“But first,” he said, “I will tell thee the meaning of that with which thou couldst not have patience. As to the boat, it belonged to poor men, toilers on the sea, and I was minded to damage it, for in their rear was a king who seized on every boat by force. And as to the youth, his parents were believers, and I feared lest he should trouble them by error and unbelief.”
The Sūfīs are fond of quoting this unimpeachable testimony that the walī is above human criticism, and that his hand, as Jalāluddīn asserts, is even as the hand of God. Most Moslems admit the claim to be valid in so far as they shrink from applying conventional standards of morality to holy men. I have explained its metaphysical justification in [an earlier chapter.]
A miracle performed by a saint is termed [karāmāt], i.e. a ‘favour’ which God bestows upon him, whereas a miracle performed by a prophet is called muʿjizat, i.e. an act which cannot be imitated by any one. The distinction originated in controversy, and was used to answer those who held the miraculous powers of the saints to be a grave encroachment on the prerogative of the Prophet. Sūfī apologists, while confessing that both kinds of miracle are substantially the same, take pains to differentiate the characteristics of each; they declare, moreover, that the saints are the Prophet’s witnesses, and that all their miracles (like ‘a drop trickling from a full skin of honey’) are in reality derived from him. This is the orthodox view and is supported by those Mohammedan mystics who acknowledge the Law as well as the Truth, though in some cases it may have amounted to little more than a pious opinion. We have often noticed the difficulty in which the Sūfīs find themselves when they try to make a logical compromise with Islam. But the word ‘logic’ is very misleading in this connexion. The beginning of wisdom, for European students of Oriental religion, lies in the discovery that incongruous beliefs—I mean, of course, beliefs which our minds cannot harmonise—dwell peacefully together in the Oriental brain; that their owner is quite unconscious of their incongruity; and that, as a rule, he is absolutely sincere. Contradictions which seem glaring to us do not trouble him at all.
The thaumaturgic element in ancient Sūfism was not so important as it afterwards became in the fully developed saint-worship associated with the Dervish Orders. “A saint would be none the less a saint,” says Qushayrī, “if no miracles were wrought by him in this world.” In early Mohammedan Vitæ Sanctorum it is not uncommon to meet with sayings to the effect that miraculous powers are comparatively of small account. It was finely said by Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah that the greatest miracle is the substitution of a good quality for a bad one; and the Kitāb al-Lumaʿ gives many examples of holy men who disliked miracles and regarded them as a temptation. “During my novitiate,” said Bāyazīd, “God used to bring before me wonders and miracles, but I paid no heed to them; and when He saw that I did so, He gave me the means of attaining to knowledge of Himself.” Junayd observed that reliance on miracles is one of the ‘veils’ which hinder the elect from penetrating to the inmost shrine of the Truth. This was too high doctrine for the great mass of Moslems, and in the end the vulgar idea of saintship triumphed over the mystical and theosophical conception. All such warnings and scruples were swept aside by the same irresistible instinct which rendered vain the solemn asseverations of Mohammed that there was nothing supernatural about him, and which transformed the human Prophet of history into an omnipotent hierophant and magician. The popular demand for miracles far exceeded the supply, but where the walīs failed, a vivid and credulous imagination came to their rescue and represented them, not as they were, but as they ought to be. Year by year the Legend of the Saints grew more glorious and wonderful as it continued to draw fresh tribute from the unfathomable ocean of Oriental romance. The pretensions made by the walīs, or on their behalf, steadily increased, and the stories told of them were ever becoming more fantastic and extravagant. I will devote the remainder of this chapter to a sketch of the walī as he appears in the vast medieval literature on the subject.
The Moslem saint does not say that he has wrought a miracle; he says, “a miracle was granted or manifested to me.” According to one view, he may be fully conscious at the time, but many Sūfīs hold that such ‘manifestation’ cannot take place except in ecstasy, when the saint is entirely under divine control. His own personality is then in abeyance, and those who interfere with him oppose the Almighty Power which speaks with his lips and smites with his hand. Jalāluddīn (who uses incidentally the rather double-edged analogy of a man possessed by a peri[17]) relates the following anecdote concerning Bāyazīd of Bistām, a celebrated Persian saint who several times declared in ecstatic frenzy that he was no other than God.
[17] One of the spirits called collectively Jinn.
After coming to himself on one of these occasions and learning what blasphemous language he had uttered, Bāyazīd ordered his disciples to stab him with their knives if he should offend again. Let me quote the sequel, from Mr. Whinfield’s abridged translation of the Masnavī (p. 196):
“The torrent of madness bore away his reason
And he spoke more impiously than before:
‘Within my vesture is naught but God,