by Reza Aslan
Like her Christian counterpart, Teresa of Avila, Rabia’s poetry betrays a profoundly intimate encounter with God:
You are my breath,
My hope,
My companion,
My craving,
My abundant wealth.
Without You—my Life, my Love—
I would never have wandered across these endless countries …
I look everywhere for Your love—
Then I am suddenly filled with it.
O Captain of my Heart,
Radiant Eye of Yearning in my breast,
I will never be free from You
As long as I live.
Be satisfied with me, Love,
And I am satisfied.
This intense longing for the Beloved, so prevalent in Rabia’s verses, betrays an important aspect of the Sufi conception of love. Above all else, this is a love that must remain unfulfilled, as Majnun discovered in the palm orchard. After all, as Attar’s birds realized on their journey to the Simurgh, one cannot begin the Way expecting to complete it; only a handful of individuals will reach the final destination and achieve unity with God. For this reason, the Sufi is often compared to the bride who sits on her marriage bed, “roses strewn on the cushions,” yearning for the arrival of the Bridegroom, though she knows he may never come. And yet, the bride waits; she will wait forever, “dying from love,” aching for the beloved, crying out with every breath, “Come to me! Come to me!” until she ceases to exist as a separate entity and becomes nothing more than a lover loving the Beloved in perfect union. As al-Hallaj wrote of his experience of unity with the Divine:
I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I.
We are two spirits dwelling in one body,
If thou seest me, thou seest Him;
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.
If, then, the perfect love is unrequited love—the kind of love that expects nothing in return—then the perfect lover and the paradigm of love for Sufis is Iblis, or Satan, who began his existence as an angel in “the Way of devotion to the service of God,” but who was cast out of God’s presence for refusing to bow before Adam. Rumi illustrates in his “Apology of Iblis” that this refusal to obey God “arose from love of God, not from disobedience.” After all, “all envy arises from love, for fear lest another become the companion of the Beloved.”
Though cast into hell, never to see the face of God again, Iblis continues to yearn for his Beloved, who “rocked my cradle” and “found milk for me in my infancy.” He will pine for God forever, crying out from the depths of hell, “I am mated by Him, mated by Him, mated by Him!”
If this somewhat flattering impression of the Devil is shocking to most Muslims, it is important to remember that that is precisely the point. As Attar claimed, “Love knows of neither faith nor blasphemy.” Only by breaking through the veil of traditional dualities, which human beings have constructed in order to categorize proper moral and religious behavior, can one achieve fana. The Sufi knows no dualities, only unity. There is no good and evil, no light and dark; there is only God. This notion should not be confused with the Hindu principle of maya (the illusion of reality), or the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata (the emptiness of all things). For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God. “Whichever way one turns, there is God,” the Quran says; “God is all-pervading and all-knowing” (2:115). And because the doctrine of tawhid insists God is One, the Sufis argue, reality must also be One.
The atom, the sun, the galaxies, and the universe,
Are surely but names, images, and forms.
One they are in reality, and only one.
In traditional Western philosophy this concept of radical unity is often called monism: the notion that all things, despite their variety, can be reduced to a single unified “thing” in either space, time, essence, or quality. However, it is perhaps more appropriate to refer to the Sufi ideal of radical unity as ahadiyyah, or “oneness,” to emphasize the theistic quality of this monistic ideal: al-Ahad, “the One,” being the first and most important of God’s ninety-nine beautiful names.
It is precisely this theistic monism that leads Sufis to reject traditional dualities, not because they eschew morally correct behavior, but because they accept only “the Existence of Oneness”: that is, Divine Unity. Admittedly, this concept has led to a great deal of confusion about the true teachings of Sufism, especially in light of the actions of the so-called Drunken Sufis who blatantly violated Islamic law by publicly drinking, gambling, and womanizing as a means of overcoming the external aspects of religion. The nonexistence of traditional dualities is, however, usually demonstrated through metaphor. And the most common metaphor for doing so is that of drunkenness and debauchery, both of which have become dominant symbols in Sufi poetry for this self-annihilating and intoxicating love.
“I will take one hundred barrels of wine tonight,” wrote Omar Khayyám in his superb Rubáiyát. “I will leave all reason and religion behind, and take the maidenhead of wine for mine.” Khayyám’s wine is spiritual wine—it represents “the grace of the Lord of the World”—and the Sufi is he who has rejected the traditional ideals of religious piety and moral behavior, who has fled “reason and the tangled web of the intellect,” in order to fill the cup of his heart with the intoxicating wine of God’s love. So says Hafiz: “Piety and moral goodness have naught to do with ecstasy; stain your prayer rug with wine!”
Once the veil of traditional dualities has been lifted, the ego obliterated, and the ruh allowed to absorb the qalb, the disciple finally achieves fana, which, as mentioned, is best translated as “ecstatic self-annihilation.” It is here, at the end of the Way, that the truth of the Divine Unity of all creation is revealed and the Sufi realizes that, in the words of Shah Angha, “the brook, the river, the drop, the sea, the bubble, all in one voice say: Water we are, water.”
By discarding his own qualities and attributes through a radical act of self-annihilation, the Sufi enters fully into the qualities and attributes of God. He does not become God, as fana is so often misunderstood by Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims; rather, the Sufi is drowned in God, so that Creator and creation become one. This concept of Divine Unity is most keenly expressed by the great mystic and scholar Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), who reformulated the traditional Muslim profession of faith (shahadah) from “There is no god but God” to “There is no Being other than the Being of God; there is no Reality other than the Reality of God.”
In Ibn al-Arabi’s school of thought—a school so influential to the development of Sufism that this entire chapter could be devoted to it—humanity and the cosmos, as two separate but intimately connected constructions of the Universal Spirit, are like two mirrors reflecting one another. By employing ta’wil, Ibn al-Arabi reinterpreted the Quran’s statement that God created humanity “from a single soul” (4:1) to mean that the universe itself is “as a single being.” For al-Arabi, human beings are thus “an abridgment of the great cosmic book,” and those few individuals who have “fully realized [their] essential oneness with the Divine Being,” to quote Reynold Nicholson, are transformed into what al-Arabi terms “the Perfect Man” (also called “the Universal Man”).
The Perfect Man is he for whom individuality is merely an external form, but whose inward reality conforms to the universe itself. He is “the copy of God,” in the words of al-Arabi’s greatest disciple, Abdul Karim al-Jili: he is the mirror in which the divine attributes are perfectly reflected; the medium through which God is made manifest.
Although Sufism considers all prophets and messengers, as well as the Imams and the Pirs, to be representatives of the Perfect Man, for Sufis the paradigm of this unique being is none other than the Prophet Muhammad himself. All Muslims look to the example of the Prophet (the Imitatio Muhammadi, if you will) to guide them on the straight path to God. But for the Sufi, Muhammad is more than just the “beautiful model” that the Quran calls him (33:21). Muhammad is the primordial lig
ht: the first of God’s creations.
The concept of “the light of Muhammad” (nur Muhammad) reveals Sufism’s deep Gnostic influences. In short, the Sufis understand Muhammad in the same way that many Christian Gnostics understood Jesus: as the eternal logos. Thus, Muhammad is, like Jesus in the words of John’s Gospel, “the light shining in the darkness, though the darkness does not overcome it” (John 1:5); or to quote the Gospel of Thomas, he is “the light which is before all things.”
Yet unlike Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels of John and Thomas, Muhammad is not to be understood as “God made flesh.” “God is the light of the heavens and the earth,” the Quran exclaims (24:35), meaning, as al-Ghazali argues in his Niche of Lights, that the nur Muhammad is, in reality, nothing more than the reflection of God’s light. Indeed, Sufism often describes the relationship between God and Muhammad in terms of the relationship between the sun and the moon, in that the latter merely reflects the light of the former. The sun expresses power; it is creative. The moon expresses beauty; it is responsive. Thus, according to Inayat Khan, “the one who gives [God’s] Message gives God’s Knowledge, not his own.… Just [as] the moon’s light is not its own.” It is this unique impression of Muhammad that has led Sufis to refer to the Prophet not just as Rasul Allah, but also as Dhikr Allah: “the remembrance of God,” though the term dhikr has many meanings in Sufism.
As one would expect, Sufi beliefs often resulted in bitter, sometimes violent persecution of their adherents at the hands of the religious authorities, who were deeply troubled by its antilaw, antiestablishment ideals. The Sufis were rarely welcomed in the mosques and so were forced to develop their own rituals and practices to assist them in breaking down the separation between the individual and the Divine. As a result, dhikr, as the physical act of remembering God, has become the central ritual activity for all Sufis, though the actual form and function of the dhikr varies drastically depending on the Order.
The most common form of dhikr is known as the “vocal dhikr,” made popular through the rituals of the Qadiri Order, which exists primarily in Syria, Turkey, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. The Qadiri, who likely represent the first formally recognized tariqah in Sufism, center their dhikr activities on rhythmic and repetitive invocations of the shahadah or some other religious phrase. Often accompanied by strenuous breathing exercises and rapid movements of the head and torso (the disciples are usually sitting in a circle), these invocations are pronounced faster and faster until the phrase breaks down into meaningless, monosyllabic exhalations of breath, which naturally come to resemble the Arabic word hu! or “He,” meaning God. By repeatedly invoking God through this physical act of remembrance, the disciple gradually strips himself of his ego so that he may be clothed instead in the attributes of God. In this way, the Qadiri claim, “the rememberer becomes the remembered.”
Alongside the “vocal dhikr” of the Qadiri is the so-called “silent dhikr” popularized by the Order of the Naqshbandi. Considered the most traditional of the Sufi Orders, the Naqshbandi primarily comprised politically active pietists who traced their lineage back to Abu Bakr and who maintained strict adherence to the Shariah. The Naqshbandi’s traditionalist brand of Sufism led them to reject music and dance in favor of more sober ritual activities like the silent dhikr, in which the names of God are repeated inwardly in an act of meditation, rather than aloud in an act of communion.
The silent dhikr does not exactly correspond to the meditation rituals found in, for example, Theravada Buddhism. However, the Naqshbandi, as well as a few other contemplative Sufi Orders, do practice something called fikr, which Ian Richard Netton correctly translates as “contemplation resulting in certitude of the divine.” In any case, like the Qadiri, the Naqshbandi have only one goal in pursuing either dhikr or fikr: union with God.
Not all dhikrs involve recitation, either vocal or silent. In fact, the most widely recognized form of dhikr is the spiritual dance of Turkey’s Mevlevi Order, founded by Rumi, and popularly known as the Whirling Darvishes. Some Sufis use the art of calligraphy as a form of dhikr, while in the Caucasus, where Sufism inherited many of the shamanistic practices of the ancient Indo-Europeans, dhikr tends to focus not so much on recitation or meditation, but rather on physical pain as a means to shock the disciple into a state of ecstasy. The Rifa’i Order in Macedonia, for example, is famous for its public acts of self-mutilation, in which disciples pierce themselves with spikes while in a trancelike state. In certain parts of Morocco, there are Sufis who practice dhikr through great feats of strength and stamina meant to separate them from the false reality of the material world.
There is another popular form of dhikr, primarily employed by the Chisti Order, who dominate the Indian subcontinent. The Chistis specialize in the use of music in their spiritual exercises. Their “remembrance of God” is best expressed through rapturous spiritual concerts called sama‘, which Bruce Lawrence describes as “a dynamic dialogue between a human lover and the Divine Beloved.”
Of course, music and dance—both of which tend to be frowned upon in traditional Islamic worship—have a long history in the Indian subcontinent, and part of the reason for the rapid spread of Sufism in India was the ease with which it appropriated both into its worship ceremonies. In fact, early Chisti evangelists would often enter a town playing flutes or beating drums so as to gather a crowd, before launching into the tales of their Pirs. So the sama’ is not only a means by which the Chistis experience the suprasensible world, it is also a valuable evangelical tool. And it is not unusual for the sama’ to function as a political rally. Indeed, unlike most Sufi orders, which tend toward political quietism, Sufism in India has always been intertwined with the social and political machinations of the state, especially during the reign of the Mughal emperors (1526–1858), when, in exchange for providing spiritual prosperity and moral legitimacy to the Empire, a select number of Sufis enjoyed enormous influence over the government.
Perhaps the most influential of these “political Sufis” was the eighteenth-century writer and philosopher Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762). A fervent disciple of the traditionalist Naqshbandi Order, Wali Allah strove in his books and lectures to strip Sufism of its “foreign” influences (e.g., Neoplatonism, Persian mysticism, Hindu Vedantism) in order to restore it to what he considered to be an older, unadulterated form of Islamic mysticism, one inextricably bound to traditionalist Sunni orthodoxy. However, Wali Allah was far more interested in reasserting fundamental Islamic values in the social and economic spheres of the state than in merely purifying Sufism. As a result, his theo-political ideology, though interpreted in widely divergent ways, had a profound effect on succeeding generations of Muslim theologians and philosophers.
On the one hand, Wali Allah’s emphasis on the resurgence of the Islamic sciences and his enlightened socioeconomic theories influenced Islamic modernists like Sayyid Ahmed Khan to form his Aligarh movement, an intellectual society dedicated not only to establishing a European educational system in India, but also to encouraging Muslim cooperation with the British colonialists who were just then beginning to take a more aggressive role in the political affairs of the Subcontinent.
On the other hand, Wali Allah’s emphasis on orthodoxy sparked a number of so-called “puritan” movements in India, the most famous of which is the Deobandi School, whose students—taliban in Arabic—played an active role in opposing the British occupation of India, and whose ethnic Pashtun contingent would eventually seize control of Afghanistan in order to impose their radically orthodox theo-political philosophy upon the state (though that story must be reserved for another chapter).
Considering the tragic effects of the colonialist experience in India, it should be obvious which vision of Shah Wali Allah’s theo-political views most successfully captured the imaginations of India’s oppressed Muslim population. As will become apparent, throughout the colonized lands of the Middle East and North Africa, the voice of modernism and integration with the Enlightenment ideals of the European
colonialists was consistently drowned out by the far louder and more aggressive voice of traditionalism and resistance to the insufferable yoke of imperialism. Thus, a new generation of Indian Muslims, born into a country that had become the exclusive financial property of the British Empire, no longer shared the popular Sufi sentiment that “if the world does not agree with you, you agree with the world.” They instead preferred the version offered by the great mystical poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938)—a disciple of the Qadiri Order and a devotee of Wali Allah—who exclaimed, “If the world does not agree with you, arise against it!”
9. An Awakening in the East
THE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM
DISPATCH FROM FREDERICK Cooper, Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, to the Foreign Office in London, regarding the fate of the mutinous Sepoys (Bengali soldiers) at Lahore, India. First of August, 1857:
On the 30th of July, some 400 Sepoys from the 26th Native Infantry escaped from the prison camp at Mianmir, where by order of the Crown they had been assembled and disarmed to prevent them from possibly joining the Mohammedan rebels at Delhi. Being weakened and famished, the Sepoys were easily pursued to the banks of the Ravi, where some 150 of them were shot, mobbed backwards into the river, and drowned. The survivors floated across the river on pieces of wood until they reached the opposite shore, whereupon they gathered together like a brood of wild fowl, waiting to be captured. Had they tried to escape, a bloody struggle would have ensued. But Providence ordered otherwise. Indeed, everything natural, artificial, and accidental combined to secure their fate.
The sun was setting in golden splendour; and as the doomed men, with joined palms, crowded down to the shore on the approach of our boats, their long shadows were flung athwart the gleaming waters. In utter despair, forty or fifty dashed into the stream; and the sowars [mounted Indian soldiers], being on the point of taking potshots at the heads of the swimmers, were given orders not to shoot. The mutineers were remarkably compliant. They were evidently possessed of a sudden and insane idea that they were going to be tried by court-martial, after some luxurious refreshment. In consequence, they submitted to being bound by a single man, and stocked like slaves into the holds of our boats.