[This is taken from Claud Field's Mystics and Saints of Islam, first published in 1910.]
The moral law proclaimed by Moses three thousand years ago agrees with that which governs men to-day, irrespective of their various stages of culture; the moral precepts of a Buddha and Confucius agree with those of the Gospel, and the sins for which, according to the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians, men will answer to the judges of the other world are sins still after four thousand years. If the nature of the unknown First Cause is ever to be grasped at all, it can only be in the light of those unchanging moral principles which every man carries in his own breast.
The idea of God is therefore not an affair of the understanding, but of the feeling and conscience. Mysticism has always so taken it, and has therefore always had a strong attraction for the excitable and emotional portion of mankind whom it has comforted in trial and affliction. Every religion is accordingly rather intended for the emotions than for the understanding, and therefore they all contain mystical tendencies.
The mysticism of Islam and
Christendom have many points of contact, and by mysticism perhaps
will be first bridged the wide gulf which separates Islam from
Christendom, and thereby from modern civilization. Just in
proportion as the various religions express the ideals of goodness
and truth they approximate to one another as manifestations of the
unchanging moral principle. Inasmuch as they surmised this, the
Motazilites (or free-thinkers in Islam), at a time when Europe lay
in the profoundest intellectual and moral bewilderment, fought for
one of those ideas which, although they are quickly submerged again
in the stormy current of the times, continue to work in silence and
finally emerge victorious. On that day when the Moslem no longer
beholds in God simply omnipotence, but also righteousness, he will
simultaneously re-enter the circle of the great civilized nations
among whom he once before, though only for a short time, had won the
first place.
It is not perhaps too fanciful to hail, as an omen
of the triumph of moral mysticism over the dogmatic rigidity of
Islam, the fact that the present Sultan Muhammad V was girded with
the sword of Osman by the head of the Mevlevi dervishes, a sect
founded by the great mystic teacher Jalaluddin Rumi of Iconium.
Forty-three years ago a Persian Orientalist Mirza Kasim Beg wrote in
the Journal Asiatique:—
"L'unique voie qui dans l'Islam puisse conduire à la reforme c'est la doctrine du mysticisme."
The period during which the asceticism practiced by
the earlier Sufis passed into the dreamy pantheism which
characterizes the later Sufism is the end of the third century after
Muhammad. This introduced a new element into Islam which for
centuries exercised a powerful influence on national culture, and is
still partially operative at present. The conception of God and of
the relation of the finite and human with the infinite and divine
from this time onward formed the chief subject of inquiry and
meditation.
The man who was destined to be the first to give
those ideas, which had hitherto been foreign to Arabian Sufism,
definite expression was a poor workman, a cotton-carder, bearing the
name of Hellaj. He was an Arabized Persian, born in Persia, but
educated in Iraq, where he enjoyed the privilege of being instructed
by Junaid. The story of his life as handed down by Shia or Sunni
writers has been much exaggerated. It is clear, however, that he had
a great number of disciples who revered him as their spiritual guide
and ascribed to him almost supernatural powers. His ever-growing
popularity much scandalized the orthodox mullahs, who moved the
authorities to proceed against him, and were successful in procuring
his execution 922 AD. Before his death he was subjected to terrible tortures, which he bore with wonderful
composure.
The reason of his condemnation was declared to be
that he regarded himself as an incarnation of the Godhead. His
disciples honored him as a saint after his death. They ascribed to
him the famous saying, "I am the Truth" (i.e. God), which
they took in a pantheistic sense. He is said to have taught the
doctrine of the incarnation of the Godhead in a man and to have
uttered the exclamation:
Praise to the Most High Who has revealed His
humanity and concealed the overpowering splendor of His Deity. Whoso
purifies himself by abstinence and purges himself from every trace
of fleshiness, unto him the Spirit of God enters, as it entered into
Jesus. When he has attained to this degree of perfection, whatever
he wills, happens, and whatever he does is done by God.
His letters to his disciples are said to have
commenced with the formula, "From the Lord of Lords to His slaves."
His disciples wrote to him:
O Spirit of the Spirit! O highest Aim
of the holy: We bear witness that Thou hast incarnated Thyself in
the form of Hosain the cotton-carder (Hellaj). We flee for
protection to Thee and hope in Thy mercy, O Knower of secrets.
The genuineness of these fragments has much to
support it, but is not entirely beyond doubt. This much, however, is
clear, that the disciples of Hellaj after his death regarded him as
a divine being. Ibn Hazm, a trustworthy author who wrote only 150
years after the execution of Hellaj, says so expressly. Ghazzali,
who wrote about fifty years later still, does not mention this, but
shelters Hellaj from the charge of blasphemy by construing his
exclamation "I am the Truth" in a pantheistic sense, and excuses it
by ascribing it to an excess of love to God and to mystic ecstasy.
In another place he says:
The first veil between God and His servant is His
servant's soul. But the hidden depth of the human heart is divine
and illuminated by light from above; for in it is mirrored the
eternal Truth completely, so that it encloses the universe in
itself. Now when a man turns his gaze on his own divinely illumined
heart he is dazzled by the blaze of its beauty, and the expression
"I am God!" easily escapes him. If from
falls into error and is ruined. It is as though he had allowed
himself to be misled by a little spark from the light-ocean of
Godhead instead of pressing forward to get more light. The ground of
this self-deception is that he in whom the Supernatural is mirrored
confuses himself with it. So the color of a picture seen in a mirror
is sometimes confounded with the mirror itself.
Hellaj was no more than the representative of an old
idea, Indian in origin, which he combined with Sufism, thereby
giving an entirely new direction to Islamic thought, which was
important, as leading to an entirely new development of the
conception of God. Even previous to Hellaj, the doctrine of
incarnation had emerged in Islam. The Caliph Ali was reported to
have been such, and was accordingly venerated by the Shias. The sect
of the Khattabiyah worshipped the Imam Jafar Sadik as God. Another
sect believed that the Divine Spirit had descended upon Abdallah Ibn
Amr.
In Khorassan the opinion was widely spread that Abu
Muslim, the great general who overturned the dynasty of the Ommeyads
and set up that of the Abbasides, was an incarnation of the spirit
of God. In the same province under Al Mansur, the second Abbaside
Caliph, a religious leader named Ostasys professes to be an
emanation of the Godhead. He collected thousands of followers, and
the movement was not suppressed without much fighting. Under the
Caliph Mahdi a self-styled Avatar named Ata arose, who on account of
a golden mask which he continually wore was called Mokanna,
or "the veiled prophet." He also had a numerous following, and
held
the Caliph's armies in check for several years, till in
779 AD., being closely invested in his
castle, he, with his whole harem and servants, put an end to
themselves.
Towards the end of the second century after
Muhammad, Babek in Persia taught the transmigration of souls and
communism. His followers, named Khoramiyyah, long successfully
resisted the Caliph's troops. He claimed that the soul of an ancient
law-giver named "Bod" had passed into him, which meant perhaps that
he wished to pass for a "Buddha."
It is well known that Shiite teachers were
especially active in Persia. In the apotheosis of Ali, as well as in
the cases of Abu Muslim, we find an assertion of the ideas peculiar
to the Persians in pre-Islamic times. The infusion or indwelling of
the Godhead in man as with the Hindu Avatars was also popular, and
widely spread in Persia. In Bagdad, from the time of the early
Abbasides, the Persians had exercised great influence. Shias were
able to profess their views freely under the tolerant or rather
religiously indifferent Caliph Mamoun. Bagdad early harbored within
its walls a number of communities imbued with Shia doctrine, and the
Persian conception of God silently, but widely prevailed.
Hellaj, educated in the orthodox Sunni school of
Junaid, which, through its laying stress on the idea of love to God,
possessed rather a mystic than dogmatic character, allowed himself
to be carried away by his passionate temperament into not only
preaching, but practically applying to himself the above-mentioned
doctrines, which though known to many, had been discreetly veiled in
reserve. When once the populace have been prepared for a new idea,
the mere expression of it is sufficient to act as a spark on tinder.
The fatal word was spoken by Hellaj; the authorities did their duty,
seized the daring innovator and put him to death in the cruel
fashion of the time. But the word once spoken had been borne on the
winds in all directions, and the execution of Hellaj gave a powerful
impulse to the spread of his doctrine. There are periods in the
lives of some nations when the longing for a martyr's crown becomes
epidemic. A few years after the execution of Hellaj, a man of the
people, Ibn Aby Azkyr, from the same village, Shalmaghan, where
Hellaj had spent his youth, gave himself out as an incarnation of
the Godhead. He was put to death with several of his followers under
the reign of the Caliph Radhi, 933 AD.
A century after Hellaj an Egyptian, Ismail Darazy, from whom the
Druses derive their name, proclaimed the Fatimite Caliph Hakim to be
an incarnation.
How great was the influence exercised in general by
those ideas for which Hellaj died a martyr's death we learn most
clearly from the pages of Ghazzali, who wrote not quite two hundred
years later. He says:
The speculations of the Sufis may be divided into two classes: to the first category belong all the phrases about love to God and union with Him, which according to them compensate for all outward works. Many of them allege that they have attained to complete oneness with God; that for them the veil has been lifted; that they have not only seen the Most High with their eyes, but have spoken with Him, and go so far as to say "The Most High spoke thus and thus." They wish to imitate Hellaj, who was crucified for using such expressions, and justify themselves by quoting his saying, "I am the Truth." They also refer to Abu Yazid Bistamy, who is reported to have exclaimed, "Praise be to me!," instead of "Praise be to God!"
This kind of speculation is extremely dangerous for the common people, and it is notorious that a number of craftsmen have left their occupation to make similar assertions. Such speeches are highly popular, as they hold out to men the prospect of laying aside active work with the idea of purging the soul through mystical ecstasies and transports. The common people are not slow to claim similar rights for themselves and to catch up wild and whirling expressions. As regards the second class of Sufi speculation, it consists in the use of unintelligible phrases which by their outward apparent meaning and boldness attract attention, but which on closer inspection prove to be devoid of any real sense.
These words of the greatest thinker among the Muhammadans at that time afford us a deep insight into the remarkable character of the period. From them we gather with certainty that the division of Sufism into two classes, one orthodox and outwardly conforming to Islam, and the other free-thinking and pantheistic, was already an accomplished fact before Ghazzali's time. We recognize also that the latter kind of Sufism was very popular among the lowest classes of the people and even among the agricultural population. The fundamental characteristic of mysticism, the striving after the knowledge of God by way of ecstatic intuition, had already come into open conflict with the fundamental principles of Islam. "Mystical love to God" was the catchword which brought people to plunge into ecstatic reverie, and by complete immersion in contemplation to lose their personality, and by this self-annihilation to be absorbed in God.
The simple ascetic character of the ancient Arabian
Sufism was continually counteracted by the element of passive
contemplation which was entirely foreign to the Arab mind. The terms
"ascetic" and "Sufi," which were formerly almost synonymous,
henceforward cease to be so, and often conceal a fundamental
variance with each other. We shall not go very far wrong if we
connect the crisis of this intellectual development with the
appearance of Hellaj, so that the close of the third and
commencement of the fourth century after Muhammad marks the point of
time when this philosophico-religious schism was completed. In
Persia the theosophy of Hellaj and his supporters found a receptive
soil and flourished vigorously; on that soil were reared the finest
flowers of Persian poetry. From the Persians this tendency passed
over to the Turks, and the poetry of both nations contains
strongly-marked theosophical elements.
Already in the second century of Islam great stress
was laid upon the cultivation of love to God, an outstanding example
of which is the female Sufi Rabia. With it was connected a gradually
elaborated doctrine of ecstatic states and visions which were
believed to lead by the way of intuition and divine illumination to
the spiritual contemplation of God. We have already endeavored to
describe the religious enthusiasm which took possession of the
Moslems in the first and second century after Muhammad and have
partly traced the causes which led to this phenomenon.
Ecstasy is an invariable concomitant of religious enthusiasm. In the endeavor to break through the narrow bounds which confine the human spirit pious and credulous natures are only too easily led astray. The instruments which man has at his command when he wishes to investigate the supernatural do not suffice to procure him an even approximately correct image of the object which he would fain observe. While the optician with the aid of mathematics can reduce errors arising from the convexity of his magnifying lens to an infinitesimally small amount, the theologian has never found a device, and never will find one, to obviate the errors which arise from the fact that his intellectual insight has to be exercised through the medium of material senses, which obscure the clearness of his observation.
And yet it is precisely this ceaseless striving,
this irresistible impulse after something higher, this unquenchable
thirst for the fountain-head of knowledge, which constitutes the
highest and noblest side of humanity, and is the most indubitable
pledge of its spiritual future. The net result of these strivings
has been an endless series of self-delusions, and yet humanity takes
on a grander aspect in them than in all its other manifold efforts
and successes. The history of this spiritual wrestling, this
hopeless and yet never relaxed struggle against the impossible,
forms the noblest aspect of the history of mankind.
The phenomena produced by Islam in this respect do
not fundamentally differ from those produced by Christianity and
Buddhism. Sufism exhibits a more remarkable development of these
phenomena, simply because it grew up in an environment which favored
their more luxuriant growth.
The Koran, which Muhammad came, as he said to
preach, was regarded as the very word of God, and must therefore
have produced an overpowering impression on the minds of the
faithful. Of this numerous instances are reported. Abd al Wahid ibn
Zaid heard one day a Koran-reader recite the following verse (Sura
45: 28):—"This is Our book, which announces to you the truth; for We
have caused to be recorded all that ye have done. Those who believe
and do good works shall their Lord admit to His favor; verily this
is the most manifest recompense." On hearing this Abd al Wahid broke
into loud weeping and fainted. Miswar ibn Machramah was not even
able to hear any verse of the Koran read, being so powerfully
affected thereby as to become senseless. Of Jobair ibn Motim it is
reported that he said: "I heard the Prophet recite the following
verses of the Koran:—
1. I swear by Tur. 2. By a book which stands written on outspread parchment. 3. By the house to which pilgrimage is made. 4. By the lofty dome of heaven. 5. And by the swelling ocean. 6. That the judgment of thy Lord is at hand.
Muhammad ibn Mansur relates that once passing a
house at midnight he heard the voice of a man praying to God loudly
and fervently, lamenting his sins with deep contrition. Muhammad ibn
Mansur could not resist the temptation; he put his mouth to the
keyhole and uttered the verse which threatens the unbelievers with
hell-fire. He heard a heavy fall within the house, and all was
still. As he went down the same street the next morning he saw a
corpse being carried out of the same house, followed by an old
woman. He inquired of her whose body it was, and she answered: "Last
night my son heard a verse of the Koran recited, and it broke his
heart." We are far from believing all these stories, but they show
what a view was held in the earliest times regarding the effect
produced by the Koran on the minds of those who heard it.
The ecstatic bent of mind of the ascetics of Islam
and the later Sufis arose from these beginnings. Then, as now,
self-originated phases of feeling were attributed to outer causes;
from the remotest times men have sought without them the Divinity
which they carried within.
The wider spread and greater permanence of ecstatic
phenomena among the Moslems than elsewhere was due to the
concurrence of various conditions, chief among which was the
peculiar temperament of the Arab. Capable of the fiercest momentary
excitement, he quickly subsided into a state of complete apathy
which is pain-proof. I have a lively recollection of the cases mentioned by my late friend
Dr. Bilharz, who spoke of the astonishing anesthesia which the
patients in the medical school of Kasr al 'ain in Cairo, where he
was professor, exhibited under the most painful operations. They
uttered hardly a sound when operated upon in the most sensitive
nerve-centers. The negro, notoriously excitable as he is, and
therefore still more exposed to complete prostration of the organs
of feeling, exhibits this apathy in a yet more marked degree than
the Arab and Egyptian. Many examples of this are found in old Arabic
authors—e.g., in the narratives of the martyrdoms of Hatyt,
of Hellaj and of a young Mameluke crucified in 1247 a.d. Of the last Suyuti has preserved a psychologically
detailed description.
Although Christian martyrology is rich in such instances of unshakable fortitude under the most painful tortures, yet in Islam the ecstatic temper has attained a higher significance and been more constantly exhibited. A chief reason of this was the religious fanaticism, which was incomparably stronger and more widely diffused in Islam than in medieval Christendom. The minds of the Moslems were kept in perpetual tension by severe religious exercises, the effect of which was intensified by fasts and pilgrimages. The peculiar manner of life in the desert, the birthplace of Islam, also contributed to this; the scanty diet, the loneliness of the desert, and in the towns the want of civic life, the poverty of ideas among the Arabs, all helped to produce the same result. Finally, deception, hypocrisy, and superstition, as, alas, so often is the case in religious matters, played a great part. Whoever did not feel ecstatically moved at the recitation of the Koran pretended to be so, and often thereby, perhaps unconsciously, exercised a great effect on others. Men began by pretending to feel religious enthusiasm and ended by believing that they really felt it.
Ghazzali mentions in the Ihya ul-ulum that the
prophet commanded that whoever did not feel moved to tears at the
recitation of the Koran should pretend to weep and to be deeply
moved; for, adds Ghazzali sagely, in these matters one begins by
forcing oneself to do what afterwards comes spontaneously. Moreover,
the fact that religious excitement was looked upon as the mark of a
fervent mind and devout intensity, vastly increased the number of
those who claimed mystic illumination.
When verses of the Koran through frequent repetition
lost their power to awaken ecstasy, single lines of fragments of
poems sufficed to produce it. Once the mystic Taury found himself in
the midst of a company who were discussing some scientific question.
All took part in it with the exception of Taury, who suddenly rose
and recited:—
Many cooing doves mourn in
the mid-day heat, Sadly under the roof of
foliage overhead, Remembering old
companions and days gone by; Their lament
awakens my sorrow also, My mourning rouses
them, and often theirs disturbs my sleep; I
do not understand their cooing, and they do not understand my
weeping: But through, my sorrow of heart I
know them, and through their heart-sorrow they know me.
Hardly had those present heard these verses than
they all fell into a state of ecstatic contemplation.
Ibrahim ben Adham, the celebrated Sufi, once heard
the following verses:—
Everything is forgiven thee, except
estrangement from Us: We pardon thee all
the past, and only that remains which has escaped Our eyes (i.e.,
nothing).
They immediately caused him to fall into a trance which lasted twenty-four hours. Ghazzali, who himself borrowed much from the Sufis, and was a diligent student of their doctrine, seeks to explain these strange phenomena on psychological grounds. He divides the ecstatic conditions which the hearing of poetical recitations produces into four classes. The first, which is the lowest, is that of the simple sensuous delight in melody. The second class is that of pleasure in the melody and of understanding the words in their apparent sense. The third class consists of those who apply the meaning of the words to the relations between man and God. To this class belongs the would-be initiate into Sufism; he has necessarily a goal marked out for him to aim at, and this goal is the knowledge of God, meeting Him and union with Him by the way of secret contemplation, and the removal of the veil which conceals Him.
In order to compass this aim the Sufi has a special
path to follow; he must perform various ascetic practices and
overcome certain spiritual obstacles in doing so. Now when, during
the recitation of poetry, the Sufi hears mention made of blame or
praise, of acceptance or refusal, of union with the Beloved or
separation from Him, of lament over a departed joy or longing for a
look, as often occurs in Arabic poetry, one or the other of these
accords with his spiritual state and acts upon him, like a spark ,on
tinder, to set his heart aflame. Longing and love overpower him and
unfold to him manifold vistas of spiritual experience.
The fourth and highest class is that of the fully
initiated who have passed through the stages above-mentioned, and
whose minds are closed to everything except God. Such an one is
wholly denuded of self, so that he no longer knows his own
experiences and practices, and, as though with senses sealed, sinks
into the ocean of the contemplation of God. This condition the Sufis
characterize as self-annihilation (Fana).
But he who is bereft of self-consciousness is none the less aware of what is without him; it is as if his consciousness were withdrawn from everything but the one object of contemplation, i.e., God. While he who is completely absorbed in the contemplation of the object seen is as little capable of theorizing regarding the act of contemplation as regarding the eye, the instrument of sight, or the heart, the seat of joyful emotion. Just in the same way a drunken man is not conscious of his intoxication, so he who is drowned in joy knows nothing of joy itself, but only knows what causes it.
Such a condition of mind may occur with regard to
created things as well as with regard to the Creator Himself, only
in the latter case it is like a flash of lightning, without
permanence. Could such a condition of the soul last longer, it would
be beyond the power of human nature to endure and would end in
overwhelming it. So it is related of Taury that once in a meeting he
heard this verse recited:—
In my love to Thee I attained to a
height where to tread causes the senses to reel.
He immediately fell into an ecstatic condition and
ran into a field where the newly-cut stubble cut his feet like
knives. Here he ran about all night till the morning, and a few days
afterwards died.
In this highest condition of ecstasy the soul is to be compared to a clear mirror, which, itself colorless, reflects the colors of the object seen in it. Or to a crystal, whose color is that of the object on which it stands or of the fluid which it contains. Itself colorless, it has the property of transmitting colors. This exposition of Sufistic ecstasy by Ghazzali shows that in his time, far from being on the wane, such phenomena were on the increase. For when a man of such comprehensive mind, such a deep thinker, so well versed in the knowledge of men and especially of his fellow-Moslems, speaks so plainly and without doubt upon the matter and seeks to explain it psychologically, this idea must have already taken deep root and spread widely.
Ghazzali is consequently to be regarded as a decided
adherent of Sufism and as approving of the enthusiastic tendencies
accompanying it. He narrates in his autobiography
how he left his family in Bagdad and went to Damascus, where for two
whole years he studied Sufism. Afterwards he made the pilgrimage to
Mecca and Medina. In his lonely musings things were revealed to him,
which, he said, could not be described, and he arrived at last at
the firm conviction that the Sufis were on the way of God and that
their teaching was the best. It must be admitted that by Sufism
Ghazzali meant that kind of it which held fast to the general
principles of Islam and was in accord, even though only externally,
with the orthodox party. These Sufis adhered to the Koran and the
traditions, but interpreted them allegorically. Mysticism must
always be propped up by a positive religion, as it has no support in
itself.
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