The Mystics of Islam

The fourth journey is usually associated with physical death. The Prophet was referring to it when he cried on his deathbed, “I choose the highest companions.” In this journey, to judge from the obscure verses in which ʿAfīfuddīn describes it, the Perfect Man, having been invested with all the divine attributes, becomes, so to speak, the mirror which displays God to Himself.

We have followed the Sūfī in his quest of Reality to a point where language fails. His progress will seldom be so smooth and unbroken as it appears in these pages. The proverbial headache after intoxication supplies a parallel to the periods of intense aridity and acute suffering that sometimes fill the interval between lower and higher states of ecstasy. Descriptions of this experience—the Dark Night of the Soul, as it is called by Christian authors—may be found in almost any biography of Mohammedan saints. Thus Jāmī relates in his Nafahāt al-Uns that a certain dervish, a disciple of the famous Shihābuddīn Suhrawardī,

“Was endowed with a great ecstasy in the contemplation of Unity and in the station of passing-away (fanā). One day he began to weep and lament. On being asked by the Sheykh Shihābuddīn what ailed him, he answered, ‘Lo, I am debarred by plurality from the vision of Unity. I am rejected, and my former state—I cannot find it!’ The Sheykh remarked that this was the prelude to the station of ‘abiding’ (baqā), and that his present state was higher and more sublime than the one which he was in before.”

Does personality survive in the ultimate union with God? If personality means a conscious existence distinct, though not separate, from God, the majority of advanced Moslem mystics say “No!” As the rain-drop absorbed in the ocean is not annihilated but ceases to exist individually, so the disembodied soul becomes indistinguishable from the universal Deity. It is true that when Sūfī writers translate mystical union into terms of love and marriage, they do not, indeed they cannot, expunge the notion of personality, but such metaphorical phrases are not necessarily inconsistent with a pantheism which excludes all difference. To be united, here and now, with the World-Soul is the utmost imaginable bliss for souls that love each other on earth.

Strange as it may seem to our Western egoism, the prospect of sharing in the general, impersonal immortality of the human soul kindles in the Sūfī an enthusiasm as deep and triumphant as that of the most ardent believer in a personal life continuing beyond the grave. Jalāluddīn, after describing the evolution of man in the material world and anticipating his further growth in the spiritual universe, utters a heartfelt prayer—for what?—for self-annihilation in the ocean of the Godhead.