marriage and procreation. Hence the growing barrenness of monocultural women,
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and hence the ongoing celebration of maternity in Islam. ‘Truly, it is your detractor who is without issue’ (Quran 108:3). Even where maternity is tolerated, in place of domestic motherhood,
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Therefore there is no real Sufism unless it is approached by two paths, obedience to the Law and the search for inner meanings (al-ma’na’l-batini).
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This is explained in an old classical treatise, the Risalat of Al-Qushari [al-Qushayri]:
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The shari‘a deals with the observance of the rites and devotional acts, whereas the Truth (Haqiqa) is involved with the inner vision of the Divine Glory. Any devotion not filled with the spirit of Truth is worthless,
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Just as the heart has unveiling, the spirit has face-to-face vision. Unveiling is the lifting of the barriers between the heart and the Real, and face-to-face vision is mutual seeing.
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As long as someone is with the heart, he has reports. When he reaches the spirit, he reaches face-to-face vision.
The knower of the Path and leader of the Folk of the Haqiqah,
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The knower of the Path and leader of the Folk of the Haqiqah,
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Shaykh al-Islām Anṣārī, has let out the secret here in the tongue of unveiling and lifted from it the seal of jealousy. He said:
“On the first day of the beginningless covenant a tale unfolded between heart and spirit.
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“On the first day of the beginningless covenant a tale unfolded between heart and spirit.
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The living heart of Islam (the actualization of the revelation), added to the faithful observance of the ritual practice, the tariqa is designated by the word Tassawuf, or Sufism.
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It is the esoteric dimension of the Islamic message, which, like the Shari‘a, the religious Law, has its origin in the Koran and the prophetic tradition.
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That Sufism is fundamentally Islamic, whatever the more or less arbitrary affiliations attributed to it by the western orientalists may be—Vedanta, Christianity, Neo-Platonism—can in no way be doubted,
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Eva was then drawn to learn Persian and to translate into French Iqbal’s works as well as those of the thirteenth-century mystic Jalaluddin Rumi, who became her spiritual guide.
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Her love for Rumi and his work led her to translate into French the whole of his masterwork, the Mathnawi, a six-volume masterwork of over 26,000 couplets.
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This affirming internal connection continued to sustain her throughout her life including her pilgrimage journey to Mecca and her time spent teaching at al-Azhar University in Cairo.
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It was also through Sufism that Islam spread in Indonesia, brought to the region by Muslim traders from Persia and the Hijaz (the desert region now known as Saudi Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina).
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From still extant tombstones and also Chinese documentation we witness the first waves of Islam arriving in northern Sumatra and Java as early as the late seventh century C.E.
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Indonesians, who seem to have a natural tendency toward mysticism, readily welcomed the Sufi understanding of Islam. The Hindu and Buddhist rulers of that era seemed tolerant to the Sufi teachings of love and asceticism that had penetrated
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The ego is by its nature an egoist, since it has to believe in its own self-existence. Like spaniels we quiver with delight when we are praised, wagging our tails and rolling over to be tickled some more;
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particularly when we are praised by those whom society loves to praise. The pleasure is supplied by the opportunity to avert our eyes from the filth in our hearts. If others see us as praiseworthy, then our self-doubt shrinks,
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and we feel reassured.
The saint may praise, but his skill is to do so only to gift us with the blessing of Expansion (bast). Here the rūh is freed from darkness and our natural joy in creation is liberated.
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The saint may praise, but his skill is to do so only to gift us with the blessing of Expansion (bast). Here the rūh is freed from darkness and our natural joy in creation is liberated.
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God says, “Surely the noblest of you with God is the most godwary” [49:13]. Tomorrow at the resurrection, every lineage will be broken except the lineage of godwariness.
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Everyone sheltered by godwariness today will be the neighbor of the Patron tomorrow. Thus it has been reported, “The people will be mustered on the Day of Resurrection.
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Then God will say to them, ‘It is a long time that you have been speaking and I have been silent. Today you be silent and I will speak. Surely I took away your lineages but you refused all but your own lineages.
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Hazrat Babajan, like the mother of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, also advised one to “always tell the Truth.”
As Annemarie Schimmel has highlighted, further study of the role of mothers in the development of Sufism
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As Annemarie Schimmel has highlighted, further study of the role of mothers in the development of Sufism
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could prove quite enlightening.
Many stories are told about pious sons who carried their aged mothers on their shoulders to enable them to partake in the pilgrimage to Mecca.
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Many stories are told about pious sons who carried their aged mothers on their shoulders to enable them to partake in the pilgrimage to Mecca.
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It would be worthwhile to study the role of the mothers in the biographies of the Sufis. Although the energetic mother of Majduddin Baghdadi, herself an accomplished physician, is certainly an exception,
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“And from the water We made every living thing.”
— Qur’ān 21:30
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— Qur’ān 21:30
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You should not have the opinion that whatever He knew, He said; whatever He could do, He did; and whatever He had, He showed. The existent things and the created things are a sample of His power.
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Revelations and inspirations are an iota of His knowledge. Just as He sent a few rulings of His knowledge to the creatures and the knowledge did not reach the bottom,
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As for the wisdom in beginning with God, then the All-Merciful, then the Ever-Merciful, it is this: He sent this down in keeping with the states of the servants, who have three states—first creation, then nurturing, and finally forgiveness.
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God alludes to creation at the beginning through power, All-Merciful alludes to nurturing through the continuity of blessings, and Ever-Merciful alludes to forgiveness at the end through mercy.
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It is as if God said, “First I created through power, then I nurtured through blessings, and at last I forgave through mercy.”
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Among the saints is the woman master (shaykha), the long-lived knower of God, Rabi‘a [d. 1216], the daughter of the illustrious shaykh Abu Bakr al-Najari al-Wasitit.
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It is said in The Clarification that the noble lady, the perfect knower of God, the wife of Sayyid Ahmad [al-Rifa‘i], the mother of Sayyid Salih, the lady of the faqirs, Rabi‘a was sound of heart and pure of mind.
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She experienced divine attractions and constant sorrow. No one could blame her for anything before God. She had a beautiful life and admirable qualities. Sayyid Ahmad called her the “lady of the faqirs” and he also nicknamed her “the mother of the faqirs.”
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A karama is not a break in the rules of a static cosmic mechanism, but is the manifestation of a free God’s ability to break with His own habits in the world.
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Since a Prophet is divinely secured from sin, he cannot and need not conceal his miracles. This is one sense in which they are distinguished from the miraculous events worked through the saints.
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Prophets, upon them be peace, demonstrate mujiza; saints, upon whom be God’s mercy, demonstrate karama. This is standard in our Sunni doctrine.
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Ali al-Khawwas: ‘No two individuals experience the
same inward taste and spiritual degree, thanks to the expansiveness of the Lawgiver’s word.’
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same inward taste and spiritual degree, thanks to the expansiveness of the Lawgiver’s word.’
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Hagiology, as Sha‘rani saw, indicates the diversity of humanity. Each saint bodies forth a possibility of perfection.
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Many saints, through tasting something of the fullness of the Sunna, conforming inwardly as well as outwardly, are given asrar turuq
al-istidlal, the secrets of the ways in which rulings are derived.
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al-istidlal, the secrets of the ways in which rulings are derived.
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