The Mystics of Islam

Although in Western and Central Asia—where the Persian kings were regarded by their subjects as gods, and where the doctrines of incarnation, anthropomorphism, and metempsychosis are indigenous—the idea of the God-man was neither so unfamiliar nor unnatural as to shock the public conscience very profoundly, Hallāj had formulated that idea in such a way that no mysticism calling itself Mohammedan could tolerate, much less adopt it. To assert that the divine and human natures may be interfused and commingled,[24] would have been to deny the principle of unity on which Islam is based. The subsequent history of Sūfism shows how deification was identified with unification. The antithesis—God, Man—melted away in the pantheistic theory which has been explained above.[25] There is no real existence apart from God. Man is an emanation or a reflexion or a mode of Absolute Being. What he thinks of as individuality is in truth not-being; it cannot be separated or united, for it does not exist. Man is God, yet with a difference. According to Ibn al-ʿArabī,[26] the eternal and the phenomenal are two complementary aspects of the One, each of which is necessary to the other. The creatures are the external manifestation of the Creator, and Man is God’s consciousness (sirr) as revealed in creation. But since Man, owing to the limitations of his mind, cannot think all objects of thought simultaneously, and therefore expresses only a part of the divine consciousness, he is not entitled to say Ana ’l-Haqq, “I am God.” He is a reality, but not the Reality.

The statement that in realising the nonentity of his individual self the Sūfī realises his essential oneness with God, sums up the Mohammedan theory of deification in terms with which my readers are now familiar. I will endeavour to show what more precise meaning may be assigned to it, partly in my own words and partly by means of illustrative extracts from various authors.

Several aspects of fanā have already been distinguished.[27] The highest of these—the passing-away in the divine essence—is fully described by Niffarī, who employs instead of fanā and fānī (self-naughted) the terms waqfat, signifying cessation from search, and wāqif, i.e. one who desists from seeking and passes away in the Object Sought. Here are some of the chief points that occur in the text and commentary.

Hence the wāqif transcends time and place. “He enters every house and it contains him not; he drinks from every well but is not satisfied; then he reaches Me, and I am his home, and his abode is with Me”—that is to say, he comprehends all the divine attributes and embraces all mystical experiences. He is not satisfied with the names (attributes), but seeks the Named. He contemplates the essence of God and finds it identical with his own. He does not pray. Prayer is from man to God, but in waqfat there is nothing but God.

The wāqif leaves not a rack behind him, nor any heir except God. When even the phenomenon of waqfat has disappeared from his consciousness, he becomes the very Light. Then his praise of God proceeds from God, and his knowledge is God’s knowledge, who beholds Himself alone as He was in the beginning.

We need not expect to discover how this essentialisation, substitution, or transmutation is effected. It is the grand paradox of Sūfism—the Magnum Opus wrought somehow in created man by a Being whose nature is eternally devoid of the least taint of creatureliness. As I have remarked above, the change, however it may be conceived, does not involve infusion of the divine essence (hulūl) or identification of the divine and human natures (ittihād). Both these doctrines are generally condemned. Abū Nasr al-Sarrāj criticises them in two passages of his Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, as follows:

“Some mystics of Baghdād have erred in their doctrine that when they pass away from their qualities they enter into the qualities of God. This leads to incarnation (hulūl) or to the Christian belief concerning Jesus. The doctrine in question has been attributed to some of the ancients, but its true meaning is this, that when a man goes forth from his own qualities and enters into the qualities of God, he goes forth from his own will and enters into the will of God, knowing that his will is given to him by God and that by virtue of this gift he is severed from regarding himself, so that he becomes entirely devoted to God; and this is one of the stages of Unitarians. Those who have erred in this doctrine have failed to observe that the qualities of God are not God. To make God identical with His qualities is to be guilty of infidelity, because God does not descend into the heart, but that which descends into the heart is faith in God and belief in His unity and reverence for the thought of Him.”

“Some have abstained from food and drink, fancying that when a man’s body is weakened it is possible that he may lose his humanity and be invested with the attributes of divinity. The ignorant persons who hold this erroneous doctrine cannot distinguish between humanity and the inborn qualities of humanity. Humanity does not depart from man any more than blackness departs from that which is black or whiteness from that which is white, but the inborn qualities of humanity are changed and transmuted by the all-powerful radiance that is shed upon them from the divine Realities. The attributes of humanity are not the essence of humanity. Those who inculcate the doctrine of fanā mean the passing-away of regarding one’s own actions and works of devotion through the continuance of regarding God as the doer of these actions on behalf of His servant.”

Hujwīrī characterises as absurd the belief that passing-away (fanā) signifies loss of essence and destruction of corporeal substance, and that ‘abiding’ (baqā) indicates the indwelling of God in man. Real passing-away from anything, he says, implies consciousness of its imperfection and absence of desire for it. Whoever passes away from his own perishable will abides in the everlasting will of God, but human attributes cannot become divine attributes or vice versa.

“The power of fire transforms to its own quality anything that falls into it, and surely the power of God’s will is greater than that of fire; yet fire affects only the quality of iron without changing its substance, for iron can never become fire.”

In another part of his work Hujwīrī defines ‘union’ (jamʿ) as concentration of thought upon the desired object. Thus Majnūn, the Orlando Furioso of Islam, concentrated his thoughts on Laylā, so that he saw only her in the whole world, and all created things assumed the form of Laylā in his eyes. Some one came to the cell of Bāyazīd and asked, “Is Bāyazīd here?” He answered, “Is any one here but God?” The principle in all such cases, Hujwīrī adds, is the same, namely:

“That God divides the one substance of His love and bestows a particle thereof, as a peculiar gift, upon every one of His friends in proportion to their enravishment with Him; then he lets down upon that particle the shrouds of fleshliness and human nature and temperament and spirit, in order that by its powerful working it may transmute to its own quality all the particles that are attached to it, until the lover’s clay is wholly converted into love and all his acts and looks become so many properties of love. This state is named ‘union’ alike by those who regard the inward sense and the outward expression.”

The enraptured Sūfī who has passed beyond the illusion of subject and object and broken through to the Oneness can either deny that he is anything or affirm that he is all things. As an example of ‘the negative way,’ take the opening lines of an ode by Jalāluddīn which I have rendered into verse, imitating the metrical form of the Persian as closely as the genius of our language will permit: