The Mystics of Islam

by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

2. A mental abstraction or passing-away of the mind from all objects of perception, thoughts, actions, and feelings through its concentration upon the thought of God. Here the thought of God signifies contemplation of the divine attributes.

3. The cessation of all conscious thought. The highest stage of fanā is reached when even the consciousness of having attained fanā disappears. This is what the Sūfīs call ‘the passing-away of passing-away’ (fanā al-fanā). The mystic is now rapt in contemplation of the divine essence.

The final stage of fanā, the complete passing-away from self, forms the prelude to baqā, ‘continuance’ or ‘abiding’ in God, and will be treated with greater fullness in [Chapter VI.]

The first stage closely resembles the Buddhistic Nirvāṇa. It is a ‘passing-away’ of evil qualities and states of mind, which involves the simultaneous ‘continuance’ of good qualities and states of mind. This is necessarily an ecstatic process, inasmuch as all the attributes of ‘self’ are evil in relation to God. No one can make himself perfectly moral, i.e. perfectly ‘selfless.’ This must be done for him, through ‘a flash of the divine beauty’ in his heart.

While the first stage refers to the moral ‘self,’ the second refers to the percipient and intellectual ‘self.’ Using the classification generally adopted by Christian mystics, we may regard the former as the consummation of the Purgative Life, and the latter as the goal of the Illuminative Life. The third and last stage constitutes the highest level of the Contemplative Life.

Often, though not invariably, fanā is accompanied by loss of sensation. Sarī al-Saqatī, a famous Sūfī of the third century, expressed the opinion that if a man in this state were struck on the face with a sword, he would not feel the blow. Abu ’l-Khayr al-Aqtaʿ had a gangrene in his foot. The physicians declared that his foot must be amputated, but he would not allow this to be done. His disciples said, “Cut it off while he is praying, for he is then unconscious.” The physicians acted on their advice, and when Abu ’l-Khayr finished his prayers he found that the amputation had taken place. It is difficult to see how any one far advanced in fanā could be capable of keeping the religious law—a point on which the orthodox mystics lay great emphasis. Here the doctrine of saintship comes in. God takes care to preserve His elect from disobedience to His commands. We are told that Bāyazīd, Shiblī, and other saints were continually in a state of rapture until the hour of prayer arrived; then they returned to consciousness, and after performing their prayers became enraptured again.

In theory, the ecstatic trance is involuntary, although certain conditions are recognised as being specially favourable to its occurrence. “It comes to a man through vision of the majesty of God and through revelation of the divine omnipotence to his heart.” Such, for instance, was the case of Abū Hamza, who, while walking in the streets of Baghdād and meditating on the nearness of God, suddenly fell into an ecstasy and went on his way, neither seeing nor hearing, until he recovered his senses and found himself in the desert. Trances of this kind sometimes lasted many weeks. It is recorded of Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah that he used to remain in ecstasy twenty-five days at a time, eating no food; yet he would answer questions put to him by the doctors of theology, and even in winter his shirt would be damp with sweat. But the Sūfīs soon discovered that ecstasy might be induced artificially, not only by concentration of thought, recollection (dhikr), and other innocent methods of autohypnosis, but also by music, singing, and dancing. These are included in the term samāʿ, which properly means nothing more than audition.

That Moslems are extraordinarily susceptible to the sweet influences of sound will not be doubted by any one who remembers how, in the Arabian Nights, heroes and heroines alike swoon upon the slightest provocation afforded by a singing-girl touching her lute and trilling a few lines of passionate verse. The fiction is true to life. When Sūfī writers discuss the analogous phenomena of ecstasy, they commonly do so in a chapter entitled ‘Concerning the Samāʿ.’ Under this heading Hujwīrī, in the final chapter of his Kashf al-Mahjūb, gives us an excellent summary of his own and other Mohammedan theories, together with numerous anecdotes of persons who were thrown into ecstasy on hearing a verse of the Koran or a heavenly voice (hātif) or poetry or music. Many are said to have died from the emotion thus aroused. I may add by way of explanation that, according to a well-known mystical belief, God has inspired every created thing to praise Him in its own language, so that all the sounds in the universe form, as it were, one vast choral hymn by which He glorifies Himself. Consequently those whose hearts He has opened and endowed with spiritual perception hear His voice everywhere, and ecstasy overcomes them as they listen to the rhythmic chant of the muezzin, or the street cry of the saqqā shouldering his water-skin, or, perchance, to the noise of wind or the bleating of a sheep or the piping of a bird.

Pythagoras and Plato are responsible for another theory, to which the Sūfī poets frequently allude, that music awakens in the soul a memory of celestial harmonies heard in a state of pre-existence, before the soul was separated from God. Thus Jalāluddīn Rūmī:

“The song of the spheres in their revolutions