IV JESUS AND ISLAMIC MYSTICISM

THE SUFI PARALLEL  … 91

The disciplines of Sufism  … 91

Love only God … 91

The Sufi ‘path’ … 92

Sufi ‘love’ and the ‘first commandment’ … 94

Seeking ‘union’ and ‘unity’ … 96

Explanations for the parallel  … 97

Non-historical explanations for the parallel … 98

A historical explanation … 101

NOTES AND RFERERENCES  … 102

IV

JESUS AND ISLAMIC MYSTICISM

THE SUFI PARALLEL

The opinion that in Sufism, Islam and Christianity come quite close to each other is widespread. On this point, Western Islamists seem to differ little, if at all.¹ It is understood that when the committed Christian—and there is hardly a Western Islamist who has not been one—approaches the subject of Islam, he tends to see, more prominently than any other, those aspects which appear to have the greatest correspondence with his own faith. It is also natural that the secular Muslim, who thinks in terms borrowed from Western culture and history, would feel particularly attracted to Sufism because its emphasis upon the personal and upon withdrawal from society is well attracted to the secularist agenda of denying Islam jurisdiction in public life. The claim, therefore, that in Sufism, Islam and Christianity come closest together, is by no means merely a ‘Western’ bias. Muslim thinkers have shared it. Such consensus must have a basis in fact; and it is this basis that we shall now seek to uncover.

The disciplines of Sufism

Love only God

All Sufi thinking begins and ends with God. The combat against Makkan polytheism in the formative years of Islam underlined the importance of abolishing from consciousness the gods of the tribes. The whole of Islam has often been compressed into the meaning of tawhīd or ‘achieving one-ness’. Besides expressing the oneness of Truth and of God, this concept has stood for the oneness of value as such, the Oneness of the object of devotion, worship, desire, and love. What Jesus had to struggle for and win for human consciousness, wresting it out of Pharisee association of the tribe with the Godhead, the Sufis found ‘built-in’, as it were, in Islam. The battle against the tribal gods of Arabia and all the particularisms they represented had already been won. Although this is only one spent of tawhīd, the Sufis singled it out and built around it a unique system of devotion and ‘loving God’ or theosophy. In a sense, therefore, Sufism is an outflow from the

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breakthrough of Islam, and may therefore also be seen as a consummation of the breakthrough of Jesus.

According to the Sufis, to see and to hold God as One was the goal of religion and ethics. It was also its beginning and condition. For unless all false claimants to Godhood were first eradicated, the soul was not free to offer the quality of worship which might lead to a real communion with God. Thus, the Sufi discipline, essentially a process of self-purification, sought, in a sense, to repeat within the self what the Prophet Muhammad had achieved within Arabia. The goal of self-purification is that the self be informed, shaped, ‘determined’ by the

Will of God alone. The radical self-transformation that Jesus proclaimed through the ‘First commandment’—love thy God with heart, soul, mind—demanded the rejection of Jahweh, the false association of a racial community with God. The Sufis, born into an already strictly monotheistic ethos, sought to cleanse the soul of whatever false deities it cherished, lesser or greater, in its most secret recesses. We do not mean that Jesus did not also demand, like the Sufis, the eradication from the soul of such personal infatuations and desires as prevent a true and total commitment to God. We do mean that the main weight of his teaching was, necessarily, centered around the Jewish preoccupation with the tribe as God.

The Sufi ‘path’

As Jesus had to strive all his life against this Jewish shirk or associationism, he could devote little time to elaborating techniques of self-purification as the Sufis were to do centuries later. Starting from a different point and using somewhat different categories, the Sufis were, as far as his ethical breakthrough is concerned, the disciples of Jesus, in every respect.² It was under their influence that the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages developed their version of the discipline of self-purification which, despite the adjective ‘Christian’ remains one and the same.³ This Sufi ‘path’ consists of a number of stages (maqāmāt) progressively more demanding in the realization of the personalist values of poverty, charity, purity, devotion, discipline, and obedience to the leader of the brotherhood, the shaykh, and implying the achievement of progressively more intense and higher states (ahwāl) of consciousness. The ideal of the Sufi path is identical with that of Jesus as well as Paul, namely, a consciousness in which only God is present and ‘determines’.

This is really a state of union with God, but of a special kind. Real life provides analogies for it—the lover becoming ‘one’ with the beloved, the pupil becoming ‘one’ with the master. Union does not mean a ‘fusion’ of bodies, or of substances, or of souls, or of consciousness. The two continue in actual fact to be two. But the consciousness of the beloved has made such an imprint upon that of the lover, that their wills and ideas appear as if they issued from one and the same source. One is not annihilated by the other, it is simply that the

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lover’s consciousness anticipates the beloved by reacting, intuiting, or feeling in the situations of life exactly as the beloved would. This correspondence become harmony is what poetic ardor names ‘unity’ when it should be satisfied with ‘union’.

Jesus too spoke of ‘unity’ with God; or rather, he was interpreted by John and the Christians of history as if ‘unity’ were what he meant. In fact, John reports him as only saying, ‘l and the Father are one,’ in the conclusion to a discussion in which Jesus’ principal argument was that his works are evidence that God had sent him (John 10:25-30). Jesus’ meaning is plain enough: he and God have the same will inasmuch as all the works he does are such as God would do. If an individual does indeed achieve such correspondence between personal will and God’s Will, that individual is perhaps right to accept the description that the two are ‘one’. However, such a phrase should neither be used nor understood casually.

Paul, too, has used the comparable phrase, ‘unity with Christ’, to mean union between the most conscious Christians, including himself and Jesus Christ. His famous phrase ‘in Christ’' or ‘to be one in Christ’, despite the elaborate speculation of later generations on the so-called ‘mystical union with Christ', etc,⁴ means no more, in final analysis, than this perfected correspondence of mind and will between Christ and the most virtuous of his followers. ‘He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit with him’ (1 Corinthians, 6:17). All the Christians are ‘one in Christ’ because they ‘have been all made to drink into one spirit’ (12: 13). These and other similarly worded statements—once the excess of sentiment and poetic expression have been disciplined—mean no more than this correspondence. Even if the theological speculations of later Christians about some ‘mystical body’ of Christ in which all Christians are united as members, are justified, it remains true that they all rest, in final analysis, upon the same correspondence.

In several places, Paul speaks of the unity of Jesus with God, and that of the Christians with Jesus, as being the same.⁵ ln this he was, surely, following the example of Jesus reported in John (17:21-2). This ‘unity’ must be a perfected harmony or correspondence in only one direction, from the ‘lover’ to the ‘Beloved’. The lover’s will, submitted to the Will of the Beloved is ‘determined’ by it: the Will of the Beloved is not ‘determined’ by the lover. It is blasphemous to speak of God, the Beloved, as necessarily willing what the lover wills. He may do so, but He also may not. Within the ‘unity’ so-called, God remains the independent object, standard and judge, the principle and goal of the ‘unity’, but in Himself wholly free of the seeker who seeks Him. To describe the nature of this ‘unity’ as a material or logical identity, to imply of it any kind of fusion or diffusion of being, is improper and indeed trivializes the intense self-discipline involved in the lover’s seeking. In this union, the individual soul and God, the seeker and the Sought, remain wholly and forever distinct, other, two.

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Both Sufism and the radical self-transformation taught by Jesus aimed at the same state of consciousness. The traditions of both later influenced each other and developed very similar preparatory disciplines. Finally, both referred to that state as ‘oneness’ and were exposed to the same misunderstanding. An essentially spiritual union was understood in literal, physical and material, terms, and, with the Christians, led to the greatest confusion of this kind history has ever seen. The Sufi state was likewise misunderstood and gave rise to an appalling crime: the claim to oneness with God exposed its author, al-Hallāj, to an incomprehension that led, abruptly, to his martyrdom in Baghdad in 922. The destinies of the two miscomprehensions could not be further apart. The Christian failure of understanding came to dominate Christendom; the Muslim failure performed its bloody deed and sank away before the Sufi tide which overwhelmed the Muslim world. The success of Sufism in Islam can justifiably be described as the success of the Jesus ethic, devoid of the theological superstructures which Christian miscomprehension had constructed around the oneness of Christ with God, or of Christ’s followers with Christ. In the Middle Ages, the intellectual disciples of Jesus were the Sufis of Islam, rather than the theologians of the Council or Pope-monarchs of Christendom. It was in Sufism that the ethical breakthrough of Jesus bloomed into a complete world-view, true to that original break-through in every way.

Sufi ‘love’ and the ‘first commandment’

Once the path of self-purification is entered upon, only one feeling is proper to God: love. Jesus had called this the ‘first commandment’, speaking in a context dominated by the Law of Moses. The Qur’an requires man to fill his consciousness with God. The Sufis reasoned that this requirement makes no other act, attitude, or feeling possible. For to worship God or to serve Him out of any other motive than love is to associate some other god with Him. Thus, in her ecstatic Arabic poetry sang Rābiʻah al-‘Adawiyyah:

I have not served God from fear of Hell, for l should be like a wretched hireling, if I did it from fear; nor from love of paradise, for I should be a bad servant if I served for the sake of what was given, but I have served Him only for the love of Him and out of desire for Him. 0 my Lord, if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if l worship Thee from hope of Paradise, exclude me thence; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.⁶

The ethical content of the Sufi love of God is, as well as the forms it has taken, identical with that of Jesus. Both consist in a state in which only God decides and moves and determines.⁷ The one so determined is blessed; the act so determined, ethical.⁸ A life so lived is felicitous not only ethically but aesthetically; it has a style which is the most

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graceful and beautiful possible.⁹ As in the ethic of Jesus the life of love is conceived by the Sufis as a genuine apolytroris, or self-emancipation. Only the tyranny from which emancipation takes place is different. The ‘false gods’ of the Sufis were desires, doubts, and longings embedded in the depths of the soul:

To become a saint of God, you must covet nothing in this world... To covet this world means to turn away from God, for the sake of what is transitory, and to covet the next world means turning away from God, for the sake of what is everlasting.¹⁰

Though mainly concerned with Jewish legalism as the means and outer form of Jewish racism, Jesus did also teach self-emancipation from the ‘false gods’ of the individual heart or self. Once the hold on consciousness of Jewish Law was broken, it was these gods that became the evil-to-be-purged of Christian mysticism. ‘Sin’, ‘desecration’, ‘pollution’, ‘evil’, etc., were for the Jews of Jesus’ time (and still are) departure from the Law. Jesus spent all his life and energy trying to teach them that this was not so. Those who listened and believed opened their consciousness to the One True God. Nonetheless, the breakthrough insight of Jesus did not come into its own until later, after the immediate context in which he had taught was past and forgotten. Only then, in the freer ethos of Christian life, did ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ come to be identified with interior ‘false gods’. Both literally and metaphorically, this evil was christened ‘Original Sin’. The association with Adam was the metaphorical element; the real ‘sin’ was the association of self with God to whom alone worship, devotion, and service belong. It was sin understood in this sense—rather than as a violation of any law—to which Sufism gave the name ‘the self’. To liberate oneself from ‘the self’ became the first and last condition of the Sufi life of grace.

It is incorrect, therefore, to equate the Christian understanding of sin and sinfulness with the Islamic understanding of prohibited (muharram) acts being committed, with khatī’ah or kabīrah. ‘Sin’ is much more serious than a wrong unjust deed, however unethical. It is a state. As understood by Jesus, and as he would have applied the term to his contemporary situation, sin is the state of being of a person in whom no radical self-transformation has taken place. In our modern terms, sin, in this sense, is what the Sufis mean by shirk, or association of other gods with the One God. Similarly, serious Christians define sin not as a misdeed, however grave, but as a state of rebellion or defiance against God. Though Jesus may not have articulated his thought precisely in this manner, such definition hits his mark more closely. To rebel against God is precisely to reject Him as the only proper goal of human worship and devotion. Enacted, sin is shirk or associationism; as a state of consciousness, it is kufr.

The religion of Jesus, therefore, may be said to seek to save man from the state of kufr in which man ‘associates’ other gods with God. According to the Sufis, Islam is primarily a religion of tawhīd or

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‘achieving one-ness’, namely ‘one-ness’ to God as object of worship, love, devotion and, indeed all desire. Jesus’ ‘Sufi’ thrust countered the racist tribalism of the Jews, the Sufis’ ‘Christian’ thrust countered the personal gods of self bodily desires, power, pleasure, and all the other lower values which, in the sinful, kufr-determined self, elevate themselves to a position of rivalry with God.¹¹

To describe that ‘state of the heart’ the Sufis used the same concepts as Jesus. The Islamic tradition of ascetic self-denial in the service of God and the ummah (i.e. the universal brotherhood under God’s Will, which is the absolute moral law) had furnished them with the tools and style of presentation. The Prophet had extolled the life of poverty and many of his companions had set it up as an ideal to be deliberately pursued. One such companion was Abū Dharr al-Ghīfāri. Echoing a famous admonition of Jesus’, Rābi‘ah, one of the earliest great figures of Sufism, counselled her fellow-seekers that ‘The best things for the servant who desires to be near his Lord, is to possess nothing in this world or the next save Him.’¹² Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Attār pictured the moral value of poverty as a commodity the purchase of which would be made at great cost if the moral motive were sufficiently intense.¹³

For Jesus, the life of poverty was the life in which `determination’ by God’s Will could happen with least resistance. Wealth puts up very stiff resistance to divine, ethical determinants and often triumphs over them. The life of poverty is, however, only a means—the end remains the same, a state of being in which the will is exclusively ‘determined’ by God. Appropriating both Jesus’ and the Islamic notions, the Sufis joined them to the gnostic notions of emanation and return. Poverty, or the non-possession of worldly things, arose from the intuition that this world is not our true home. Whereas, ethically, poverty was meant to reduce resistance to the morally imperative, it here produced a world-view. The poor seeker is not only readier to do the good, he is also readier to leave this world and its shackles and ‘return’ to his Lord, whence he came. Poverty came to be understood as the beginning of the ‘return’. In this life, led under Islamic-Christian poverty, the soul was supposed actually to engage itself in the ascent, or return to God, its primordial source.

Seeking ‘union’ and ‘unity’

Through this opening, gnostic theosophy entered and was grafted on to an ethos disciplined by Islamic asceticism and Jesus’ poverty, and informed by the tawhīd of Islam. Here, the Sufi sought ‘union’ with God (where the Prophets, Jesus as well as Muhammad, would have been content with acquiescence to His Will). Both trends, however, are present in Sufism. The one keeps close to Islam in the strictly ethical sense of surrender to divine determinants, even though it regards such surrender as effect, rather than cause, of communion with God. The

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other pretends to enter the soul into ecstatic identity with the Godhead and fuse its being with the Divine Being.

First, Abū Sa‘īd b. Abī al-Khayr suggested the new ideal in what seems to be a strictly ethical statement: ‘Those who in this world live in joy and agreement with one another must have been akin to one another in yonder place. Here they love one another and are called the friends of `God, and they are brethren who love one another for God`s sake’ (trans. R.A. Nicholson in Smith, 1950, p.61). Then, ‘Umar Khayyām projected the ideal in a form the understanding could grasp concretely and which could readily be used by the Sufi zealous enough to assume it as an objective,¹⁴ Finally, Husayn b. Mansūr al-Hallāj achieved the ideal and sang its raptures,¹⁵ and then Muhyī al-Dīn b. al-‘Arabī fastened to it the capstone of philosophy, an abstract system of thought.¹⁶ The effects of this pantheistic philosophy upon ethics were not long in coming. Ibn al-‘Arabī himself wrote in verse, as befits the thought:

Within my heart, all form may find a place.

The cloisters of the monk, the idol’s fane

A pasture for gazelles, the Sacred House

Of God, to which all Muslims turn their face:

The tables of the Jewish Law, the Word

Of God, revealed unto His Prophet true.

Love is the faith l hold and whereso’er

His camels turn, the one true faith is there.¹⁷

At this point Sufism has obviously defeated its own original purpose which, like Jesus’, had been strictly ethical. Nonetheless, as the history of Sufism has shown, this outcome is the logical consequence of any ‘monistic’ ethic such as Jesus’, that is, an ethic founded exclusively upon only one category, the ‘state of the soul’, upon only a single aspect of ‘achieving one-ness’ or tawhīd.

Explanations for the parallel

We must confirm that Sufism and the ethic of Jesus have run on parallel lines. Their development, history, and destiny were of the same nature. Even the miscomprehensions to which they were vulnerable were, as we have seen, of the same kind. The list of like occurrences, expressions, attitudes, achievements, and of like strains and suffering at the hands of those who did not (or would not) understand, is very long indeed. But no account of a parallel in ideas and history is complete until it has revealed the parallel in the genesis of the ideas in question. Only the study of their genesis can reveal the inner motives, the secret logic, of these ideas and movements. Nor is it possible really to understand the later history and development without understanding the first impulse and beginning.

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Non-historical explanations

Attempts to explain the parallel between the ethic of Jesus and Sufism fall generally into three classes. First, there is the committed Western Islamist view—committed Christian or committed secular—whose explanation hinges on ‘reaction’. The Jesus ethic was a reaction against Jewish legalism. In the case of Sufism, the reaction was against Islamic legalism personified and expressed by the fuqahā’ (jurists) of Sunni (orthodox) Islam. Jewish Law and the Sharī‘ah, according to this view, are one in that they both envisage a ‘kingdom’ that is really a ‘king’s peace’, concerned merely with external conditions and circumstances (Cragg, 1959, pp.106-7, 121). Further, they are one in that they require ‘no inward conditions of an exacting kind—regeneration or radical transformation’ (pp. 130-1, 123). Hence, the need for an inward-looking ethic of spiritual regeneration and spirituality such as Jesus taught and Sufism had achieved. (For this view, special emphasis has to be put on the Christian influences on the Sufis.¹⁸ )

Second, there is the more balanced Western Islamist explanation, exemplified by Louis Massignon (see, e.g., Massignon, 1922). This explanation seeks the origin of Sufism in the purely Arab asceticism of the early Madinan community, particularly the Companions of the Prophet. This opinion is one shared by the majority of Muslim scholars who argue that unless Sufism is presented as an internal development within Islam, it cannot be adequately understood. Non-Islamic elements incorporated into Sufism are easily accepted on the grounds that such elements have been integrated within a larger framework of ideas that are purely Islamic.

Thirdly, there is the view of the committed Sufi who can find no non-Islamic elements at all in Sufism. Rather, this view maintains, the first Sufi was none other than the Prophet himself; the Sufi book none other than the Holy Qur’an; and the history of Sufism none other than the history of Islam. For example, a recent Sufi thinker, Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din writes (1952, Preface, p.10): ‘It will be clear to anyone who understands this book that without Sufism, the Islamic religion would be like a circumference without a center, that the first Sufi is the Prophet himself and that Sufism is therefore as old as Islam. In fact, far from being a later development, as some people maintain, Sufism was never so generally widespread, in proportion to the total number of the faithful, as it was during the life of the Prophet.’ It is clearly impossible to debate such an argument. It is founded on the attribution of thoughts and concepts to the Prophet Muhammad which he could not have had, and the attribution to the Qur’an (through very labored allegorical interpretation) of meanings which no analysis can support. In the end, this view rests on assertion and the use of occult illumination as the criterion of truth.

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Hovering between the first two positions is H.A.R. Gibb. He likes the scholarship of Massignon but prefers the conclusion of Cragg. He finds that Massignon’s evidence that Islamic mysticism was descended from early Islamic asceticism does not prove much. For, ‘even if this may be granted, it will be remembered that the groundwork of the asceticism of the Koran is identical with that of Eastern Christianity’ (Gibb, 1954, p. 128). Thus, according to Gibb, the claim of Christian influence on Islam remains valid. We can accept this on the grounds that Islam is the third sublime moment of Arab religious consciousness, after Moses and Jesus, and natural heir to the whole of that tradition. To repudiate either the person of Jesus or his teaching would inevitably imply that God changed His mind and strategy—which is blasphemy. Jesus stands in the middle of a Prophetic tradition; without him that tradition is incomplete; the historical advent of Islam cannot be explained without Jesus’ historical mission. We may then say, in answer to Gibb, that insofar as Eastern Christianity is Christian, and Islam has incorporated within itself the true teachings of Jesus, Islam may well have something in common with Eastern Christianity, and Sufism (as an outflow from Islam) likewise. But Gibb’s claim is false, insofar as it maintains that the Qur’an, the Prophet or early Sufism, were nourished by ideas that were ‘borrowed’ (transmitted historically) from Eastern Christianity.

The difference between the ‘committed’ and ‘balanced’ Western-Islamist on this question is only a slight one. The former sees Islam as a version of ‘Pharisee’ legalism. This ‘Islam’ ‘needed’ Sufism so that it could move towards what (apparently) every human heart needs to move towards, namely, the love of a Self-sacrificing God. This natural tendency was assisted by the influence of Eastern Christianity: there was a revival among the Muslims (formerly Eastern Christians) of their former Christian sentiments and ideas. The ‘balanced’ Western-Islamist position (shared by some Muslims also¹⁹) is that in the course of its third century, Islam did decay into an empty legalism. Sufism was able to provide, through its goal and disciplines, a spiritual need among the people for inward purity and personal closeness to God. The argument thus holds that, from at least its third century on, Islam had only the Sharī‘ah to offer to its adherents. Moreover, this Sharī`ah was merely a body of laws, in the normal sense, that is, laws concerning external circumstances and external relationships.

Whether the Sharī‘ah really was what either argument pretends, and whether Sufism really could satisfy the needs that the argument claims it arose to satisfy—are questions not relevant in the context of this chapter. Our present aim is to describe and (as far as possible) to explain the origins and nature of the parallels between Sufism and the ethic of Jesus. In order to do so, we need to determine the truth or otherwise of the very definite, confident claim by Gibb that ‘the groundwork of the asceticism of the Koran is identical with that of Eastern Christianity’. Gibb’s assertion, large as it is, does not rest upon any evidence—none is offered in Mohammedanism from which

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it is quoted, nor in any other of his works known to me. There is, however, another comment in his book which relates Islam to Eastern Christianity. He writes (p.48) ‘…In reaction from the asceticism and tendency to withdraw from the world which was so marked a feature of Eastern Christianity, Mohammed from the first set his community squarely in the midst of the world. His often-quoted phrase ‘No monkery in Islam’ implies not only no professional cenobitism, but that the scene of religious activity in Islam is the life of men in the widest sense. All social activities were to be included within its purview and to be penetrated by its spirit’. Now, if ‘the groundwork of the asceticism of the Koran’ is ‘identical’ with that of Eastern Christianity’, then Sufism is not a future of Islam at all but of Eastern Christianity—if Gibb’s other comment is also accepted that Islam is a ‘religious activity’ whose ‘scene’ is set very deliberately ‘in reaction from the asceticism... of Eastern Christianity’. The two assertions are, very evidently, contradictory. The only way to reconcile them is, as we suggested, to see Sufism as wholly foreign to Islam, as in fact ‘Eastern Christian’ and not ‘Islamic’—a conclusion which is plainly absurd.

The absurdity arises from the Western refusal to recognize that Islam follows the revelation of the Jesus ethic, and follows it in the same stream. The Christianity of Jesus was a repudiation of Jewish law in favor of the inward ethic of self-transformation. Sufism cannot be described as a repudiation in the same manner of the Islamic Law, the Sharī‘ah. lnsofar as Sufism is Islamic it must contain the Jesus ethic already; similarly, insofar as the Sharīʻah is Islamic, it too must contain the Jesus ethic already. It may be that there were many Muslim

individuals—merchants, poets, scholars, soldiers—whose thought and practice was a more or less diluted form of either Islam or Sharī‘ah. In this case, it is possible to argue that, if Sufism was a revolt at all, it was a revolt against the thought and practice of certain Muslims, not that it was a revolt against the Islamic Law as such. But was Sufism a revolt?

If it was, then the Sufis' own claim that they are followers of the early ascetics in Islam, the Companions of the Prophet and the Prophet himself; must be false. For, if the claim to be followers of the Prophet and his Companions is true, they must have practiced ‘Sufism’ too. But in that case, what was their revolt against? It is through and with their practice, under the guidance of the Qur’an, that Islam and Islamic Law, the Sharī‘ah, were historically embodied. Were they then in revolt against themselves?

The idea that Sufism is a revolt, a repudiation of some sort, against Islam needs to be dropped. Throughout the first two centuries of Islam, hardly any of the shaykhs claimed by Sufis as predecessors were not, also, great shaykhs of ‘public’ Islam, hardly a single major idea of these predecessors is not shared equally by both later Sufis and later orthodox Muslim scholars and jurists.

What then is the relation between Sufism and Islam? There is over-whelming evidence to support the Sufis’ claim to be following the

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Prophet and his Companions. However, since there is also much in Sufi doctrine and practice that is wholly new (and unknown to the Prophet and his Companions), the Sufis’ claim must only be granted under severe qualification. Furthermore, it must also be acknowledged that, as the Sufi movement developed in history, it did admit some wholly un-Islamic elements—even though the central structure of authentically Islamic concepts and practice is there too. That Sufism was a ‘revoIt’ against the Sharī‘ah is not a tenable explanation, logically or historically. Insofar as Sufism did deviate from the Sharī‘ah, it was a Sharī‘ah misconceived and misapplied. Better then to use terms such as ‘emphasis’ or ‘preference’ rather than ‘revolt’ or ‘repudiation’ when describing the relation between Sufism and Islam.

The explanations we have so far considered for the origin of Sufism fall into error or absurdity because they are based on attitudes to the subject rather on historical evidence. A detailed historical account would take us too far into digression," but a few brief observations may be permitted.

A historical explanation

When Islam travelled outside Arabia, the process of arabization of the Muslim converts did not stay abreast of their Islamization—particularly in Persia and beyond. The Companions of the Prophet, the Arabs of the Peninsula and the arabized peoples of the Fertile Crescent, were able fully to grasp the meanings and values of Islam in their original, authentic Qur’anic idiom. However, that idiom constituted a serious obstacle for the unarabized Persians. They had to turn to ta’wīl or interpretation; they had to translate into categories of non-Arabic consciousness what was presented to them in the Arabic of the Divine Revelation. To some degree the original meanings, especially the weight of certain concepts relative to others, and the interrelation of those concepts, did not carry into their consciousness. The poetical figures of the Qur’an as with any other poetic figures forced into foreign concepts and categories, were understood too literally. But a literal understanding of the Qur’anic verses inevitably found them in contradiction with the message of Islam. The sublime descriptions of God’s transcendence, for example, appeared to the non-Arab mind as gross anthropomorphism. The problem could only be resolved in either of two ways. Either by completing the arabization process already begun; or through allegorical interpretation if the non-arabized consciousness was to preserve its non-arabness. In Persia, the latter course was the course of destiny.

A ‘knowledge’ began to develop in Persia designed to fill the needs of an unarabized Muslim consciousness. In time, this knowledge grew and became a discipline. Allegorical interpretation was pressed into the service of politics, especially as the Shī‘a division became more and more established in Persia and the diversion between knowledge (‘ilm) and gnosis (ma‘rifah) became greater. The former was primar-

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ily rational, interested in deducing oughts for the doing and willing of a soul that, having grasped the original meanings intuitively, was more concerned with the ethical task of realizing the content of those meanings. The latter was primarily intuitive, sifting, refining and contemplating meanings for the satisfaction of an understanding that could not understand. It is no accident that ‘ilm or rational science, remained both exclusively Arab and exclusively of the Sharī‘ah, of the how of realization of the revealed divine pattern. In contrast, ma‘rifah remained exclusively a concern with meanings; it grew increasingly personal, allegorical, and esoteric. Sufi ma‘rifah was not at all a revolt against, or a repudiation of, Islam; rather, it was a movement to satisfy the need of an unarabized, yet Islamic, consciousness, for intellectual harmony with the Divine Revelation.

In conclusion, we must again affirm that the ethic of Jesus and Islamic mysticism are comparable, even parallel, responses to the commandment to love only God. The goal and disciplines of the Sufis certainly influenced the Christian mystics and there are, therefore, many identities of expression and aspiration in the works of both. The reason for all this is not, as Western scholars (with some Muslim support) maintain, that Sufism was a ‘foreign element in Islam, a combination of external influence and internal revolt. The revelation of Jesus, the ethic of Jesus, are central to Islam and an integral, included, part of it. The great failure of Western scholarship is an inability to grasp (perhaps a Christian inability to allow) that the ethic of Jesus could be given a valid historical expression other than the historical expression to which it was subjected by Christianity. In other words, Western scholarship is possessive of the Jesus ethic; demanding for it, exclusively, one context and one only—historical Christianity. It is to this context that we now turn.

Notes and references

Notes

¹           ‘Mysticism was the common ground where medieval Christianity and Islam touched ach other most nearly. The fact is founded on history... It explains why the ideas, methods, and systems produced by mystics—Roman Catholic and Muslim—of that period seem to bear the stamp of one and the same spiritual genius… It would be indeed strange if no influence from this source [Sufism] reached men like Aquinas, Eckhard and Dante’. (R.A. Nicholson, 1952, pp.210-11). Arguing against the view presented in Louis Massignon, 1922, that early Islamic mysticism may have its origin purely in the asceticism of the Qur’an, H.A.R. Gibb wrote: ‘...The groundwork of the asceticism of the Qur’an is identical with that of Eastern Christianity, and, in consequence, in the development of Islam outside Arabia the two systems cannot always be disentangled…

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Here, [i.e. in Sufi-inspired prose and poetry] and not in the abstractions of the theologians, is the true [sic] spirit of popular Islam... Apart altogether from doctrines and beliefs it is interesting to note how tenacious Christian usages were, in spite of the change of faith’ (Gibb, 1954, pp.128-9, 131). ‘This orthodox mysticism, among the Arabs, received its first definite consideration [from] Hārith  b. Asad al-Mūhisibī and it owes much to the ideal of asceticism founded in Christianity, which taught the doctrine of complete renunciation’ (Smith, 1950, p.3). Arberry (1956, p.11) agrees ‘for the sake of brevity to accept... [the question]... as proven.’ Many, many more opinions like these might be cited.

²           ‘We must acknowledge,’ writes Zaki Mubarak in one of the classic treatises on the subject in any language, ‘that the personality of Jesus did in fact affect the Sufi outlooks. The Sufi books seem never to tire of quoting Jesus’ words; the Christian monk commanded great respect, and these words were often quoted by the Sufis’ (Mubarak, n.d., vol.2, p.26).

³           R.A. Nicholson, expressing what every student of Sufism acquainted with Christian mystic writings must have experienced, wrote: ‘Not long ago, as I was turning over the first few pages of Miss Underhill’s Mysticism, my eye fell on two quotations, one from a medieval German mystic, the other from an English author whose death had just been announced; and it struck me that l could recall exact Muslim parallels to both. Eckhard’s famous saying, ‘the word sum [l am] can be spoken by no creature, but by God only; for it becomes the creature to testify of itself non sum [I am not]’ reminded me that three and a half centuries earlier, at Baghdad, Abu Nāsr al-Sarrāj, commenting on a definition of mystical unity (tawhīd), had written, ‘none saith ‘l’ except God, since real personality belongs to God alone.’ The remark of Edward Carpenter, ‘this perception seems to be one in which all the senses unite into one sense,’ caused me to look up some verses in the Tā’iyya of the Egyptian poet and saint, lbn al-Fārid (612/1235)... How much it [the West] learned of these matters during the Middle Ages, when Muslim philosophy and science, radiating from their center in Spain, spread light through Christian Europe, we have yet to discover, in detail, but the amount was certainly considerable’ (Nicholson, 1952, p.210).

⁴           For a historical and systematic discussion of this subject, see Albert Schweitzer, 1956.

⁵           See, for example, Romans 12:4-5; 1Corinthians 10:17, 12:12; Galatians 3:28; Colossians 3:15, etc.

⁶           Rābi‘ah al-‘Adawiyyah (185/801) as reported by Jāmī (1859 edn, p.716) and by Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Attār (Tadhkirāt al-Awliyā’, 1, 69, 73) in Smith, 1950, p.11. See also the verses ‘Two ways l love Thee’ trans. In R.A. Nicholson, 1952, pp,213-14, and compare the same insight in much the same language in Francis Xavier: ‘My God l love Thee: not because/ l hope for heaven thereby /Not with the hope of gaining aught /Not seeking a reward: /But as Thyself hast loved me /O ever-loving Lord!’

⁷           See, for an example of the passion with which this state is sought, Ibn al-Fārid’s: ‘Let my passionate love for Thee overwhelm me... ‘ (trans. in Smith, 1950, p.96).

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⁸           Bābā Kūhī of Shirāz, trans. R.A. Nicholson in Smith, 1954, pp.23-4.

⁹           Abū al-Qāsim b. Muhammad al-Junayd (298 AH (910), in Sarrāj Kitāb

al-Lāmah, pp.29ff) trans. in Smith, 1950, p.35.

¹⁰          Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Attār (Mantiq ul-Tayr, Paris, 1859, p.143) trans. in Smith, 1950, pp.9-10.

¹¹          The Sufis’' repudiation of the evils of the Self is expressed in terms no less forceful or moving than those with which the Christians repudiate the state of sin. For an example, see the verses from ‘Umar Khayyām, trans. E.H. Winfield, in Smith, 1954, p.87: ‘The ‘Truth’ will not be shown to lofty thought/ Nor yet with lavished gold may it be bought;/ Till self be mortified for fifty years,/ From words to ‘states of heart’/ No soul is brought..,// The more I die to self, I live the more, ...From self-reliance, Lord, deliver me…’

¹²          Rābi‘ah al-‘Adawiyyah, as reported by Jāmi, in Nafahāt al-Uns, p.716; Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Attār, Tadhkirāt al-Awliyā’, 1, p.(18; Smith, 1950, p.11,

¹³          ‘A certain man was constantly bewailing his condition and complaining of his poverty. Ibrāhīm ibn al-Adham said to him: ‘My son, perhaps you paid but little for your poverty!’ ‘You are talking nonsense,’ said the man. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Does any one buy poverty?’ Ibrāhīm replied, ‘For my part, I chose it of my own free will, nay, more, I bought it at the price of this world’s sovereignty, and I would buy one instant of this poverty again with a hundred worlds, for every moment it becomes worth yet more to me…’ ‘(Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Attār, Mantiq ul-Tayr, Paris, 1859, p.143, trans. in Smith. 1950, pp.9-10.)

¹⁴          See the verses (trans. E.H. Rodwell in Smith, 1954, p.63): ‘O Soul! from earthly taint when purified,/ As spirit free, thou shalt toward heaven ride/ Thy home the empyrean! Shame on thee/ Who dost in this clay tenement reside!...’

¹⁵          ‘I am He whom I love and He whom I love is I/ We are two spirits in-dwelling one body/ When thou seest me, thou seest Him,/ And when thou seest  Him, then thou dost see us both’ (al-Hallāj 309 AH (922), in Smith, 1950, p.37).

¹⁶          ‘The essences of things,’ he wrote, ‘are in themselves non-existent, deriving what existence they possess from God, who is the real substance of all that exists. Plurality consists of relations, which are non-existent things. There is really nothing except the Essence, and this is transcendent for itself, not in relation to anything, but we predicate of the One Substance transcendence in respect of the modes of being attributed to it: hence we say that God is He (huwa) and is not not-He (la huwa)...The inward says ‘no’ when the outward says ‘I’, and the outward says ‘no’ when the inward says ‘I’, and so on in the case of every contrary, but the speaker is One, and He is substantially identical with the hearer’  (Ibn al-‘Arabī, trans, RA. Nicholson in Smith, 1954, p.34).

¹⁷          Ibn al-‘Arabī, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (London, 1911, p.19, trans. in Smith, 1950, p.97).

¹⁸          For example, A.L. Tibawi (1928, pp.36-7) writes: ‘Ardent discussions took place between the Sufis and the Christians and verses from the

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gospels began to appear in Sufi saying….   The important effect that Christianity left upon Sufism is the theory of divine love’. Tibawi then quotes (pp.37-8) a Sufi story that Jesus passed by three groups of ascetics who gave him different accounts of their lives. To the last group, who said ‘The reason for our asceticism is only the love of God’, Jesus answered, ‘You are the nearest to God.’

¹⁹          For example, Zaki Mubarak who quotes (n.d., p.25), most unscrupulously, from the newspaper al-Siyisāh (June 3, 1932) ‘a passage from page 124 of an English book on Philosophy of Religion by Edward Ross: ‘The word Islam means acquiescence to the will of God, the purpose of which is the inculcation of the idea that God is the incomprehensible potentate-judge against whom rebellion is futile. Neither holiness, nor love are attributes of that God. Nonetheless Muslims did appear who were not satisfied with this ‘dry’ religion; for the appearance of Sufi sects in Islam is itself the evidence of the existence among the Muslims of a longing for a closer relationship with a living God overflowing with love.’’ Russ‘s remarks do tax one’s tolerance; but far worse yet is Mubarak’s comment on the passage front Ross: ‘These [Ross’s words] are true words indeed, except for their attribution of dryness to Islam for it is not necessary that we regard God as merciful or compassionate all the time; and it would be ignorance to forget God’s wrath against the evil and the unjust... Sufism did, however, fill the empty flanks of Muslim hearts. Sufism is that which neutralized in the Muslims, the materialistic coarseness cultivated by legalist culture.’

²⁰          Hardly any Sufi writings have survived from the first century and very little has come from the second. Sufism has indeed been a late phenomenon in the Muslim World. Most of the material attributed to the so-called Sufis of the first three centuries consists of direct or indirect quotations by later Sufis. The suspicion that this material may have been contrived or edited to accord with later Sufi thought can therefore never be completely ruled out. The history of the development of Sufism is itself the history of its three key concepts: ma‘rifah or gnosis, in contradistinction to ‘ilm or rational knowledge; haqīqah or the essential truth in contradistinction to sharī’ah or the Law, and finally, wilāyah or sainthood, in contradistinction to nubuwwah or prophethood. None of them appear in their specifically Sufi meaning in any work earlier than the fourth century, though as Arabic concepts they have always been well known and popular and the Qur’an used them often. Only after 300 AH do they make an entry into Islamic vocabulary with a distinctly new (Sufi) meaning.

The concept of wilāyah as meaning something especially Sufi, i.e., sainthood, to denote a class of Muslims who (by their discipline and ascent through mystical states) have achieved a station of communion with God different from the communion achieved by the Prophets, is said to have been formed and first used by al-Tirmidhī (d. 285 AH). But since only his compilation of the Prophet’s ahādīth has survived (his other works are lost), we may doubt whether a man as orthodox as al-Tirmidhī would have thought his communion with God of a different sort than that of the Companions of the Prophet. In Massignon's Receuil (1929, p.33),

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the only mention of this problem of wilāyah / nubuwwah occurs in a list of questions attributed to al-Tirmidhī in the report of lbn al-ʻArabī and (of course) answered by the latter.

The other two pairs of concepts are correlates; ‘ilm or science (rational knowledge) is the pursuit of Sharī‘ah, the Qur’an and the Sunnah and the sciences that developed out of them. The method of ‘ilm is rational though intuition which agrees with the Qur’an and Sunnah, with the demands of reason and internal coherence, and with the consensus of the believers, is also allowed. Ma‘rifah, on the other hand is the wholly intuitive, and therefore personal and esoteric, pursuit of haqīqah (the Truth, God Himself) with the aim of intense contemplation and union with Him. A.J. Arberry (1956) repudiates the claim that the introduction of ma’rifah into Sufi theory was the work of al-Muhāsibī (d. 245 AH) because, he holds, ‘the conception certainly occurs in the fragments of earlier ascetics.’ But he gives only two such ‘fragments’, one by Ibrāhīm b. al-Adham (d. 160 AH) and the other by his pupil Shaqīq of Balkh (d. I94 AH). Both these quotations Arberry obtained from Hilyat al-Awliyā (the Sufi ‘Live of the Saints’) by Abū Nu‘aym al-lsfahānī (d. 430 AH). But to quote al-lsfahānī is a far cry from asserting that ma‘rifah—in the Sufi sense of gnosis—‘certainly occurs’ in the ascetics of the second century. From the same source, Arberry quotes a passage attributed to Hātim al-Asamm (d. 237 AH) in which a fuller theory of gnosis is presented. Despite Arberry’s naïve confidence, this is all much too flimsy to justify or support a theory regarding the origins of Sufism.

Indeed, even if we took the material attributed by later Sufis to, for instance, al-Muhāsibī, to be all genuine, we do not meet in it the opposition to the Sharīʻah which may justify the description of early Sufism as a reaction against legalism. On the contrary, al-Muhāsibī’s reported writing understand virtue in terms exclusively ofthe Sharīʻah.

L. Massignon (1929, pp.18-20) gave us the original Arabic version of part of al-Muhāsibī’s Wasāya. A.J. Arberry attempted an English translation of what seems to be the same passage of the same manuscript. In this we read (Arberry, 1956, pp.47-50):

I found through the consensus of believers regarding the revealed Book of God that the path of salvation consists in laying hold of the fear of God, and performing his ordinance, abstaining from what He has made lawful and unlawful alike and following all that He has prescribed, sincere obedience to God, and the imitation of His Prophet. So l sought to inform myself of God’s Ordinances, and the Prophet’s practices, as well as the pious conduct of the saints.

The original is;

istarshadtu al-‘ilma wa aʻmaltu al-fikra wa ataltu al-nazara

fatabayyana lī fi kitāb Allāh taʻāla wa ijmā’ al-ummah anna ittibā’ al-hawā yu ʻmī an al-rushd wa yudillu ʻan al-haqq… thumma wajadtu bi ijmā’ al-ummah fī kitāb Allāh taʻāla al-munazzal ‘ala rasul Allāh salla Allāhu ʻalayhi wa sallam anna

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sabīla al-najāti fī al-tamassuki bi taqwā Allāh wa adā’i farā’idihi wa al-waraʻi halālihi wa harāmihi wa jāmiʻi hudūdihi wa al-ikhlāsi li-llāhi bi a’mālihi wa al-taʻassa bi rasūli Allāhi salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam fatalabtu ma’rifata al-farā’idi wa al-hudūdi wa al-sunani wa al-warāʻi ‘inda al-ulamāʻi wa fī al-athari fara’aytu ijmāʻan wa ikhtilāfan..

It should be translated:

I have sought knowledge for guidance, applied the mind and considered the matter for a long time. This, it became clear to me, in the book of God Exalted is He and in the consensus of the ummah, that to follow one’s whim blinds one to guidance and leads further astray from the truth… I then found, in the Book of God Exalted is He, sent down upon God’s Prophet (may God’s blessing and prayer be upon him), in agreement with the consensus of the ummah, that the road to salvation lies in the preservation of the fear of God, in the performance of His obligatory commands, in piety—[observing] the permissible and [avoiding] the prohibited, in observing all His prescriptions and sanctions, in the sincere obedience to God and in observing the example of the Prophet (may God’s blessing and prayer be upon him). I therefore sought the knowledge of the prescriptive duties and of the sanctions, of the Prophet’s practices and of piety, from the ‘ulamā’ and in the traditions. I have found consensus as well as divergence…’

Evidently, al-Muhāsibī never ‘sought to inform’ himself of the ‘pious conduct of the saints’ as anything in which the ‘path to salvation consists’. On the contrary, he sought the path of salvation with the ‘ulamā’, having understood with the consensus of believers, that it consists of many other things besides piety. Arberry’s ‘pious conduct of the saints’ is simply not there. The only interpretation under which it may be forced in, namely, the conjunction of warā'i and ‘ulamā’, makes objectionable syntax of the Arabic sentence, destroys the flow of the prose; and even so, can give us only ‘pious conduct of the ‘ulamā’ who were the Sufi saints’ greatest antagonists.

Obviously, this is a serious misunderstanding. That al-Muhāsibī has found himself ‘in agreement with the consensus of believers’ proves that he thought of himself in no terms of reaction against them. That he found out piety to consist in obedience to the Sharīʻah, or Law of Islam, and imitation of the Prophet, is incompatible with a Sufi apolytrosis (self-emancipation) from that Law. Finally, that he sought to learn the ‘prescriptions and sanctions’—he could not have chosen terms that can better express, connote, and denote the Sharīʻah —at the hands of the ‘ulamā’, whose Islam, according to the supposed Sufi thesis was barren,

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futile, and a misunderstanding, is the very opposite of what any consistent Sufi would have done if Sufism is what it is claimed to be. It is by no means impossible that Arberry used another manuscript which at least in this passage runs slightly differently from that of Massignon. Indeed, the misunderstanding, or ‘twist’ in case the translation is correct, might well have been that of the Sufi enthusiast who reported al-Muhāsibī’s Wasāyā. But given Massignon's Arabic text, there is no escape from the charge that Arberry's translations has ‘adapted’ the text to suit the argument. First, the Arabic text has no word which by any stretch of meaning can be translated as ‘saint’. The word ‘ulamā’ denotes the very people against whom Sufism is supposed to be a revolt. The Arabic athar, which signifies the corpus of traditions, has completely disappeared in the translation. The Arabic preposition ‘inda qualifies the verb talabtu. It is ‘at the hands of ‘ulamā’, as it were, that knowledge of all these things is to be sought and al-Muhāsibī is here declaring his conviction that that is so. Obviously the halāl (permissible) and the harām (prohibited) does not mean the ascetic ‘abstaining from what He has made lawful and unlawful alike’ but the Islamic golden mean of doing the one and avoiding the other. The guardians of the knowledge of this halāl and harām were, and still are, the ‘ulamā’. That is why al-Muhāsibī realized that he had to go to them to find that knowledge, and to the athar or corpus of traditions to find the knowledge of the practices of the Prophet. To seek obedience to God and imitation of His prophet in ‘the pious conduct of the saints’ is sheer invention. Sufi enthusiasts often quote the early Sufis as evidence for fantastic claims, forgetting that what they quote are not the earlier, but the later, Sufis, and involving allegorical distensions to deduce their arguments from the words of these alleged Sufi ‘predecessors’. Thus, for yet another example, Zaki Mubarak (n.d.) quotes a statement as coming from the same al-Muhāsibī, supposedly the first intellectual of Sufism, to the effect that he refused to receive the inheritance his father had left him. He did so on the ground that his father was not a Sufi that the Sufis and the non-Sufis are two millahs. (the Arabic millah is stronger than a merely different religious sect; it indeed means a different religion; cf. the Qur’anic millah of lbrāhīm, or millat al-awwalīn, etc), and that the hadith is true that no inheritance can pass in any direction between people of different religious sects. Nonchalantly, without the slightest doubt that al-Muhāsibī could not have possibly thought of Sufism as another millah, and that this fantastic tale must be a later fabrication, Zaki Mubarak gives his source as al-Risalāh al-Qushayriyyah, by Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayri (d, 465 AH). Likewise, although the Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam (Gibb and Kramers, 1953), rightly warned under Dhū’l Nūn al-Misrī’ (d. 245 AH) that ‘it is…improb-able that the surviving opuscules attributed to him…are really genuine; [that]...the Sufi biographers regard him as the father of mystical theory and...attribute to him the formulation of the doctrine of gnosis…after their fashion,’ it nevertheless ventured on rather doubtful ground when it affirmed in its article on ‘Tasawwuf’ that Dhū’l Nūn al-Misrī’ introduced the notion of ma'rifah into Sufi vocabulary with a ‘twist’ of meaning all his own.

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References

Arberry, A.J. (1956) Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam, Allen and Unwin, London,

Arnold, T. and Guillaume, A. (eds) (1952) The Legacy of Islam, Oxford University Press.

Cragg, Kenneth (1959) Sandals At The Mosque: Christian Presence Amid Islam, Oxford University Press, New York.

Gibb, H.A.R (1954) Mohammedanism, Home University Library, Oxford.

Gibb, H.A.R. and Kramers, J. (1953) (eds) Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, Brill, Leiden.

Massignon, Louis (1922) Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane, Paris.

Massignon, Louis (1929) Recueil de textes inédits concernant l’histoire de Ia mystique aux pays de l’Islam, Paul Gauthier, Paris.

Mubarak, Zaki (n.d.) Al-Tasawwuf al-lslāmī, 2nd edn, al-Maktabah al-Tijariyyah al-Kubra.

Nicholson, R.A. (1952) ‘Mysticism` in Arnold and Guillaume (1952).

Schweitzer, Albert (1956) The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Macmillan, New York.

Siraj Ed-Din, Abu Bakr (1952) The Book of Certainty, Rider, London.

Smith, Margaret (1950) Readings from the Mystics of Islam, Luzac, London.

Smith, Margaret (1954) The Sufi Path of Love, Luzac, London.

Tibawi, A.L. (1928) al-Tasawwuf al-lslāmī al-‘Arabī, Cairo.

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