by Robert Irwin
When Abu al-‘Atahiyya became an ascetic, he ‘donned the robe of austerity’. Sufis commonly wore robes of coarse wool (suf) and it is possibly because of this that the Sufis, or Muslim mystics, are so called. The word Sufi embraces a wide range of belief and practice in different parts of the Islamic world over the centuries. Some Sufis were simple pietists and ascetics. Other Sufis sought ecstasy and a lover’s union with God; some of these made use of a wide range of techniques to do so, including perpetual prayer, fasting, self-mutilation, dancing and listening to music. Some even advocated the use of wine, drugs or the contemplation of beautiful boys in order to bring them closer to God. One category of Sufis, the Malamatis, went so far as to lead sinful lives so that they could worship God without any expectation of reward in the afterlife. Again, the writings of Sufis show variously the influence of Christian mysticism, gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Buddhism and Hinduism. However, while it is clear that some Sufis were scoundrels or heretics, large numbers led virtuous lives. The profession of Sufism can be perfectly compatible with Islamic orthodoxy.
The historical origins of Sufism are unclear. Sufi teachers traced their chain of transmission right back to the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin ‘Ali. In the eighth century one comes across individuals, such as Hasan of Basra (d. 728), who were revered for their simple, ascetic piety. From at least the ninth century onwards Sufism began to acquire more of a distinctive doctrinal identity (or identities). Sufi masters who made provocative statements and who taught contentious, possibly heretical doctrines, such as Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 874?) and al-Hallaj, started to appear. In the early centuries the pursuit of the Sufi way was an individual matter. Only from the thirteenth century onwards did the great Sufi orders begin to form (including, among many others, the Shadhilis, the Qadiris, the Rifa’i, the Mevlana, and the Naqshabandi). There were (and are) Sufi orders in both Sunnism and Shi’ism. In the organized Sufism of the later Middle Ages, Sufis followed a specific way or tariqa, they received initiation from the hand of a master, and they often lived together in a special lodge or zawiya. Sufis made an enormous contribution to Islamic culture. Many leading artists and musicians were Sufis and, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, some of the greatest writers in later centuries, among them al-Ghazzali, Ibn al-’Arabi and Ibn al-Farid, were Sufis.
The career of the Sufi Hallaj, his preaching mission, his arrest and trial for heresy in Baghdad and his crucifixion, was one of the causes célèbres of the period, Husayn ibn Mansur al-HALLAj (c. 858–922) studied with Sufi teachers before travelling extensively in Persia, Turkestan, Arabia and India. He was famous for his miracles (or what his enemies preferred to describe as cheats and conjuring tricks). According to one witness, ‘I was summoned … by the slave in charge of Hallaj, and when I went out to him he told me that he had been taking to Hallaj the tray which it was his daily custom to bring to him, when he found that Hallaj was filling the room with his person, stretching from roof to floor and from side to side, so that there was no space left; this spectacle frightened him so much that he dropped the tray and fled.’ He added that ‘the slave was in a fever, shaking and trembling …’
Hallaj put poetry to the service of mystical doctrine, as can be seen from the following seven poems from his Diwan:
1
I continued to float on the sea of love,
One surging wave lifting me up, another pulling me down;
And so I went on, now rising, now falling,
Till I found myself in the middle of the deep sea,
Brought by love to a point where there was no shore.
In alarm I called out to Him whose name I would not reveal,
One to whose love I have never been untrue:
‘Your rule is indeed just,’ I said, ‘Your fair dealings I am ready to defend with my very life;
But this is not the terms of our covenant.’
2
Painful enough it is that I am ever calling out to You,
As if I were far away from You or You were absent from me,
And that I constantly ask for Your grace, yet unaware of the need.
Never before have I seen such an ascetic so full of desire.
3
Your place in my heart is the whole of my heart,
For your place cannot be taken by anyone else.
My soul has lodged You between my skin and my bones,
So what would I do were I ever to lose You?
4
My host, who can never be accused of even the slightest wrong,
Made me share his drink, as a perfect host should do.
But when signs of my drunkenness became clear,
He suddenly called to His headsman to bring the sword and the mat.
This is the end of keeping company with the Dragon and drinking with Him in the summer season.
5
I am He whom I love and He whom I love is I;
We are two souls dwelling in one body.
When you look at me you can see Him,
And you can see us both when you look at Him.
6
You who blame me for my love for Him,
If only you knew Him of whom I sing, you would cease your blame.
Other men go away for their pilgrimage, but my own pilgrimage is towards the place where I am.
Other men offer sacrifices, but my sacrifice is my own heart and blood.
They physically circumambulate the temple,
But were they to proceed reverently around God Himself,
They would not need to go round a sacred building.
7
I swear to God, the sun has never risen or set without Your love being the twin of my breath;
Neither have I confided in anyone except to talk about You.
Never have I mentioned Your name in gladness or in sorrow,
Unless You were in my heart, wedged in my obsessive thoughts.
Nor have I touched water to quench my thirst without seeing Your image in the glass.
Were it possible for me to reach You I would come to you at once, crawling on my face or walking on my head.
I say to our minstrel that if he is to sing he should choose for his theme my grief at the hardness of Your heart.
What cause have foolish people to blame me? They have their own faith and I have mine.
Mustafa Badawi (trans.), ‘Seven Poems by Al-Hallaj (c. 858-922)’,
Journal of Arabic Literature 14 (1983), pp. 46–7
Hallaj was also notorious for his provocative mystical statements, such as ‘Ana al-Haqq,’ ‘I am the Truth’. Opponents also noted that he appeared to venerate Iblis, the Devil, for he held that Iblis was to be praised for the unflinching monotheism which led him to refuse to bow down with all the other angels before man, since God alone was worthy of veneration. Eventually Hallaj was seized, and after being exposed in a pillory he spent nine years under house arrest in the caliphal palace. He only emerged from this incarceration on the day of his execution, which is described by the eleventh-century historian Miskawayh:
Hallaj was led out to the area of the Majlis, where an innumerable crowd of the populace assembled. The executioner was ordered to administer a thousand strokes of the scourge; this was done and Hallaj uttered no cry nor did he plead for pardon. Only (my authority says) when he had got to the six hundredth blow Hallaj called out to Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Samad: Summon me to your side and I will tell you something which in the eyes of the Caliph will be equal to the storming of Constantinople. The Chief of police replied: I have been told that you were likely to offer this, or even more, but there is no way whereby you can be relieved of the scourge. Hallaj then maintained silence till the thousandth stroke had been delivered, then his hand was amputated, then his foot, then he was decapitated; his trunk was then burned, and his head erected on the Bridge. Afterwards the head was removed to Khorasan.
Hallaj’s adherents asserted that the victim of the blows was an enemy of his on whom his likeness had been cast, s
ome of them pretending to have seen Hallaj and heard from him something of the sort, with follies not worth transcribing. The booksellers were summoned and made to swear that they would neither sell nor buy any of Hallaj’s works.
H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth (trans.), The Eclipse of the
“Abbasid Caliphate, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1901), pp. 90-91
Although ABU TAMMAM (c. 805–45) was the son of Thaddeus, a Christian tavern-keeper in Damascus, he converted to Islam. Abu Tammam spent his early years as a weaver in Damascus, before moving on to become a water-seller in Cairo. Despite these lowly origins, he invented a distinguished but wholly bogus Bedouin genealogy for himself and adopted the dress of a Bedouin Arab (a form of affectation that makes one think of T. E. Lawrence). Poetry served Abu Tammam as it had served so many other clever and ambitious men, as a means of advancement and as a way of securing the entree into the ‘Abbasid court. Abu Tammam found favour with the Caliph al-Mu’tasim (833–42) and he celebrated the latter’s prosecution of the jihad, or holy war, against the Byzantine empire. However, since his voice was singularly unattractive the caliph preferred that his poetry was recited by a rawi. Abu Tammam became an expert panegyrist, working in the badi” style – that is to say, he produced some brilliant images while making use of weird words, ornately tortuous constructions and word-play. His fondness for antithesis is evident in his most famous poem, a qasida which celebrated the caliph’s capture of the Byzantine town of Amorium in central Anatolia in 838. The first forty of the poem’s seventy-one lines are given here:
Sword tells more truth than books; its edge is parting wisdom from vanity:
In gleaming blades, not lines of dusky tomes, are texts to dispel uncertainty and doubt.
Knowledge is found in the sparkle of lances, glittering between opposing ranks, not in the seven sparkling lights of heaven.
What use is such lore, what use the stars themselves, and men’s specious inventions about them? All lies,
Mere falsity and patched-up fables, neither tough oak (if reckoned right) nor pliant sapling.
Strange things they declared time would reveal in direful summer months,
To scare men with dread disasters, on the appearance of the star in the west with its comet-tail;
They claim to see in the lofty zodiac an ordered precedence, of signs ‘reversed’ and signs not so,
Judging events thereby – but the stars are heedless, whether moving the full circle of the firmament or close to the pole.
Were it true that they had ever plainly forecast a coming event, they would not have concealed this, stamped as it is in stocks and stones.
Victory of victories! too lofty to be compassed by poet’s verse or orator’s speech,
A victory at which heaven’s gates are thrown open and earth struts in her freshest garments.
Day of Amorium fight! our hopes have come away from you with udders full of honeysweet milk;
You have left the fortunes of Islam’s children at the height, heathens and heathendom at lowest ebb.
She [Amorium] was a mother to them: had they had any hope of ransoming her, they would have paid as ransom every kindly mother among them and father too.
She’s now a maiden unveiled and humbled, though Chosroes had been impotent to master her, and Abukarib she had spurned
– virgin unravished by the hand of disaster, greedy Fate’s blows could never hope to reach her –
From the age of Alexander, or before then, time’s locks have grown gray while she remained untouched by age;
God’s purpose, working in her year after year (a thrifty housewife’s churning) made her at last cream of ages.
But black grief, blindly striking, came upon her, her who had before been called the dispeller of griefs.
It was an ill omen for her, that day when Ankara fell and was left deserted, with empty squares and streets:
When she saw her sister of yesterday laid waste, it was a worse contagion for her than the mange.
Within her walls lie numberless heroic cavaliers, locks reddened with hot flowing gore,
By practice of the sword (henna of their own blood), not in accord with practice of faith and Islam.
Commander of the Faithful! you have given over to the fire a day of hers, whereon stone and wood alike were brought low;
When you departed, night’s gloom there was as noonday, dispelled in her midst by dayspring of flame,
As if the robes of darkness had renounced their colour, or sun never set:
Radiance of fire while darkness still lasted, murk of smoke in a noontide smirched,
Sun seeming to rise here though it had sunk, sun seeming to depart there although it had not.
Fate, like clouds rolling away, had revealed for her a day both fair and foul
(Sun did not rise that day on any bridegroom, nor set on any man unwed):
Dwelling of Mayyah, not yet deserted, haunted by her lover Ghaylan, was a scene not more sweet to look on than Amorium’s deserted dwelling,
Nor were Mayyah’s cheeks, blood-red with modest shame, more charming to beholder than Amorium’s cheek all grimed
By disfigurement with which our eyes are better pleased than with any beauty that has ever appeared, or any wondrous sight.
A fine event! its effects seen plainly, joyfulness the outcome of evil event.
Would that heathendom could have known for how many ages past Fate had been holding in store for her the spears and lances!
This is the wise design of al-Mu’tasim, God’s avenger, expectant and yearning for God.
Full-fed with victory, his spearheads have never been blunted nor parried in defence of a life inviolate;
Never did he make war on a folk, or assault a town, without an army of terrors going before him;
Had he not led a mighty host on the day of battle, he would yet have had a clamorous host in himself alone …
A. F. L. Beeston (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, pp. 159–61
COMMENTARY
The opening lines allude to the fact that Byzantine astrologers, consulting their books, had concluded that Amorium could not be taken and warned the Muslims that their enterprise was doomed, but the Muslim warriors had gone on to prove them wrong. They advanced through Anatolia to capture first Ankara and then Amorium. It is obvious from the beginning that the poem operates through antitheses: the sword against the pen, light against dark, conquest against defeat, and so on. Puns also play a large part in the effects that Abu Tammam achieved, but inevitably these are absent in the translation. You will have to read the original Arabic to enjoy them.
A Muslim woman is said to have appealed to the caliph for help against the Byzantines; hence the repetitive female imagery, in which, among other things, the captured city is compared to a violated woman. This qasida can also be read as a poem of vengeance. It reapplied the Jahili vocabulary of tribal feuding to the vengeance taken by the caliph for Byzantine attacks on Muslim towns. Despite the relative novelty of Abu Tammam’s badi ornamentation, he was more generally producing a pastiche of old Bedouin forms and adapting those forms in order to appeal to the salons of Baghdad.
Chosroes, or Khusraw, was the name of the Sasanian emperor of Persia in the days of the Prophet. Abukarib, also known as As’ad Kamil, was a legendary king of South Arabia in pre-Islamic times. Like Chosroes, he was famous for his conquests.
Dhu’l-Rummah, ‘He of the Tent Peg’, was the nickname of Abu Harith Ghaylan ibn ‘Uqba, an eighth-century poet, famous for his love of Mayyah.
In the rest of the poem (not translated by Beeston), the Byzantine flight is described. The Emperor’s cowardice is likened to that of an ostrich and the Byzantines are conventionally referred to as al-Asfar, ‘the Yellow Ones’. Then the poet returns to the siege and the women captured as a result. (They have waists like quivering branches and bottoms like sandhills.) Finally the caliph and his victory are praised once
again.
Abu Tammam’s metaphors and similes may strike the modern Western reader as far-fetched or strained. Many medieval Arab critics found fault with Abu Tammam on the same grounds.
In the ‘Spring’ qasida which follows, Abu Tammam evokes a landscape and the changing of the seasons in a meandering sort of way, before ending up with a panegyric to the caliph.
Genial now, the season’s trim’s aquiver;
moist morning earth is fragile in its gems;
The grateful van of summertime has come:
yet do not think winter’s late hold thankless,
For, but for what winter’s own hand planted,
dry fruitless scrubland is all summer would find.
The winter has consoled the land for winter
for countless nights, and days, its downpour streaming:
Rain, from which clear skies deliquesce, and then
clear [spring] skies, all but dripping with their plenty,
A double rainfall: one spring showers, plainly
showing their face, and clear skies, hidden rain;
And when dew makes the earth’s locks gleam with oil,
one fancies rain-clouds have passed remissly by.
Our spring, our own, of nineteen years’ estate,
no spring but thou, outblooming spring in glory!
There’s no delight that time could be despoiled of
if meadows could be beautiful forever –
And yet we know that change makes every thing
ugly, but is the earth’s sale source of beauty.
My two companions, look about you fully
and see how the earth’s face has been painted:
And see broad sunny daylight which is blanched
by flowers of the uplands, as if moonlit;
A world for human sustenance, which sudden
unveiling of the spring makes pure prospect.
Its core now fashions for its outer side
blossoms enough to bring the bloom to our hearts,
Flowering sprays all glittering with dewfall
like so many eyes welling over it,
Glimpsed only to be screened again by fronds, like
young virgins, now glimpsed, now shrinking back again,