Sufism
SCHOLARS AND
historians are naturally prone to fall into the error (especially erroneous
in dealing with the Orient) of assuming that because an order, a dogma, or a
regulation is set down in black and white, it thereby acquires practical
force as law, theology, or ceremonial. Nothing can be less like the truth.
The elaboration of a dogmatic law set a theoretical standard which was
gradually and partially approached in certain relations but never fully
applied. Similarly, the formulation of an orthodox theology was the work,
and excited the interest of only a comparatively small body of scholars; to
the great mass of Muslims this dogmatic superstructure was, continued to be,
and (one might almost add) still is a matter of general indifference. The
cause of this was not altogether either apathy or ignorance. It may have
been in part due to the fact that the more developed theological systems
were largely negative and substituted for the vivid personal relation
between God and man presented by the Quran an abstract and depersonalized
discussion of logical concepts. A strong religious sentiment is not likely
to be roused–or, if it exists, to be moved to enthusiasm–by the orthodox
solution of the problem of the Divine Attributes as it is expressed in the
words of one of the standard textbooks of the Islamic faith: ‘They are not
He nor are they other than He.’
Consequently the elaborate theological system did not in any respect
represent the practical religious beliefs of the people, and in fact, the
majority of theologians very strongly held the view that it should not even
be communicated to the masses. Nor did it even command the adherence of
great numbers of the educated for several centuries after the Mu’tazilite
conflict. The Hellenistic spirit, though banished from orthodox circles,
long continued to influence the thought of those who were now called
heretics, or at least suspected of being heretics, until political and
economic disasters put an end to all independent intellectual activity. But
the influence of the philosophical school was a diminishing factor in the
later development of Islam, and it is rather to popular religion that we
must turn for an understanding of its course.
The movement of popular religion in Islam is closely connected with
the history of Islamic asceticism and mysticism. Professor Massignon, in a
brilliant survey of the whole field of early Islamic mysticism,
has sought to prove that the mystical movement was the direct heir of
primitive Muslim asceticism, itself derived from the Quran and the practice
of the Prophet. But even if this may be granted, it will be remembered that
the groundwork of the asceticism of the Quran
is identical with that of Eastern Christianity, and, in
consequence, in the development of Islam outside Arabia the two systems
cannot always be disentangled. What seems certain, at least, is that the
mystical sense of the Presence of God, which was implicit in Mohammed’s
activity as prophet, found no response in the pragmatic and unintrospective
realism of his immediate Arab followers. But by contrast their religious
devotion was, at its best, the outcome of a profound spiritual experience
stimulated by Mohammed’s preaching of the Judgement.
Of all the great religions of Western Asia, Islam has generally been
regarded as the most worldly and least ascetic. Several reasons may be
adduced for this judgement, such as the condemnation of celibacy, the
absence of a priesthood with spiritual functions, and above all that
preliminary compromise with the exigencies of political life which, attained
by Christianity only after three centuries of existence, was reached in
Islam during the lifetime of its
founder. Yet amongst the very earliest generations of Muslims, in all parts
of the Islamic world, there were many men who brought the spirit of devotion
into their daily activities, and to whom Islam was a discipline of the soul
and not merely a collection of external rituals. Their creed was a stern
ascetic creed, which bade every man go about his work with the fear of
eternal punishment ever before his eyes, remembering that this world is but
a temporary habitation, and that every gift it
has to offer, power, riches, pleasure, learning, the joy of
parenthood, is vanity and temptation–not indeed to be rejected or avoided,
but to be used with a deep sense of the awful responsibilities which they
entail. The highest type of this early asceticism is al-Hasan of Basra
(643–728), whose memory remains fragrant in Islam to this day.
In the second century of the Hijra it was from the ranks of the
ascetics that there arose those popular preachers in whom the
zeal of the old Nestorian missionaries was reborn and who were the real
missionaries of Islam amongst the people. The name by which these preachers
were known, qussas, ‘story-tellers’, indicates their method. In
the form of sermons or commentaries on Quranic texts they stuffed the minds
of their hearers with materials derived from the most heterogeneous
sources–ancient Arabian legends, Christian, Zoroastrian, and even Buddhist
stories, materials from the Gospels, and Jewish Haggada, and all the
inherited lore of ancient Syria and Babylonia. Amongst this mass of
material, two sources, Christianity and Gnosticism, stand out most
prominently. But the contributions of both were pressed into an Islamic
mould, however repugnant they might be to primitive ideas. Among the most
significant of these grafts upon the stem of Islam was the transformation of
the Second Advent of Christ into a doctrine of the coming of the Mahdi, the
‘rightly-guided one’ who will effect the final victory of Islam by means
of a divine catastrophe. Another, of equal importance for the future of
Islamic religious thought, was the evolution of the doctrine of the person
of Mohammed. We have already seen that Shi’ite influences contributed to
this evolution; but alongside these there were superimposed upon the natural
reverence of the Believer for the person of the Prophet several of the
Christian ideas of the person of Jesus.
Many of the miracles and sayings of the Gospels, and of the legends
with which the Eastern churches had surrounded the figure of the Founder of
their faith, were transferred to Mohammed. In early Muslim mysticism outside Arabia Jesus still occupies a place
alongside and little if at all inferior to Mohammed, but gradually the
figure of Mohammed transcends the other, until at the end of the third
century we find in the works of the great mystic al-Hallaj a hymn to the
Prophet in which Christian and Gnostic images are fused into a triumphant
synthesis:
All the Lights of the Prophets
proceeded from his Light; he was before all, his name the first in the Book
of Fate; he was known before all things and all being, and will endure after
the end of all. By his guidance have all eyes attained to sight.... All
knowledge is a drop from his ocean, all wisdom a handful from his stream,
all times an hour from his life.
Here, and not in the abstractions of the theologians, is the true
spirit of popular Islam, and to this Arabia contributed nothing but the
historical existence of Mohammed. Apart altogether from doctrines and
beliefs it is interesting to note how tenacious Christian usages were, in
spite of the change of faith. Well down into the later Middle Ages, the
Christian festivals survived alongside the official feasts of Islam as the
great public festivals of the Mohammedan
world.
There is room here only for a brief summary of the beginnings of the
mystical movement in Islam which goes by the name of Sufism. The origin of
the term Sufi is complex, but in general connected with the wearing of
undyed garments of wool (suf).
At first it was not a uniform but a mark of personal penitence, and some
early ascetics condemned the use of it. Ibn Sirin (d. 729) criticized some
ascetics for wearing suf
‘in imitation of Jesus’ (as he said): ‘I prefer to follow the example
of the Prophet who dressed in cotton.’ It appears that a particular group
of ascetics of Kufa in the second century were called generally al-Sufiya.
But by the fourth century the wearing of woolen garments had become the
regular badge of the Sufis of Iraq and the name was commonly applied to all
mystics. The suggestion that the name was derived from the Greek
Sophos or Sophia
seems to be quite fanciful.
In the second century, the first traces of collective organization
appear in small groups for pious discussion and also the first convents,
collections of cells imitated from the Melkite hermitages, or of grottoes in
imitation of the Nestorians. Groups of ascetics met for the purpose of
reciting aloud the Quran and other religious pieces, and these recitations
gradually took on a liturgical character
(dhikr), evolving in the direction of ‘spiritual concerts’ (sama’) with their attendant perils of ecstatic
fervours. Of the later developments of the
dhikr more will be said in due course, but already al-Hallaj
found it necessary to condemn the revivalist element which it contained:
It is Thou that castest me into ecstasy, not the dhikr;
Far from my heart be the thought of cleaving to my
dhikr;
The dhikr
is the pearl of the throat piece which hides Thee from my eyes.
At the same time a change was coming over the general character of
this asceticism. At first its basis was fear of God and of the Wrath to
come, the same fear that had inspired Mohammed; and the mystical element of
love and adoration, if not entirely absent, was secondary and unstressed.
But already in the sayings of the woman saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiya (d. 801)
the mainspring of mysticism is love: ‘Love of God hath so absorbed me that
neither love nor hate of any other thing remains in my heart.’ And in her
famous verses she distinguishes the illuminative from the contemplative life
and prefers the former:
In the end it was this mystical love, so close in its
conceptions and language to the primitive Christian mysticism, which reduced
the ascetic motive of fear to the second place, and supplied the basis for
Sufism.
This change in the character of Islamic mysticism is associated also
with a change in its leadership. At first the leaders were them-selves of
the class of Ulama, or orthodox religious teachers. But in the course of the
third century their place was taken by men who had not been brought up in
the traditional religious disciplines, but who belonged for the most part to
the lower middle or artisan classes of the towns, especially from the mixed
half-Persian, half-Aramaized Arab population of Baghdad. At the same time,
too, certain implications of a social character began to enter into what had
been hitherto exclusively–and still remained primarily–a religious
movement. While avoiding the political revolutionary aims of the Shi’ite
propagandists, it implied a protest none the less against the social and
political abuses which appeared to be condoned by the official Sunni Ulama;
but its programme of reform was bound up with the awakening of the religious
conscience of individuals and the consequent reaction of this spiritual revival on the
social organization of the Community. These social implications were
probably reinforced by the labours of the Sufis in preaching to and
converting members of their own class, as well as their missionary labours
in other fields. For at all times and in all countries the ascetics and
Sufis were the most active propagandists of Islam.
For both these reasons, the gradual breaking away from orthodox
control and the new social implications, the Sufi movement began to be
regarded with suspicion by the orthodox Ulama and the authorities, and still
more by the Shi’a. This suspicion grew as the Sufi leaders became more
‘advanced’ in their views and bolder in giving expression to them, and
the rift seemed to be widening between Sufism and orthodoxy. Some attempts
were made to silence them; when these failed, an example was made of the
most prominent of them, a wool-carder, Mansur al-Hallaj, who was charged
with heresy in having identified himself with God and cruelly executed at
the beginning of the fourth century. And it is pertinent to observe that
this punishment was inflicted not by violent fanatics but by pious upholders
of the ancient faith like the ‘Good Wazir’, Ali ibn Isa.
Repression, however, proved futile. The Sufi movement was, for one
thing, too firmly based on the Quran and the moral teachings of Islam to be
easily put down. Despite the views of some advanced leaders, despite a
tendency towards neglect of the ritual prescriptions of Islam, despite even
the outside influences which ran counter to the traditional outlook of
Islam, its strength lay in the satisfaction which it gave to the religious
instincts of the people, instincts which were to some extent chilled and
starved by the abstract and impersonal teachings of the orthodox and found
relief in the more directly personal and emotional religious approach of the
Sufis. It is essential to bear in mind this popular character and appeal of
Sufism, which arose out of the ranks of the people and appealed to the
people, whose main reading-matter, then as even now, was furnished by short
lives of the ‘saints’, often filled out with miraculous works. ‘The
labours of the mystics and the qussas
among them were what gave to Islam its permanent type as we know it today.
Their spontaneous movement... was the first apologetic and categetic of
Islam.’
During the fourth and fifth centuries, therefore, it grew in
strength, though still frowned upon by the Ulama, and correspondingly
developed more marked congregational features. It was about this time
that the dhikr
and sama’, from being
simple congregational recitation
of and meditation over the Quran, began to show a more definite liturgical
tendency, marked especially by the recitation of chants and litanies. It was
not this in itself, however, which marked if off from the orthodox services,
since similar liturgical ceremonies were commonly performed at that time in
the mosques as well. The hostility of the theologians was due partly to the
fear that the Sufi dhikr might come to rival or even
supplant the mosque as the centre of religious life. At bottom there was a
deeper reason for the conflict.
The claims of the theologians to religious leadership were based on
their exclusive possession of the sciences of theology and law, and their
position as the sole authoritative exponents of Islamic doctrine. It was, as
we have seen, after infinite trouble and difficulty that these sciences had
been built up, and their acquisition involved long and arduous study. It was
by their means that the substance of the Faith had been preserved against
both heretical ‘innovations’ in doctrine and the attempts of the secular
arm to override its privileges and obligations. The theologians were justly
proud of their system and jealous for the maintenance of its authority. By
this method alone, they held, could knowledge of the Truth or reality of
things be apprehended and preserved, and any relaxation would open the way
to heresy and corruption, both spiritual and material. These claims,
however, were bluntly and even derisively rejected by the Sufis. There was,
in their view, but one
way to knowledge–not the rational and second-hand ‘knowledge’
(‘ilm) of the schools, but direct and personal ‘experience’
(ma‘rifa) culminating in momentary
union or absorption into the Godhead. Theology, so far from assisting
this process, actually hindered it. The conflict between doctrinaire legist
and follower of the Inner Light was fundamental and seemed irreconcilable.
It would take too long to review all the outside influences and
doctrines which were finding their way into Sufism during these formative
centuries. Two instances will suffice. True Quranic asceticism condemned
celibacy: ‘Ye that are unmarried shall marry’
is the plain command given in the Quran (xxiv, 32). Christian
asceticism on the other hand condemned marriage, but in face of the whole
spirit of Islam could not effect a reversal of Muslim doctrine.
Nevertheless, it steadily gave currency to traditions ascribed to Mohammed
in which the old ascetic denunciation of women reappears. Gradually it began
to influence Sufi practice; while in the third century practically all Sufis
were married, by the fifth we find one of the main exponents of Sufism
writing: ‘It is the unanimous opinion of the leaders of this
doctrine that the best and most distinguished Sufis are the unmarried, if
their hearts are unstained and their minds free from sin and lust.’
The other doctrine, which was scarcely less fateful for the future of
Islam than the exaltation of Mohammed, was the veneration accorded by the
disciple to his Sufi shaikh during his life and the elevation of former
shaikhs to the rank of saints. Nothing could be more foreign to primitive
Islamic ideas; but in the teeth of the Quran, Tradition, rationalism, and
orthodox theology (which regarded the invocation of saints as trespassing
into polytheism by derogating from the worship of God alone) the worship of
saints crept into the Islamic fold and eventually. swept everything before
it. ‘Know (says the same authority) that the principle and foundation of
Sufism and knowledge of God rests on Saintship.’
But with saint-worship came another Christian-Gnostic doctrine,
scarcely less repugnant to orthodoxy: the belief in the existence of a
saintly hierarchy culminating in the
Qutb, the Pole of the world, who with his saintly vicegerents and
hosts governs and superintends the earth, the old Demiourgos in an Islamic
dress. And to this day the visitor to the Zuwela Gate in Cairo will find it
covered with shreds of cloth attached to the nails in the door by pious
suppliants of the Qutb.
So far, then, from diminishing and disappearing, as time went on,
under the influence of the opposition of the Muslim doctors, these popular
non-Islamic elements established themselves more and more firmly with the
Islamic fold. More and more the pedantry of the orthodox schools drove the
religious-minded into the ranks of the mystics, where men sought not
metaphysical ‘knowledge’ of religion but living ‘experience’ of God.
During the fifth century there was a marked drift towards Sufism of some of
the ablest thinkers and a search for some principle of compromise, which
prepared the way for the revolution that seemed to come with startling
suddenness about the end of the same century. A striking symptom of this
change of attitude was given by the treatise of a celebrated theologian
al-Qushairi (d. 1072) in which he urged the cause of the higher Sufism and
the acceptance of the Sufi doctrine of ecstatic communion with the divine.
But the name with which the revolution is linked is that of al-
Ghazali
(d. 1111), a man who stands on a level with Augustine
and Luther in religious insight and intellectual vigour. The story of his
religious pilgrimage is a fascinating and instructive one–how he found
himself in revolt against the casuistry of the theologians and set out to
seek the ultimate Reality through all the Muslim religious systems and
philosophies of his time, and how at length, after a long struggle, bodily,
mental and intellectual, he fell back in sheer philosophic agnosticism on
personal experience of God and found it in the Sufi path.
Al-Ghazali’s work and influence has been summed up by Professor
Macdonald in a classic passage:
First, he led men back from
scholastic labours upon theological dogmas to living contact with, study and
exegesis of, the Word and the traditions. What happened in Europe when the
yoke of medieval scholasticism was broken happened in Islam under his
leadership.
Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he reintroduced
the element of fear. It was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching.
The horrors of hell must be kept before men; he had felt them himself.
Third, it was by his influence that Sufism attained a firm and
assured position in the Church of Islam.
Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical theology
within the range of the ordinary mind.
Of these four phases of al-Ghazali’s work, the first and the third
are undoubtedly the most important. He made his mark by leading Islam back
to its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a place in its system
to the emotional religious life. He was not a scholar who struck out a new
path, but a man of intense personality who entered on a path already blazed
and made it the common highway.
The life-work of al-Ghazali bears a striking analogy to that of
al-Ash‘ari. Both of them, at a time when orthodoxy was in conflict with
another current of thought which strongly attracted the minds and wills of
religious thinkers, forged a synthesis that allowed the essential principles
of the other movement to find accommodation in the orthodox system.
Al-Ash‘ari, having been a Mu’tazilite, was able to reinforce orthodox
Islam by putting its theology on a logical basis. Al-Ghazali, having been an
Ash‘arite theologian, was able to re-establish theology on a basis of
personal mystical experience. For it must not be thought that, in adopting
the Sufi ‘path’, he rejected his former theology; it is rather that the
certainties of personal experience allowed him to combine with great
boldness and confidence, what had hitherto seemed separate and conflicting
scholastic, philosophical, and mystical systems of ideas.
Furthermore, just as, in the case of Ash‘arism, the new body of
ideas once absorbed, developed within the orthodox fold as an integral
element of Muslim thought and went far to transform
its nature, so now the ‘way’ of the mystics, stamped with the
approval of
ijma and accepted as orthodox, opened a new stage in the history of
Muslim religious development. And (as had happened with Ash’arism also)
some of the directions taken in the course of this development were
unexpected and disconcerting.
This was not merely because of the logical incompatibility of Sufism
with Ash’arite theology in the last resort. The oriental thinker, though
he is apt to press an argument to conclusions by what seems to us an
excessive reliance on the method of logical deduction, is not disturbed by
inconsistencies between the conclusions so derived from accepted postulates.
With his habitual distrust of human reason, he is content to accept them as
each standing for a facet of ultimate truth, which can be completely
synthesized only in the Divine mind. More important was the fact that
orthodoxy and mysticism had tended to follow diverging paths: now, although
they were tied to one another, their paths remained separate. This was
fraught with grave consequences. Orthodoxy, however austere and scholastic,
had always maintained high moral and intellectual standards, and refused to
countenance (in matters of religious belief and practice) innovations and
usages which detracted from the purity of early doctrine. Though it had
borrowed the weapon of Greek dialectic, it had used it on the whole in order
to maintain its positions against Greek ideas. But this had a weak
side in giving it a rather aristocratic or exclusive character, to some
extent removed from the understanding and hearts of the people.
Sufism, in spite of the loftiness of its religious ideals, had almost
from the first been less fastidious and more ready to admit alien practices
and ideas provided that they seemed to produce results. Within the ranks of
the mystics there were wide gradations, ranging from men of great
intellectua1 attainments and character to whom mysticism offered a rich
spiritual experience, strengthening their grasp of the truths of their
religion, down to those who found in mysticism an emotional and moral
satisfaction and cared little whether their practices and postulates were in
harmony or not with Islamic doctrine. Already in some circles the pursuit of
the ecstatic state had affected the primitive dhikr and introduced
into its ritual such adventitious aids as dancing and the rending of
garments. The leaders of Sufism had regarded with some indulgence this
influx of elements of popular religion, they may perhaps hoped that, by a
closer association with orthodoxy, the practice of Sufism would itself be
purified from these doubtful accretions.
The first results were, indeed, promising. The orthodox church was
undoubtedly refreshed and strengthened, and acquired a more popular
character and a new power of attraction. During the century after al-Ghazali
it won over large sections of the population in Western Asia and North
Africa which had hitherto held somewhat aloof. Shiasm in particular seems to
have suffered an eclipse, and lost much of its influence, except in a few
mountain fastnesses and the fringes of the Persian Gulf. It was not only in
the old Muslim lands that these effects were seen; in the vast new areas
(Asia Minor, Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and Central Africa) which were
in process of annexation to the Islamic dominions, multitudes were brought
over to Islam in spite of wide and old-standing differences of religious
outlook.
But there were features even in this mass movement which were
received with misgiving by the stricter Ulama. What al-Ghazali did not
foresee (and cannot be held responsible for) was that through the breach
which he made there would rush in a full tide of popular religious practices
of heterodox and the intellectual conceptions by which his ideals would be
debased and the orthodox doctrines of Islam gravely disturbed. For this
acceptance of Sufism could not be limited to a simple compromise; now that
Sufism itself was orthodox, it was impossible to hold to the old hard and
fast lines which had been drawn between what was and what was not
permissible and which had set a barrier to the penetration of the popular
practices. The compromise became a capitulation; Sufism swept over the whole
body of Islam and rode roughshod over, though it could not entirely stifle
the resistance of the scholastic theologians. The very success of the Sufi
missionaries was probably one of the main reasons for their acquisition of
such a height of prestige and such a measure of secular support that it
became an almost hopeless task for the theologians to attempt to stem the
popular tide. This was markedly seen in the attitude of the Turkish rulers
(such, for example, as Timur) who were outwardly respectful to the Ulama,
but positively humble before the Sufi shaikhs.
Before matters came to this pass, however, the orthodox set them-
selves to the task of meeting the challenge. The earlier struggle against
Greek influences and the heretical sects had shown the theologians the value
of organizing and controlling higher education. Until the middle of the 6fth
century, education had been provided for in an unsystematic and on the whole
private way. The mosque served as centre of instruction and every scholar
who had perfected himself in some branch or other of religious studies
became the centre of a group of students, to whom he in due course issued an
ijaza, or authorization to teach to others what they had learned from
him. The beginnings of systematic education seem to be connected with the
struggle against Shiasm, which had taken the initiative in establishing
regular schools (e.g. al-Azhar, founded by the Fatimid governor in the new
city of Cairo in 969). Towards the end of the fifth century a
movement began in Persia and spread westwards for the establishment and
endowment of madrasas, or institutions for theological instruction
with an official status, salaried teachers, and in many institutions also
provision for the maintenance of students as well. Within the next two or
three centuries hundreds of these madrasas were set up throughout the
eastern Islamic lands and in Egypt, and brought the control of higher
education more and more into the hands of the theologians.
In these institutions the upper classes and all the educated elements
received a grounding in the traditional disciplines and fundamental
doctrines and principles of Islam, which served, though necessarily within a
relatively limited sphere, to counteract the antinomian tendencies and
laxity manifested in several of the Sufi groups. By this means there was
created in every country an influential body of men, who had the task of
leading the half-converted masses gradually into the orthodox fold.
Nevertheless, we must admit that this control often had what appeared to us
to have been serious results for the future of Islam. Originality and
vitality were gradually crushed out of existence, the field of study was
restricted except among a favoured few, to a narrowing circle of traditional
subjects acquired by rote and endlessly reproduced in lifeless commentaries.
The theology of Islam as taught in the madrasas remained in the grip of the
dead hand, so going far to give colour to the charge of petrified
medievalism which has been laid against the Ulama almost down to our own
day.
Though there is a measure of truth in this charge, it does some
injustice to the Ulama at the same time. A fully developed theology is not
lightly to be changed or set aside, nor can it be, so long as it meets the
needs of the community which it serves. It may at most be restated in terms
of the changing thought-forms of the community. From the thirteenth to the
nineteenth century no new currents of thought entered into the Islamic
community to stimulate intellectual speculation, partly because it had
attained a measure of internal equilibrium, and partly because it was
isolated from the influence of the Western Renaissance. Not that, as it is
sometimes supposed, these were centuries of complete intellectual
stagnation, for within the community the conflict of Sufi monism or
pantheism with orthodox theology remained a live issue. How strong the
challenge of the Sufi theology became will be seen in the next chapter. It
was this challenge that set the terms of the activity of the Ulama. While
popular religion was running to seed in extravagant forms of theosophy,
their task was to furnish the sheet-anchor which would hold the community
fast to the essentials of Islamic belief and maintain its unity.
Their action can not unfairly be compared to the stand made by the Christian
Church in the Dark Ages and it deserves the same recognition.
Essai sut les Origines de Lexique t
echnique de la Mystique m u sulmane, Paris,192 .
D. B. Macdonald in
Encyclopaedia of Islam,
s.v. Kissa.
AI-Hujwiri,
Kashf al-Mahjub, tr.
R. A. Nicholson, p. 363.
Al-Hujwfri,
Kashf al-Mahjub, tr. R. A. Nicholson, p. 210.
D. B. Macdonald,
Development of
Muslim Theology, pp. 238– 9. I have abridged
the original text.
