The Kashf al-mahjúb: The oldest Persian treatise on Súfiism

Hunger sharpens the intelligence and improves the mind and health. The Apostle said: “Make your bellies hungry and your livers thirsty and your bodies naked, that perchance your hearts may see God in this world.” Although hunger is an affliction to the body, it illumines the heart and purifies the soul, and leads the spirit into the presence of God. To eat one’s fill is an act worthy of a beast. One who cultivates his spiritual nature by means of hunger, in order to devote himself entirely to God and detach himself from worldly ties, is not on the same level with one who cultivates his body by means of gluttony, and serves his lusts. “The men of old ate to live, but ye live to eat.” For the sake of a morsel of food Adam fell from Paradise, and was banished far from the neighbourhood of God.

He whose hunger is compulsory is not really hungry, because one who desires to eat after God has decreed the contrary is virtually eating; the merit of hunger belongs to him who abstains from eating, not to him who is debarred from eating. Kattání[162] says: “The novice shall sleep only when he is overpowered by slumber, and speak only when he must, and eat only when he is starving.” According to some, starvation (fáqa) involves abstention from food for two days and nights; others say three days and nights, or a week, or forty days, because true mystics believe that a sincere man (ṣádiq) is only once hungry in forty days; his hunger merely serves to keep him alive, and all hunger besides is natural appetite and vanity. You must know that all the veins in the bodies of gnostics are evidences of the Divine mysteries, and that their hearts are tenanted by visions of the Most High. Their hearts are doors opened in their breasts, and at these doors are stationed reason and passion: reason is reinforced by the spirit, and passion by the lower soul. The more the natural humours are nourished by food, the stronger does the lower soul become, and the more impetuously is passion diffused through the members of the body; and in every vein a different kind of veil (ḥijábí) is produced.

But when food is withheld from the lower soul it grows weak, and the reason gains strength, and the mysteries and evidences of God become more visible, until, when the lower soul is unable to work and passion is annihilated, every vain desire is effaced in the manifestation of the Truth, and the seeker of God attains to the whole of his desire. It is related that Abu ´l-`Abbás Qaṣṣáb said: “My obedience and disobedience depend on two cakes of bread: when I eat I find in myself the stuff of every sin, but when I abstain from eating I find in myself the foundation of every act of piety.” The fruit of hunger is contemplation of God (musháhadat), of which the forerunner is mortification (mujáhadat). Repletion combined with contemplation is better than hunger combined with mortification, because contemplation is the battle-field of men, whereas mortification is the playground of children.