The Mystics of Islam

by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

[6] The reader should be reminded that most, if not all, mystical Traditions ascribed to Mohammed were forged and fathered upon him by the Sūfīs, who represent themselves as the true interpreters of his esoteric teaching.

I will not waste the time and abuse the patience of my readers by endeavouring to classify and describe these various grades of illumination, which may be depicted symbolically but cannot be explained in scientific language. We must allow the mystics to speak for themselves. Granted that their teaching is often hard to understand, it conveys more of the truth than we can ever hope to obtain from analysis and dissection.

Here are two passages from the oldest Persian treatise on Sūfism, the Kashf al-Mahjūb of Hujwīrī:

“It is related that Sarī al-Saqatī said, ‘O God, whatever punishment thou mayst inflict upon me, do not punish me with the humiliation of being veiled from Thee,’ because, if I am not veiled from Thee, my torment and affliction will be lightened by the recollection and contemplation of Thee; but if I am veiled from Thee, even Thy bounty will be deadly to me. There is no punishment in Hell more painful and hard to bear than that of being veiled. If God were revealed in Hell to the people of Hell, sinful believers would never think of Paradise, since the sight of God would so fill them with joy that they would not feel bodily pain. And in Paradise there is no pleasure more perfect than unveiledness. If the people there enjoyed all the pleasures of that place and other pleasures a hundredfold, but were veiled from God, their hearts would be utterly broken. Therefore it is the way of God to let the hearts of those who love Him have vision of Him always, in order that the delight thereof may enable them to endure every tribulation; and they say in their visions, ‘We deem all torments more desirable than to be veiled from Thee. When Thy beauty is revealed to our hearts, we take no thought of affliction.’”

“There are really two kinds of contemplation. The former is the result of perfect faith, the latter of rapturous love, for in the rapture of love a man attains to such a degree that his whole being is absorbed in the thought of his Beloved and he sees nothing else. Muhammad ibn Wāsiʿ said: ‘I never saw anything without seeing God therein,’ i.e. through perfect faith. Shiblī said: ‘I never saw anything except God,’ i.e. in the rapture of love and the fervour of contemplation. One mystic sees the act with his bodily eye, and, as he looks, beholds the Agent with his spiritual eye; another is rapt by love of the Agent from all things else, so that he sees only the Agent. The one method is demonstrative, the other is ecstatic. In the former case, a manifest proof is derived from the evidences of God; in the latter case, the seer is enraptured and transported by desire: evidences are a veil to him, because he who knows a thing does not care for aught besides, and he who loves a thing does not regard aught besides, but renounces contention with God and interference with Him in His decrees and acts. When the lover turns his eye away from created things, he will inevitably see the Creator with his heart. God hath said, ‘Tell the believers to close their eyes’ (Kor. 24. 30), i.e. to close their bodily eyes to lusts and their spiritual eyes to created things. He who is most sincere in self-mortification is most firmly grounded in contemplation. Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah of Tustar said: ‘If any one shuts his eye to God for a single moment, he will never be rightly guided all his life long,’ because to regard other than God is to be handed over to other than God, and one who is left at the mercy of other than God is lost. Therefore the life of contemplatives is the time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular vision they do not reckon as life, for that to them is really death. Thus, when Bāyazīd was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said to him, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by this world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.’”

I take the following quotation from the Mawāqif of Niffarī, an author with whom we shall become better acquainted as we proceed:

“God said to me, ‘The least of the sciences of nearness is that you should see in everything the effects of beholding Me, and that this vision should prevail over you more than your gnosis of Me.’”

Explanation by the commentator:

“He means that the least of the sciences of nearness (proximity to God) is that when you look at anything, sensibly or intellectually or otherwise, you should be conscious of beholding God with a vision clearer than your vision of that thing. There are diverse degrees in this matter. Some mystics say that they never see anything without seeing God before it. Others say, ‘without seeing God after it,’ or ‘with it’; or they say that they see nothing but God. A certain Sūfī said, ‘I made the pilgrimage and saw the Kaʿba, but not the Lord of the Kaʿba.’ This is the perception of one who is veiled. Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage again, and I saw both the Kaʿba and the Lord of the Kaʿba.’ This is contemplation of the Self-subsistence through which everything subsists, i.e. he saw the Kaʿba subsisting through the Lord of the Kaʿba. Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage a third time, and I saw the Lord of the Kaʿba, but not the Kaʿba.’ This is the ‘station’ of waqfat (passing-away in the essence). In the present case the author is referring to contemplation of the Self-subsistence.”

So much concerning the theory of illumination. But, as Mephistopheles says, “grau ist alle Theorie”; and though to most of us the living experience is denied, we can hear its loudest echoes and feel its warmest afterglow in the poetry which it has created. Let me translate part of a Persian ode by the dervish-poet, Bābā Kūhī of Shīrāz, who died in 1050 A.D.