by Reza Aslan
I am a dreamer who is mute,
And the people are deaf.
I am unable to say,
And they are unable to hear.
What is Sufism? It is the love of Majnun for Layla. It is “numberless waves, lapping and momentarily reflecting the sun—all from the same sea,” according to the Sufi master Halki. It is the practice of “adopting every higher quality and leaving every lower quality,” in the words of the “Patriarch of Sufism,” Ibn Junayd (d. 910). The Sufi is “not Christian or Jew or Muslim,” Rumi wrote. He is not of “any religion or cultural system … not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all … not an entity of this world or the next.” He is, in Ishan Kaiser’s description, “the actual temple of the fire worshipper; the priest of the Magian; the inner reality of the crossed-legged Brahmin meditating; the brush and the color of the artist.”
Drunk without wine, sated without food, a king beneath a humble cloak, a treasure within a ruin, Sufism is to Islam what the heart is to the human being: its vital center, the seat of its essence. It is, in Majnun’s words, “the pearl hidden in the shell, the face beneath the veil.” Sufism is the secret, subtle reality concealed at the very depths of the Muslim faith, and only by mining those depths can one gain any understanding of this enigmatic sect.
ONE SPRING MORNING in tenth-century Baghdad, the frenetic but scrupulously controlled markets of the capital city were thrown into a state of agitation when a raggedly dressed man named Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj—one of the earliest and most renowned Sufi masters—burst onto the crowded square and exclaimed at the top of his voice, Ana al-Haqq! “I am the Truth!” by which he meant, “I am God!”
The market authorities were scandalized. They immediately arrested al-Hallaj and handed him over to the Ulama for judgment. The Ulama in Baghdad were already familiar with this controversial Sufi master. Although born a Zoroastrian into a priestly (Magian) family in southern Iran, al-Hallaj had converted to Islam and moved to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad at a fairly young age. An early disciple of the legendary Sufi Pir, Tustari (d. 896), he had matured into a charismatic preacher known for performing miraculous deeds and making outrageous statements. Called “the Nourisher” by his disciples, al-Hallaj first gained notoriety, not to mention the ire of the religious authorities, by claiming that the Hajj was an internal pilgrimage that a person of pure heart could perform anywhere. He further alienated the Ulama by focusing the bulk of his teachings on Jesus, whom he considered to be a “Hidden Sufi.” For these declarations, he was condemned as a fanatic and a “secret Christian.” But it was his intolerably heretical claim to have achieved unity with the Divine that made al-Hallaj the most famous, though by no means the only, Sufi martyr in history.
Although given numerous chances to recant during his eight years of imprisonment, al-Hallaj refused. Finally, the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir, under pressure from the religious authorities, sentenced him to death. As a demonstration of the severity of his heresy, the Caliph had al-Hallaj tortured, flogged, mutilated, and crucified; his corpse was decapitated, his body dismembered, his remains burned, and the ashes scattered in the Tigris River.
What did al-Hallaj mean? Was he actually claiming to be God? If so, how can we reconcile Sufism as a legitimate sect of such a radically monotheistic and fervently iconoclastic religion as Islam?
Many prominent Sufis roundly condemned al-Hallaj. Al-Ghazali, perhaps the most important Muslim mystic in the history of Islam, referred to al-Hallaj in his eleventh-century masterpiece, The Alchemy of Happiness, as a “foolish babbler” whose death was “a greater benefit to the cause of true religion.” Al-Ghazali did not criticize al-Hallaj for claiming to have achieved a level of spiritual unification with God in which his essence had merged with the essence of the Divine. What he and others objected to was the fact that al-Hallaj had publicly disclosed what was meant to be a secret.
Having spent his life striving to harmonize Islamic mysticism with Islamic orthodoxy (he was, incredibly, both a Sufi and a Traditionalist Ash‘arite), al-Ghazali understood better than anyone that such esoteric knowledge must be revealed slowly and in stages. Just as “a child has no real knowledge of the attainments of an adult,” and an unlettered adult “cannot understand the attainments of a learned man,” so, al-Ghazali wrote in Revival of the Religious Sciences, not even a learned man can understand “the experiences of enlightened saints.”
Al-Hallaj’s offense was not the sacrilege of his startling declaration, but its imprudent disclosure to those who could not possibly understand what he meant. Sufi teaching can never be revealed to the unprepared or the spiritually immature. As al-Hujwiri (d. 1075) argued, it is all too easy for the uninitiated to “mistake the [Sufi’s] intention, and repudiate not his real meaning, but a notion which they formed for themselves.” Even al-Hallaj admitted that his experience of unity with God came after a long journey of inward reflection. “Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little,” he wrote of God in his Diwan, “by turns, through reunions and abandons. And now I am Yourself. Your existence is my own, and it is also my will.”
To understand where al-Hallaj ended on this inward journey, one must look back to where he began: at the first station on the long and arduous path of spiritual self-reflection that Sufis call the tariqah: the Way. The tariqah is the mystical journey that leads the Sufi away from the external reality of religion and toward the divine reality—the only reality—of God. As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the summit—some better than others. But because every path eventually leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant. All that matters is to be on a path, to be constantly moving toward the top—one measured, controlled, and strictly supervised step at a time—passing diligently through specific “abodes and stations” along the Way, each of which is marked by an ineffable experience of spiritual evolution, until one finally reaches the end of the journey: that moment of enlightenment in which the veil of reality is stripped away, the ego obliterated, and the self utterly consumed by God.
By far the most famous parable describing the Sufi Way and the stations that a disciple must pass through on the journey toward self-annihilation was composed by the twelfth-century Iranian perfumer and alchemist Farid ad-Din Attar (d. 1230). In Attar’s epic masterpiece, The Conference of the Birds, the birds of the world have gathered around the hoopoe (a mythical bird), who has been chosen by lot to guide them on a journey to see the Simurgh: King of the Birds. Before they can begin the journey, however, the birds must first declare their absolute obedience to the hoopoe, promising that
Whatever he commands along the
Way We must, without recalcitrance, obey.
The oath is necessary, the hoopoe explains, because the journey will be perilous and fraught with physical and emotional adversity, and only he knows the Way. Consequently, he must be followed without question, regardless of what he demands.
To reach the Simurgh, the birds will have to traverse seven treacherous valleys, each representing a station along the Way. The first is the Valley of the Quest, in which the birds must “renounce the world” and repent of their sins. This is followed by the Valley of Love, where each bird will be plunged into seas of fire “until his very being is enflamed.” Next is the Valley of Mystery, where every bird must take a different path, for “There are so many roads, and each is fit / For that pilgrim who must follow it.” In the Valley of Detachment, “all claims, all lust for meaning disappear,” while in the Valley of Unity, the many are merged into one: “The oneness of diversity / Not oneness locked in singularity.”
Upon reaching the sixth valley, the Valley of Bewilderment, the birds—weary and perplexed—break through the veil of traditional dualities and are suddenly confronted
with the emptiness of their being. “I have no certain knowledge anymore,” they weep in confusion.
I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure
I love, but who is it for whom I sigh?
Not Muslim, yet not heathen; who am I?
Finally, at the end of the journey, the birds arrive at the Valley of Nothingness, in which, stripped of their egos, they “put on the cloak that signifies oblivion” and become consumed by the spirit of the universe. Only when all seven valleys have been traversed, when the birds have learned to “destroy the mountain of the Self” and “give up the intellect for love,” are they allowed to continue to the throne of the Simurgh.
Of the thousands of birds who began the journey with the hoopoe, only thirty make it to the end. With “hopeless hearts and tattered, trailing wings,” these thirty birds are led into the presence of the Simurgh. Yet when they finally set their eyes upon him, they are astonished to see not the King of Birds they had expected, but rather themselves. Simurgh is the Persian word for “thirty birds”; and it is here, at the end of the Way, that the birds are confronted with the reality that although they have “struggled, wandered, traveled far,” it is “themselves they sought” and “themselves they are.” “I am the mirror set before your eyes,” the Simurgh says. “And all who come before my splendor see / Themselves, their own unique reality.”
Attar was a Sufi master who developed through his poetry and teachings the concept of “spiritual alchemy,” in which the soul was treated like a transmutable base metal that must be rid of impurities before it can be restored to its original, pristine—one could say golden—state. Like most Sufis, Attar considered all souls to be receptacles for God’s message. At the same time, he believed there exist varying degrees of receptivity in every individual depending on where he or she is on the Way.
During the first stages of the Way (where the great majority of humanity find themselves), the nafs, which is the self, the ego, the psyche, the “I”—however one chooses to define the “sum of individual egocentric tendencies”—remains the sole reality. As the disciple moves along the Way, he encounters the ruh, or Universal Spirit. The Quran refers to the ruh as “the breath of God” blown into Adam to give life to his body (15:29). In this sense, the ruh is equated with the divine, eternal, animating spirit that permeates creation—that is itself the essence of creation. The ruh is Pure Being. It is that which Hindus call prana and Taoists call ch’i; it is the ethereal force underlying the universe that Christian mystics refer to when they speak of the Holy Spirit.
In traditional Sufi doctrine, the ruh, or spirit of God, is locked in an eternal battle with the nafs, or the self, for possession of the heart—the qalb—which is not the seat of emotion (emotions, in most Muslim cultures, reside in the gut), but rather the vital center of human existence—“the seat of an essence that transcends individual form,” in the words of Titus Burckhardt. In more familiar terms, the qalb is equivalent to the traditional Western notion of the soul as the driving force of the intellect.
An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to absorb the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicating self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. It is here, at the end of the journey, when the individual has been stripped of his ego, that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit and achieves unity with the Divine.
Although the actual number of stations along the Way varies depending on the tradition (Attar’s Order, for instance, acknowledged seven of them), Sufis are adamant that the steps must be taken one at a time. As Rumi wrote, “Before you can drink the fifth cup, you must have drunk the first four, each of them delicious.” Furthermore, each station must be completed under the strict supervision of a Pir; only someone who has himself finished the journey can lead others along the path. “Do not travel through these stations without the company of a perfect master,” warned the glorious Sufi poet Hafiz. “There is darkness. Beware of the danger of getting lost!”
The Pir is the “Sublime Elixir,” the one who transmutes “the copper of seekers’ hearts into pure gold, and cleanses their being,” to quote the Sufi scholar Javad Nurbakhsh. Like the hoopoe, the Pir demands perfect submission from his disciples, who pledge him their loyalty in the form of a bay’ah, the oath of allegiance traditionally given to a Shaykh or a Caliph. Yet the Pir enjoys far greater authority than any Shaykh or Caliph ever could, for he is “the friend of God.” The Pir is not just a spiritual guide; he is “the eyes through which God regards the world.” In much of Sufi poetry the Pir is referred to as “the cosmic pole,” or qutb: the axis around which the spiritual energy of the universe rotates. This concept is brought vividly to life by the famed Turkish Sufi Order of “Whirling Darvishes,” who perform a spiritual, trance-inducing dance in which disciples mimic the movement of the cosmos by spinning in place, sometimes for hours at a time, while simultaneously orbiting the Pir, who becomes the center of their constructed universe.
As those who have completed the Way, Sufi Pirs are venerated as saints. The anniversaries of their deaths are holy days (termed urs, Persian for “weddings,” because in dying and leaving this world, the Pir is finally united with God). Their tombs are pilgrimage sites—especially for impoverished Muslims for whom the Hajj is unfeasible—where devotees gather with their oaths, petitions, and appeals for intercession. So great is the Pir’s spiritual power—his baraka—that merely touching his tomb can heal a sick man of his illness or impart fertility to a barren woman. As with the majority of Sufi activities, these tombs are completely egalitarian with regard to sex, ethnicity, and even faith. Particularly in the Indian subcontinent, it is not unusual for Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims to congregate in nearly equal numbers inside the mausoleums of Sufi saints.
By the sheer power of their spiritual charisma, the Pirs gather disciples in order to impart to them the esoteric knowledge Sufis call erfan. Like the Greek term gnosis, erfan refers to a heightened level of knowing in which one is able to intuit ultimate reality. However, erfan is a nonintellectual, nonrational knowing that, in the words of Shah Angha, the forty-second Pir of the Oveyssi Order, can be achieved only “through self-discipline and purification, in which case there is no need to become involved in the method of reasoning.” Because the intellect cannot fathom the divine mystery, the Sufis believe that true understanding of the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it can be achieved only when reason has been abandoned for love.
Of all the principles that the Sufi disciple must integrate into his life, none is more important than the principle of love. Love is the foundation of Sufism. It is the language through which Sufism is most perfectly expressed and the sole avenue through which its ideals can be understood. The experience of love represents the most universal station on the Sufi Way, for it is love—not theology and certainly not the law—that engenders knowledge of God.
According to the Sufis, God’s very essence—God’s substance—is love. Love is the agent of creation. Sufism does not allow for the concept of creation ex nihilo because, before there was anything, there was love: that is, God loving God’s self in a primordial state of unity. It was only when God desired to express this love to an “other” that humanity was created in the image of the Divine. Humanity, then, is God made manifest; it is God objectified through love.
When Sufis speak of their love for God, they are not referring to the traditional Christian concept of agape, or spiritual love; quite the opposite. This is a passionate, all-consuming, humiliating, self-denying love. As with Majnun’s love for Layla, Sufi love requires the unconditional surrender to the Beloved’s will, with no regard for one’s own well-being. This is love to the point of utter self-annihilation; indeed, that is its very purpose. Love, according to Attar, is the fire
that obliterates the ego and purifies the soul, and the lover is he who “flares and burns …”
Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,
Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send
A hundred worlds toward their blazing end,
Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,
Who has no time for doubt or certainty,
To whom both good and evil are the same,
And who is neither, but a living flame.
Like most mystics, Sufis strive to eliminate the dichotomy between subject and object in their worship. The goal is to create an inseparable union between the individual and the Divine. In Sufism, this union is most often expressed through the most vivid, most explicit sexual imagery. Thus Hafiz wrote of God, “The scent of Your hair fulfills my life, and the sweetness of Your lips has no counterpart.”
Some of the most captivating use of sexual imagery in Sufism can be found in the writings of the aforementioned Rabia of Basra (717–801). Orphaned at a young age, Rabia became a slave and the sexual property of her master. Yet, she longed throughout her life to experience mystical union with God, sometimes going without sleep for weeks at a time in order to fast, pray, and meditate on the movement of the universe. It was during one of these nightly meditations that her master first noticed a blinding nimbus of light shining above her head, illuminating the entire house. Terrified, he immediately set Rabia free, allowing her to go into the desert to pursue the Way. There, in the wilderness, Rabia achieved fana, or self-annihilation, becoming the first, though not the only, female Sufi master: a woman in whose presence the venerable scholar Hasan al-Basra admitted to feeling spiritually bankrupt.