The Nature of Sufism; An Ontological Reading of the Mystical in Islam 9780429448737

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ʻThe Nature of Sufism is a unique contribution to an old discussion. In bringing Heidegger to bear on Sufism, Milad Milani has created something that is part history, part philosophy, and sometimes almost mystical – though what that term, too, might mean is questioned as well as clarified. This radical and fascinating book covers a lot of ground: Sufism and Heidegger, of course, but also Junayd and Ibn Taymiyya, Corbin and the Persianate, love, and even Jesus. Challenging and well worthwhile.ʼ – Mark Sedgwick, Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University, author of Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (2016), and co-editor of Global Sufism: Boundaries, Narratives and Practices (2019)

The Nature of Sufism

This book explores how Sufis approach their faith as Muslims, upholding an Islamic worldview, but going about making sense of their religion through the world in which they exist, often in unexpected ways. Using a phenomenological approach, the book examines Sufism as lived experience within the Muslim lifeworld, focusing on the Muslim experience of Islamic history. It draws on selected case studies ranging from classic Sufism to Sufism in the contemporary era mainly taken from biographical and hagiographical data, manuscript texts, and treatises. In this way, it provides a revisionist approach to theories and methods on Sufism, and, more broadly, the category of mysticism. Milad Milani is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the Western Sydney University.

Routledge Religion in Contemporary Asia Series Series Editor Bryan S. Turner

Professor at the City University of New York and Director of the Centre for Religion and Society at the University of Western Sydney

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The Nature of Sufism An Ontological Reading of the Mystical in Islam Milad Milani

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeReligion-in-Contemporary-Asia-Series/book-series/RELIGIONASIA

The Nature of Sufism

An Ontological Reading of the Mystical in Islam Milad Milani

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Milad Milani The right of Milad Milani to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-32833-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07905-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44873-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my children: Nala Nastaran, Nhura Maree, and Luca Darian, Milani.

Contents

Preface Foreword Acknowledgements List of tables List of figures List of abbreviations Introduction

xii xv xviii xx xxi xxii 1

1 ‘Introduction’ to Sufism

21

2 The journey through Islam: a phenomenological analysis of the Sufi tariqa and the experience of the ‘master’

45

3 ‘Being Sufi’

66

4 Jesus as sign

91

5 Absent Christ, present God

119

6 Break with the past: transgressing restrictions of the category and scholarship on ‘mysticism’

133

7 Conclusion: the ontological question for Sufism

141

Index

146

Preface

This book was in no uncertain terms written on the wind of inspiration. I  had the idea to write it immediately following my reignited interest in the writings of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). After reading Heidegger again I knew what I had to write, and I began composing the book proposal, which I wrote during the summer of 2018 and submitted to Routledge for consideration. It was accepted soon after. Prior to writing the proposal, however, I had been working on a paper intended for publication, which is now contained in the second chapter of the present book. It was with this draft article that the thought process of the book really began. In it, I started wrestling with the idea that what makes Sufism cannot be what is preserved by the tradition, but rather had to be that which keeps pushing the tradition forward and redefining it. Hence, the question for which I had not yet found an answer: what was that thing? The paper moreover represented deeper layers of thought structure underlying the book, since the draft article was written from lecture notes for a unit of study that I regularly teach on Sufism. As I began to see the answer to my question in my reading of Heidegger, the scope of that paper was opened up to the possibility of a book. This book follows the pattern of my thinking about the topic of Sufism as a subject of study since my doctoral days. It is more experimental and perhaps even daring in its reconsideration of historical Sufism than my two earlier books. Yet they are all connected by the pursuit of a single question: what is the source of the origin of Sufism? Initially, I contemplated an earlier, and more imperfect, version of the same question: where did Sufism originate? But as I progressed in my reflections upon the subject, I realised the true nature of the question I wanted to ask. I had first thought I was interested in a question of historical origins, but I learned that it was in fact the ontological aspect of that question that was more pressing, it having captivated me from the start. In everything I read about Sufism, nothing had taken the problem of being Sufi seriously. The condition of being Sufi has been generally taken for granted as part of the Islamicate world and thus as Islamic mysticism. Complex historical contextualisation of Sufism as connected to currents of mysticism from antiquity (e.g., Neoplatonic) having been most prominent. Yet no one had asked about the source of origin of Sufism, that is, the more basic ground that allows for the being of Sufi-ness within the Islamic. The preoccupation of scholars has primarily been

Preface  xiii with the Islamic as the source of origin. But I argue there is something more basic than that to be considered the origin of Sufism, and that this was Sufism. In reading the history of Sufism and thus historicising Sufism, scholars (and historical Sufi figures themselves) had missed the main subject of analysis: that Sufism was its own ontological point of origin. Relatedly, it had never really been about looking for similarity of comparable mysticisms elsewhere to define Sufism, but instead to look at the essence of Sufism – that is, in Heideggerian terms, that which is what it is as it is – as its origin. Without having to locate the origin of Sufism in the other, or worse yet, without having to settle for its origin within the Islamic, the scope of exploration suddenly opened up the possibility of understanding Sufism in a new way and in terms of its correlation with ‘truth’ and ‘art’ as Heidegger had put it in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Using the Heideggerian frame to analyse a contested subject in Islamic Studies provided the critical edge with which to approach Sufism from an angle that had not yet been considered. As I make clear in the following pages, this book does not convey a Heideggerian view of Sufism nor is it a synthesis of Heideggerian theory with Sufi mysticism (where Heidegger is morphed into some kind of ‘Sufi mystic’). Far from it, this book is about the critical tools with which Heidegger himself conducted his own investigation into the nature of being, and by asking the question of being for the first time. Thus, I do not necessarily (nor always) follow Heidegger where he leads in his thinking, but instead, allow myself to be inspired by the same conditions for inquiry that motivated him in my thinking through Sufism. This book, therefore, represents my reading of Sufi data with a view to the hermeneutic phenomenology that Heidegger advanced in his reconsideration of the classics. Why Heidegger? No other thinker, to my view, tackled the question of the past and present condition of human existence quite the way he did. I  have always been drawn to the adventurous thinkers, the bold and innovative theorists, especially those that have dared to revise history and, not least, the way that we reflect on the state of our being in the world. In this way, three thinkers of the Continent have always appealed to me: Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Nietzsche (1844–1900), and of course, Heidegger. But this book also draws on more recent inspirations as linked to an interest in an ancient persona: I have always been fascinated by the enigmatic figure of Jesus. In Sufism, Jesus the son of Mary is not only highly revered but holds the prestigious place of ‘the seal of the saints’ according to The Great Sheikh, Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), who was perhaps the most influential figure  in Sufi history. As such, and in relation to Jesus scholarship, this book follows the researches of two distinguished scholars, in particular; one no less controversial than the other, but both of whom have left their mark on Jesus scholarship as simultaneously garnering respect and being suspect – this to me an unquestionable sign of ‘authenticity’. I speak of, in order of birth, Geza Vermes (1924–2013) and Thomas Sheehan (b. 1941). The works of both these men have academically inspired the way I think about the subject I study. Vermes, a historian of religion, first advanced a radical reading of Jesus as a Jewish charismatic

xiv  Preface teacher of interior religion. Sheehan, a philosopher of religion, in line with his work with the Jesus Seminar, pursued an even more radical position that Jesus called for the end of God and religion – a point, he famously makes, the Church had conveniently overlooked. I would be lying if I were to say that I have not endeavoured to anything less provocative in my own interpretation of Sufism. Since my days as a student at University, I  have always questioned the standard reading of religious materials; always asked ‘but why?’ and ‘why not?’. The cultural apple does not fall far from the tree, as it were, for as (the Persian) Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037), had asserted, mainstream knowledge is a tool for controlling the masses. Knowledge of the real is ascertained by asking the question, and following the question to its ultimate conclusion. (I would dare say, he was the most original thinker, in the East, before Martin Heidegger, in the West.) The reason I raise the question of Jesus is to say that Sufism has more than an accidental relationship with the teachings of this persona that has been cast out of history and into the future of eschatological expectation. So, to phrase it in my Australianness, this book has come about through a fair amount of time in research and reflection on topics I believe hold value for understanding: Persia, Sufism, Jesus, and Heidegger. Milad Milani Western Sydney University

Foreword

The business of scholarly research in the Humanities (and arguably in all disciplines) is the creation of new information or the revelation of existing knowledge that has been neglected or obscured for whatever reason (Gulbrandsen & Aanstad, 2015). This is an easy statement to make, but in practice is a difficult and protracted task that in the twenty-first century often involves painstaking sifting of primary evidence, textual and material, and the interrogation of existing research, so as to shift perspectives or find unexpected and unexamined areas for development, whilst seeking competitive funding and a place in the ‘knowledge economy’ (Hazelkorn, 2015). The academic study of religion, and particularly of topics like mysticism and religious experience, esoteric fraternities, and contested scriptures, is often underrated in the assessment of impactful or significant Humanities research. Since 2001, Islamic Studies has been subjected to ‘securitisation’, which has directed a majority of funding to projects focused on anti-Western millenarian thought, radicalisation, and terrorism (Kurzman & Ernst, 2012). A research climate focused on such issues is hardly one in which the study of Sufism, or Islam’s contribution to mystical religion, or Islamic esotericism is likely to flourish. In this context, Milad Milani’s The Nature of Sufism is an important contribution to the aim of keeping research into Islam (including history, theology, and social currents, as well as texts, doctrines, and practices) as broad as possible. Milani’s book is ambitious, in that it employs a range of strategies and tactics to dramatically reposition Sufism and Sufis: it is not a new history of Sufism, such as Alexander Knysh recently published (Knysh, 2017); nor is it a study of Sufism with regard to the historical development of Islam. Rather, it is an interrogation of the relationship of Sufism and Islam, in which Sufism is examined via the hermeneutics of history and phenomenology. Milani, like the French polymath and early scholar of Islamic philosophy, Central Asian Sufism, and Iranian esotericism, Henri Corbin (1903–1978), finds inspiration in the philosophical approach of phenomenology, and that of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) specifically (Green, 2005). Heidegger’s central concept, being in the world, when applied to Sufis, produces strikingly different results to conservative interpretive frameworks which presume the appropriateness of situating Sufi in the context of normative Islam.

xvi  Foreword The questions of ‘Why Sufism?’ and ‘What does it mean to be a Sufi?’ underpin Milani’s consideration of the relationship of mysticism and mystical experience to Islam and Islamic asceticism, which is potentially a site of origin for Sufis and Sufism. Critiques of the term including mysticism and mystical experience in the discipline of Religious Studies are not often applied within Islamic Studies (Eck et al., 2018), where paradoxically anti-orientalism and orientalism are both influential, and traditionalist approaches remain vigorous despite many contemporary scholarly attempts to update paradigms and shift conversations in productive directions. One great strength of The Nature of Sufism is the deft way Milani utilises, undercuts, and reestablishes ‘classic’ Sufi tropes, such as the tariqa being characterised in terms of sober and intoxicated faith, and the role of love and experience of the divine for mystics generally, and Sufis in particular. Milani contends that the paradox of Sufism is that if it is viewed as purely and simply Islamic, then it cannot be Sufism, but if it is not Islamic (however complexly defined), then it is not Sufism either. A related aspect of this highly intellectual project is the centrality of Jesus for Milani’s thesis (Milani, 2011). Jesus is seen as the embodiment of God’s being in the world, although Milani cautions against a purely historical view of both Jesus and the seal of the prophets, Muhammad. The eschatological significance of these powerful prophets is carefully investigated, particularly with attention to whether they were mystics and privy to the experience of divinity. From this primordial period, in which Jesus and Muhammad are the exemplars, Milani moves to assess the Sufism that flourished between the two great Sufi thinkers Junayd al-Baghdadi (830–910) and Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). It has been recognised that Sufism and Sufi orders are transregional and transnational (Kurzman & Ernst, 2012, p. 37) and may function to bridge the divide between Sunni and Shi’a, at least in the area of individual spirituality and experience of the divine. Milani concludes his study, arguing that Sufis are the product of a phenomenological (in this sense, first-person experience) process of being Muslim. Thus, Sufis engage with the Islamic tradition and the Qur’anic text as if in conversation with the past (interpreting their experience in terms of the heroes of the past, like Muhammad). Heidegger defined ‘art’ as the opening up of meaning, and Milani brings that perspective to bear on Sufis and their interactions with the Qur’an. For Milani, Sufism is, to use Heidegger’s terms, the ‘clearing’ or ‘event’ of disclosure for potentiality and possibility for being Muslim in the Islamic lifeworld. Such a statement is a radical rethinking of Sufism in the twentyfirst century, where the global often trumps the local and geopolitical reality outweighs religion, identity, and the claims of history (Mignolo, 2003). That alone makes this book powerful and valuable. Carole M. Cusack The University of Sydney

Bibliography Eck, Diana, Asani, Ali & Mottahedeh, Roy, 2018. Integrating Islamic Studies Within Religious Studies. Thinking Islam Within Religious Studies: Methods, Histories and Futures.

Foreword  xvii Harvard Divinity School Video. [Online] Available at: https://hds.harvard.edu/2018/10/03/ news/video-thinking-islam-within-religious-studies-methods-histories-and-futures. Green, Nile, 2005. Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbin’s Approaches to Mystical Islam. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 17(3), pp. 219–226. Gulbrandsen, M. & Aanstad, S., 2015. Is Innovation a Useful Concept for Arts and Humanities Research? Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14(1), pp. 9–24. Hazelkorn, E., 2015. Making an Impact: New Directions for Arts and Humanities Research. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14(1), pp. 25–44. Knysh, Alexander, 2017. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. Kurzman, Charles & Ernst, Carl W., 2012. Islamic Studies in U.S. Universities. Review of Middle Eastern Studies, 46(1), pp. 24–46. Mignolo, Walter D., 2003. Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: The Role of the Humanities in the Corporate University. Nepantla: Views from the South, 4(1), pp. 97–226. Milani, Milad, 2011. Representations of Jesus in Islamic Mysticism: Defining the ‘Sufi Jesus’. Literature & Aesthetics, 21(2), pp. 45–64.

Acknowledgements

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli is the famous Latin phrase by Terentianus Maurus about the nature of books. I have come to believe this is more than an impressive phrase. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, alludes to it in his rendering of it as ‘Books share their fates with their readers’. I like the version found in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate: put into the mouths of the twin booksellers in Spain: ‘All books have a destiny of their own . . . Even a life of their own’. The full translation, however, reads: ‘According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny’. There is no doubt in my mind that books are authored, but they are the fruit of no one individual. I can only attest to this fact through the circumstances of the coming together of this book. Like any good author, one has to follow one’s gut. But one also has to be able to listen. For me, a good book is a reflection of a balance of these. Long hours of conversation with friends and colleagues underpinned my thinking about the subject under study. Through this process, I remained fiercely committed to what I knew needed to be said but found myself enriched by the thoughtful and critical retorts of my fellow conversationists. I thank especially Vassilios Adrahtas, Nicholas Harvey, Zolt Salontai, Morokoth So, and Father Alexis Rosentool for our treasured conversations. I  am particularly indebted to a young ardent student of mine, wise well beyond his years, and whose wit, resourcefulness, and perceptiveness have been indispensable in the process of this book coming to be what it is. Thank you, Rhys Harford. I cannot express my gratitude enough to Bryan S. Turner, Series Editor of Routledge Religion in Contemporary Asia Series, for his support of my work as a scholar of religion. Likewise, my great thanks to Peter Sowden, Section Editor of Asia series, for his vision and support of the idea from its infancy; not least for his patience and kindness towards me through the process of completing the manuscript of this book, which coincidentally was put on a short pause when I became a father for the third time. This brings me to the one person who has passed onto me her love of words and thus helped me improve on mine. She has been an inspiration for this non-native English-speaking author. I  am eternally grateful to my wife and love, Natasha Maiolo, for having read and helped improve the written word of this book.

Acknowledgements  xix I wish to offer my sincere thanks to Carole Cusack for writing the forward to this book. I am grateful not only because I have known Carole since the time of my graduate studies at the University of Sydney but also because I know her to be a formidable studies of religion scholar whose far-reaching knowledge and expertise in the field have given me renewed confidence in following my gut in scholarship. I am grateful to Mark Sedgwick for having read the manuscript and agreeing to give his endorsement of it. As this book was written with the view to ‘think outside the box’ of Sufi studies literature, Mark’s support, as a leading scholar of Sufism, is of tremendous value to me. Thank you, Mark. Last, but not least, an additional thanks to my colleague and friend, Vassilios, who spent most of the December holidays on the tedious task of proofreading the final draft of this manuscript, and for having worked painstakingly on, and producing, the index. To Zolt I offer sincere thanks for reading the final proofs, whose scholarly acuity is greatly appreciated. I  would also like to express my thanks to the editorial and production teams for bringing this book to the printed page. Finally, I  wish to say that any errors, oversights, or unyielding passages found therein are entirely due to my own neglect.

Tables

0.1 List of Sufi figures of the Persian ‘School’, twelfth to the thirteenth century 0.2 List of Sufi figures of the Persian ‘School’, tenth to the eleventh century 3.1 List of Sufi figures of Persian love tradition, denoting ethnicity and linguistic orientation 4.1 List of Sufi figures representing paradigm shift 4.2 Qur’anic references to Jesus

8 8 76 95 99

Figures

1.1 Basic pattern of religious development in early Islam 2.1 Diagrammatic representation of ‘Sufism going through Islam’

27 62

Abbreviations

Sufism DS M MT R

Diwan-e Shams. (Jalaluddin Rumi, 1380/2002. Kulliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Edited by Badi al-Zaman Furuzanfar. Tehran: Talayeh.) Masnavi-e Ma’navi. (Jalaluddin Rumi, 1997. Masnavi-e Ma’navi. Tehran: Safi Alishah Publishers.) Mantiq al-Tayr. (Fariduddin Attar, 1964. Mantiq al-Tayr. Edited by Seyed Sadeq Gohari. Tehran: Publishing House for Scientific and Cultural knowledge.) Rubayat of Rumi. (Jalaluddin Rumi, 1380/2002. Kulliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Edited by Badi al-Zaman Furuzanfar. Tehran: Talayeh.)

Heidegger BT

Being and Time. (Martin Heidegger, 2010. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised and with a Forward by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press.) GA Gesamtausgabe. (1978–. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.) GA 2 Sein und Zeit. (Martin Heidegger, [1927] 1977. Edited by Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann.) OWA The Origin of the Work of Art. (Martin Heidegger, 1975. The Origin of the Work of Art. In: Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 17–87. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.) PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. (Martin Heidegger, 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.) PR The Principle of Reason. (Martin Heidegger, 1991 [lectures given in 1956, first published in 1957]. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.) PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life. (Marting Heidegger, 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.) VA Vorträge und Aufsätze. (Martin Heidegger, 1959. Vorträge und Aufsätze 2. Auflage. Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske.)

Abbreviations  xxiii WdP

What Is Philosophy? (Martin Heidegger, 1962. What Is Philosophy? Translated by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde. Bilingual Edition containing the text of Was ist das – die Philosphie? London: Vision Press.)

Other LM

The Life of Moses. (Gregory of Nyssa, 1978. The Life of Moses. Translation, Introduction, and Notes by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Preface by John Meyendorff. New York: Paulist Press.)

Introduction

An overview Sufism is typically seen as something Islamic. It is situated within the context of the study of Islam and it is also usually expected to be treated through the Islamic paradigm of spirituality. Such an approach to Sufism is problematic to say the least, not because it is erroneous, but precisely because it is anticipated as the norm. To be sure, Sufism is shaped by and confined to the Islamic (by which I mean the context). Yet, though Sufism is Islamic in this ordinary sense that scholarship expects to find it, it is at the same time radically un-Islamic. That is to say, Sufism is so genuinely Islamic that by virtue of its Islamicness it transcends the very identity value of the Islamic altogether. As such, the task in this study is simultaneously an undermining and underlining of the Islamic, aiming to completely and paradoxically treat its status as (un-)Islamic. The paradoxical reference is warranted on grounds that the advent of Sufism in Islamic history is indicative of a changing process of experiencing the divine, undergoing fluctuations and transfigurations from before orthodoxy to after it. The variance of Sufi manifestation is a result of the very personal and intimate experiences that can be found in biographical studies that emphasise what it means to be Muslim in any given context. Thereby, the unorthodox nature of this study is based on what is deemed to be originally the unorthodox nature of Sufism (by which I mean before orthodoxy). The premise being that it would not be unreasonable, therefore, to study Sufism, which is by nature eccentric – though it was reigned in and made to fit orthodoxy, and even an orthodox form of Sufism was eventually developed – through the same lens. The first point of inquiry for the study of Sufism is one usually overlooked: what is Islam? A first crucial reply must be in the apophatic style: ‘Islam’ (whatever it might be thought of ) is not a religion!1 If this is correctly extrapolated, the problem of understanding Sufism in the Islamic framework becomes clear. The immediate observation is that it becomes impossible to distinguish the two unless certain ground rules are laid bare methodologically. For instance, one might agree to take ‘Islam’ to mean the developed legalistic tradition and ‘Sufism’ as the spiritual alternative. Or that Sufism is the mystical aspect of formal Islam. Such categorisations are useful but ultimately problematic, since they offer a restricted DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-1

2  Introduction assessment based on a simplification of a nuanced phenomenon that is Sufism. This much is clear from classical and contemporary debates on the definitions of Sufism. Early descriptions of Sufism offered by Sufi apologetics of the classical period present the argument that Islam is Sufism (al-Junayd, al-Sarraj, alMakki, al-Ghazzali). Roughly contemporaneous views taken up by adherents of strict orthodoxy who had a limited tolerance for what Sufism might otherwise entail advanced the view that Sufism is Islam (al-Hujwiri, Ibn Taymiyya). In the modern era, Orientalist scholarship, and views largely disseminating from Western European intellectual circles, postulated Sufism as a foreign influence (i.e., of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism) (e.g., R.C. Zaehner, Louis Massignon). More recent treatments from various historical perspectives have presented Sufism as accommodating imported religious and spiritual elements within a centralised Islamic identity (i.e., of Hellenism, Neoplatonism, Christian asceticism) (e.g., Richard Bulliet, Alexander Knysh, Nile Green). My own estimation sits somewhere in between the traditional and modern dialogues with respect to what Sufism is. To my view, Sufism is not ‘influenced’ but rather takes ‘inspiration’ from the other, and thereby enters into a complex relationship that is only ever paradoxically – and in some sense only phenomenologically – understood. Given the phenomenological emphasis, we start with the Muslim as Sufi with the aim to end up where the Sufi is self-disclosed as Muslim. The latter signifying that the Sufi upholds an Islamic worldview, but goes about making sense of their religion through the world in which they exist, often in unexpected ways. To this end, I will take a revisionist approach to theories and methods on Sufism, and, more broadly, the category of mysticism. The book draws on selected case studies ranging from classic Sufism to Sufism in the contemporary era (mainly taken from biographical and hagiographical data), and manuscript texts and treatises. The book utilises the phenomenological approach of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) as an analytical tool for examining Sufism within the Muslim lifeworld. Yet the focus of this work is not on Heideggerian theory, but instead on the Muslim experience of Islamic history in the light of Heidegger’s philosophy of history. The main objective of this study is to offer a timely rethinking of the question of Sufism in Islam through a paradigm of exploration that is Heidegger-inspired, though not Heideggerian per se. Here, Sufism is treated as a meaningful presence to agency within the Islamic structure, offering an interpretation of Sufism that is understood on several layers of disclosure.

Preliminary considerations In my work I have attempted to make the point that the study of religion is not to be relegated to the confines of any one disciplinary field; but rather, the relational facets of religion – society, culture, politics, etc. – are to be studied in conjunction with the tools of corresponding disciplines. In this respect, religion, as it is discussed in this work, is the object of study from a multidisciplinary perspective. As such, Sufism, which is generally examined through the field of Islamic studies, is here examined with a view to hermeneutics of history and phenomenology.

Introduction  3 The same consideration is applied to my theorisation about mysticism. Mysticism is not just about one thing, such as inner piety, spiritual love, or hidden knowledge, and may well be about all or some combination of them depending on the context, and therefore, it will not have just one definition. In Sufism in the Secret History of Persia, I asserted: ‘It is time for a recognisable distinction to be made between the mystic Sufi tradition and Islamic piety’ (Milani, 2013, p. 207). I made explicit that ‘Islamic Mysticism’ and ‘Sufism’ are not the same thing (2013, p. 207). This thesis was based on a wider cultural study of the spread of Islam in Iran, isolating the Iranian influence on the Sufi tradition to denote ‘Persianate Sufism’ as a discrete phenomenon (2013, pp. 205–206). The implication is that while Sufism emerges from the isolated occasion of the Muslim ascetics, it does not become ‘Islamic’ until after it is reintroduced to Islam by those claimants to Sufism that were interested in mending the mystical and orthodox schism and presenting the Sufi as heirs to the true doctrine of the Sunni (Milani, 2013, p. 208). It is this historical gap that is often glossed over, which was underlined in the examination of Sufism from a history of ideas perspective. In the process, special emphasis was placed on the newly developed culture and worldview of the Sufis as markedly different from that of mainstream belief. Furthermore, that certain instrumental components of the Sufi tradition that include music, poetry, singing, and dancing are clearly foreign to the fundamentals of historical Islam. In writing the book, my main concern, at that time, was with the Persian culturo-religious influence that had shaped Islam to the needs of the Iranian converts through a long and drawn-out process that took roughly 400 years. The distinction that I made between ‘Islamic Mysticism’ and ‘Sufism’ was indicative of later developments in Sufism (of the eleventh to the fourteenth century), whereby I  reserved Sufism for the advocates of the ‘religion of love’ that was nurtured at the hands of the Sufis who were drawn to the poetic; in particular, those who championed the Persian language and its cultural past. Thus, I bracketed Islamic mysticism as religiously appropriated ‘mysticism’ from which Sufism, as a continually evolving tradition, was divergent. Its centre of gravity – from a Persianate point of view – was entirely fixed on a contrasting fulcrum: love. I argued that this Sufism of the Persianate world, in its new form, was on its way to exiting the orbit of Islamic orthopraxy and, as such, becoming a new phenomenon in its own right. To me, this was analogical to the emergent Jesus movement that eventually became Christianity. Like the fallacy ‘why have apes not evolved into humans?’ it would be incorrect to raise the objection: why has Sufism not left Islam, as it were, to become something else? The short answer is that it has, in many ways, though through its so-called ‘neo-Sufi’ manifestations; albeit, I argue that such branding is inadequate, and instead a way of codifying – and thus denying – these groups the accomplishment of having made the evolutionary step. In the present book, my motivation is driven by the same kind of questions about Sufism but here in a much earlier historical timeframe. Going to early Islam and looking at the very first glimmers of a mystical appreciation of religion in its history is the main focus. As such, the distinctions made about Islamic mysticism

4  Introduction and Sufism are different from my earlier deliberations as is their context. In this study, Sufism is the tradition that arises to appropriate mystical piety for orthodoxy and, therefore, mysticism is treated as the emergent phenomenon developing out of the asceticism of the early Muslim pious renunciants. I follow the logic of my earlier Christian analogy for Sufism, but here with some modifications as to the periodical examination. The idea is that the evolving mystical piety is a recurrent and necessary step in the historical development of the Islamic religion. As in the Christian, where the mystics emerge from among the ascetics, so too do we see the same process unfold, almost verbatim, in the history of Islam. The distinction however remains, since asceticism does not disappear from view and because asceticism and mysticism (whilst not mutually exclusive) define the ascetics and the mystics in their own way, for the two are not always the same in one person. The point that I make is that the mystical piety encountered in early Islam (prior to its appropriation by the tradition that will be known as Sufism) is not a conscious borrowing of the Christian nor a direct influence necessarily in all cases, but rather reminiscent – on its own terms – of the charismatic piety of first-century Judaism, in which the peculiarity of one charismatic’s teachings stands out in particular: that of Jesus. It should also be mentioned that when I wrote my first book, Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) had not yet become available in print. Ahmed’s book presented academia with a new linguistic paradigm to analyse Islam, and thus for me, Sufism also. The significance of Ahmed’s thesis is that ‘being Islamic’ was determined by a set of criteria that factored in a wider pool of Muslim exegesis on what it means to be Muslim. His work stated that there has always been an important hermeneutical relationship between what he called ‘Pre-Text’, ‘Text’, and ‘Con-Text’ of Revelation which is lost to Muslims due to its depletion in favour of the emphasis on ‘Text’ (i.e., reading Quran, Sunna, Hadith, Sharia, and so on, in isolation) (Ahmed, 2016, ch. 5). However, Ahmed draws on a multitude of case studies – from ‘the Balkans to Bengal’ – to demonstrate that Muslims have historically understood divine revelation in a variety of ways that seem contradictory yet which remain coherent because of the possibility of the hermeneutical engagement with ‘Pre-Text’ for meaning-making when placing what is understood into ‘Con-Text’. Yet various processes of reification have shifted religious understanding in favour of a legalistic and scriptural reduction of Islam (Ahmed, 2016, p. 515). Apropos Ahmed’s reading of Islam, Sufism has as much a place within Islam  – given that it is undeniably Islamic (according to Ahmad’s rendition of the noun) – as those who have been historically labelled as ‘Muslim winedrinkers’ (2016, p. 3). Yet, my reading of Sufism (extra-Ahmed) is that it should also speak to the interpretability of subtle sensibilities both horizontally and vertically, which is largely absent in Ahmed’s analytical model. Taking Sufism as an anomaly within Islam, though already made categorically problematic in Ahmed’s literary assessment, is about a study of Sufism in this book that challenges the assumptions – and thus the restrictions – of (both the scholastic and traditionalist) convention.

Introduction 5

‘Methodology’ This book being an exercise in working out a problem, by rethinking the way Sufism has been conceived of time and again in the scholarly imagination, necessitates a kind of freedom from the conventional methodological constraints. Geza Vermes put it such that ‘the grandiloquent, but highly fashionable, label of methodology’ is by no means the ‘sacred rule book’ that necessarily must be followed in order to legitimately arrive ‘at the right conclusion’ (Vermes, 1993, p. 7). Indeed, I take on board Vermes’ spirited view that ‘research aiming to be innovative should not be bound by strict, predetermined rules’ (Vermes, 1993, p. 7). On a related note, it so happens that over the course of time many good works of scholarship become dated not because what they contain is redundant, but because of what is deemed as outmoded approaches by their critics. I  for one have no intention of keeping to such leanings as are thought fashionable – or even worse, a matter of rigour – by some. The quality of a work, so far as I am concerned, is in the substance of the work, not its methodology. I recall many times Richard Bulliet mentioning in his lectures of his own work coming under criticism due to the unconventional approach that he had undertaken, but that his critics could not disagree with his conclusions. The irony is sufficient to make the point that methodology is used to serve as the tool for interrogation and discovery, not to be the measure of the material at hand. Should, say, a particular method, like form criticism be now considered obsolete in Jesus scholarship, or should Heideggerian language used to open up key points of insight on classical Islamic esotericism be seen as peculiar, neither should detract from the outcome of the work were it to be of value in advancing scholarly knowledge. I am, of course, speaking about the works of Thomas Sheehan and Henry Corbin, respectively, neither of whose contribution is taken for granted in this work, even despite the trendiness of Saidism having made Corbin unfashionable (Green, 2008, pp. 248–250) or Bauckham’s critique (2006) of those last century methods undermining Sheehan. To this end, I very much like what Corbin said in an interview in response to his own efforts being misunderstood: ‘I am neither a Germanist nor an Orientalist, but a philosopher pursuing his quest wherever the spirit guides him’ (Corbin, n.d.). Couched within a history of religions approach, I  draw on Heidegger’s philosophy as a catalyst for an investigation into the nature of Sufism. This book is a study on why Sufism exists, how it relates to Islam, and what it means to be ‘Sufi’. I consider what Sufism is as a Muslim experience, and as such, move away from the traditional historical rendering of Sufism to offer a new approach to an examination of being Sufi. Rather than pre-empting what it means to be Sufi, this book is an inquiry into why Sufism exists, asking why it is as it is. This is then used as a lead-in to discourse about interpreting Sufism beyond traditional and historical readings. Asking ‘Why Sufism?’ is a trigger for the question of appropriation of meaning that has not been adequately asked, or significantly answered, by conventional modes of examination. For certain, this book is unconventional in its approach. My intention is not to address the factuality of Sufism but rather, its facticity. I begin by asking: ‘Why

6  Introduction is there Sufism at all rather than just Islam?’, though the question itself is not the focus, but instead serves to illustrate that asking about Sufism ‘at all’ is ultimately a dead end and inadequate. By doing so, I want to distinguish between the ontological question of being Sufi as such and the historical traditional question about Sufism which is unreservedly accepted ipso facto. Before we can move on, there is the inevitable question of the variance between ontology and theology that needs to be settled. In this work, I do not take a ‘theological’ position. Rather, in my undertaking, I deliberately restrict myself not by the ontological premise, but rather to the language of ontology. This is not in order to shy away from theological issues that may arise but to curtail the theological prerogative so as not to lose sight of the present question of Being, which was so dear to Heidegger – and which will be preserved here. Asking ‘What is meant by Sufism?’ is a literal prelude to what is taken for granted about how the history of Sufism has obscured the question of being Sufi in the pursuit of the why of Sufism. The question of ‘being Sufi’ has been altered since the determinations placed upon it by al-Junayd al-Baghdadi (d. 910). As a prominent figure and respected progenitor of institutionalised Sufism, he was the architect of Sufi metaphysical language. In this way, al-al-Junayd is no doubt for Sufism much like Heidegger’s Plato in the history of Western thought; and in the same vein the decisive obstruction to the reawakening of the question of being Sufi as a pivotal event in the spiritual fate of Islam. This is precisely because the way we understand what it means ‘to be Sufi’ is a departure from the understanding of the entirety of the existence of Sufism, which was put into play by al-Junayd and subsequently followed up by the tradition that emerged around it. I argue that what has been lost is the ‘inception’ (Anfang), by which Heidegger meant that which gives a historical time its trajectory rather than a mere chronological point of beginning. A key task of this book is to reawaken lost and overlooked possibilities of being Sufi as inherent to an initial inception of its antiquity; that is, before the nihilism of al-Junayd’s idealism took hold as the basis for the foundation now known to us as Sufism.

The period in focus: twelfth to the thirteenth century The significance of the period in focus is twofold: to set the scope of the project firmly within the study of Sufism in Asia and to underscore the Persian characteristic of the milieu in which post-classical Sufism flourished. The importance of the 1100s (particularly over that of the typically valued 1800s) for understanding Islam in the present age has been long established (Bulliet, 1972). Whilst the wider scope of the book examines Sufism as it appears from the ninth century up until the modern period in some cases, the period in focus is from the beginning of the 1100s until the end of the 1200s. This is a time where Sufism is defined by the experience of religious and cultural pluralism due to an exchange of ideas with regions beyond Islam’s borders. Sufis of note such as Attar, Ibn al-Arabi, Rumi, Ruzbihan Baqli, and Fakhr al-Din Razi that fall within this period share in the same nuanced approach in thought and praxis, reflecting a richly complex

Introduction  7 integration of Classical Antiquity, that is, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Iranian traditions. This is a highly intellectually creative, innovative, and productive period in terms of works produced that showcase ideas built upon the model of earlier classical Sufis. It is a unique period situated after the ascetic and prior to the dogmatic type of mystical piety. The latter, in particular, tariqa or ‘tariqaSufism’ brings about the systematisation of Sufi ideas and practices and produces a reified and contained experience of Sufism with lodge-dwelling dervishes in a highly ritualised setting. The focus of this work, however, is on the type of Sufism as represented by Attar and those closely akin to his kind of Sufism that is unorthodox and even at times flirts with heretical themes. This is Sufism prior to Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), the renowned Hanbali scholar and Sufi, who outright rebuked those brethren of his time who followed the kind of teachings (as outlined previously) he deemed to be heretical. Although he was representative of a minority ‘radical’ position during his own lifetime, Ibn Taymiyya has been, nevertheless, highly influential in revivalist circles in shaping Sufi thought and regulating Sufi orthodoxy since. The reification of Sufism in the mirror of orthodoxy is ultimately brought at odds with the popularity of the ishq movement, highlighting the Persianate, through which the tope of love was made prominent in Farsi Sufi literature, in particular. Such a tension in the experience of Sufism also importantly reveals the mystical intonations of regional Sufis over against the stereotype of ‘Islamic Mysticism’ (or what is defined in the literature as ‘religious mysticism’). In terms of (contemporary) relevance, it links in with discourse on what constitutes ‘the Islamic’ and how such important changes in the history of Sufism have been determined by limited views about Islam and thus Sufism. It connects to the outlook that a close study of Sufism offers much in the way of understanding the nature of religious pluralism and the alternative narrative in Islam. This is therefore driven by a strong historical biographical emphasis that yields much in the way of period and regional insight as well as insights into the types of Sufism. Most critical to the historical period under study is the kind of Sufism that flourishes between two giants of Sufi orthodoxy: al-Junayd al-Baghdadi (830– 910) and Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). The former being ‘the Father of doctrinal Sufism’, formulated a metaphysics of Sufism to present Sufi-mysticism as inherent to the Islamic, though not foregoing the nuanced appreciation that was involved in reaching the depths of the truths of Islam. The latter having rejected the seemingly monistic-theosophic style of Sufism as heretical and having influenced the recognition of Sufism as properly aligned with monotheistic creed. There is, as such, a short list of well-known Sufi figures that are bookended by al-Junayd and Ibn Taymiyya that demonstrate the distinctive quality of the kind of Sufism that is by nature deeply mystical in the sense of being paradoxical whilst at the same time beset by severe contradiction and tension at the core of its identity, thinking, and experience. Also of relevance are figures that fall within the early portion of the period of interest that are influential to the figures referred to previously.

8  Introduction Table 0.1 List of Sufi figures of the Persian ‘School’, twelfth to the thirteenth century Attar of Nishapur (d. 1221) Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240)

Rumi (1207–1273)

Ruzbihan Baqli (1128–1209)

Fakhr al-din Iraqi (1213–1289)

Persian of Khurasan, travelled widely and wrote numerous texts in Farsi. Mauritian Arab of Andalucía. Travelled widely and spent much time in Mecca, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Both influenced (through his doctrine of unity of being) and was influenced by the Persian Sufi love tradition. Persian of Balkh, relocated to Konya (Turkey). Author of Mathnawi (known as ‘the Qur’an in Persian’) and Diwan of Shams, love odes dedicated to his master Shams. Presently recognised as a saint by his adherents, the Mevlevi Sufi Order founded by his son in his honour (known as the Whirling Dervishes). A Daylamite Persian of the Fars province. The defender of ecstatic Sufism. A Hallajian, that is, a disciple of the teachings of Mansour al-Hallaj (m. 922) (al-Hallaj taught a doctrine of love and ecstasy and was executed on the basis of allegations made against him for heresy). Persian of Hamadan near Iraq. Advocate of the doctrine of love in Persian Sufi tradition.

Table 0.2 List of Sufi figures of the Persian ‘School’, tenth to the eleventh century Ahmad al-Ghazali (1061–1126) Ayn al-Ghuzal al-Hamadani (1098–1131) Yahya al-Suhrawardi (1154–1191)

Persian of Tus, greater Khurasan. Wrote the first treatise on love in Sufi thought in Farsi. A Hallajian. A Persian Sufi martyr (martyred at the age of 33) and judge of Hamadan. Executed based on alleged claims of heresy. A Persian Sufi theosophist and martyr of Northwestern Iranian provinces. Executed based on charges of heresy.

Limitations on Sufism This book brings to bear the overlooked phenomenological question of what it means to be Sufi as a possible blind sight of scholarship in the pursuit of the Sufis. Existing literature on Sufism has come a long way since classical orientalism and traditionalism, but these paradigms continue to skew the way Sufism is read into history, society, and politics. The challenge for any study of Sufism is to continually wrestle with how it is that Sufism makes sense within the world of Islam as seemingly both an anomalous and analogous entity. The book does not proceed to undermine the traditional and historical currents of thinking about Sufism, but to rather place them in their proper context of understanding Sufism through their appropriate modes of intellectuality.

Introduction 9 I am painfully aware of the political stigma attached to the question of the origin of Sufism. It threatens to unravel the entire history of Islam, let alone the message of its Prophet and the destiny of his followers. I  intend to address all this – with due care – in the appropriate context of Islamic history as well as the etymological relatedness of relevant terms that are used to appropriate sense and meaning within Islamic history. Yet I aim to do this not at the risk of shrinking in the face of difficult questions about the past. I am, furthermore, mindful of additional restrictions such as presents itself in the form of ‘evidence’. The question of what constitutes evidence is an important one philosophically and less so categorically. Its value is not so much in what is today esteemed knowledge derived from so-called evidence-based research (of the quantitative, and not even of the qualitative, type), but rather for the sake of the inquiry into what evidence might actually entail. This is, at the very least, important for our consideration, since in the face of the ultimately unknowable reality of that which we hope to uncover, a reality that has for so long been lost to us, the talk of ‘evidence’ becomes, in actual fact, absurd. Convention demands dependence upon either written or oral sources to be deemed authoritative, but here I will settle for a mere reasonable guess as having more use, because it is more honest. We have the impression that history is deduced from the written word, and this search for meaning is misguided. The past is not captured by what is written down, but rather for a short time experienced in a moment that quickly vanishes, in moments where conversation takes flight with ideas, and the heart is filled with inspiration and vision, both of which are ironically the Holy Grail of scholarly ‘textual’ proof. Instead, textuality must take a wider sense here to convey the problem that we tend to forget; that evidential substantiation is always and by necessity secondary to the experiential referent. We continue to read religion through textual evidence as if it is identical to the events they are meant to represent. Hence, we treat the former as though it is the latter, whereas it is at best a window of opportunity to surmise and imagine that which actually transpired. In this way, we are not discoursing on religion in terms absent of the phenomenological (gestaltlich) and historical (geschichtlich), but rather the emphasis is absolutely brought to bear in Heidegger as seinsgeschichtlich (his ‘history of being’ approach) as central to this study. Heidegger’s thinking remains always and consistently unencumbered by fixtures in thought and thus always open to change so much that he is not the same man from beginning to end, being himself in effect the project in the ‘art’ of thinking! In Heideggerian terms, the ‘open clearing’ or ἀ – λήθεια (Sheehan, 2015, p. 144) is not about coming to terms with what has become the accepted norm, but rather that norm as the subject of study in terms of what it might yet yield to further philosophical probing, that is, what is yet to be discovered about that thing by virtue of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Heidegger, 1960) (Heidegger, 2011). This brings us to the question of authenticity. It is indeed my intention in this book to directly address the issue of the authentic and inauthentic, drawing on the Heideggerian paradigm. Can we talk about ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ Sufism? One could suppose that it is better to speak about Sufism as being more Islamic

10  Introduction than ordinary (that is, non-Sufi) Islam, and by extension that a Sufi is, therefore, more Muslim than a (non-Sufi) Muslim. This is fundamentally a position akin to that of the classical Sufi apologists, and it is also most glaringly an essentialist position, and what is more, it assumes the ordinary Muslim to be somehow or in some way deficient. The issue that is raised with the question of authenticity is one that pertains to a distinction of categories to be discerned by virtue of a quality that is ascertained about the status of being truly mystical, and not a question that seeks to divulge the notion of ‘true’ Islam, which is the intention of the argument that a Sufi is more Muslim than a Muslim. The authenticity of what is to be considered Sufism as mystical is closely connected to the history of Sufism. When the Sufi first emerge in public, they come under attack from scholars of the four schools, and it is not until the matter is eventually resolved (by which I mean when Sufism was finally made a convincingly Islamic affair) that the severity of the criticism of it dissipated. That it is convincingly Islamic is not the point under review, but the fact that Sufism is about the phenomenological shift that takes place historically, and that it conveys a transformative and transformational experience of religious experience beyond religious formality. Such a thing can only be hinted at and retrieved with care from instances of recorded history: the sensing of the history of being.

Jesus in Sufism I will be elaborating at length on the relationship of Sufism – and in particular, of specific Sufi figures – to Jesus. Briefly, and for the benefit of the reader, I want to lay out the general way in which Jesus is understood in classical Sufism.2 Jesus is the subject of study and reflection for numerous important figures of Sufi history and from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from the very conservative to the eccentric.3 This indicates that the significance of Jesus was not trivial or accidental, but rather intentional and purposeful. There are of course differences in the way that Jesus was thought of and incorporated into Sufi discourse. What follows is a range of just some of the more famous Sufis. In Attar and Rumi, and generally among the Persian poets, Jesus as a liferenewing source in relation to the Holy Spirit (ruh al-qudus) is underlined.4 There are more nuanced readings of Jesus in Persian Sufi literature, but this will be discussed in Chapter 4. Of particular note, and a well-spring of examination, is the figure  of al-Hallaj, who not only made significant allusions to Jesus in his works and poems, but also importantly appears to have based the execution of his Sufism on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – or at least it so appears from the literature about him. The general tenor of Sufi esoteric outlook is that Jesus is a ‘physician of souls’ and thus ‘his miracles are understood spiritually’ (Robinson, 1991, p. 56). Whilst this literature reproduces, and comments, on details known to Christians about the passion, it never (at least not openly) cedes the Christian view of Jesus’ divinity. Ibn al-Arabi is well known for his mystifying references to Jesus, but his overwhelmingly complex and often incomprehensible linguistic style makes it difficult to ascertain exactly what is meant. Nevertheless, within a

Introduction 11 carefully produced typology of prophethood and sainthood, he places Jesus as the ‘Seal of the Saints’, which tends to signify the continuance of divine communion and flow of mercy beyond the doctrinal limitation of Muhammad as ‘the Seal of the Prophets’ (Q 33:40). Finally, representing the orthodox position, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s (d. 1111) harmony text (of mysticism and legalism), ihya ulum al-din, shows Jesus to have been a wandering healer, miracle worker, and lover of God.5

Persianate studies and Sufism Again, in brief, as my view has already been discussed and will be further elaborated upon throughout the subsequent chapters, I will outline what is at stake in Persianate studies and the study of Sufism. The vast amount of Orientalist scholarship attests to the interest in Persia – as part of the greater fascination with the Orient – as a place of mystery as well as the assumed origins of, at least, the monotheistic traditions. Beyond this, postOrientalist scholarship located the fulcrum of interest on the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution which resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is problematic for a number of reasons, one of which is that the question of Iran as a cultural symbol in what is mostly nationalist politics that shifts between the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic. The related literature, therefore, oscillates between views that on the one hand examine Sufism in relation to the Iranian religious past, and on the other hand take a censorious position.6 The middle ground is the new ground of contention dominated by the works of Lloyd Ridgeon, William Chittick, and the late Leonard Lewisohn (d. 2018) that maintain Sufism as situated firmly within the frame of traditional Islam, whilst acknowledging the historical contribution of the Persianate, albeit, neither as a foundational source nor as the predominate influence on Sufi doctrine and practice. Persianate studies is a prominent field of scholarly investigation, which was pioneered by figures such as Reynold A. Nicholson, Arthur J. Arberry, and of course, Marshal Hodgson. Their efforts helped shift the focus of the study of Islam from what was almost exclusively based on Arab Islam to Iran. Hodgson famously introduced the phrase ‘Persianate society’, arguing its having been central in the historical development of Islam since the medieval period. Persianate studies, as defined – à la Hodgson – by Said Amir Arjomand (the Executive Editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies), is a wide-ranging area of academic exploration including Ottoman, Central Asian, and South Asian regions (2008). The towering figure  of Richard N. Frye declared the critical role of Iran in Islamic history (Frye, 1962), ascertaining the ‘Iranicization of Islam’ as a process in his historical and philological study (Frye, 1979). Last but not least, Henri Corbin’s extensive examination of Sufi and Shi’a history challenged the Arab-centric view of Islam by showing Iran and Iranians to be at the heart of its esoteric and mystical traditions.7 The Persianate world continues to be recognisably a rich soil of investigation for scholars, in particular those interested in Islam. These include the historical role of the New Persian language in facilitating the spread of Islam (Zadeh, 2012),

12  Introduction the impact of Zoroastrian converts on the social and cultural life of Islamic tradition (Choksy, 1997), the role of Iran in the establishment and dissemination of key institutions (Bulliet, 1994). More recently, publications with extensive coverage on the adoption of Persian language in the frontiers of the Persianate world (Green, 2018) and on Persianate studies as an analytical category, rethinking modalities of Persianate culture, including religion, language, social status, and literature as well as reflecting on the future of research (Amanat & Ashraf, 2019).

Chapter outline Chapter 1: ‘Introduction’ to Sufism. This chapter presents ‘Sufism’ as problematic. It begins by treating the historical origins of Sufism as an issue of analytical ambiguity rather than a chronological investigation. The chapter will proceed in dismantling the primal trigger for the academic inquest into Sufism: ‘why is there Sufism at all rather than just Islam?’ It will use this to get at the heart of the problem, which is in the way that Sufism has been understood since Judayd, the point of departure for traditional and historical Sufism. Al-Junayd’s success in quashing the accusations against the ‘Sufi’ as heterodox – and bridging the gap between Sufism and Islam that was increasing through the legacy of al-Hallaj  – had a major setback in that it produced a bipolarity of experience of Sufism: on the one hand, the Sufi thought of themselves as orthodox Sunni Muslims; on the other hand, they had believed themselves as the ‘true’ Sunni. This chapter asserts the problematisation of Sufism starts with the polarisation of its experience following the al-Hallaj event. Chapter  2: The journey through Islam. This chapter  begins the task of phenomenological analysis in conjunction with a history of religions approach for delineating an ontology of Sufism distinct to the way the Sufis have been historically understood. It deals with two case studies cardinal to Sufi experience: the notion of the tariqa and the ‘master’. Tariqa is here read as a comprehensive term, inclusive of the function of the master, both central to Sufi hermeneutics. Here a crucial development built upon the previous chapter where Sufism is both simultaneously the engagement with Islam as it is with its Destruktion; it is simultaneously about keeping hidden implicit meanings as it is itself a process of ‘world disclosure’ (Erschlossenheit). It is this tension that will be explored and brought to the fore in the language of Sufism. The ‘problem’ of Sufism in relation to Islam is directly linked to the interpretation of the experience of the tariqa and master. This experience is explained as the necessary stages to assume the potential for authenticity. Chapter  3: ‘Being Sufi’. This chapter  continues to outline the emerging category that assists in the hypothesis of this book. If Sufism does not come to its own authentic experience, then it cannot be Sufism in the truest sense. It will always be in the state of inauthenticity, operating out of its habituated Islamic paradigm. If, and when it does, however, Sufism must be then treated as what it potentially holds and the possibility that it provides for understanding, interpreting, and becoming through the experience of being Sufi. The chapter  proceeds

Introduction  13 to describe the categories: ‘authentic Sufi Dasein’ and ‘inauthentic Sufi Dasein’ to resolve the bipolarity of experience in Sufism. The former functions in harmony with the ontological condition as described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly as mysticism within the Islamic paradigm. The latter does not function in accordance with the ontological condition described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly within the category of mysticism. This chapter draws on several case studies from the tabaghat genre, specifically that of Attar’s, and other key Sufi works to conduct its analysis. Chapter 4: Jesus as Sign. There is a momentary interval, though not disjuncture from the main thread of argument with the present chapter and the one proceeding. These chapters appear as digressions to the main body of the text, but they are instead divergent in their approach to the Qur’an as inspiration for Sufis. An exegesis of Surah Maryam (specifically, Q 19:16–35), combined with a Sufi reading of Jesus, gives proper scope for an ontological reading of the Gospelic Jesus as an inspired phenomenological, though not historical, source of the Sufi. The point of the chapter is to demonstrate the precedent of the Qur’anic-come-SufiJesus in classic Sufism which preserves a distinct, but [traditionally and historically] obscured, ontological link with the Jesus of early Christianity – the teacher of an internal Kingdom of Heaven (Sheehan, 1986). Chapter 5: Absent Christ, present God. Following the interval commenced in the preceding chapter, the present chapter addresses the messianic element within Islam. Islam is the historical expression of a tradition born in the absence of the Prophet (Muhammad). Yet, Islam is not without Christ, for it is His return that is decreed by tradition at the Apocalypse along with the Mahdi. Islamic identity is retrospective in its historical mode, since it is fortified by what Muhammad did (as per his Sunna), but it is also prospective with Jesus as the Sign of the Day of Resurrection and the slayer of al-dadjal (the antichrist). As such, Islam is a religion that is defined by two ‘absences’: one being retrospective in nature and thus that of the Prophet Muhammad, and another being prospective in nature and thus that of the Messiah (Jesus). Thus, there are two ontologies pertinent to understanding Islam as a historical and phenomenological force: Muhammad and Jesus. The Sufis, it is argued, have found this balance in their Jesus-inspired ontology as definitive of their understanding of him, which is distinctive from a traditional Islamic reading and distanced from seeing Jesus as just a prophet; in this, theirs is phenomenologically closer to a Christianite interpretation. Chapter 6: Break with the past: transgressing restrictions of the category and scholarship on ‘mysticism’. This chapter  picks up on the trail of the book’s hypothesis of Sufism as historically anomalous and analogous in relation to Islam, but that it is always an unexpected ontology of Islamic lived experience. Here, the problem is addressed from a methodological standpoint concerning the category of mysticism  – though not being about the history of scholarship but rather  – keeping in mind its development and use in scholarship throughout the twentieth century (especially, William James, Henri-Louis Bergson, and Max Weber) as well as some aspects of the problem of its application in more recent scholarly thought (Steven T. Katz). The term ‘mysticism’ is a western academic construct,

14  Introduction which sought to capture an aspect of religious experience seen as distinct from the formalities of the institution. The problem in recent debates is that mysticism is anachronistic and that the traditions of the past do not speak about it (at least not in the same way we do). In this chapter I will discuss mysticism in terms of the ineffable, which regardless of scholarly constructionism, is something both real and felt – and thus described, albeit, in the cryptic language (i.e., through analogy, allegory, and more prominently through poetics) – in historical religion. Indeed, mysticism is the particular type of engagement with religious content that is primarily experiential and profoundly personal and individual. Conclusion: retrieving the Sufi. This chapter  brings together the threads in the thesis of this book that the Sufis are the product of a phenomenological (in this sense, first-person experience) process of being Muslim. That is, they have engaged with their tradition and holy text as through a conversation with the past (interpreting their experience of the heroes of the past, e.g.,  Muhammad) and the object as art (the Qur’an) in the way that Heidegger defined ‘art’ as the opening-up of meaning. Sufism is, using Heidegger’s terminology, the ‘clearing’ or ‘event’ of disclosure for potentiality and possibility for being Muslim in the Islamic lifeworld.

The literary terrain and its audience What I hope is that this book will offer a unique perspective on Sufism by way of an ontological study in the style of Heidegger. I am certain that I am not the only one to have considered Sufism in connection to Heidegger, though I can say with some measure of certainty that there are no studies, as far as I am aware, that have been devoted to studying Sufism in such a way as I propose in this book. Indeed, one can encounter any number of articles on the Internet that espouse a sort of Heideggerian-Sufi exploration that present interesting parallelisms, yet ultimately bordering on (or outright being) conflations of Heidegger’s thinking and Sufi metaphysics (Bayman, 2019) (Vadillo, 2018). Interesting as they may be, these have little to do with the task at hand. I am interested in the nature of Sufism, embarking upon a phenomenology (i.e., an unveiling of the veiled) in the hermeneutical endeavour Heidegger himself had taken up. What I intend to do is to use hermeneutics as the available key to ‘open a lock’ – in the way that Heidegger himself had done in the exercise of his search for meaning – to use the language of Henry Corbin (Corbin, n.d.). In fact, I  find it hard not to relate to Corbin’s own efforts in pioneering a study of the mystical and esoteric in Islam through the phenomenological hermeneutics he discovered in Heidegger. And as such, I suppose if this work resembles any other in its approach, at least in vision, if not aspiration, it is that of the great Corbin. An unavoidable concern for any study involving Heidegger is that the master of thinking himself is not always readily in hand. For certain, to arrive at the philosophy of the man as he found himself in his thinking process of hermeneutical inquiry – and not as we see him as we find him in what is published of him – is to traverse through an intellectual terrain of no less impressive list of thinkers, albeit, a short list here offered containing

Introduction 15 such notables as Duns Scotus (1266–1308), Thomas of Erfurt (c. 1300), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). So, by no means do I take the reading of Heidegger – either as a thinker or that of his work – at face value, but instead as an exercise with which he himself was engaged in his own work: Ereignis – ‘the open-clearing’ (Sheehan, 2015) – that which ‘brings about being . . . the opening up of a clearing . . . opened up by its own finitude’ (Sheehan, 2001, p. 5). Though one might find passing reference to either Heidegger or ontology in a small number of recent books on Sufism, as for example, in Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality by Sa‘diyya Shaikh or Beauty in Sufism: The Teachings of Ruzbihan Baqli by Kazuyo Murata, there is nothing currently that has treated the subject as the present book sets out to do. The edited volume Heidegger in the Islamicate World by Kata Moser, Urs Gèosken, and Josh Hayes, is certainly a useful compendium on the reception of Heidegger’s thought in Islamic intellectual traditions, but it is in no way a work concerned with the question of Sufism through a Heideggerian lens. Similarly, studies conducted on Heidegger and classical Islamic philosophy/theology deserve a mention, but these are by no means comparable to the undertaking in this book, which solely focuses on Sufism. Of note is Muhammad Kamal’s From Essence to Being: The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger which offers a parallel analysis of the two underlining similarities in coming to terms with the question of ‘being’. This echoes the earlier by Alparslan Acikgenc titled Being and existence in Sadra and Heidegger: A comparative ontology, which presents a comparative study of ontological concepts as found in Sadra and Heidegger. To be sure, the list of books published in recent years on Sufism is long, and none of them correspond to the focus of the present work. Of note, though not comparable in undertaking, are those books offering an exhaustive display of Sufism in its complexity: Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh’s Sufism East and West: Mystical Islam and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Modern World; Francesco Piraino’s Global Sufism: Boundaries, Narratives and Practices; and Alexandre Papas’ Thus Spake the Dervish: Sufism, Language, and the Religious Margins in Central Asia, 1400–1900. Christopher Melchert’s Before Sufism provides a lucid account of the historical transition of Islamic renunciant piety to Sufism. Two other works that are of significant value in terms of their conceptual study of Sufism are Alexander Knysh’s Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism and the late Arthur F. Buehler’s Recognizing Sufism: Contemplation in the Islamic Tradition. Not all of these works are the target of criticism nor are they the subject of interrogation in what they say about Sufism. Those to which I do refer throughout the book are works that have in some way engaged with the problems I address and mentioned only if directly germane to the working through of the problems raised. As is made clear, a significant portion of the present study is invested in the Persian cultural tradition and the role of Jesus in the development of love-based mysticism in the Persian world, because I believe there is an important connection here to excavate. The intention here is not to dwell ad nauseam on available

16  Introduction literature and scholarly debates regarding them, because as I have indicated, those issues that will come into the orbit of focus concerning the matters treated in this book will be dealt with accordingly. I simply wish to signal to the reader where I sit in the frame of academic discourse on these matters. Also, I am acutely aware of not being adversarial in my notations of others’ works, for I hold to the collegial spirit in which myself and my colleagues might benefit from the parliament of ideas shared and debated, even if we come to disagree. On the topic of the study of Jesus in relation to Sufism, there are a handful of collected writings that survey textual sources and help navigate the literary and historical terrain.8 Of these, a nod to Neal Robinson’s Christ in Islam and Christianity: The Representation of Jesus in the Qur’an and the Classical Muslim Commentaries is a must. To date, it provides a most comprehensive and foundational textual analysis, in the fashion of Biblical studies, of Jesus in Muslim thought. Yet here I am less interested in the classical commentaries than I am with detecting instances of the Jesus experience in Sufi ontology; in this, what I undertake in this book remains distinct from but not at odds with Robinson’s provisional findings (1991, p. 2). Also, I have set the primary scope of research on Sufi figures of Persian origin for reasons that are outlined by Lewisohn (2001) in his examination of Christian symbolism in Persian Sufi literature. Whilst Lewisohn had set the precedent, his focus was limited to mapping instances of esoteric Christianity among Persian-speaking Sufis. Moreover, his piece is a historicisation of Christianity in Persia, contextualising the association between Persian Sufis and Christianity dependent upon the Mongol religious tolerance during their dominance of Persia in the medieval period. As significant a contribution this is, I depart from it in the present undertaking in two ways: first, by way of the focus on figures prior to this period and, second, by way of a revisionist approach to the historicisation of the relationship between Persian Sufis and Christianity – my focus being specifically on Jesus and the Jesus experience, as noted. On the matter of the ‘Persianate’ in Sufi studies, the issue has not been about the influence of Persian culture and language on Islamic history, but rather concerning disputes around the dynamics of that relationship. In the field of Persianate studies, I maintain Marshal Hodgson’s seminal study that afforded the Persian civilisational element (1968, pp. 46–52) its due. Hodgson, who also coined ‘Persianate’, which was concordant with his other neologism, ‘Islamicate’, is the basic ground of research upon which I conduct further reasoning. I should also like to note that whilst I hold tremendous respect for the intellectual stature of such fellows as Hamid Algar and Hamid Dabashi, and can understand the rationale behind their assertions, I am by no means in agreement with their suppositions about the role of Persianness and Iran in Islamic history.9 Lastly, those that know the works of Leonard Lewisohn will note that I depart from his conclusions about Attar and the Persian Sufi tradition as a figure and a phenomenon contained within the Islamicate.10 The main thrust of Lewisohn, as the preeminent scholar of Persianate Sufism, had been to reclaim Persian figures such as Attar, Rumi, and Hafiz, among those most well known to a Western audience, as well as the tradition of love-mysticism to which these figures belonged (2006, 2010, 2014). This is a position that Ridgeon had adopted in his reading of Rumi (2001), and Chittick on

Introduction  17 his reading of Ibn al-Arabi (2013). Essentially, the aim was to regulate the liberty of interpretation of popular renderings based on a selective reading of such figures generally. But it was also about a postcolonial readjustment from the way they were observed in the West: they had been revealed by Orientalist and Western enthusiasts as mystics of the Orient and their association with poetry being the central aspect of their identity. This corrective approach stipulated the logic that because they are evidently Muslim, they must be read through the Islamic. This logic seems reasonable but it is incorrect in one major assumption that all who are born and ‘speak’ in the language of a particular faith are thorough of that religion. On the one hand, it goes without saying that religion and religious belonging are far more complex than that which can be captured by any abstract reading of it. I, on the other hand, start with the premise that as figures located within the Islamicate, the boundary – including the nature and quality – of their Muslimness yet remains open to inquiry depending on the parameters that are set for investigation. There is one other book deserving of a special mention here, because it ties in with the assumption in my own research that Sufism arose from the proximity of early Islam to Eastern Christian asceticism. In that milieu, Muslim pious aspirants were able to see in Eastern Christian pietism an example worthy of imitation that did not – and I want to stress this as particularly important, because I will come back to this point repeatedly throughout the chapters of this book – conflict with the piety of Muhammad. The book and its author are famous. The Roman Catholic priest and scholar of Islamic studies, Miguel Asín Palacios (1871–1944), had already postulated the view of exchange of influences between Christianity and Islam. He explored in several works the influence of later Sufism on medieval European Christian mysticism, inferring Sufi mystical antecedents to such figures as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross as well as that tradition’s influence on Dante (Asín Palacios, 1968, 1981). The book El Islam cristianizado (1931)11 argued that Sufism has its genesis in Eastern Christian monasticism. The implication is of particular note: early Eastern Christian monasticism provided the conditions for the emergence of Sufism (mystical Islam) where mystical ideas and systems were developed and refined by that tradition before its transmission to medieval Europe, influencing the burgeoning mystical tradition there. I mention Palacios’ work because I am in agreement with it in principle. I depart from it on two significant points: first, that Sufism was probably not influenced by monasticism but asceticism; and second, that his close reading of Ibn al-Arabi postulated a Neoplatonic colouring of Sufism. The audience of this book will be determined by what this book sets out to do in a study on Sufism. Whilst other books on Sufism have been chiefly concerned with historical reporting, cultural relativism, or particularities of sociological knowledge, thus demonstrating the assortment of views available on Sufism, this book is multidisciplinary in nature and looks to the ontological. It will certainly be of use for academic audiences across all fields, especially Religious Studies, Philosophy, Historical Studies, Sociology, and Islamic Studies. It will also be suitable as a reference for professionals with a broad interest in Islam as well as for the general lay reader with avid interest for complex knowledge about

18  Introduction religion and its relationship to human society at large, especially given tensions around the role of Islam and Muslims in the Western context. Given Sufism is a global topic of immense interest for both the academic and professional sectors, I am hopeful the book will be well received by its international appeal to audiences worldwide. The subject of Sufism has far-reaching appeal in terms of research interest and teaching in courses exploring the impact of Islamic history on modernity, and as such, I am also hopeful that colleagues with an interest in Sufism as well as those immersed in its study will find this book of value, if not offer invaluable critique.

Notes 1 Naturally, the term ‘religion’ will continue to be utilised in this work in order to demarcate modes, attitudes, and most importantly to demarcate and distinguish the mystical element from that of the religious. Whilst religion is a complex issue in itself, from all perspectives, notwithstanding the linguistic, it has a practical value for which it is employed in this book as a reference to what is ordinarily used in common parlance as a reference to the community of believers and individuals who uphold a historical creed. 2 For a full discussion on Jesus in the view of the Sufis, see Milani (2011); on Jesus as Sufi polemic, see Milani (2018). 3 Tarif Khalidi’s study demonstrates this point with by way of collected sayings attributed to Jesus from the classical to the modern period (2001). 4 For a list of figures of the Persian Sufi tradition, see Javad Nurbakhsh (Nurbakhsh, 1983). 5 See Robinson (1991, p. 59; notes 202–203). 6 This is well demonstrated in Hamid Algar’s rebuke of Henry Corbin’s thesis (Algar, 1980). For an outline of this, see Carl W. Ernst (2018, p. 420ff ). 7 From the extensive list of publications, see for example Corbin (1977). 8 See Leirvik (2010); Ridgeon (2001b); Markwith (2015); Khalidi (Khalidi, 2001). 9 See Algar (1999, 2006); Dabashi (2018). 10 On Lewisohn’s view, see for example, in Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight (2006, p. xx; Lewisohn, 2010). 11 I am using the English translation by Wahhab Baldwin (2017).

Works Cited Ahmed, S., 2016. What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Algar, H., 1980. The Study of Islam: The Work of Henry Corbin. Religious Studies Review, 6(2), pp. 85–91. Algar, H., 1999. Sufism: Principles and Practice. 1st ed. Oneonta, NY: IPI. Algar, H., 2006. Islam in Iran. In Encyclopaedia Iranica. [Online] Available at: www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iran-ix2-islam-in-iran [Accessed 10 September 2020]. Amanat, A. & Ashraf, A., 2019. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere. Leiden: Brill. Arjomand, S. A., 2008. From the Editor: Defining Persianate Studies. Journal of Persianate Studies, 1, pp. 1–4. Asín Palacios, M., 1931. El Islam cristianizado: estudio del sufismo a través de las obras de Abenárabi de Murcia. 1st ed. Madrid: Editorial Plutarco. Asín Palacios, M., 1968. Islam and the Divine Comedy. Translated by Harold Sutherland. London: Frank Cass.

Introduction 19 Asín Palacios, M., 1981. Saint John of the Cross and Islam. Translated by Elmer H. Douglas and Howard W Yoder. New York: Vantage. Baldwin, W., 2017. Sufism is Christianized Islam: A Study of Sufism through the Works of Ibn Arabi of Murcia. Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Bauckham, R., 2006. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Bayman, H., 2019. From Modern Philosophy to Sufism: Heidegger. [Online] Available at: http://henrybayman.com/from-modern-philosophy-to-sufism-heidegger/ [Accessed 14 November 2019]. Bulliet, R. W., 1972. The Patricians of Nishapur: A  Study in Medieval Islamic History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bulliet, R. W., 1994. Islam: the View from the Edge. New York: Columbia University Press. Chittick, W. C., 2013. The Religion of Love Revisited. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 54. [Online] Available at: www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/religion-oflove-revisited.html. Choksy, J. K., 1997. Conflict and Coorperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Corbin, H., 1977. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corbin, H., n.d. From Heidegger to Suhravardi: an interview with Philippe Nemo. [Online] Available at: www.amiscorbin.com/en/biography/from-heidegger-to-suhravardi/ [Accessed 17 November 2019]. Dabashi, H., 2018. Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn al-Quzat al-Hamadani. Abingdon: Routledge. Ernst, C. W., 2018. It’s Not Just Academic! Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies. London: SAGE/Yoda Press. Frye, R. N., 1962. The Heritage of Persia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Frye, R. N., 1979. Islamic Iran and Central Asia: 7th-12th Centuries. London: Variorum. Green, N., 2008. Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbin’s Approaches to Mystical Islam. In: M. R. Djalili, A. Monsutti & A. Neubauer, eds. Le Monde turco-iranien en question. Paris: Karthala, pp. 247–259. Green, N., 2018. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Heidegger, M., 1960. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Stuttgart: Reclam. Heidegger, M., 2011. Basic Writings from ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964). Edited by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge. Hodgson, M., 1968. The Venture of Islam (Volume 3). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Khalidi, T., 2001. The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leirvik, O., 2010. Images of Jesus Christ in Islam. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum. Lewisohn, L., 2001. The Esoteric Christianity of Islam: Interiorisation of Christian Imagery in Medieval Persian Sufi Poetry. In: L. Ridgeon, ed. Islamic Interpretations of Christianity. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 127–156. Lewisohn, L., 2006. Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. London: I.B. Taurus. Lewisohn, L., 2010. Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Lewisohn, L., 2014. The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, Inc.

20  Introduction Markwith, Z., 2015. Jesus and Christic Sanctity in Ibn ‘Arabi and Early Islamic Spirituality. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 57, pp. 85–114. Milani, M., 2011. Representations of Jesus in Islamic mysticism: Defining the ‘Sufi Jesus’. Literature and Aesthetics, 21(2), pp. 45–64. Milani, M., 2013. Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. Abingdon: Routledge. Milani, M., 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Nurbakhsh, J., 1983. Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis. London: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications. Ridgeon, L., 2001a. Christianity as Portrayed by Jalal al-Din Rumi. In: L. Ridgeon, ed. Islamic Interpretations of Christianity. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 99–126. Ridgeon, L., 2001b. Islamic Interpretations of Christianity. Abingdon: Routledge. Robinson, N., 1991. Christ in Islam and Christianity: The Representation of Jesus in the Qur’an and the Classical Muslim Commentaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sheehan, T., 1986. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. New York: Random House. Sheehan, T., 2001. Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegamon to Introduction to Metaphysics. In: R. Polt & G. Fried, eds. A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Yale University Press, pp. 3–16. Sheehan, T., 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Vadillo, U. I., 2018. Heidegger for Muslims. [Online] Available at: http://islam4europeans. com/2018/01/13/heidegger-for-muslims-shaykh-umar-vadillo/ [Accessed 14 November 2019]. Vermes, G., 1993. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. London: SCM Press Ltd. Zadeh, T., 2012. The Vernacular Qur’an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 ‘Introduction’ to Sufism

Introduction This chapter  is about Sufism as problematic. That is, it seeks to problematise ‘Sufism’ as a subject of investigation. As such it is not a new history, but rather a fresh approach to Sufism. While the former seeks to revisit the sources of information about Sufism in a new and meaningful way that might shed light on a perceived ‘reality’ of its past, the latter is about the quest for meaning per se that can be retrieved from the past – as it might be found, and examined – without pre-existing prejudice. This might seem an incredulous endeavour, but it is one that is Heidegger-inspired. And in that line of thought that sought to undermine the Western intellectual tradition is the present study of Sufism situated. The value of such an approach is in working through the problematics that underpin the connection between the sources of knowledge and what we might presume to know about the subject. Therefore, rather than undertaking a chronological investigation into the historical origins of Sufism, the chapter begins by treating these origins as an issue of analytical ambiguity, before proceeding to dismantle the primal trigger for the academic inquest into Sufism: ‘why is there Sufism at all rather than just Islam?’ It will use this line of questioning to get at the heart of the problem, which is precisely the way that Sufism has been understood since al-Judayd, the point of departure for traditional and historical Sufism, and then Ibn Taymiyya, the climax of the constructed form of ‘orthodox Sufism’. Junayd’s success in quashing the accusations against the ‘Sufi’ as heterodox – and bridging the gap between Sufism and orthodoxy that was increasing through the legacy of al-Hallaj – had a major setback in that it produced a bipolarity of experience in Sufism. While on the one hand, the Sufi presented themselves as adherents of orthodoxy (the view that became prominent with Ibn Taymiyya), on the other hand, they held Sufism as the essence of Sunnism (the view championed by al-Ghazali). This chapter asserts the problematisation of Sufism starts with the polarisation of its experience following the al-Hallaj event. In returning to this point in time and revisiting the way events took shape – as well as what it might mean to reconsider the past, rather than just looking for a way to reshuffle known data – this chapter is presented as an ‘introduction’ to Sufism; because we start again, from the beginning. DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-2

22  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism

Sufism as problematic Sufism is understood always in relation to Islam. For example, however profound the mathnawi-e ma’nawi of Rumi ([1375] 1997), it is precisely so in relation to the principal texts of Islam, the Qur’an, and Hadith; because, even though the mathnawi offers parables that interpret their content, it is still dealing with these texts in a way that is consistently relating to their core meaning. This is not to say that Sufis do not go beyond the boundary of conventional religion in charting new ideas, experiences, and comprehensions unique to their works, but it is always so in relation to Islam. I am inclined to agree with Lloyd Ridgeon that Sufism is indeed one of the more difficult terms to define in Islamic history, having produced so many manifestations, and which – he rightly says – makes it harder still to find a core that runs through them all (Ridgeon, 2016).1 Furthermore, although I appreciate his caution about the impossibility to render any attempt at a coherent definition meaningful, I am reluctant to do away with the definitional term ‘mysticism’ for Sufism, as Ridgeon seems to suggest, on the grounds that not all who call themselves Sufi have had a ‘mystical’ experience. Ridgeon’s advancement of Sufism as a type of extreme piety of obedience to God for some, or for others a kind of traditional longing for God – represented by the hadith of Gabriel wherein the Prophet is taught the tripartite layering of Islam as submission (islam), faith (iman), and excellence (ihsan) – is misleading. As a first point, the very experience that is preserved in the report attributed to the archangel is itself of a mystical nature since – as the content spells out – no one but Muhammad is aware of the angelic presence who appears as but a man to the others who are there with the Prophet (including the transmitter of the report). Secondly, the entire basis of the report is predicated upon the core mystery of Revelation, that is, it presents an example of the human relationship with God as part of the biblical narrative; and here shown in the contact between Muhammad and Gabriel – which Muhammad as the prophet to the Arabs spends the first 12 years of his mission explaining to his fellow tribesmen – is paramount to the heart of meaning in Islam. What is most odd is that Ridgeon insists that Sufism is better regarded as ‘an orientation towards God that builds upon and excels in practice and faith’ (Ridgeon, 2016, p. 1). If anything, this is a most instructive definition of Islamic praxis as one finds it. If we would take such a definition at face value for Sufism, it would be making Sufism tantamount to Muslim pietism, which is not entirely wrong, though wanting. All Muslims are encouraged to be pious in a genuine invitation to Islamic faith and practice that entails they follow Qur’an and Hadith, not the least, the content of the hadith of Gabriel, since this is a source that offers the very definition of ‘Islam’ – literally – as Gabriel instructs Muhammad. So, it is incumbent upon all Muslims to excel in their religion; what then of Sufis? It is well to point out that the early history of Sufism presented certain facets of belief and practice that were deemed controversial, especially in regards to the nature of Sufi claims of ‘mystical’ experience; that the Sufi wrote prolifically and debated on the precise detail of such topics as a human–divine association and the

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  23 value of mediumship; and that a wide range of ideas about what it meant to be Sufi could be found within its wider tradition, which wildly contradicted one another, such that advocates of Ibn al-Arabi defended a speculative worldview, those of al-Ghazali (d. 1111) emphasised a theological one and those who would take up jihad rejected all such approaches (Ridgeon, 2016). Neither of these instances of variance is definitive objections to Sufism as mystical; instead, they signal a ­tangential  – yet important  – problem of the connection between language and thinking that persists in the study of Sufism. Hence the value of studying the nature of Sufism in this study. Rather than to resolve the challenge of definition by doing away with the mystical because not all so-called Sufis fit the profile, it might instead be an invitation to redress the less-discussed value of Sufism in light of the limitations of language. If there is to be a proper distinction that differentiates and adequately categorises ‘Islam’ and ‘Sufism’, the latter would need to be seen as a little more than just pietism. In the first instance, there has to be a serious rethinking of the figures classified in the Sufi tradition – not all those who are listed in the biographical traditions, or those generally thought-to-be Sufi, are/or should be labelled as such. With regards to the former, the tadhkirat al-awliya of Attar is a good example as any, since like all in the genre it features figures that were retroactively included, and who were clearly not Sufi per se. The useful category of ‘proto-Sufi’ in recent scholarship2 has been the saving grace of much debate concerning who is in and who is out, but nevertheless, it has been more or less a sweeping-under-the-rug of the problem rather than facing it squarely. Regarding the latter, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali is a case in point. Though a titan of Islamic intellectual history, yet should he be considered Sufi? This is a complicated question, not least because he was a complex man. His time with the Sufis during his years of spiritual drought taught him a great deal about their methods (as is evident from his writings) (Calder et al., 2003, pp. 229– 232), yet his utilisation of Sufism (for furthering religious understanding), rather than his involvement as a Sufi, is what is overlooked. One would not be hardpressed in asserting al-Ghazali a Muslim theologian proper, albeit with mystical tendencies having rubbed off on him.3 For certain, there are Sufi(esque) elements in his works, and undoubtedly his exegesis is inspired by what he had learned from them; however, the tenor of his preoccupation is not mysticism. Rather, he appropriates Sufism – in an exercise that is at best a critical ‘cherry picking’ – to suit orthodoxy. Sufism is to him but a means to satisfy his thirst for knowledge; the way of the Sufis is used by him as ammunition for irrefutable proof of Islam. Knowledge was easier for me than practice. So I  began by acquiring their knowledge from their books. What became clear to me through my experience of their path is the truth and the essence of prophecy. (Calder et al., 2003, pp. 229, 232) It would seem that al-Ghazali has been not altogether misread as ‘Sufi’, yet it remains – and credit must be given where it is due – that his encounter with the

24  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism mystics was ultimately about his effort to understand, adopt, and defend the Sufi way to knowledge as one of several. His acclaim, in the words of Reynold A. Nicholson: Through his work and example the Sufistic interpretation of Islam has in no small measure been harmonised with the rival claims of reason and tradition, but just because of this he is less valuable than mystics of a purer type to the student who wishes to know what Sufism essentially is. (Nicholson, [1914] 1989, p. 24) Now, I want to return to Attar’s tadhkirah to make my point in this section clear. I mentioned Attar as an example, because his listing should not be exempt from criticism, but I did not just mention him to show he too is guilty of tampering with the category. In fact, that all the biographers of the Sufis are culpable is not something to be held against them, since they were neither historians nor biographers in the modern sense. They were indeed polemicists who not only construed meaning but also composed it. Whilst the biographers of the tabaqat genre are actually attempting to produce a pseudo-history, the tadhkirah of Attar is a carefully crafted corpus of legend that speaks of the human and superhuman feats of the saints, supplemented by biographical detail (Attar, [1966] 1983, pp. 14–15). In this sense, it is at least a little more honest in its intent. The tadhkirah is not entitled ‘Sufis’ or ‘Mystics’ (aside from Arberry’s rendition which includes ‘mystic’ in the English title), but ‘Saints’ (awliya). Attar offers a list of saints, not Sufis or mystics. They are figures of value for a general readership that may not necessarily have knowledge of Sufism, but would recognise the legacy of most – and by chance become also acquainted with the Sufi (mystics) therein listed. An obvious example of this ploy is in the inclusion of Ahmad ibn al-Hanbal, who is certainly not Sufi nor a mystic in any sense of these terms. Arberry’s English title is Muslim Saints and Mystics, which at least indicates that Attar’s list distinguishes the two. For Arberry, that the original list ends with the martyr – and Sufi – al-Hallaj (d. 922), reveals to us that it was, in fact, Attar’s intention to communicate something about the fate of the Sufis and their mysticism. Al-Hallaj’s public execution is a deliberate choice for a climactic finale that suggests a crisis event having befallen the Sufis. Even if Shebli’s inclusion is accepted, it stands for the closing of an era of Sufism, since he marks the end of the formative period (Attar, [1966] 1983, pp. 16–17). Recurrence and comparativism Might Sufism be more than just Islamic pietism? It must. Current scholarship, as excellent as it is, has, having become too engrossed in the finer technicalities of the issue, come to overlook some very simple possibilities. The matter is not about ‘Sufism’ being inherently Islamic or a borrowing from elsewhere, both of which are defensible to varying degrees and depending on the context of examination. Rather, it is about the course of Islamic history repeating the pattern of religious

‘Introduction’ to Sufism 25 history in its sister traditions. Comparative assessments, though useful, have, in this instance, detracted from a simple historical observation: a mystical sensibility has evolved within Islam – its textual tradition having already contained the seeds of meaning  – through similar processes of religious cognition as it had within Judaism and Christianity previously. That Sufism is more than Islamic pietism is a given. It is of little help to compare Sufis and Salafis, for example, in order to show Sufism as distinctive (and thereby make a case for it as mysticism). This is only to measure a Salafi interpretation of Islam against a Sufi one. Salafism being a modern revivalist movement sees itself in stark contrast to the mystical tenor of the Sufi. Rather, it is far more useful to examine Sufism as a historical progression that emerged out of certain kinds of Islamic praxis, in particular, such as renunciation. Today, it is perhaps easier to distinguish Sufi from non-Sufi as the gulf between interpretations and their practices has greatly increased through the diversification of the tradition itself. For example, a muwahhid is identified by the belief that the Qur’an and Hadith contain self-evident truths such as tawhid (which is oneness of God). It is no accident that such a strict reading of the text, which yields God’s absolute incomparability, is blatantly discernible from a less rigid view that appreciates the finer association of transcendency and proximity or incomparability and similarity, which is already evident in the confessions of Muslim pietists well before the advent of Sufism (cf. Ridgeon, 2016; Melchert, 2015). The emergence of the mystical within the Islamic world only sees more complex and refined ideas emerge that echoed the legacy of Christian contemplatives, centuries prior, in reminiscent languages such as the Persian maxim hameh oost (all is He) and the Arabic saying wahdat al-wujud (unity of being). There is naturally too much difference of opinion among early Muslims to make a neat picture out of Islam without risking oversimplification, though it is helpful to note, as Melchert suggests, that the source of the friction between mystic and non-mystic – as it had been even in the Christian setting – stemmed from strands that were simply anti-mystical (Melchert, 2015, pp. 14–15; Louth, 1981, p. 100). There are too many similarities that can be garnered from a comparative analysis that might support the case of a Muslim borrowing from Christian asceticism, and this may be demonstrated within reason, but the fundamental fact of the matter – and one that is overlooked – is that this similarity is, in the first instance, a coincidence of religious experience. The ‘puzzle’ as it were that ‘early Islamic renunciation looked so similar to contemporary Christian asceticism, whereas it took centuries for Islamic mysticism to appear, even though there was already a well-developed Christian mystical tradition . . . for it to have taken up as well’ is not that early Muslims ‘took over what made sense to them, not everything they encountered’, but rather that it is a case of Islamic history repeating a pattern transparent in the Christian (Melchert, 2015, p. 14). Observed in this way, Sufism remains no longer an enigma of historical inquiry, but rather a logical development in Islam. The scholar can avoid the awkwardness of comparativism in favour of coincidental similarity. The fact that both Christianity and Islam are endowed with mysticism does not necessitate a correlation along a determined linear continuity, forcing the view that the latter could not but have borrowed from the former that

26  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism which is anthropologically and philologically concomitant, but rather can suggest that both traditions contain elements of religious practice – quite similar, since they are germane to the same biblical textual narrative – that would rightly arise (given the right conditions) in due course (and certainly without the need to be prompted necessarily by external inspiration). It would not suffice to go so far as to deny that borrowings as a result of cultural exchange was happening, or that indeed this exchange was inspirational to parties on opposing sides, but we would do well to keep in mind that similar ideas and strands did emerge even in instances of complete isolation.4 Renunciant piety and the evolution of mysticism in early Islam Islam follows the same eschatological pattern that informs and animates both Judaism and Christianity, that is, Islam is an eschatological religion, which from its earliest history demonstrates a preoccupation with seeking divine forgiveness and the hope of entry into paradise. This principle concern gave rise to the ascetical exercises that now furnish Islamic ritual practice.5 At the heart of it is an asceticism of renunciation which reinforces certain morals that correspond with the prescribed behaviour in relation to the initial anxiety about absolution and the reward of eternal life after death. Though most Muslims have lived integrated social lives for centuries, particularly from the eighth century onwards, they have lived as ascetics of civic society who adhere to the strict rules of their religion’s foundational principles. Because Islam is an eschatological religion at its core, being Muslim is inherently to be a renunciant through their submission (taslim) to the divine godhead. And because Muhammad established a new religious community over the old Arab pagan one, and since he did not reject the world but rather transformed it through Islamisation, Muslims are not monastics in that they are expected to leave mainstream society to fulfil their religious obligations, but they are ‘civic monks’ – pious renunciants who live, work, wage war, marry and have children for the sake of God.6 Motivated by this pattern of religious behaviour, certain key virtues of early Islamic piety come to view: trust in God (tawwakul); constant prayer and recital of revelatory verses for fear of the Last Judgement and to keep such images clear in mind; abstinence from excess so as not to be distracted from God and the promise of the hereafter; and spiritual warfare as an inflection of the greater battle waged against the (‘inner infidel’) self. In line with such ascetical practices, and as an extension from them, the practice of helping the poor and needy, and wariness of materialism secured against greed, envy, and lust. It would not be an overstatement to say that the early Companions were ascetics who practiced renunciant piety – so much so that Muhammad receives complaint from a Companion’s wife about his neglect of her in several related reports7 – and, in fact, they did so in imitation of their prophet, zealously following his practice. Moreover, what could be easily added to this list as having been part of the practice of early Muslim renunciation, though less common, is: the wearing of wool; celibacy or forbearance from normal conjugal relations had they married; avoidance of

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  27 Modality 3: Religious morals Corresponding outcome: Reinforced behaviour that correlate 1 and 2

Modality 2: Asceticism of renunciation Corresponding outcome: Resulting ritual practice for achieving the goal

Modality 1: Eschatological concern Corresponding outcome: The goal of an afterlife Figure 1.1 Basic pattern of religious development in early Islam

seeking monetary reward, even if licit gain (kasb); spiritual mourning from constant sadness over one’s past sins because of the fear of God’s judgement; and lastly miracles attributed to saintly figures’ prayer and petition to God (Melchert, 2015, pp.  4–10). What is of significance, however, is that renunciation would evolve due to certain developments in the Muslim world by the end of the eighth century as a result of mass conversion to Islam, which saw increasing distrust for its public display (Melchert, 2015, p. 12). The adjustment called for a readjustment of outward show of austerities (such as that of wearing wool) to a practice of inward piety and renunciation. None of these are particularly Sufic, since they clearly predate the advent of Sufism, but are properly ascetic. It can be comfortably maintained that Islam is an ascetical religion and that it is a pietistic tradition of strict austerities before it becomes the religion of the masses, after which the renunciant piety practices of an elite community are appropriated in various ways into the mainstream and throughout the various communal sectors of Islamic worship. Christopher Melchert’s thesis asserts that Sufism arises out of the crisis of the eighth century as a result of the growing attitude of disparagement for outward austerity, but that it is the second of a two-solutioned response to the problem of ‘maintaining a rigorous piety and allowing believers to make a living’, the first being the Protestant solution of the ‘ “Hadith Folk” in the Islamic’ that espoused internal piety and the disposal of tedious rituals (Melchert, 2015, p. 13; Melchert, 2002). He asserts the Sufi solution in the Islamic is akin to the ‘monastic solution in the Christian and Buddhist traditions’ (Melchert, 13). In it, asceticism persisted and, in some instances, it did so in a more severe form, where individual practitioners

28  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism would pursue it to its extreme, but all in all, Sufism came to observe a balanced approach that was representative of the pervasive Sunni catholic attitude for tolerance of difference, not least because of the efforts Junayd who ‘repudiated the most extreme forms of austerity in favour of inward dependence on God’ (Melchert, 2015, p. 13). The pattern that we can follow is the fundamental practice of austerity by Muslim ascetics that comes to be gradually replaced by the internalisation of austerity with the rise of popular religion; the ‘monastic’ ideal ensures the persistence of outward austerity until it is tempered by the overarching orthodox civic moderacy. It is at this point, however, that recent scholarship, having faithfully followed the trail of clues from modern scholars (such as Massignon), is suspended in agonising over terminology in addressing problems with the emergence of Sufism. The study of the term can be very useful in ascertaining who has been called ‘Sufi’ and why, however, as both Ridgeon and Melchert have pointed out in following Bushanji’s famous statement: ‘a reality without a name may be difficult to pin down’, not to mention ‘the problem of transition periods, when names will be applied inconsistently to different things’ (Melchert, 2015, p. 14; Ridgeon, 2016, p. 1). Ridgeon is correct in stating that Sufism is difficult to define because ‘it has thrown up so many manifestations that it is often difficult to witness a core that runs through them all’ (Ridgeon, 2016, p. 1). But the problem is neither the inconsistency nor irregularity; the problem is rather the assumption to the contrary. Whilst I would agree with my colleagues here that a careful scholarly approach would be not to overinvest in the name, I would also point out that calling the bluff of categorisation is simultaneously in itself a significant insight into understanding Sufism in the Islamic. We know that the first person to be called ‘Sufi’ was Abu Hashim (d. 767–8?), a Kufan; even though the piety practice of wearing wool preceded his time (Nicholson, 1906, p. 305; Massignon, [1922] 1997, pp. 104–107). We know from studies in classic Sufism that Sufis acceptable to the Sunni mainstream were active in the second half of the ninth century (Melchert, 2005). Yet as it has come to light, none of these things tell us anything penetrating about Sufism, at least not on the surface of things; though it does give us a clue to paying closer attention to the Sufis themselves, that is, to the nature of being Sufi. If we revisit the Bushanji statement: ‘it was a reality without a name, but now a name without a reality’ (Attar, 2003, p. 546), it can be surmised that the Sufis themselves knew well before Western scholarship began pondering its secrets that its mysteries were not in a name, but rather what the name came to mean through the nature of its reality. The statement is a signal towards the substance of the thing itself. What is this ‘reality’ that Bushanji refers to? The answer is found through another clue in the document: he never uses the term ‘Sufism’, but rather tasawwuf. The assumption generally made is that the two are synonymous because they are both analogous with another notoriously difficult term, ‘mysticism’. As Melchert points out ‘the Arabic tasawwuf refers to the wearing of wool, not religious experience’ (Melchert, 2015, p. 14) and it would be fair to see the term Sufism as similarly indicative of the practice of wearing wool. This is important, but the problem is that Melchert classifies tasawwuf (as the wearing of

‘Introduction’ to Sufism 29 wool) and Sufism (as the experience of mysticism) independently, which diverges from the trail of clues Bushanji has left behind. Now, their relationship to the third term ‘mysticism’ is resolved not as a rational substitute for the Arabic, but more precisely because of what the meaning of wearing wool entails. Bushanji is referring to tasawwuf because of what it means to wear the wool, as in being cognate to the Christian maxim to carry your cross. The meaning is therefore not as the common noun, but the gerund verb form of the noun: ‘wool-wearing’. The significant clue here is that the gerund form of its understanding can be read both as either an outward and, more importantly, inward austerity. The key it communicates is that the ‘mystic’ is someone who is ‘wool-wearing’ like in ‘carrying[-his]-cross’, as in a Sufi. Therefore, ‘Sufism’ is determined by what the nature of wool-wearing entails. If one is a ‘Sufi’, one commits to wearing the wool (either literally or figuratively). Furthermore, at this most complex level, the linguistic triangulation is corroborated through the pattern of historical development in Islamic piety: woolwearing is an early form of renunciant piety and functions as the historical basis for which mysticism in the Islamic emerges from the soil of asceticism. Moreover, this same pattern is, as already stated, confirmed as a comparable phenomenon in the history of religion. On the one hand, the problem of a forced comparativism is that it presupposes derivation and/or diffusion by necessity. On the other hand, the shortfall of historicism is that what is visible to historical reconstruction is the linear pattern of asceticism followed by mysticism, giving the impression that the latter is a result and/or consequence of the former. In my estimation, the mystical is in the ascetical; it is part of the monastic, that is, it is the very process of the experience of ascetical practice – within the monastic lifestyle – that gives way to certain kinds of experience and insight, based on self-reflection and God-realisation which then lead to a particular shift in consciousness and ultimately to transformation. The problem is that most of this remains invisible to conventional methods of processing the data of religion, because of the single remaining fact, that is, the anomaly of an otherwise perfectly rational conclusion: that not all those who practice asceticism become mystics. There is perhaps not a satisfactory historical explanation for this, since it is by all means a phenomenon of a highly nuanced personal and subjective nature. What produces the mystic is, in the hypothesising of Bernard McGinn, the sudden and unexplained development of ‘mystical consciousness’ (McGinn, 2008). McGinn’s thesis gives proper attention to the phenomenological experience as well as the ontological framework of understanding how the mystical comes into view. Furthermore, McGinn’s observation – in terms of Christian mysticism, at least – extends from the Synoptic teachings of Jesus about a hidden power of faith (Mk 11:12–20), which is a newly emerging kind of charismatic piety in the tradition of the hasid (loving devoted) common to his time but with roots in older charismatic Judaism of figures such as Honi the Circle-Drawer (Vermes, 1993, p. 5). What remains to be seen is whether in ‘Islamic mysticism’ this theorisation also stands to reason, and I suspect it will. As for the emergence of the term ‘mysticism’, seen as a separate problem in scholarship, it has to be understood in the context of the longstanding historical

30  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism consequence of separation from the Church in the West, which is aided by the scholastic and rationalistic tendency to mentalise for the sake of clarity of definition and, as such, placing greater emphasis on the how of monasticism. The early Fathers of the Church (of the East) always focused on the what of monasticism by offering words of instruction on experience; the how was regarded as a mystery fulfilled in the individual by the Holy Spirit and as a whole life of Grace (Climacus, [1959] 2012, p. 18). The distinction made by late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century scholarship between ‘asceticism’ and ‘mysticism’ as two distinct forms of piety – the former, piety that stresses obedience to a transcendent deity; the latter, piety that stresses communion with an immanent deity echoes the Western scholastic legacy of rationalisation, definition, and categorisation.8 Whilst ‘mysticism’ (as distinctly defined) is indeed a term of the Protestant intellectual imagination, it is, nevertheless, a testament to what is both discernible and distinguishable as mystical in the religious. Yet careful scholarship should avoid blindly following the centuries-old pattern of rational dualism. Not only is it not a question of why Islamic renunciation resembled its contemporary Christian asceticism and not Christian mysticism  – as though the two are different things – but that it did look like Christian asceticism because of the very fact that mysticism is part of the process of asceticism; what else would it look like? For obvious reasons, the two traditions (Christianity and Islam) are on different timelines, roughly 600 years apart, and when mystical piety did come to prominence as a historical manifestation of a phenomenological experience of the Islamic, especially through the literary record, it only becomes visible (and by extension tangible) as a thing to itself, though never distinct from what it is as the ascetical. The nature of all ascetical writings of the Fathers since early on showed monasticism as a dedication of individual life to God and was based on their instruction from experience as one ‘rule’ for all monastics: ‘fasting, vigilance, and prayer, with vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience’ (Climacus, [1959] 2012, p. 18). For certain ‘mysticism’ has a clear history in Christian usage in relation to the true apprehension of God through Jesus Christ, yet an Islamic parallel of a similar mystical piety, which embraced hypostasis, is visibly present in the mid-ninth century well before Junayd’s domestication of the movement by bringing it into line with Sunni orthodoxy.9 Whilst the term ‘Sufism’ may arguably be ultimately insignificant in itself, within it is, nevertheless, contained the seed(s) of mysticism, which emerged in time as it did in Judaism before Islam. Since Christianity emerged out of charismatic pietism within Judaic tradition as a mystical tradition in its own right, it would be pointless to say that Christianity went through a process of developing mysticism out of asceticism; Christianity is an institutionalised mystery religion that formed out of Jewish asceticism. The Sufi did not have to borrow from Christian asceticism or mysticism, as Melchert ponders, to achieve their own, but rather it would have been sufficient – whilst being aware of the New Testament material, and likely inspired by it (and other known stories about Jesus) – to be left alone to develop a mystical piety along the same lines in their own good time. More aptly, mysticism is an experiential revolution  – through its shift of consciousness in religious understanding that relates to the apprehension of God through

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  31 unexplainable means (rather than rational)  – that transforms the individual or community, sometimes beyond its former identity (as in the case of Christianity from Judaism). Similarly, Sufism as ‘mysticism’ is much akin to a ‘Christianity’ for Islam as ‘Judaism’. Like the ‘mystical’ claims of the early Jesus movement for the Jewish pietism of their time, the mystical claims of the Sufi provoked hostility from the Muslim ascetics of their era, since it was seen as something both new and distinctive (though not different or separate) within the Islamic. It would have been highly unusual were there not to have been a measure of resistance to the mystical developments in the Islamic in the ninth century or, at the very least, an outright hostility towards their more provocative claims. These were the claims of a budding movement of mystical piety with fresh and new ideas, though not different or, worse, theologically-legally adverse. The evolution of the humble ascetic with mystical capacity into the complex mystic with ascetical tendencies is precisely an expression of developments in Islamic pietism in the first three centuries of its life. As mysticism continued to further develop both philosophically and poetically, as well as later still, organisationally, those who were not privy to their ways or insights remained outside the circle of initiates and further isolated from its traditions. The hostility, therefore, began a defence of the renunciant piety that defined the pristine features of the Companions’ faith practice in imitation of their Prophet. That they had captured the essence of the Prophet’s meaning, comprehensively, is doubtful; though it is certain that their practice was a reflection of more of their own understanding of the Prophet than that of the Prophet’s understanding. The same must be said about the Sufi who came to see themselves as the ‘real’ Sunni and began to define themselves as inheritors of the Prophet’s true teaching of Islam. The question of the religion of Muhammad, and its relation to Islamic developments after his death, will be addressed later. For now, we turn our attention to the formulation of Sufism in the ninth century with special regard given to Junayd. Junayd and the tradition One can almost speak about mystical piety without using the term ‘Sufism’, but what the term represents is the point at which Muslim piety had arrived in evolving into a tradition of its own. We know without doubt there was a tradition as such to speak of by the time of al-Ghazali, in the twelfth century, because he writes about them and their distinct methods in detail, first hand, as an outsider. I would say his would be a kind of historical account in the manner of a more modern biographical study of the Sufi, rather than a tribute to them as in the case of the encyclopaedic hagiographies (tabaqat genre) of al-Sulami (d. 1021), Abu Nu’aym (d. 1038), al-Qushayri (d. 1072), and al-Hujwiri (d. 1071) in that they were Sufi, writing from within the tradition (Calder et al., 2003, pp. 229–252). The tradition, orchestrated under the guidance of al-Junayd and set into motion through his formulation of mystical metaphysics, had taken root by the time of the Sufi apologists al-Makki (d. 966) and al-Sarraj (d. 988) who wrote the key Sufi manuals: Qut al-Qulub and Kitab al-Luma. Their works were a comprehensive treatment of Sufi doctrine, practice, and customs that defined technical terms and

32  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism referenced the greats of that tradition. Just over half a century separates the earliest apologist from the earliest tabaqat author, and almost exactly the same amount of time separating al-Makki from al-Junayd, the founder of the tradition, before him, which demonstrates the forward momentum of the tradition in the making as a result of al-Junayd. It may not come as a surprise to say that there is not ‘Sufism’ before al-Junayd – as a comprehensively understood term (albeit, it was a term associated earlier with disreputable and marginal figures)10  – but that there were ‘Sufis’, that is, there were certain ascetics who were wool-wearing and displayed either a tendency towards mysticism or who were already unmistakably mystical. For example, the disinterested love of the Basran female ascetic, Rabia al-Adawiyya (d. 801–802) shows a strong intuitive tendency for the mystical, though not a mysticism, since hers was more a radical eradication of whatever distracts one from God. This was a common practice among the ascetics of Iraq emphasised by mutuality, which recognised divine transcendence (Melchert, 2015, p.  15). Yet as in the case of Dhu al-Nun (d. 859) and Bayazid al-Bistami (d. 874), we see the kind of devotional practice that obliterates any notion of duality between the absolute and the conditional. The former remarks that while he walks on the earth, his spirit dwells in the kingdom; and the latter uttering that he and He is one (Abu Nu’aym, Hilyah, vol 9, p. 258; cited in Melchert, 2015, p. 15). The mystics of the generations before and after al-Junayd had to be appropriated by the biographers so as to conform to the tradition, but this was significantly challenged by the calling of al-Hallaj (m. 922) and those who carried on his legacy as a reminder that mysticism was more than tradition. On one occasion Ibn Ata sent him a message. ‘Master, ask pardon for the words you have spoken, that you may be set free’. ‘Tell him who said this to ask pardon’, Hallaj replied. Ibn Ata wept when he heard this answer. ‘We are not even a fraction of Hallaj’, he said. (Attar, [1966] 1983, p. 267) So, there are those who did and those who did not conform to the tradition despite the subsequent suspicion of mystical piety. And my interest is with those who did not, for they must be distinguished as mystics par excellence in the face of the conformist tradition of Islamic mysticism; the tradition that al-Junayd set in motion through the influence of his metaphysics. As such, it becomes more the technical and professional preoccupation of the advocates of tradition for definition of terms and states (including and) pertaining to the ‘Sufi’ than with meaning and, therefore, with Sufism as such. As for the non-conformists of the later era such as Attar of Nishapur and Rumi, for example, they were little concerned with technicalities but wrote didactic works from experience (and through the use of parable and hyperbole) for the sake of sharing the ontological value of their own existential journey for the benefit of a small circle of friends or disciples. More importantly, theirs was a mysticism in the proper sense in that it represented the

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  33 countermovement to the tradition in the spirit of al-Hallaj. The challenge for such mystics was that they had been since before al-Junayd faced by antagonism both from the outside and among them: the anti-mystic ascetics and the emerging Sufi of al-Junayd. That this distinction was both real and felt is demonstrated in the Inquisition (mihna) of 877–878. This famous Inquisition was instigated by a popular preacher and ascetic from Basra, Ghulam Khalil (d. 888), towards the end of his life (perhaps as a means to revive a failed career as a hadith scholar).11 He had used his influence at court to acquire the indictment of seventy or more mystics on the charge of heresy based on their use of the passionate term ishq for love, rather than the Qur’anic terminology hubb (Q 5:54); the underpinning issue being that these mystics ‘were saying they no longer feared God, but, rather, loved him’ (Melchert, 2015, p.  16). In the end, the process turned out to be more of a harassment of the mystics’ use of language for expressing their experience of the divine, since they were acquitted. But some, such as Nuri (d. 907), upon learning of the persecution fled Baghdad, while others, notably al-Junayd, avoided arrest by denouncing the mystics and presenting himself as a student of law (Melchert, 2015, p. 16). As a consequence of the Inquisition, al-Junayd was prompted to redress the problem of language for expressing mystical experience by developing one that would no longer cause offense or draw the suspicion of the old-fashioned ascetics (Melchert, 16). In his formulation, the quintessence of mystical experience was contained by his resolution of the tradition of sobriety: union was bookended by separation, annihilation by subsistence, and drunkenness/ecstasy by soberness. His triadic methodology, as Melchert points out, such as separation–unity–separation (farq–jam’–farq) and subsistence–annihilation–subsistence (baqa–fana–baqa) did away with apparent dichotomies, for example, farq–jam and fana–baqa, which in turn permitted the discourse on drunkenness, union, and annihilation in the wake of the third experience of having come out of the absorption, now (allegedly) transformed by the experience. All in all, al-Junayd tried to direct mysticism to an inward state so as to produce a mystical style of piety that would be compatible with life in the world as a Muslim.12 But this rationalisation proved to be complicit in the process of subjugating the mystics. Not only did the tension between ascetics and mystics not subside, given that two mystics of great renown, al-Hallaj and Ibn Ata, were put to death in the years following the trials, what is more, it further exacerbated the already growing rift between the mystically inclined pietists who were divided by their habit of either the demonstrative or sober approach. This is particularly emphasised in the positioning of al-Junayd in opposition to certain figures, especially al-Nuri and al-Hallaj in the literature. For instance, Nuri wishes to see if he can perform a miracle by God, and so he stands between two boats and says: ‘By your mightiness, if a three-pound fish does not come out to me, let me drown myself’. Then there came out to [him] a fish weighing three pounds. When al-Junayd heard of this, he said, ‘It should have been a snake come out to him in order to bite him’. (Al-Sarraj, 1914, p. 327)

34  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism Regarding his (albeit, complex) interaction with al-Hallaj, when the fate of the man is being decided by the people and the authorities, al-Junayd is consulted regarding the mystic: ‘These words which al-Hallaj speaks have an esoteric meaning’, they told al-Junayd. ‘Let him be killed’, he answered. ‘This is not the time for esoteric meanings’. (Attar, [1966] 1983, p. 267) This very concern about esoteric meanings is shown to be of particular importance, and to hold special value in defining the mystical. It is aptly choreographed in a story about al-Nuri being reprimanded by the caliph for causing affront to the muezzin during the call to prayer by saying labbayk at the barking of a dog, that is, ‘here I am’ (a response reserved for God upon the intention to make pilgrimage to Him).13 The lesson al-Nuri imparts is that the muezzin performed his task inattentively, whilst the animal had been praising to the best of its ability despite not knowing how to pray and not having the expectation of reward. At this point, it would do to recall the source of hostility from the anti-mystical ascetics, which came to a head in the event of the Inquisition. The emerging mystical piety  – which now showed itself as distinct from the old renunciant piety – faced hostility on several grounds. These are listed in no particular order, but maybe seen as being linked in important ways: the passionate love of God (to the extent that it would overshadow the notion of taqwa or fear of God); ecstatic behaviour; union; hierarchy, that is, of master and disciple; communion with God; and the practice of sama’ (rapture through musical audition). There is also a second aspect of the hostility, which stemmed from an in-house tension regarding the response to the persecution of mystics. It was basically between those who would appease the ascetics and those who would remain mystic without reservation. As such, a divergence took place in the theoretical elaboration of the mystical path between the schools of drunkenness and sobriety. The significance of our paying close attention to al-Junayd is that he fulfils the third and final aspect of the mystics’ story. The so-called ‘triumph of Sufism’ is recognisably and justifiably owed to reconciliation (between ascetic and mystic) and, more importantly, consolidation (through the appropriation of the contesting pietism of Khurasan to Baghdad) in the emergent tradition of Sufism. Nevertheless, the fervour and spirit of mysticism continued, though now absorbed into the Sufi tradition. It would be prudent to consider that the previously underlined hostility had always pivoted on a balance of continuity and discontinuity, such as defined by the practice of musical audition, but also, and more decisively, on the emphasis of such practices and attitudes among the mystics (Melchert, 2015, p.  17). For example, the expectation of communion with God might have been intuited, but never vocalised; or charismatic figures (awliya ‘friends of God’) of the early period having been perceived as intercessors, but never ranked on par with the prophets. And so in light of this, terminology would be utterly useless without a

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  35 clear picture of events. Early Islamic piety of the seventh and eighths centuries is characterised by its renunciant piety, but which comes under suspicion in the eighth century with the push for the normalisation of faith in the form of the pious civil life. A more extreme reaction to this emerges with the wool-wearing movement that is gradually recognised as the emerging mystical piety, rejecting the worldly and commencing a revolution of the heart, which was openly proclaimed and publicly demonstrated, by placing emphasis on internal piety. This in turn draws hostility from anti-mystical figures who set out to suppress the movement, albeit, unsuccessfully, through the mihna. A  major reform of mysticism takes place under the directorship of al-Junayd who adapts the mystical piety – under threat of persecution in Baghdad – to mainstream popular Sunni piety and comes to be known as the tradition of tasawwuf. It is this tradition of organised mysticism that spreads from Baghdad in the tenth century absorbing rival pious movements by the middle of the eleventh century. A further problem of terminology is to remember that ‘Sufism’, as mentioned earlier, is not even a term used by mystics, but a modern Western scholastic term capturing the quality and state of the ‘Sufi’. The term in predominant use is tasawwuf. Hence, the mysticism of the pre-sobriety pietism is not Sufism, but rather a mysticism without a name, which later is given the technical term, tariqah (the way and/or method of such and such teacher), once absorbed by that tradition. The genius of al-Junayd is that he was able to manipulate the course of history by a carefully elaborated metaphysical doctrine that produced orthodox mysticism in Islam. Furthermore, his intellectual prowess extended to the point that whereas the mystics had internalised religion in their emphasis on mysticism, he proceeded to internalise mysticism to reassert the prominence of religion. The problematisation of Sufism in this section is about the challenge of rereading the history of Sufism, this time, not through the metaphysics of al-Junayd. What al-Junayd gives rise to is ‘Sufism’, which is precisely a synthesis of the prominent ascetic and newly emerging mystic tendencies discussed previously. Understandably, this has led Alexander Knysh to assert Sufism as ascetic-mystical in his recent study (2017, pp. 10, 12). And so the problem of historicisation persists in the assumption about Sufism as two distinct but inseparable components, which they are not; at least, not until after al-Junayd. Rather, the argument I make is that mysticism is an epiphenomenon to asceticism. Consequentially, there is an important step in the reconstruction of events that has been missed: the one between the mystics and the triumphant Sufi tradition of al-Junayd. This detail is never considered by Knysh, admittedly, since his work is a reimagining of Sufi history as part of a comprehensive study that accumulates multiple narratives. The task at hand is, however, a revisionist exercise that pays close attention to the metamorphosis of the phenomenon in question, and is more aligned – albeit, with some qualifications – with the thesis Melchert has presented. Hence at this juncture, there are some points of debate that need to be addressed. Following the argument hitherto expounded, the basis of mysticism is asceticism. Put another way, mystical consciousness emerges from the ascetical lifestyle of the pious renunciants. The formulation of mystical thought in later mysticism is

36  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism something that is forged out of literal examples of the early pious ascetic frontier warriors, such as, Ibrahim al-Adham and Hasan al-Basri – who were not mystics, let alone Sufi – yet we dare not deprive them of access to mystical experience as such. The anecdotal accounts of the lives of the ascetic-warriors of faith produced a culture of chivalry and comradery, but more importantly, a deeply felt ‘mystical’ awareness due to the fierce nature of their lifestyle which was made up of both the intensity of experience and the temporary condition of life around them. Theirs being an exemplary display of living and dying with religious zeal became legendary, but it also preserved important foundational concepts and insights into meaning. Once the time of the zealous warriors of faith had passed, the spirit of their attitude remained in the asceticism of the new mystical piety, which was to generally put down the sword and take up the wearing of wool with similar ardour. The fable of Attar’s death at the hand of his Mongol captive is exemplary (Milani, 2018, p. 42). The influence of such commitment to faith in Christian tradition as exemplified by Jesus’ crucifixion and, subsequently, that of the martyrs in the Church’s early history, serve to enrich the spiritual life of non-ascetical members. Indeed, far removed from the horror of being nailed to the cross or forced into the arena for sport, the gruesomeness of the experience has been translated – in both Christian and Islamic mysticism – directly from the asceticism of those who faced unexpected terrors. So, in the distant piety of later practitioners, examples of the past were indeed incorporated into mystical text to convey beliefs and not experiences, since the emphasis was on language rather than experience (Sells, 1994, p. 9). Furthermore, the later Sufi tradition engages with the ‘meaning event’ primarily as an intellectual exercise in mysticism – as opposed to strict ascetical practice – whereby the mystical texts were in fact viewed from the perspective of performative reading (Nelstrop, 2009, p. 37). In making this observation in relation to Sell’s thesis, I would say that Ridgeon is on the mark about the actual effect that such mystical texts had on their readers (Ridgeon, 2015, p. 149), but can we say for certain that even a primarily intellectual encounter with texts would not stir an experiential awakening in readers? Asceticism, therefore, plays an important role in Sufi history, and not just as a hyphenated dual component to mysticism. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to deny asceticism as the basis of early Muslim experience prior to Islam’s gentrification with the rise of Muslim civilisation. Islam is fundamentally an ascetical religion that has a later-added component of civility. This leads to the oft-raised concern regarding moderation – in religious practice – in Islam. As it is usually pointed out, as does Knysh (2017, p. 15ff ), Qur’an and Tradition provide contradictory evidence on the matter, yet the latter prevails in settling the issue in favour of moderation over ascetic zeal. However, the point that remains is that the Qur’an is an older document source, though arguably a redaction in its own right (Reynolds, 2010), and its content is in large part ascetical in nature. Tradition, however, is socially evolved and culturally tempered to include aspects of (and accommodate) the civil component of living as a Muslim in the everyday (Brown, 2018). So, historical layering needs to be taken into account when considering the apparent disparity between Qur’an and Tradition regarding the position on

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  37 asceticism. On the academic matter of separating the ascetic and mystical, as Knysh quite rightly points to Weber’s thesis (Knysh, 2017, p. 10), it should also be reminded that a close reading of Weber’s proposition on charisma reveals a sociological analysis of behavioural types that seeks to categorise for the purposes of distinguishing cause and effect in the social context (Turner, 2013, pp. 28–29, 34). Thus, it makes good sense as an academic practice to make the distinction rather than not and, furthermore, to avoid pinning a methodological flaw on the pioneering efforts of the sociologist. In appealing to McGinn’s study of mysticism as validation for the ‘ascetic-mystical’, Knysh argues that mystical theory always guides ascetic practice in order to produce mystical experience and insight, hence they go hand in hand. Though McGinn quite clearly speaks about the mystical theory (theoria) of a pre-Christian contemplative culture of Hellenic wisdom, and it is this that guides (and transforms) the early Christian communities and the later medieval Christian Church asceticism to produce Christian mysticism (McGinn, 2006). I argue that the same thing happens with Islam giving rise to Sufism, or to be exact, ‘ascetical Islam’ giving rise to ‘mystical Islam’. Even if we call on Ibn Taymiyya and al-Dhahabi as observants of the intermingling ascetic-mystical quality of Sufism, as they saw it in their time, it is already well and truly after the time of al-Junayd and the impact of his legacy on mystical piety is well established (cf. Knysh, 2017, p. 11). The case of Ibn Khaldun, however, is the most pertinent. His thesis of pure asceticism, which is also noted by Knysh (2017, p. 11), is rather an interesting bit of clue to the nature of early Islam as a religion of asceticwarriors. While Knysh sidelines Massignon and Melchert as following Ibn Khaldun on this point (incidentally being the same conclusion reached by Weber about Islam), since neither comply with the proposed hyphenation, it would seem to me that they are nevertheless correct, since they had been focused on the evolutionary process of asceticism in Islamic history and its social development as well as the processes of transformation that gradually lead to the emergence of mysticism, especially given their focus on sources from the period preceding al-Junayd (cf. Knysh, 2017, p. 11). Knysh’s theorisation of Sufism as ascetic-mystical seems to read the conflation into the history of world religion, of which the Sufis are a prime example. I have no cause to object to this rendering in principle; however, I will point out that Knysh’s citation of Bernd Radtke’s conclusion about the link between ascetical practices and mystical reward is hardly conclusive in favour of his conceptualisation (cf. Knysh, 2017, p. 11). Radtke’s thesis states that ascetical practices and self-imposed strictures of early Muslim pietists were driven by mystical aspirations and goals and that the exercise of self-imposed strictures was for spiritual reward (of either salvation or intimacy with God) (Radtke, 2005). In his own words, to subject oneself to such difficulty ‘demands a really good cause’ (Knysh, 2017, p. 12), and I would argue that the self-imposed hardships of religious practice are in principle  – and generally  – done for the reward of otherworldly gain. So, there is not a need to make a special case for it as defining Sufism per se. Of course, it is both fathomable and undeniable that the ascetical and mystical qualities are inseparable phenomenologically speaking, and especially observable in the manner of Sufi praxis in the post-al-Junayd scene. Though

38  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism my focus on the early metamorphosis of mystical piety in Islam cannot ignore the fact that to arrive at mysticism one needs asceticism; though, I do admit that not all ascetical exercises lead to mystical experience necessarily, because the intention to seek mystical attributes is not always present nor a given in piety. Yet this is not to say that accidental mystical experience did not happen, for example, to Ibn Taymiyya (who was a Sufi initiate of the tariqah), even Ibn al-Hanbal (!), though it would not make them mystics because of it. The mystical requires a certain attitudinal and experiential consistency arising out of occasional experiences of the Sacred (the residue of which remains) rather than the accidental experience that might occasionally emerge in religious experience. To be sure, Ridgeon points out the undeniable disparity of experience in the Sufi tradition, especially in his case studies of al-Nasafi and Ibn al-Arabi and others that are contrary in experience but nevertheless Sufi in whole (Ridgeon, 2015). What I propose is that both Knysh and Ridgeon’s observations are indicative of something far more interesting than plain observations of odd occurrences, limitations, and inadequacies, and I dare say that they have intentionally set out the problems for debate to emerge. In my view, it is instead a signification of the necessary and contingent types of mysticism within the Islamic experience. We do not have a complete picture of Mysticism, no matter how carefully we pay attention to textual data as Radtke implores (Radtke, 2005). What we can work with, along with good scholarship of textual translation and analysis, is theory. While the mystics of the proceeding generations (following al-Junayd) take on the name ‘Sufi’, as it was by then normalised in defining Islamic mysticism, it is precisely because of this overlooked relationship that the question of Sufism has lingered unresolved in Western scholarship. It is therefore not altogether unreasonable to assert that al-Junayd is in fact the progenitor of the Sufi tradition in a similar manner that the genius of Paul of Tarsus – a man, to say the least, no less familiar with the depth of mystical insight than al-Junayd – in his giving rise to Christianity. What ties the point of this section together is that Heidegger’s philosophy identified what he saw as a major flaw in the intellectual history of Western philosophical tradition since Plato’s hard distinction between the absolute and conditional. Heidegger maintained that the question of the meaning of Being had been forgotten because of Plato’s theorisation and thereby in his renewed philosophical saga sets out to retrieve the question of meaning viz (his) Aristotle (the latter had already rejected Plato’s theory of Forms). That pre-Socratic wisdom, the religion of Jesus, and the mystical experience in Islam were buried under layers of historiciation at the hand of the traditions of Platonism, Christianity, and Sufism is on the way to recovering what was known at the inception rather than settling for a mere chronological beginning. Following in the footsteps of Heidegger, the quest for the recovery of meaning is here paramount to understanding Sufism, because as his work continually reminds us, we have lost the meaning of things for the sake of the description of them. The so-called Sufism that is read about and talked about and known by all is a generic product of Muslim piety, made famous by its mystique. Like the supermarket honey that is largely made of sugar and tastes almost identical across

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  39 the available range, Sufism was in fact intended to be stock-standard Islamic mysticism advanced by al-Junayd. So, we have Sufism, but by the same token we have a phenomenon that was once something that now is really not anything; and we come full circle with Bushanji. I also want to return to Ridgeon’s conclusion. He is right about his assertion that ‘it is not entirely accurate to define or call Sufism “Islamic mysticism” ’ (Ridgeon, 2016, p. 1), though not for the same reasons I  have pointed out here. His identification of ‘Sufism’ as an advanced Muslim pietism defines what early Islam was: a renunciant piety; the early Muslims were ascetics, probably in the manner of their Prophet. Mysticism is what emerges from the process of asceticism in the Islamic in order to form a recognisably distinct mystical piety that only later becomes known as ‘Sufism’ in the sense of it defining the craft of the Sufi (sufigari) to outsiders. Sufism, as such, has always been perceived, from the time of al-Junayd, as a syncretism of the ascetic and mystical due to a skewed reading of the history of Sufism in the absence of al-Junayd’s accomplishment. Ibn Taymiyya: a paragon of traditionality I think it is important to say something, albeit, briefly, about Ibn Taymiyya’s position on Sufism, since he was an important, if not controversial figure in his own right. Ibn Taymiyya moved with his family to Damascus from his native Harran due to the pending Mongol incursion. There he received the best education and followed in the footsteps of his uncle and paternal grandfather in becoming an outstanding Hanbali scholar and juriconsult. In addition to being an expert on Hanbali doctrine, he cultivated himself in heresiographical works, honing in on the falsafa and Sufiyya. For the most part, he was an outspoken iconoclast and a polarising figure who advocated for strict adherence to Qur’an and Sunna. To this end, he was a sincere purist aiming to purge all that he (and his followers) deemed as deviant Islam (Bori, 2010; Michot, 2012). It is in this way that he comes into conflict not with the rational or mystical approach in Muslim thought outright, but rather with certain aspects of reason and mysticism gone awry. That he was a Sufi, belonging to the Qadiriyya tariqah, is well established (Makdisi; Spevak). The question, however, is what he believed Sufism to be. We know that he was well read on the Sufis, having sound knowledge of the works of Sahl al-Tustari, alJunayd, Abu Talib al-Makki, Abu’l Qasim al-Qushayri, Abd al-adir al-Gilani, and Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardi. Ibn Taymiyya makes particular note of being ‘deluded’ by Ibn al-Arabi’s Futuhat al-Makkiyya, as a young man, before discerning the subtle heretical nature of his ideas (Laoust, 2012). It would seem, then, that Ibn Taymiyya did not condemn Sufism, but those Sufis and their works, which he deemed to hold prohibited content that altered doctrine, ritual, and morals such as monism (wahdat al-wujud), antinomianism (ibaha), and esotericism (ghuluww) (Laoust, 2012). His position on Sufism, therefore, was defined by his own categorical treatment of it consisting of acceptable and unacceptable kinds. That which he considered orthodox Sufism was in perfect harmony with the example of Muhammad, and as such it was this Sufism that he

40  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism espoused in his methodology of ‘the happy mean’ (wasat), merging theological, traditionalist, and Sufi methods of learning that utilised reason (aql), transportation [of sources] (naql), and free will (irada) (Laoust, 2012). The point, however, being that Ibn Taymiyya, though not a simplistic ‘Wahhabi’ (as he is resurrected to be later on), was a complex figure with a deep understanding of the spiritual within Islam. Yet his constitution was such that he was a literalist in line with the Hanbali creed, and as such favoured the kind of Sufism that was institutional, fundamentalist, and conventional. We might ask whether Ibn Taymiyya had any significant influence in shaping the history of Sufism. Perhaps not in his own time, but his efforts in opposing prominent heads of tariqah is indicative of a final wave (in the fourteenth century) of purging Sufism from heretical innovations, and thereby upholding the standard of orthodoxy. We have to remember that al-Junayd’s aim was to preserve the mystical aspect by showing it to be in line with the standard religious outlook. The Tradition (i.e., Sufism) that al-Junayd established demonstrates a harmony of religious mysticism and religious formalism united in his ideal of ‘Sufism’ in the sense that Islam is Sufism. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) championed this view in his defence of orthodox Sufism and admonition of eccentric Sufis. There is a subtle shift in Ibn Taymiyya’s outlook, which I think is indicative earlier on in Hujwiri, that asserts Sufism is Islam. And so what is common to both, however – the former placing emphasis on Sufism and the latter on Islam – is a hybrid that unmistakably posits the significance of Islamic identity. A summary of the problematic In summary, ‘Sufism’ is a technical concept that defines two things: the Sufi craft, if we read it as a translation of the Persian sufigari, as well as a broad-stroke conceptual term used to define the historical tradition of Islamic mysticism, which has today extended well beyond the Islamicate. In the West, the term more specifically represents the definitional compound of the ascetical-mystical elements that describe the advocates of the tradition, yet which is no more than another slightly more complex explanatory verbiage. The term that is key in the mystical literature of medieval Islam, however, is tasawwuf, which has been typically read by scholars of Islamic Studies as no more than the putting on of the woollen garb. However, what has been overlooked is the experiential quality in the act of putting on the woollen garb, that is, the activity of wool-wearing as having contained the quintessentially mystical element of Islamic piety. From a phenomenological perspective, the lesson from Bushanji is again useful in that mysticism is not something that one can just enter into (as in, instantly start being a mystic after signing up at the door), but that it is a process that is entered into which can lead to mystical experience and insight under the right conditions. The literature is only too clear in its instructions for the wayfarer on the path of mystical piety: the combination of the Grace of God and the ascetical exercises are required for its preparation. The particulars of mystical practice that come to bear, at first unsystematically, in various mystics would again be meaningless

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  41 to anyone who has not undergone the process. (For instance, al-Ghazali speaks specifically of ‘taste’ and ‘tasting’ the teachings of the Sufis as someone who had the first-hand experience of their way.) When systematised by organised Sufism, these same practices such as sama’, would nevertheless require the necessary processes for it to be adequately inculcated. More so, it takes right intention as well as such practices as contemplation on the divine, meditation on the meaning of sacred terms and texts, loving God and His creation, and so on.14 As to why mysticism at all, I have elsewhere discussed at length its historical (sociopolitical and cultural) processes during its emergence (Milani, 2018). Yet in terms of the search for meaning, it is about the absolute power of elemental religiosity that is underpinned by the spiritual and moral in the face of the force of a fundamental religiosity that is intermixed with worldly power. The poignancy of this point rests on the basic realisation that no manner of strength can match the one who holds real power through wealth, status, armed forces, or weapons of mass destruction other than the discovery and realisation of the inner sanctuary of human experience in the divine. If we take the ‘barbarian element’ of history as an example, let us revisit a scene from the popular television series, Vikings (season 1, episode 2), when Ragnar’s raiding party sack a monastery, killing everyone in sight, taking the treasures of the church, putting an axe to the wall-mounted Cross and burning the place to the ground along with the Gospel manuscripts. The bluntness of the scene portrays something rather meaningful about the nature of religious experience. The Symbol of God appears to be of a dead God, defenceless and weak. That this is the point of view of the invader is unquestioned. Yet suppose the point of view of the oppressed. To their mind, God is not in the ornaments of gold, silver, or stone and wood, but in the spirit of what they contain. A Cross will not strike down its Viking assailant, and a monk may run for fear of his life, but the strength that may be found by those who have the will to muster it is not in retaliation in kind, but fortification in spirit. Mysticism is fundamentally an act of radical inner rebellion by turning away from that which may or does potentially hold power over you (either through your own desires and attachment to it or through forces beyond your control). That is why the experiential value of tasawwuf – as opposed to just seeing it as being garbed in an item of clothing – is so potentially valuable in defining the meaning of what Sufism – as mysticism – represents. The turning away is absolute and unconditional in the commitment to the kind of piety that communicates the unreserved faith in entering into communion with God at the expense of all else. Sufism, rightly understood, is the urgent, imminent, and immediate eschatological experience in Islam, an experience akin to the fervour of the early Companions and to the Prophet, no doubt, but also, and more intriguingly, but primordially to the ‘religion of Jesus’ (Vermes, 1993, esp. ch. 7) (a point I will take up in later chapters). For the purposes of our preamble in this chapter, in sum, the Sufi tradition of al-Junayd replaces the urgency of the eschatological experience for civility. To close, this chapter has been about the examination and exploration of the historical conceptualisation of mysticism as a phenomenon in Islamic history. Yet this task was pursued to convey something about the meaning of Sufism and its

42  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism nature both as part of the Islamic and apart from it. In the next chapter, I  will continue the same line of inquiry regarding the meaning and nature of Sufism but will utilise the term ‘Sufism’ generally as a hermeneutical rather than a historical construct.

Notes 1 For an extended discussion on the issue, see Ridgeon (2015). I am not going to challenge Ridgeon on every point made in his chapter as he essentially makes a case for ‘limitations’ and ‘problems’ regarding terminology for which I am agreed in principle. What I offer in this chapter is a serious rethinking of the approach inspired by such a line of critical inquiry. Ridgeon makes excellent observances about the unpredictable nature of Sufism as it appears both from a broad glance as well as from contradicting case studies, yet there are gaps in the thread of thinking about the ‘problem’, as it were, that I hope to introduce to the discussion. 2 Also, ‘proto-Sufism’ and (Knysh, 2000, p. 9; 13) and ‘proto-mystic’ (Green, 2012, p. 23). 3 In Islamic intellectual history, al-Ghazali’s unique achievement, that is, his career as an original theologian, is largely ignored compared to the publicity he receives as a claimant to Sufism. Indeed, the complex range of his education both within Sufism and Hellenic philosophy (though he comes to critique the former and reject the latter) is precisely, and ironically, what makes him a superb theologian, the likes of whom is not seen until the rise of figures in the Shi’a world much later, such as Mohsen Fayz Kashani (d. 1680). 4 Richard Bulliet cites an example of this between the histories of Rome and China (Bulliet et al., 2015, pp. 114–115). 5 For example, as contained in the five pillars and the six articles of faith, that is, fasting, prayer, alms, and belief in the Day of Judgement and so on. 6 On the phenomenon of the ‘civic monk’ in Islam, see Milani, 2018, pp. 59–61. 7 Sahih Bukhari 5199. Whilst it is commonly read as Muhammad’s injunction to moderation in practice, it is not that his method was soft or relaxed, lacking in true ascetical fervour or zeal. 8 On a discussion of ‘asceticism’ and ‘mysticism’ in Sociological Theory, see Mueller, 1973. 9 See ‘The Pilgrimage of Bayazid’ in Rumi’s Mathnawi (Calder et al., 2003, pp. 260–261). 10 Those who were ‘often involved with political opposition and certainly not demonstrably mystics’ (Melchert, 2015, p. 22; 13). 11 Upon his death he seems to have been a person of renown (Jarrer, 2015). 12 For example, ‘collection of hadith, the study of jurisprudence, and making a living’ (Melchert, 2015, p. 17). 13 A phrase which follows the Biblical tradition: hin-ne-ni (‘Here I am’): Genesis 22:1; Genesis 22:11; Genesis 27:1; Genesis 31:11; Genesis 46:2; Exodus 3:4. 14 McGinn (2006) spells out the component parts of mystical praxis.

Works Cited Abu Nu’aym, 1932–8. Hilyat al-awliya. 10 vols. Cairo: Matba’at al-Sa’adah and Maktabat al-Khanji. Al-Sarraj, 1914. The Kitab al-Luma fi’l-tasawwuf. Edited by Reynold A Nicholson. Leiden: Brill. Attar, [1966] 1983. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-awliya. Translated by A. J. Arberry. Reprinted. London: Routledge.

‘Introduction’ to Sufism  43 Attar, 2003. Tadhkirat al-awliya. Edited by Javad Salmasizadeh. Tehran: Movasseseh Farhangi Andisheh Darogsar. Bori, C., 2010. Ibn Taymiyya wa-Jama`atuhu: Authority, Conflict and Consensus in Ibn Taymiyya’s Circle. In: Y. Rapoport  & S. Ahmed, eds. Ibn Taymiyya and His Times. Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp. 23–52. Brown, J. A. C., 2018. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oneworld. Bulliet, R. et al., 2015. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. 6th ed. Stamford: Cengage Learning. Calder, N., Mojaddedi, J. & Rippin, A., 2003. Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature. London: Routledge. Climacus, S. J., [1959] 2012. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Archmandrite Lazarus Moore. 4th Revised ed. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Green, N., 2012. Sufism: A Global History. Malen, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Jarrer, M., 2015. Ghulam Khalil. In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. [Online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27469 [Accessed 26 December 2018]. Knysh, A., 2000. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill. Knysh, A., 2017. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laoust, H., 2012. Ibn Taymiyya. In: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. [Online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_ 3388 [Accessed 16 June 2018]. Louth, A., 1981. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Massignon, L., [1922] 1997. Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism. Translated by Benjamin Clark. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. McGinn, B., 2006. The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. New York: The Modern Library. McGinn, B., 2008. Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Approach. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 8(1), pp. 44–63. Melchert, C., 2002. The Piety of the Hadith Folk. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 34, pp. 425–439. Melchert, C., 2005. Basran Origins of Classical Sufism. Der Islam, 82, pp. 221–240. Melchert, C., 2015. Origins and Early Sufism. In: L. Ridgeon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sufism. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–23. Michot, Y., 2012. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Milani, M., 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Mueller, G. H., 1973. Asceticism and Mysticism: A Contribution Towards the Sociology of Faith. In: G. Dux, T. Luckmann & J. Matthes, eds. International Yearbook for the Sociology of Religion 8: Sociological Theories of Religion/Religion and Language. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 68–132. Nelstrop, L., 2009. Christian Mysticism: An Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Approaches. London: Ashgate. Nicholson, R. A., 1906. An Historical Enquiry Concerning the Origin and Development of Sufism. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38, pp. 303–348. Nicholson, R. A., [1914] 1989. The Mystics of Islam. Reprinted. London: Arkana. Radtke, B., 2005. Neue kritische Gänge. Utrecht: Houtsma.

44  ‘Introduction’ to Sufism Reynolds, G. S., 2010. Qur’an and its Biblical Subtext. Abingnon: Routledge. Ridgeon, L., 2015. Mysticism in Medieval Sufism. In: L. Ridgeon, ed. Cambridge Companion to Sufism. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–149. Ridgeon, L., 2016. Sufis and Salafis in the Contemporary Age. London: Bloomsbury. Sells, M., 1994. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Turner, B. S., 2013. The Sociology of Islam. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing. Vermes, G., 1993. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. London: SCM Press Ltd.

2 The journey through Islam A phenomenological analysis of the Sufi tariqa and the experience of the ‘master’

Introduction The task of the previous chapter was to demonstrate the problem of assumptions that prevail in the study of Sufism, particularly in relation to what it is and how it is to be understood. This chapter will engage in a hermeneutical discussion of Sufism to set the scene for the more specific question about what it is that constitutes ‘Sufi’ as a category of inquiry. My concern in this chapter is with a single question: did the Sufi foster a tradition that could produce a religious modality independent of religious Islam? While this question might seem irrelevant, it is germane to the problem of the mystical within organised and institutional religion (King, 2004). In the cases that I will be looking at, the same applies to Sufism within Islam. There is a disparity between agency and structure where the Sufi is situated within the Islamic paradigm but are simultaneously distinct. This constitutes the core of the problem of Sufism as both anomalous and analogous, which plays out in the Sufi experience of being Islamic. The Sufi is the same – as Muslim – but different – as mystic – because Sufis are within the society (of Muslims), but are not part of the mainstream; they participate in the faith (of Islam), but keep themselves remote from simplistic belief. This is true in so far as the Sufi adhere to the hadith (Prophetic ‘report’): ‘I am not of the world and it is not of me. Verily, I have been sent and the Hour is not far behind’,1 which echoes the popular scriptural maxim (paraphrasing John 17: 14–17) to be in the world, but not of it. It is such distinctiveness about Sufis that opens up the question of ontology pertinent to this chapter. Firstly, this chapter points out that the Sufi problematic is associated with the familiarity of language and ideas conventionally used to define Sufism. Secondly, it seeks instead to understand the problematic by isolating key moments of tension that remain at the core of Sufi identity. Of interest is the experience of the tariqa2 and the master, because these both are representatives of a phenomenological enclave within Islam. The approach is to treat Sufism as situated in Islam and at the same time being distinct from it. Thirdly, this tension tells us something about the peculiarity of the Sufi modus operandi that both engages with and redefines what it means to be Islamic. The chapter will suggest that we need to re-evaluate Sufism as contained by the phrase ‘Islamic mysticism’ to recover extant forms of DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-3

46  The journey through Islam understanding that reveal Sufism as the familiar other within Islam. To do this, the chapter employs the language of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology; specifically, in the sense of Heidegger’s use of Dasein as ‘mode of being’ (Brandom, 2002, p.  325). Heidegger’s phenomenology enables a critical analysis of the being-ness of Sufi not bound by preconceived modes of understanding. It, therefore, assists to delineate an ontology of Sufism distinct from the way it has been historically understood.

Where to start? The metaphysics of Sufism are here interpreted in the light of Heidegger’s phenomenology. As noted, I do not apply a Heideggerian reading, but rather a Heidegger-inspired analysis. That is, I  am using Heidegger’s phenomenology as inspiration for understanding and interpreting Sufism. In this task, Heidegger’s philosophy serves both as a guiding theory as well as an analytical tool. The considerations of this chapter were made in the light of undertaking a close analysis of the experiential content of Sufism. It was, more importantly, in seeking to understand Sufism from the point of view of the Sufi experience. I have, therefore, for obvious reasons, drawn on the phenomenology of religion and history of religion approach. I draw on Heidegger’s hermeneutic, employed in his Sein und Zeit, not as a point of comparison between Heidegger and Sufism, but as a useful tool for a phenomenological approach to Sufism. There is, nevertheless, a striking parallel between Sufi metaphysics and Heidegger’s philosophy as a shared empathy for discovering the nature of being. Heidegger’s notion of Dasein ‘Being[-There]’ and das Nichts ‘Non-Being’ or ‘Nothing[ness]’ is a case in point. If the realisation of Dasein is the telos of Heideggerian philosophy, then, the idea is relatively cognate with the Sufi conception of fana wa baqa (‘annihilation’ and ‘subsistence’ [in God]), whereby the Sufi is brought to a fuller state of being through a transformative realisation in this world (and not after it).3 Though tempting, it would not accurately reflect Heidegger’s philosophy to infer it as a sort of Sufism or vice versa Sufism as a pre-emptive Heideggerianism. Rather, it is more interesting to note that the existential problems that Heidegger singles out are analogous to the existential crises identified in Sufi literature. For instance, a radically simplified version of Heidegger’s philosophy (albeit, problematic as it may be) warns against not taking life for granted, recognising the lack of value and meaning in our lives, and seeing that our being in the world is also being in the world with others. He provided a practical response to these in his life’s work.4 Our ‘fallen state’ is the cause of much suffering, which for Heidegger was because of Geworfenheit or ‘thrownness’. There was no choice in being ‘thrown’ into the world. Individuals and societies had to overcome it by understanding it. As such, Heidegger distinguished between two modes of being: Uneigentlichkeit ‘inauthenticity’ and Eigentlichkeit ‘authenticity’. In realising, we could truly live for ourselves in accordance to ‘mine-self’ as authentic Dasein. That is, to surpass the socialised and superficial mode of being which Heidegger called ‘they-self’ or inauthentic Dasein. Sufism offered a similar typology of the ‘self’ or

The journey through Islam  47 nafs as denoting a conscious progression of being through the stages of its temporality: the ego-self (nafs ammara), blaming-self (nafs lawwama), and ­realised-self (nafs mutma’ina).5 But this is to surmise more generally about the matter. In a more focused manner, the approach from Heideggerian phenomenology is helpful to an assessment of the experiential quality of the tariqa and the master by using his notion of ‘historicality’ to delineate the value of beingness as distinct from its being historicised in a concrete sense. As will be demonstrated through the examination of the tariqa and the master, both are self-contained potentialities that signal a difference between the mode of experiencing the mysteries of religiosity and the concreteness of religious identity. Sufism is both simultaneously the engagement with Islam as it is with its Destruktion; it is simultaneously about keeping hidden implicit meanings as it is itself a process of Erschlossenheit ‘world disclosure’. It is this tension that will be explored and brought to the fore in the language of Sufism. The ‘problem’ of Sufism in relation to Islam is directly linked to Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. The interpretation of the experience of the tariqa and master is to be contained within its temporality, as it must proceed to be explicated in necessary stages to assume the potential for authenticity. In other words, if Sufism does not come to its own authentic Dasein, then it cannot be Sufism in the truest sense. It will always be in the state of inauthentic Dasein, operating out of the ‘they-self’ of its habitual Islamic paradigm. If and when it does, however, Sufism must be then treated as what it potentially holds and the possibility that it provides for understanding, interpreting, and becoming through the experience of being Sufi. Consequently, a typology of ‘authentic-Sufi-Dasein’ and ‘inauthentic-SufiDasein’ emerges. The former functions in harmony with the ontological condition as described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly as mysticism within the Islamic paradigm. The latter does not function in accordance with the ontological condition described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly within the category of mysticism analogous with the Islamic paradigm.

What is Sufism? Further theorisation It might be a cliché to start this chapter  by asking ‘what is Sufism?’, but it is certainly a question that persists in a meaningful way. I  approach the question here not descriptively, but phenomenologically. What I mean to demonstrate by this is the importance of paying attention to the ‘thing in itself’, though not in the Kantian ontical sense, but à la Hiedegger’s ontology (Overgaard, 2002). Many excerpts from the literary body of the Sufi tradition show a direct concern with hermeneutics as such, and I will argue also with ontology, especially in delineating the periphery of sentient awareness. However, there is an important difference in the way that Heidegger conceived the activity of phenomenology as fundamentally hermeneutic. For Heidegger, phenomenology was about the provision of interpretation in conjunction with the role of the interpreter in ceaselessly revising, enhancing, and replacing the understanding of ‘Being’ (Caputo, 1986; Kisiel, 2002). Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology is a self-contained process that

48  The journey through Islam is subject to a hermeneutic spiral that leads to a gradual comprehension of the subject. As he wanted to understand the factical aspects of Dasein, similarly I treat Sufism as a possible world in which Dasein exists, with its own factical aspects. Heidegger’s hermeneutic helps to tease out the phenomenological structure of Sufism as an anomaly within the Islamic paradigm. Many examples can be drawn from the history of Sufism, but none more direct than mystical poetry. The following verse from a ghazal (sonnet) attributed to Hafiz (the fourteenth-century poet much beloved by Iranians) is indicative as it is instantly introspective: saal-ha del talabeh jaameh jam az maa mikard; va-aan cheh khod dasht ze bigaaneh tamanaa mikard (‘For years the heart had sought after the Grail from us; And a needless quest for what it [the heart] had already possessed’).6 Yet it is more than introspective. It turns the reader inward only to bring them out. There are in fact three parts to the verse; two divulged, one implied: a) the outward [seeking the grail] and b) the inward journey [having already possessed the grail, but not knowing it yet]; and c) the self-realisation through disclosure of the self to itself [having already possessed the grail, and coming to know it]. The important point is that the third cannot be rendered without the first two episodes. The poetic corpus of Hafiz is a classic example of the uninhibited mystical mood that prevailed in the libertine7 circles of medieval Sufis; hence my calling on it as a segue to examples from the texts of the classical Sufis. Hafiz was well informed about the Sufi Weltanschauung, because while not himself a Sufi  per se, and certainly not a dogged follower of a specific order, writing in the rich religious culture of fourteenth-century Shiraz, he fully understood what it was. He was a rend, quick-witted, and experienced in mystical parlance; in other words, nobody’s fool. The aforementioned verse sums up rightly the experience of Sufism as a quest for the self, but only figuratively within the traditional setting. The reality of it was something quite different as Hafiz tells us (Hafiz, who understands the inner world of Sufism, but sits outside of it): the search was reflective of the overall journey of the wayfarer to realise ‘what it had already possessed’ – its self-being-in-the-world, in Heideggerian terms. Here the balance of Heidegger’s effort to bring together a contextual search for meaningfulness and an ontological search for the nature of being (Campbell, 2016) can be reflected in a hermeneutic of Sufi poetry. The medieval experience of Sufism was, indeed, intimately bound to poetic language. Its grandmasters used it to convey mystical experience to lend itself readily to the communication of emotional, over and above factual, content. Yet more than this, as Heidegger would have insisted, emotionality might be considered part of the facticity of the religious experience of Sufi Dasein. It is not just the dichotomy of emotionality and factuality as though two separate things; rather, emotion as the content of factical experience. Sufis, in this sense, wanted to understand their religion (Islam) within the context of their own living experience of it, which is both an exercise of a hermeneutics of religion from their standpoint, but also from our own, a hermeneutics of the factical aspects of Sufism as such in its meaningfulness (cf. Campbell, 2016; Guignon, 1984). For Heidegger, poetry as art opened up the world of meaning (OWA, p. 71), and the quest for meaning is nowhere better portrayed than through Sufi poetry. At a

The journey through Islam  49 deeper level, the utilisation of poetry among the classics was to exercise poiesis (ποίησις), in the sense that it was the creative activity of disclosing the unseen. The Sufis had worked with theological language from early on, but the development of poetry – in conjunction with the birth of the Persian language – allowed for a new hermeneutic structure for perpetual interpretation that also drew upon an ancient repository of wisdom that now replenished the faith (Milani, 2013). This placed the quest for meaning at the centre of an emerging ‘Sufi theology’, and not its rationalisation as dogma in the way that theologians (i.e., in the kalam tradition) had done, but a tradition that had for a long time developed itself on the ascetic strictness of the early pietists. It had done so by building on the core experience of the theophanic utterances (tadjalli) of early enigmatic figures like Rabiya al-Adawiyya (d. 801) and Bayazid al-Bistami (d. 874), which followed the occasion of the apophthegmatic sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the Christian monastic tradition (Milani, 2019). So, it was not new in the history of religion, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, but new as part of the evolving Islamic tradition. These sayings, at their core, are the lineaments of the extreme pietism and asceticism practiced in Christianity and Islam, respectively. That is, they denote a sense of immediacy, fervour, and rigour which is conveyed in the sayings or utterances of the desert monastics and early Sufis subsequently. By again asking the question ‘what is Sufism?’ in this work, I want to present a theoretical consideration, from the point of view of a phenomenological analysis, about the conditions of experience in the Sufi tradition. This is an important consideration because there are instances within the body of Sufi literature that allude to the possibility of distinctiveness from religious Islam, but which are never actualised. So, what is this potentiality? Why is there such a potentiality? The problem of distinctiveness has, in the classic understanding of Sufism, remained only a potentiality as far as can be surmised from the texts. Although a critical assessment can be made in combination with an analysis of the methodology of certain Sufi organisations (Milani  & Possamai, 2013), because the potentiality is easier discerned in the modern Sufi reinventions of tradition (Milani & Possamai, 2016), it is possible to assert that Sufi groups do, to varying degrees, exhibit a typology of modality visibly distinct to the normative religious experience of orthodox Islam (Milani, 2013, pp. 307–380). Now, this is more than just the difference between the mystical and the mainstream, esoteric and exoteric; it is more than saying that Sufism is a mysticism within a religious tradition. Rather, this is something about the way in which the function of being ‘Sufi’ yields a result that is phenomenologically distinctive, leading to a perceivably different ontological understanding of the Islamic experience. It will not do to assert that Sufism is somehow structurally outside of Islam, nor that Sufism is mystical Islam simply in terms of semiotics. The distinctiveness, I argue, is detectible in a close analysis of the tariqa and the master as representative of core Sufi praxis. This is why, as an experiential tradition, it is the ontological condition of the tariqa and the presence of the master that is central to a sufficient examination of the structures of experience and consciousness pertaining to Sufism in this chapter.

50  The journey through Islam There are subtleties, but there are more important nuances with regards to the Sufi modus operandi. To explore the issue raised, I draw on two masters of the poetic genre, Attar and Rumi, because they are paradigmatic of the broadest appeal to Sufi sensibility, but also because they are simultaneously the most unique in their interpretation of the experience of the tariqa and the master. In the Sufi tradition, the tariqa is generally conceived of as holding a distinctively interchangeable meaning. That is, as both the ‘path’ upon which the acolyte journeys towards God and the ‘method’ that informs the specific style of disciplinary practice that conditions the acolyte. As such, I use ‘tariqa’ distinctly in this sense, implying both meanings, unless otherwise signified by the individual use of it as either ‘path’ or ‘method’. Rumi and Attar, however, demonstrate a deeper propensity for a nuanced understanding of the tariqa in their poetry. For them, the tariqa is both separately and simultaneously the ‘path’ and ‘method’ of Sufism, but they also disclose the tariqa has an intricate correlation with the concept of the master in Sufi practice. The Sufism of Attar and Rumi interprets the tariqa as the embodiment of the experience of the master. An important distinction emerges between that of the ontological condition of the tariqa within the phenomenology of the master as tariqa, and the historical-linear tariqa, denoting the silsila (‘chain’) that represents the materiality of experience of the line of masters leading back to the Prophet. Whilst the latter is fundamentally indicative of organised Sufism, the former is emphatically expressed in the poetry of Rumi and Attar as an ontology of the master as both the path and method to God. This does not mean that the historical-linear tariqa is devoid of its own ontology. It is quintessentially what it is because of the phenomenological association it has with the present master who is connected through a chain of masters leading back to its founder and ultimately to the Prophet. As such, each historical-linear tariqa is both the extension of the master’s experience and the fullness of the realisation of the path and method as contained within the master as representative of the spiritual line descending from the Prophet. What is distinct in the rare occasion of Attar and Rumi’s poetry is that an ontology of the tariqa is defined in a phenomenology of the master. The Sufism of Attar and Rumi cannot be understood unless properly contextualised historically, but also with regards to the two classical Sufi schools of thought: the ‘sober’ and ‘intoxicated’. We know very little about Attar. But we do know that he did not write for the public, but privately for perhaps a few close disciples. He may have very well intended for his works to be posthumously discovered. So, they are much more candid in their criticism of mainstream religiosity, portraying a tense personal relationship with God that is especially pronounced in the musibatnameh (book of suffering). Rumi was a formally educated Muslim trained in the Islamic sciences and the typical tariqa Sufism of his time. Yet Rumi becomes the legend that he is due to his encounter with a vagabond dervish by the name of Shams from Tabriz. What is peculiar to Rumi’s best-known work of poetry, masnawi-e ma’nawi (spiritual couplets) is that it almost perfectly balances the paradoxical views of antinomianism and orthodox Islam. It is his Diwan-e Shams ([1380] 2002), however, that breaks this balance in favour of the former (and) in (the fulness of ) confession of his love for his spiritual master, Shams.

The journey through Islam 51 In terms of their association with the Sufi schools of thought, Attar and Rumi are progenies of the latter, their Sufism being primarily defined by the modality of spiritual intoxication rather than sobriety. The two schools nevertheless represent the tariqa experience in the broadest sense, and the influence of these two Sufi schools carry through to the present day, and they define the style and type of Sufism that is practiced by individual Sufi groups.8 In each of these cases, two distinct and implicit understandings of Sufi teaching can be detected regarding the tariqa and the master. Since Sufism is a product of the Islamic world, the ‘Islamicness’ of the Sufi is not here under scrutiny; rather, it is the experiential criteria for the Sufi telos that is the source of inquiry. In a way, such a suggestion goes beyond the superficialities of sectarianism. It points to a pronounced expression that Sufism is the mystical journey through Islam.

Attar and Rumi: possibility and potentiality in the Islamic experience Heidegger said that ‘Language speaks, not man. Man only speaks when he fatefully answers to language’ (PR, p. 96). So, it is that Attar and Rumi might be considered as fatefully engaged with language in their effort to speak the mysteries whispered to them. Mystics who adopted the poetic mode of expression did so knowing that poetic language would guard against attempts at reducing its content to rational discourse and/or concrete non-contradictory propositions. Poetic language deliberately provided a sense of open-endedness; it facilitated an elasticity of reference to simultaneous, multiple, and sometimes, unlimited, meanings and ideas that could be expressed at any one time. Moreover, the aesthetic value of language was used to create tension between various levels of meaning that were never meant to be resolved (Knysh, 2000, pp. 150–151). Such as it is, some qualifications need to be made regarding language and poetry in the light of Heidegger’s philosophy. In the first instance, the quality of tension is true to Heidegger’s own writing, such as Being and Time, as carrying this deliberately unresolved tension, since it was never conceived as a finished work (Schmidt, 2013, p. 23). Furthermore, the observation made about the definitional use of the ‘self-disclosure of Dasein as it is in the world’ as not being principally psychological, challenges the way mystical poetry is normally understood. The process of Dasein’s realisation ‘is not a form of self-knowledge or selfreflection’ (Schmidt, 2013, p. 207); instead, ‘Dasein is its disclosedness’ (GA 2, 133/BT, 129): ‘Dasein . . . discloses itself to itself’ (Schmidt, 2013, p. 207). It is therefore not an exercise of finding something inside itself as itself, but rather what it finds of itself in the world. The actuality of Dasein is its own ability to perceive itself fully as an unfolding existent in the world. This is a crucial factor in understanding not only Heidegger’s thinking about Dasein, but a critical turning point in the way that poetic insight is understood phenomenologically. Sufi poetry has long since been discussed in the context of cognitive analysis, and thereby the process of Sufi hermeneutics is understood in the same vein as a search for

52  The journey through Islam something inside the self. Yet neither in Attar nor Rumi’s poetry is a dogma about internal truth confirmed; it has only ever been assumed. Neither poet offers this easy escape. I would not deny that self-knowledge and self-reflection, and other references to what is inside, internal, and interior are common tropes in Sufi rhetoric, but the thinking of both Attar and Rumi did not afford such naivety about the human condition or the world in which the human is placed. I would argue, like Heidegger, Attar and Rumi would have held that the facticity of disclosure was about an ontological realisation of the being of Dasein as the ‘event’ in which Dasein is opened up to the world and to itself (Schmidt, 2013, p. 207). There is another related consideration to be made regarding the poets – as the conduits of art – themselves. It is not just the works as such, but in drawing on Heidegger’s view that ‘all art is essentially poetry’  – which is to say ‘bringing-into-being’ (PLT, p. 73), it is the poet who is the presentation of what is sacred. The poet is the locality of the disclosure of what is hidden in plain sight of their temporality of being. Indeed, the very quality of Dasein is premised by a question ‘to be’ in the way that its being in the world is ‘a constant unfinished quality . . . in the essence of the basic constitution of Dasein’ (GA 2, p. 236/BT, p. 227; cited in Schmidt, 2013, p. 206). As such, it is in this way that I discuss Attar and Rumi. Attar (c1190-c1230[?]) wrote in the style known as mathnawi or ‘couplets’. His most significant works which are known for their inward-looking and visionary character are: mantiq al-tayr (Conference of the Birds); ilahi nameh (The Book of God); and musibat nameh (The Book of Suffering). They are all concerned with three main themes, which Attar pursues with utmost intensity, emotion, and determination (Knysh, 2000, p.  151). Firstly, Attar is focused on the complete annihilation of man in God (fana). His interpretation of this notion of spiritual death is one that may sometimes lead to, or be fully realised in, physical death. It is unclear if this is an extreme use of irony in his poetry or a legitimate consideration of the meaning of fana for Attar. What is clear, however, is that from his renowned story of the moths contained within the epic tale of the Conference, the actuality of knowing the mystery of the fire is in perishing and being consumed by it (MT: 3987–4004).9 Also, considering what the birds find in the Simorgh at the end of the journey is one step removed from the finality of knowing the Absolute; the last step is again going beyond the self that is revealed in the mirror of the Truth (MT: 4240). The second theme of Attar’s works is the underlying unity of all beings. For him, there is nothing other than God, and all things are of one substance. A closer observation of this notion reveals a nuanced understanding of the conventional monotheistic ideal. If Attar believes in a canonical God, he is certain that this deity is paradoxically invested in His own creation; and furthermore, is intimately involved in the unfolding of his creative genius – humankind – as it is in the process of the creation, fall, and redemption of Man that God has hidden the answer to theodicy (Kermani, 2011, pp. 87, 113). The final theme is the fulcrum by which the key to Attar’s metaphysics turns. He maintains irrevocably that the realisation of one’s self is the basis for grasping the vital mysteries of God and of the universe. The quest for God appears inward, but it is more accurately an encompassing process of disclosure.

The journey through Islam  53 The fact that the journey to God appears at first to be an external quest is an illusion of human error to assume ‘God’ as an end-point linearly conceived, but it is also incorrect to conceive Attar’s notion of the journey to God as internal. The search does in fact entail searching one’s heart for God, but the journey is only deemed external or internal from the point of view of human experience. What Attar reveals consistently in a close reading of his poetry is captured clearly in the following verse [God speaks as the reflected Simorgh in the mirror]: ‘The journey was in Me; the deeds were Mine’ (MT: 4255).10 It appears that Attar was fully aware of the encapsulated modality of the experience of tariqa as ontology. The master is ontologically absent but phenomenologically present through the experience of the seeker. It is in this way that Attar presents a new ontological condition for the tariqa as master. The Creator is reflected in the soul of his creature but is not contained within. The former is not comprehended through the worldliness of the latter but the possibility and potentiality that lies beyond (MT: 4291–2). Because for Attar any real and sufficient understanding (of God) can only be arrived at through physical death  – and it is clearly presented in the ending of mantiq al-tayr – it is he, and not Rumi, who in the Heideggerian sense can be referred to as reaching its wholeness in death (Schmidt, 2013, p. 208). The legend of Attar’s story is that he was killed at the hands of his Mongol captor by his own cunning. Rumi (1207–1272) wrote two definitive works that bear his legacy to this day: the divan-e Shams (The Corpus of Shams), which is in the form of sonnets in honour of his beloved friend, confidante, and master; and the mathnavi-e ma’navi (Spiritual Couplets), written in the final years of his life and dedicated to his beloved disciple Hussam al-Din Chelebi who helped him to complete the work. Both works are complimentary in the sense that the first discloses that the tariqa is synonymous with the master; while the second contains the secrets of this exchange: ‘Love’s secret that’s been kept concealed; Is best through tales of other loves revealed’ (M1: 136).11 It is well known that Rumi’s poetry presents him as a passionate lover of God, willing to forgo perfection of style in order to carry substance. He lived in a deeply religious world and was surrounded by zealous disciples from whom Rumi often sought solace in the companionship of Shams. The experience of Shams was the transformative condition for Rumi’s self-realisation as a mystic in his own right. There are distinct moments in his poetry that reveal this process, and where the author is shown to be licentious in his expression. ‘Don’t give me duties now I’ve passed away. My senses dulled, I’ve no clue how to pray. For anything a drunk might sing is wrong. Whether he’s meek or boastful in his song’ (M1: 128–129).12 Within these instances of total immersion, Rumi conveyed an unorthodox and explosive style of writing that directly shared his mystical mood. In so doing, he advocated a personal and ecstatic way of writing poetry reminiscent of the ‘intoxicated’ school. The culmination of Rumi’s experience was a lamenting of the tragic separation from his friend and master, which he transferred to the hyperbole of the pain of separation of creation from the Creator. At the core of both these works is the doctrine of eshq-e elahi (‘pure [divine] love’), which was instilled by the chance encounter with Shams.

54  The journey through Islam There is, therefore, a notably distinctive tension at the heart of Rumi’s metaphysics, and it arises out of the conflict of his person. In his life before Shams, he was an orthodox scholar and follower of a traditional school of Sufism. When he is reborn through the ‘baptism’ of Shams, Rumi becomes hazrat-e mawlana (Our Holy Master). So, Rumi was by all accounts a Sunni, Ash’arite, and Hanafi, but in the course of his awakening, he became more than this. Whilst in his poetry one reads an author with the full force of textbook knowledge, one is also and occasionally privy to extraordinary moments that defy categorisation. Now, it is correct to say that due to his Ash’ari theology, Rumi’s God transcends human notions of good and evil, and Whose relations with its creation remain unknown. Yet, Rumi repeatedly hints at the notion that He is imminent through experiences of the pain of the separation from the Beloved. Whilst he held that God’s plan for his creation was wholly inconceivable – for He would bring ‘non-existents’ into existence at will – Rumi did express that God’s activity was discernible in the balance of Nothingness and Being. Most importantly, Rumi conveys the view that the world was made by God in preparation for the creation of Man. It was as if the stage was set for the deliberate unfolding of existence, and through which humanity was given the opportunity to rise above its materiality by virtue of being thrown into the very conditions of worldliness. This process of temporality, and to a significant degree, the infliction of human suffering, as with Attar’s works, produced the possibility and potentiality of human beings to become aware of the worldly constraints to which they were otherwise bound (Ritter [1955] 2013). Whilst personal effort was indispensable to reach the higher state of spiritual life, the relationship between God and his creature was both subtle and mysterious; and so, the process of its completion unending. Still, Rumi was certain of a single known fact about the historicality of God: His grace. Rumi speaks often about the manifestation of a guide or friend sent from God to assist the wayfarer. For Rumi, this was in no uncertain terms the appearance of Shams (DS: 1390).13 Given this, Shams, as the master par excellence for Rumi, was the beginning and end of Rumi’s experience of the tariqa (DS: 2711). Rumi, in line with the fate of Attar’s protagonists, goes towards his death [in Shams]. This is a symbolic death as in the hadith Rumi cites: ‘Die before you die’ (M6: 723) where our protagonist is disclosed to himself existentially and ontologically (GA 2, p. 269/BT p. 259; cited in Schmidt, 2013, p.  209). However, Rumi is never, in a Heideggerian sense, ‘whole’ because of the state of the living Dasein as an ‘outstanding potential’; this is because ‘as long as Dasein is, something is always outstanding: what it can and will be’ (GA 2, p. 233/BT, p. 224; cited in Schmidt, 2013, p. 208). Nevertheless, he is authentic Dasein who had heard the ‘call of conscience’ that disturbed his everyday life and summoned him back to himself (Schmidt, 2013, p. 209). It is important to keep the distinction between Heideggerian terminology and traditional Sufi parlance, as earlier noted, in order not to fall into the trap of conflating the two. Yet in the above, by teasing the boundary between them, I want to show that Sufism does not have to be read with the traditional gloss it normally is. There is much more in Sufism to be gained from a reinterpretation that frees up space for analysis, though not altogether abandons traditional readings. What is

The journey through Islam 55 clear from a close reading of the text is that the language of Sufism is ultimately defined by notions of interiority because of its practical need to discern the obvious, transparent, and felt experiences of being, and not a literal emphasis upon something imagined. This style of ‘religious speaking’ peculiar to the Sufis is about the need to meaningfully engage with the outward-looking aspects of Islam, and as such offering up its own repository of terms for navigating the exteriority of religiosity.

The ‘sober’ and ‘intoxicated’ school The version of Sufism that is broadly acceptable to the Muslim scholarly elite (ulama) is the one that is presented by the ‘sober’ school. As per al-Junayd’s suggestion, ‘intoxication’ is tolerated only to the extent that it is contained within the ‘sober’ framework. Hence the so-called ‘triumph of Sufism’ is in the success of having appropriated the unrefined mystical piety that was emblematic of Bayazid and later Hallaj. What comes to be the dominant Islamic – by which I mean ‘religious’, that is, formalistic – Sufi experience was built in the sober style, in line with both orthodox Sunni Muslim experience and point of view. The earliest Sufi treatises of this kind, such as that of al-Junayd (d. 910), al-Sarraj (d. 988), and al-Makki (d. 996) intended to demonstrate the compatibility of Sufism with mainstream Islamic belief. It was upon the efforts of these early Sufi scholars that the pinnacle works of Hujwiri (kashf al-mahjoub) and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (ihya ulum al-din) were based. Despite the attestation of Sufism’s compatibility, the intentionality of incorporating the mystical experience of the Sufis within Sunni Islam was triggered by the growing sense for the difference between the two. The success of the ‘sober’ school of Sufism ensured the credibility of Sufis as truly Muslim, but it did little to assuage the tension that continued to brew. That al-Junayd had never denied the fact that the Sufi path contained deeper secrets which were never meant for the uninitiated, that Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996), and others like him, preserved a separate genre of treatises on the esoteric nature of the path for the initiated (Arberry, Sufism, pp.  68–69), tells us that a key difference between the ‘sober’ and the ‘intoxicated’ Sufis was the code of non-disclosure. (There is, however, a deeper sense in which the ‘sober’ and ‘intoxicated’ schools are differentiated that is ontological, and which will be discussed in detail in this section.) In a sense, the experience of the ‘intoxicated’ Sufis was also misunderstood by onlookers as something un-Islamic; which is why the efforts of the ‘sober’ Sufis were not entirely in vain. Bayazid expressed his mystical experience with those around him, yet al-Junayd felt obliged to curtail the meaning of his experience in a language appropriate to mainstream belief (Arberry, 1970 [1950], p. 54). Hallaj indiscriminately and publicly professed the hidden secrets of the faith, despite being repeatedly discouraged, and subsequently disowned, by fellow Sufis on account of it; still, his experiences and teachings were later moderated by Hujwiri for the benefit of orthodox opinion (Hujwiri, 2000 [1911], pp. 150–153, 260ff ). The Sufi style of the ‘intoxicated’ school which was built on the legacy of Bayazid

56  The journey through Islam and Hallaj continued to thrive and was kept alive in part through the Sufi experience of later Sufis such as Attar and Rumi, since by their time intoxicating elements of Sufism were already well defended in the established sober setting, but also importantly through the pedagogical models of khaniqahi Sufis like Abu alHassan al-Kharaqani (d. 1033) and Abu Said Abu al-Khayr (d. 1049) (cf. Nicholson, Islamic Mysticism). Both Attar and Rumi give pride of place to Bayazid and Hallaj as exemplars of the sincere mysticism in their works. Hallaj was particularly important to Attar; the closing chapter of the mantiq al-tayr prescribes the cessation of words due to the limitation of mortal form in attaining to God. It is ended by a summary of Hallaj’s martyrdom as a literal demonstration of human capacity not in physical form, but in spirit (MT: 4263). Rumi invokes Bayazid on several memorable occasions in verse, but one in particular is apt which makes the point about the friends of God interceding on His behalf (M2: 2227–2251). This kind of Sufism is defined by its flirtation with, and a projection of, a certain kind of antinomian style that on occasion defied the order of religious hierarchy and the restrictions of its formal boundary.

The historical-linear tariqa The religiously moderated Sufism of the ‘sober’ school was further reified within the Islamic tradition through a formalisation process that systematised Sufi doctrine and organised Sufis into prominent fraternities, brotherhoods, or ‘orders’. This historicising of the Sufi experience made distinct parts out of the whole, placing the emphasis on the individual process of the tariqa, master, and disciple. The meaning and usage of the tariqa however retained the value of denoting both, and equally, the ‘path’ and ‘method’ (i.e., the path or method of so and so master), which also denoted the correlative notion of the salik (wayfarer) and murid (student) as a component part in activating the unspoken experience when the two were brought together. The historicity of the tariqa, in terms of the available theories and methods of Sufism at the time of the rise of the Sufi orders, was not just about the masters of the path that carried the lineage, but also about their credibility as legitimate heirs of the authentic sunna of Muhammad. The Sufi apologists, following in the footsteps of al-Junayd, had begun to position themselves as the true Sunni, but they were also adamant about their role as the only reliable transmitters of the message of Islam (Knysh, 2000, pp. 118–121). The historical-linear tariqa can therefore be considered as the Sufi expression of authority in Islam. It represents an ideal about each Sufi master’s aspirations that adhered to an imagined tariqa al-Muhammadi or the tariqa par excellence. As was customary, each path and method, defined by the grand masters of the Sufi tariqa, was validated by its irrefutable link to the Prophet. Chains of authority (silsila) were often known to have been boastful in promulgating the spiritual genealogy of a Sufi lineage, linking that Sufi master to their spiritual descendent, ultimately leading back to the Prophet of Islam. Yet it is the aspiration, not the actual verification, that is particularly of note here, since many were fabrications. Of note is the fact that the historical-linear value of the tariqa is in its representation of the idea

The journey through Islam  57 of a direct connection to the Prophet through recognised masters; this being the perpetuation of the ‘prophetic experience’ through a designated spiritual genealogy. The linear model of verification of historical tariqa betrays the fact that there was something more than historicity at play.

The tariqa and the master The content of Attar and Rumi’s poetry reveals an alternative model of deciphering the tariqa experience not as linear but vertical. The Sufi tradition had developed for itself a tripartite theory and method for reaching the goal. It was typically expressed as: sharia, tariqa, haqiqa. Sharia was the observance of Revealed Law in preparation for wayfaring on the path. Tariqa was the stage of embarking on the path to God. Haqiqa was having reached the end of the path, whereby the wayfarer enters the stage of Ultimate Reality or God. This tripartite conceptualisation was likely derived from two sources: the Hadith14 and the Qur’an. The first was a deeply rooted attitudinal system in the form of islam, iman, and ihsan, which is in the famous Hadith of Gabriel in which the Archangel Gabriel teaches Muhammad the religion; and the second consists of the levels of attaining certainty of God’s truth as recorded in the Quran: ilm al-yaqin, ayn al-yaqin, and haqq al-yaqin (102: 5; 102: 7; 69: 51). What is clear is that these are both systems that are vertically oriented. This three-stage model is a vertical hermeneutical process towards a core ontology: going beyond religion as form and into religion as essence. In the sense of their historicity, the ‘orders’ are about the glorification and/or honouring of the namesake, to varying degrees, but in the sense of denoting religious experience through the example of the master as being a principal condition. Historically too, the ‘orders’ are independent paths/methods of the various namesakes, each of which delineates the accessibility to the ‘prophetic experience’ through the master. The creation of the ‘orders’ as denoting lineage was the task of the centralisation of the master as experience. Beyond the reified, traditional notion of the tariqa as silsila is the qualitative measure of its modus operandi as transferring deeply-experienced-religion through three primary points of ‘historicality of being’ to use Heidegger’s concept of Dasein’s Geschichtlichtkeit. In the tariqa experience, this is identifiable as the ‘world-time’ of the Prophet, the Sufi founding master or namesake, and the present-time-master. Since time is unfolding with infinite potentiality and possibility, the present-time-master becomes the point of continual extension in time whose quality is only validated in the shadow of the first two moments in the tariqa experience as history. If we analyse the tariqa experience in terms of Heidegger’s notion of ‘historising’ (geschehen), as in a ‘happening’ or ‘occurring’ fate or destiny of a thing, then it can be thought of in the following manner. The tariqa exists because Dasein as the founding master ‘repeats’ or ‘retrieves’ the possibility to choose the Prophet as ‘its hero’ (BT, 385). The repetition of the possibility is not, in Heidegger’s philosophy, an exact reproduction of it. It is, rather, the possibility to engage with the selected source, not from interpretations presented by others, but by one’s own meaningful interaction with it. The founding Sufi master (who is the namesake of the ‘order’) is engaged

58  The journey through Islam with the Prophet in choosing the possibility to repeat the ‘prophetic experience’ through his own experience, and not in imitation of him such as existed in the Shi’a or Sunni interpretation (which is what makes it Sufi per se). Here, I take the ‘prophetic experience’ to denote the experience of being (Dasein) in conversation with the Prophet as hero. The founding master is engaged in this conversation with the Prophet spiritually. The master’s lineage is produced through the line of subsequent masters, but it is defined by the imitation of, or the copying of the accepted or standard interpretation of the founding master. Together, the Prophet, as hero, and now the Master, as symbol, form the specific identity of the ‘order’. The tariqa experience as history, therefore, in the sense of ‘historising’, signifies the establishment of Sufism as a tradition in the long stretch of time. Yet the tradition is still made up of two chief component parts that delineate the ontological periphery of the Sufi experience. The experience is itself denoted by an ontology of the tariqa and the master. That is, the tariqa as experience and the master as a fulfilment of the goal as contained within the tariqa experience. The phenomenological filament of the tariqa as experience has its roots in the early Sufis. Here, the internalisation of the experience of agency (individual relating directly to God without intermediary) denotes the modi propheti – the prophetic mode as ‘I am’. That is to say, the Prophet is not seen as separate to the Sufi, but in operation through him as ‘prophetic experience’. A gradual development that arises out of the early Sufi experience is the Prophet as ‘master’ and mystic supreme. This is the exemplification of the ‘Mystical-Muhammad’ through a process of imitatio Muhammadi (Milani, 2018). Both these developments eventuate in the culmination of an ontology of the Sufi Master as the living spiritual heir to the Prophet; which in its extreme form becomes the master as experience, that is, ‘the master is all’, not just as the beginning and end of the path, but the tariqa as experience in its totality. This is overlaid with the concurrent development of discipleship in relation to the emergence of mastership. While initially the disciple experience would be informed by experiencing multiple masters, it is the reverse that becomes the standard (singular master for multiple disciples). Phenomenologically, this change occurs in the light of, and because of, the ontological formulation ‘the master is all’. Now, the master tradition within the tariqa experience has two main types of expression corresponding with the two schools of Sufi praxis already noted: sober and intoxicated. That is to say, ‘the master is all’ is understood in two distinct ways: moderate and extreme. In the former expression, the master leads the disciple away from himself and towards an awareness of the Prophet, and through him ultimately to God. This is the perfecting of the disciple through the process of apprehending intangible experience through tangible experience. The latter expression is the same in principle but differs in process. Here, the master is all contained; not as a guide or a leader to the experience of the Prophet or God elsewhere, but contained and experienced within and through the master. In this notion, the master both is and is not, simultaneously, the tangible and intangible. The master is the delineation of the path itself. He is the ‘path’ and the ‘method’. The master is delineative, not denotive. He shows the parameters for journeying and searching. The disciple must journey and discover the experience that denotes

The journey through Islam 59 the prophetic and God realisation as divulged in their own experience facilitated by becoming one with the master. It is here that Sufism divulges its potentiality to retrieve possibility by being in conversation with the past. More importantly, it shows us a process of engagement with the past within the Islamic tradition that is not about making claims about the past but making choices. That is, the experiential core of Sufism is about the potentiality of choosing one thing over another that may have been possible at the time of Muhammad, for example, but that Muhammad may not have made that choice based on the conditions of his own historicality. If we consider the shahada (‘no god, but God’), the Sufis push the boundaries through the master tradition contained within the tariqa experience in two important ways that present the possibility of alternative choices. Sufi esoterica challenge conventional and traditional views of mainstream belief in denoting what is ‘religion’ and ‘god’. In view of the sober and intoxicated experience of Sufism, the ‘sober’ school places emphasis on the master as true Islam embodied; which in its radical expression must render any notion of ‘religion’ obsolete. The ‘intoxicated’ school on the other hand place emphasis on the view that the master is all, and all is the master; the master is the sum total of experience, which in its extreme sense must render any notion of ‘god’ obsolete. There is ‘no god, but God’, yet if we understand this is in the sense of hermeneutic ontology as explained, there is ‘no religion, but the-God and there is ‘no god, but the-Master’. It is the master who is the tariqa as experience. Through this process, the conditions of authentic-Sufi-Dasein are fulfilled, wherein the Sufi having entered into the activity of Sufism (as opposed to imitating a tradition), becomes a Sufi in the ontological sense of having reached its telos. And so, Sufism is, in this sense, truly ontologically distinct (not from, but) within Islam.

Old ties and new developments The conceptualisation of the tariqa as ontology is not without precedent; it is based on the discreet model that already exists in the description of Attar and Rumi’s experience of the tariqa and master. As mentioned, Attar makes it clear that there is nothing about the tariqa experience that is outside of the master as Lord. Rumi envisaged Shams as ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ of the tariqa experience, both as the presence of God as Grace and as the Guide to Himself. The connotation of Christian language is not accidental. A very good example of it is found in a basic comparison of ideas. I will offer a general and a specific sample so as to make the point. The fourth-century text by Gregory of Nyssa titled, The Life of Moses is a sufficient reference. In it, we find the analogy of measuring the proximity to God by way of the distance of a bow’s shot (LM, 260), which is precisely used in sura al-najm (Q 53: 9) for the same purpose. More specifically, we find discussion on the dimensionless soul and allegory of God’s ‘front’ and ‘back’ as a metaphor to explain spiritual virtue in both Gregory and Rumi (LM, 221) (M1, 2019–2020).15 I give more direct examples elsewhere and, in more detail (Milani, 2019). There is an obvious sense in which Sufism seems to be heavily ‘Christianised’ in its most intoxicated

60  The journey through Islam experiential depiction; but it does not lose its Islamic form, because where it may have drawn inspiration from the other, it was to facilitate the mysticism within Islam. By ‘Christianised’ I do not mean Sufism is secretly Christian. Rather, that the qualitative experience in both – in relation to realisations about the mysteries of faith – is referenced in the value placed upon the hierophanic personification of divine agency. Sufism does so in a way that is familiar, yet discrete. So, here Sufism advocates divine intimacy in a new way that defines its coming into its own. By comparison, Jesus was rooted in the Jewish tradition as a practicing and knowledgeable Jew, yet he becomes distinctive because of his recognition and confirmation as the Messiah (of the Jews). The Christian faith emerges out of the Jewish milieu, and it is confirmed, that is, as something other in itself, by the witnessing of both its adherents (Christians) and its deterrents (Jews) that Jesus is distinct from Judaism. Such is a rough outline of the emergence of Christianity as distinct from both the initial Jesus movement and the early Apostolic communities that sprang up everywhere across the Levant and the Mediterranean. To be clear, therefore, Jesus is distinct but always remains a part of Judaism, while Christianity is distinct and moves to stand apart from it. The advent of the mystics of Islam reverberates the Jesus experience in the sense that they are – albeit, those that are in the authentic-Sufi-Dasein sense Sufi – always distinct but never stand apart from the Islamic. And in the same way that Jesus was both within tradition but not contained by it, thus allowing for the flight of Christianity from Judaism, early Sufi perception of religion allowed their heirs to depart – granted, through internal revolutions – from Islam, and thus escape (even if momentarily) its mirrored external transformations. Historically, Sufism is Islamic in the sense that it is characteristically about the perpetuation of the ‘prophetic experience’ as embodying both the message of revelation (Qur’an) and the way of being Muslim (Sunna). In a meaningful way, this is not simply the imitation of the Prophet, but rather the active participation in his experience. The Sufi emphasis on a rhetoric of interiority of religion and the individual-heart-relation to God provides a unique vantage point in interpreting Islam. Its historical connection to the Prophet, the Qur’an, and Sunna confirms the Sufi rootedness in the Islamic tradition. Time and again, however, individual Sufis have demonstrated a distinctiveness because of their affirmation as ‘saints’ or ‘friends’ of God (awliya). Furthermore, the very experience of being Sufi is something that produces an arcane tradition of its own (with accompanying rituals, code of conduct, culture, art, philosophy, and practices). More to the point, the embodied example of ‘intoxicated’ Sufis like Bayazid or Hallaj has produced such ruptures between Sufis and the ulama that subsequent ‘sober’ Sufis have worked so hard to mend. So, it seems that both adherents (mystics) and deterrents (exoteric scholars) confirm Sufism as distinct. In these moments of Islamic history, we see such Sufis as rooted in Islamic tradition, yet being idiosyncratic by virtue of their fulfilment of a – let us say – experiential ‘union’ with God. They are paradoxically identified from both the point of view of the (‘sober’) Sufi and the ulama as heretical, despite being unavoidably Islamic à la Ahmed (2016).

The journey through Islam 61 The example of Jesus is comparable with regards to the individual cases of Sufi figures  – at least, those that meet the qualification above  – even though Sufism does not ever make the radical break with Islam in the way that Christianity eventually did from Judaism. The point, however, is that Sufism as the mystical aspect of Islam is the familiar other of Islam as itself (Milani & Adrahtas, 2018). The Sufis, no matter how antinomian or innovative, never cease to remain Muslim; and where in such rare cases we might discover unorthodox behaviour, being Muslim is never about Muslim identity, but a Muslim becoming. Being Muslim, in this sense, is about a continual realisation – without end – of what it means to succumb to the will of God as ontology. The Jesus example is apt because Jesus is never distinct from Judaism, but distinct within its tradition as a charismatic figure who is posthumously appropriated into the emerging new ‘Christian’ faith. Ultimately, what qualifies Sufism as distinct is not the externalities of religious change, but rather the existential struggle of its ontological search for meaning that is fundamental to its praxis. Sufism would be phenomenologically at its height when it is in the zone between orthodoxy and heresy, where Sufis are there defined by the manner of their balancing act. Here it is easy to see how some would fall on the ‘wrong’ side of the mainstream and vice versa, regardless of their mystical quest in earnest. The customary reading of Attar and Rumi comes from traditional appropriations of them, but as standalone figures, they represent more than just a pillar in holding the roof of Sufi tradition. On their own, they are windows into the unknown aspect of faith, and in their own, they embody the revelation experience that in turn divulges the Prophetic and Textual stasis. Though the Sufi historical thrust might very well have produced a new religion, it did, at the very least, give rise to a new face of Islam. While Sufism does emerge out of Islam and come into its own (as had Christianity), it never formed into a new religion for several reasons. The power of Sufi organisational leaders and their immense accumulation of wealth is ultimately curbed by the caliph-sultan, and by the fifteenth century (when almost all the male members were associated with a Sufi order) its networks were regulated and its organisations answered to the head of state.16 Not the least, the Sufis were already on the losing side of a long battle for the heart of the populace against their rival ulama class, which comes to ahead by the end of the tenth century (Bulliet, 1994, p. 106). We might also add that Sufism was ideologically fastened to Islam as a result of al-Junayd’s efforts to reconcile Sufism to the Sunna a century before that. Despite this, Sufism has remained a spiritual-mystical force at the heart of religion, even though it was never destined to be constitutionally set up for sociopolitical, and thus religious, autonomy. In its subdued form, however, it produced a distinct tradition by the eleventh century and a rich culture of influence, in particular in connection with the Persian cultural style, which could in no way materialise religious change openly. The change that Sufism inspired remained an internal one, or at the very least, in some circles, subterranean. The comparative key here is in the ‘reformation experience’ within Christian history. One might say that Luther’s internal individualistic Reform (inspired by

62  The journey through Islam inner revelation) was ultimately forsaken for an external mass reform. So, whilst there is the Reformation without a reformation in Christian history, Sufism is a reformation without the Reformation in Islamic history.

Conclusion: difference within sameness This chapter has sought to answer the question about the distinctiveness of Sufism as an Islamic phenomenon. It has formulated a typology based on Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology as a way to respond to the problematic of Sufism as difference within sameness. It is hoped that this typology contributes to the shortfall of language that has been used to treat Sufism in its proper context without denying its Islamicness or attributing it entirely to something other. As such, the Heidegger-inspired neologisms, authentic-Sufi-Dasein and inauthentic-SufiDasein, adequately reflect the problem of definition and context of Sufism as well as serving as a more accurate linguistic tool for discourse on the subject. The process of the unfolding of Sufism is one that is through Islam, by which sameness and difference are experienced simultaneously. If Islam were signified by a dot on a page, the Sufi’s journey would look as though a straight line from the dot, moving from left to right, then circling back onto itself and moving down vertically through the dot towards the bottom of the page. This diagrammatic description is a simple representation of the three-stage process of the tariqa as broadly defined by the Sufi tradition: sharia, tariqa, haqiqa. Everything that unfolds in the process of wayfaring as described by the Sufi happens within the framework of the Islamic tradition. There is nothing un-Islamic about it. The dot is Islam; Sufism is rooted in Islam, and therefore it is Islamic. However, beyond the typical Islamicness of this representation, there is a more nuanced realisation. The inflexed direction of the line that proceeds from the dot and returns to go through it vertically is a symbolic portrayal of the Sufi method of looking within Islam by turning in on itself and going through Islam.

Figure 2.1 Diagrammatic representation of ‘Sufism going through Islam’

The journey through Islam  63 The tariqa experience, as argued in this chapter, is phenomenologically the journey through Islam and beyond. It is not a separate ‘path’ outside of Islam, but a path and method of the Sufi which is distinctive, yet part of Islam. The outcome and the experience are deeply felt also in a distinctive way, making familiar the other. This is a process by which the Sufi, as a Muslim, is engaged in an adopted experience of Islam which is different from the known peripheral experience of Islam. The point of raising the question of Sufism as both anomalous and analogous from the start has been to engage in a meaningful and critical debate about the condition of Sufism as an innovative force within Islamic history. Can Sufism be thought of as producing a modality independent from religious Islam? It must. Otherwise, it cannot be what it is. Yet can it be un-Islamic? It cannot, for it would not be Sufism. Sufism, as we must conceive of it, needs to be thought of as a perpetual movement that is tradition-inspired and, at the same time, innovative. It is defined by the tension that describes it phenomenologically as both simultaneously continuity and discontinuity in relation to Islam. As defined by its ontological condition, as authentic-Sufi-Dasein, it must always move forward and beyond.

Notes 1 The account comes from al-Suyuti (1445–1505), reported in Tarikh al-Dimashq (History of Damascus by Ibn Asakir). 2 In Sufi history, this term denotes a School or Order of the Sufi tradition. Because I will be referring to the term extensively in this chapter, I have decided to treat it as part of the common parlance (without italicising, and) with its normative meaning in the Arabic intact (i.e., manner, mannerism, method, mode). However, I do this so as to discuss the term in context and then to expand from a typical understanding of the term in its usual usage in order to enter into interpretive means of exploring the term in a nuanced way in relation to case studies in Sufi literature and hermeneutics. 3 On the Sufi notion of annihilation and subsistence in God, see Gerhard Böwering (1979). 4 With thanks to Alain de Botton (2014). 5 Qur’an 12:53; 75:2; and 89:27. 6 My translation: ghazal 143, line 1 (Hafiz, 1984, p. 193). 7 The term is used in the sense of the French libertinage érudit of the Baroque era, which denoted the freethinking circles of philosophers and other intellectuals there (Pintard, 2000). 8 Milani (2016) demonstrates the propensity of influence of style of the ‘sober’ and ‘intoxicated’ schools in a comparative study of the Nimatullahi and Naqshbandi Sufi orders. 9 For corresponding English translations of this and subsequent references to Attar’s mantiq al-tayr I am using Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Attar, 1984). 10 For the translation, see Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Attar, 1984, p. 220). 11 For the translation, see Jawid Mojaddedi (Rumi, 2004, p. 12). 12 For the translation, see Mojaddedi (Rumi, 2004, p. 12). 13 I am using the Furuzanfar edition (Rumi, 1380/2002). 14 Here denoting the collective canonical corpi. 15 For the translation, see the Nicholson MS. (Rumi, 1375/1997). 16 By the early modern period, the Sufi organisational forms that dominate – such as seen in the Ottoman and Safavid world – are those state-sponsored and which correspond with ruling edict and sacred law.

64  The journey through Islam

Works Cited Ahmed, S., 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Arberry, A. J., [1950] 1970. Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam. New York: Harper. Attar, 1984. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. London: Penguin. Botton, A. d., 2014. The School of Life. [Online] Available at: https://youtu.be/Br1s GrA7XTU Böwering, G., 1979. The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam. Berlin: de Gruyter. Brandom, R., 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bulliet, R. W., 1994. Islam: The View from the Edge. New York: Columbia University Press. Campbell, S. M., 2016. Early Lecture Courses. In: F. Raffoul  & E. S. Nelson, eds. The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 179–184. Caputo, J. D., 1986. Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology. Husserl Studies, 1, pp. 157–178. Guignon, C., 1984. Moods in Heidegger’s Being and Time. In: What is an Emotion: Classical Readings in Philosophical Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–239. Hafiz, 1984. Diwan-e Hafiz. Edited by P. N. Khanlari, 2nd ed. Tehran: Nil Publishing. Hujwiri, [1911] 2000. Kashf al-Mahjub. Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. Wiltshire: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust. Kermani, N., 2011. The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Cambridge: Polity Press. King, R. E., 2004. Asian Religions and Mysticism: The Legacy of William James in the Study of Religions. In: J. R. Carrette, ed. William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience. A Centenary Celebration. London: Routledge, pp. 106–123. Kisiel, T., 2002. Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts. London: Continuum. Knysh, A., 2000. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill. Milani, M., 2013. Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. Abignon: Routledge. Milani, M., 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Milani, M., 2019. Classic Sufism and Gnosis. In: G. W. Trompf, G. B. Mikkelsen  & J. Johnston, eds. The Gnostic World. Abignon: Routledge, pp. 328–336. Milani, M. & Adrahtas, V., 2018. Modern talking: Sufi socio-political discourse. Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 4(2), pp. 175–194. Milani, M. & Possamai, A., 2013. The Nimatullahiya and Naqshbandiya Sufi Orders on the Internet: The Cyber-Construction of Tradition and the McDonaldisation of Spirituality. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 26(1), pp. 51–75. Milani, M. & Possamai, A., 2016. Sufism, Spirituality and Consumerism: The Case Study of the Nimatullahiya and Naqshbandiya Sufi Orders in Australia. Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 10(1), pp. 67–85. Overgaard, S., 2002. Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Revisited. Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 3(2), pp. 73–90. Pintard, R., 2000. Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Genève: Slatkin. Ritter, H., [1955] 2013. The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in teh Stories of Farid al-Din Attar. Translated by John O’Kane with Editorial Assistance of Bernd Radtke. Leiden: Brill.

The journey through Islam 65 Rumi, J., [1375] 1997. Mathnawi-e Ma’nawi. Translated by Reynold Nicholson. Tehran: Marvi Publishers. Rumi, J., [1380] 2002. (Diwan-e Shams) Kulliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Edited by Badi alZaman Furuzanfar. Tehran: Talayeh. Rumi, J., 2004. The Masnavi: Book One. Translated by Jawid Mojaddedi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, D. J., 2013. Being and Time. In: F. Raffoul & E. S. Nelson, eds. The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 191–198.

3 ‘Being Sufi’

Introduction This chapter continues to outline the emerging category that assists in the hypothesis of this book: if Sufism does not come to its own authentic experience, then it cannot be Sufism in the truest sense; it will always be in the state of inauthenticity, operating out of its habituated Islamic paradigm. If, and when it does, however, Sufism must be then treated as what it potentially holds, and the possibility that it provides for understanding, interpreting, and becoming through the experience of being Sufi. The chapter proceeds to describe the categories ‘authentic Sufi Dasein’ and ‘inauthentic Sufi Dasein’ to resolve the bipolarity of experience in Sufism – as familiar, and as other, to Islam. In terms of the categories, the former functions in harmony with the ontological condition as described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly as mysticism within the Islamic paradigm. The latter does not function in accordance with the ontological condition described, which is how it is defined as an anomaly within the category of mysticism. This chapter draws on several case studies from the tabaghat genre, specifically that of Attar’s, and other key Sufi works to conduct its analysis.

The ontological question for Sufism In the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the principal measure of religion stems from compassion. And so, mysticism, ontologically speaking, and within the context of religious life, is about the meaning carried behind certain words, thoughts, rituals, and so on, to be discovered not by rational faculty alone, but also through the experience of the language that leads to new forms of awareness. One important phenomenological distinction that must be made between religion and mysticism is the respective attitude towards the substance of faith or belief. For instance, the belief in Revelation is religiously constituted by the goal to revere, imitate, and repeat its content ritually and assiduously. Yet similarly the same belief is mystically constituted by the goal to gain new experience from that foundational source that serves as the wellspring of possibility. In this way, mysticism is never just about one thing in the way that it presents itself, nor subsequently in the way that it is defined. It is always, in its truest ontological sense, revolutionary DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-4

‘Being Sufi’  67 and transformative in perpetuating divergence and change in the phenomenology of religion, and by so doing, always in a certain kind of necessary friction with the status quo. In quite the opposite terms, religiousness is ontologically about the preoccupation with the preservation of the achieved standard. In this chapter, I want to take up the question of being that Heidegger brought to the foreground of Western thought in the workings of his philosophy. This very question is what is therefore applied to the working out of the nature of Sufism in this book. In this chapter, specifically, the point made is about what makes Sufism distinct, not just as Islamic, but as something pointing to meaningfulness beyond it. The paradox of the problem, as hitherto pointed out, is that were Sufism to be Islamic it would not be Sufism and consequently were it to be not Islamic it would no longer be Sufism. This problematic in itself holds the key to the question about the being of Sufism, which has begun to be unpacked in the first two chapters. Sufism is more than what it seems if, and when, but precisely because, it is what it is as mysticism, and not as a religion. By this measure, one can discern clear signs of difference between mystical-Sufism and religious-Sufism, or put another way, Sufism as mysticism or Sufism as religion. The latter refers to the normalisation of mysticism within the religious context and its appropriation by the religious ethos as part of that religion’s identification. Sufism is formalised and institutionalised within the cultural framework and put to task in preserving core religious identity. The propensity for possibility is curtailed by the proclivity for preservation. By this measure, it is possible to differentiate the Sufis, and their Sufism, though not as variegated by silsila, bay’a, tariqa, in the formal institutional sense, but by its value ontologically. I am going to begin to apply the appropriated neologisms authentic-Sufi-Dasein and inauthentic-Sufi-Dasein to make the distinction between what I have otherwise termed mystical-Sufis and religious-Sufis. As a point of clarification, neither does the latter assume that those identified with it are devoid of the mystical entirely, nor, vice versa, is the former presumed to be indicative of those identified with it as being devoid of religiosity. The phraseology authentic and inauthentic, as an adaptation of Heidegger’s own usage for discussing Dasein, is to delineate a history of Sufi figures, that is, those that are authentic and thus Sufi in the ontological sense of being Sufi as outlined earlier. These anomalous figures in Sufi history are not representative of a tariqa in the ordinary sense but are themselves tariqa phenomenologically and, strictly, in the ontological sense. Among them are also those who are not, strictly speaking, considered tariqa, but whose texts serve in the same capacity. So, there are those Sufis who are ‘icons’ of the tradition and there are those whose texts are ‘gospels’. Of the former we can list Bayazid, Hallaj, Shams, and of the latter the works of Attar, Rumi, and Ibn Arabi. In the spirit of Heidegger’s work on classical Greek figures such as Parmenides and Aristotle, I  admittedly seek to interpret selected Sufi figures to review and reaffirm them, but more forcefully to reclaim them (as Heidegger had done his heroes) from the prevarication imposed by the present state of the category. In this way, we can begin to answer the question of ‘why Sufism at all, rather than just Islam?’, but more importantly the question that has not yet been seriously taken up by scholarship about the relationship between Sufism and ‘Being’. As for the

68  ‘Being Sufi’ former question, I would say that this has been addressed adequately in the first two chapters, and also summarised here in the opening remarks. It is the second question that is more pertinent, directly relating to the investigation into thinking about Sufism here embarked.

Clarification of Being-ness in Heidegger’s thought The guiding question of Western metaphysics was encapsulated by ‘what is a thing?’ It was progressed to ‘what is a thing as such?’ and finally to ‘what is being itself?’ It is Heidegger who raises the question of ‘Being’, which to his claim had never been previously raised, based on the premise that Western thought has always determined the nature of the human being in relation to Being and it has also held that the human being exists in correspondence to Being. As such, his work predominantly argued for what should have been obvious about the human being as a creature that has language and, therefore, that the human being has a language by virtue of the fact of existing in a knowing-relation to Being. What he set out to explain, as he puts it in simple terms, is that the question of Being has not been raised because Being itself has remained concealed from the human being, and thus the question that had to be raised and the answer that has to be received is in regards to ‘what and who man is’ (Heidegger, 2019).1 Heidegger’s philosophy was distinguished from other modes of Western thought not by the question of being as in ‘being of things’, that is, this or that thing, but by the essence of being itself, that is, not this or that thing. He was preoccupied with precisely the pursuit of working out ‘what being is’; hence to answer the whence and why of meaningful presence at all, the correct question had to be asked. This was not in terms of ‘whence beings?’ or ‘whence being at all?’ To Heidegger, it was clear that Being was the key to the self-understanding of beings and that the ‘open clearing’ was the answer to where being had arisen. The question that undoubtedly remained was ‘whence and how is there “the open?” ’, by which was intended ‘Being’. Accordingly, the disclosedness of things was understood through the process of being in relation to clearing, in relation to appropriation, that allowed for meaningful disclosedness in and with the human apprehension of those things that were encountered in the world. This was linked to the disclosedness of the clearing which was the hidden presence of the openness that lets things be intelligible, that is, ‘have being’. The why and how was answered by the fact that the human being was the event as the open-clearing where meaningful apprehension took place (Sheehan, 2015, p. 125). Heidegger meant by the reference to ‘Da[-]sein’ two things. Dasein generally indicated the concrete, personal hermeneutical openedness, while Da-sein was used to denote ‘essence’ or the ontological structure of the same openedness (Sheehan, 2015, p. 136). His intention was to demonstrate by Da as interpreted to mean the ‘openness’ or ‘the open’ to assert the human being as ‘thrown-open’ and ‘being brought into one’s openedness’ (Sheehan, 2015, p. 137). Thereby, Da means appropriated openedness; the appropriated clearing of being. The human being is the Da, which is the openedness of being and Da being the word for the open expanse of the clearing, that is, human ‘ex-sistence’ (Sheehan, 2015, p. 135).

‘Being Sufi’ 69 The distinction here between the personal and structural was important to understanding Heidegger’s thinking. The personal was indicative of our state of living in a range of concrete possibilities, while the structural referenced our very essence as a possibility. Heidegger placed emphasis on possibility over actuality: ‘Higher than actuality is possibility’. He meant this primarily as an inversion of the metaphysical tradition of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. In that tradition, the human condition is defined by its movement towards actualisation – ­regardless of whether the goal is fulfilled – in imitation of God. In it, actuality (to actually be) is placed higher than possibility (the ability to be). Heidegger proposes the reversal of this proposal, because, as he consistently demonstrates in Sein und Zeit, to be Da-sein means that as possibility one has exceeded oneself-as-actuality, that is, structurally, by one’s very essence. For Heidegger, the human being is unequivocally an excessus. The full weight of Heidegger’s philosophy is brought to bear on the issue of hermeneutics and ontology as part of the entire project of phenomenology as he sees it in the following terms: When (personal) ex-sistence embraces its (structural) ex-sistence, Heidegger says, one is ‘authentic’, the self-responsible author of his or her own finite life. When ex-sistence flees its ex-sistence, it is ‘inauthentic’, insofar as it refuses to fully understand and embrace itself and ‘become what it already is’. (Sheehan, 2015, p. 139) In Heidegger’s view, life is a natural process of disclosure, whereby life as ‘selfunfolding’ is ‘a being-moved’ that is ‘change whereby something hidden comes to light’, which is ‘disclosedness’ (Sheehan, 2015, p. 140). We therefore understand, in practical terms, the things we are in contact with, and make use of, in terms of the purpose we assign to them and within a world of meaningfulness that shapes our understanding of things (Sheehan, 2015, p. 146). As it has come to light, Heidegger’s intentions for Being and Time were set out in two parts, each with a distinctive aim to dramatically revise the intelligibility of meaningfulness. The first part was to put forward the human being as the source of meaningful presence in relation to the things in the world. And as such, the second part was to take apart the preceding philosophical tradition until we are left with what remains of our own guiding experience that had primordially disclosed to us the nature of (our own) being (what we are). So, it is uncanny in the way that a poem from Abu Said Abu al-Khayr captures the ontological sentiment of Heidegger’s thought – about the importance of the role of being in understanding meaningfulness in relation to itself as Being – well before in the eleventh century: Until college and minaret have crumbled This holy work of ours will not be done. Until faith becomes rejection And rejection becomes belief There will be no true believer.

(Shah, 1968, p. 219)

70  ‘Being Sufi’ The idea, then, is to assert that for Sufism to be ‘authentic’ it has to realise itself as it is: Islam; and for a Sufi to be disclosed as Muslim. But this is not in the ordinary sense that is usually perceived. Sufism is typically thought of in popular rendering as spiritual escapism and the Sufi as seeking otherworldliness. Hence a Sufi does not flee from his or her existential crisis and neither is Sufism about the denial of Islam. Conversely, the Sufi finds meaningfulness in the possibility of unfolding and, Sufism, therefore, is the process of coming to understand the meaning in relation to itself as Islam. Sufism is not Islam, and the Sufi is not Muslim in actual fact, but only as a possibility of self-disclosing.

Persian culture and the revelation of mysticism This brings us to the question of what makes Sufism distinct from Islam, phenomenologically, and thus what demarcates ‘authentic’ from ‘inauthentic’ Sufi Da-sein. One distinguishing factor is inexplicably love, and with its phenomenology of love, Sufism renews the ontology of faith as the possibility of being over and above the Islamic actuality of being. Ibn al-Arabi’s poetic verse expresses the ‘Sufi turn’ – if we may borrow from Heideggerian literature – explicitly: ‘I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith’ (Ibn al-Arabi, 1911). It should be clear that the reference made to the ‘love tradition’, or as it later comes to be known in Sufi literature as ‘the religion of love’ (al-din al-hubb [Ibn Arabi], mazhab-e eshq [Rumi]), is not an attempt to assert this tradition alone as the sole representative of authentic-Sufi-Dasein; it is, however, a significant example, and one that cannot and, should not, be underestimated. Those that belong to the tradition of love are defined by a certain distinct experiential transformation that has a distinguished linguistic marker, for which they are well known and, which is immediately noticeable in the Sufi corpus. Such description has also traditionally produced a soft boundary to demarcate the religion of love within the wider pool of Sufi mystical experience, though in no certain terms. Furthermore, not all Sufis who make proclamations of love are of the tradition (of love) nor should they be counted as belonging to it. Many Sufis allude to love, either directly or indirectly, because it is a prominent theme in the Islamic mystical tradition, but there is a clear difference between those that are of the religion of love and those who index it as part of the mystical ethos. Generally speaking, love itself is not overtly part of the Islamic discourse, but it is inherently a component of Islamic consciousness through the Qur’anic injunction to compassion and mercy. The example of the exchange between al-Hallaj and Ibrahim al-Khawwas demonstrates what I am talking about: it is said that ‘when Husayn-b-Mansur, God hold him in His mercy, came to Kufa, and stayed in the house of Muhammad ibn Hasan ‘Alawi, Ibrahim Khawwas, God hold him in His mercy, entered Kufa, and, having learned that Husayn was there, went to see him. Husayn asked him: “O Ibrahim, what benefit have you derived from these forty years persistence in this way

‘Being Sufi’  71 of life (going around the desert, living in hardship)?” He answered, “the way of abandonment to God (tawakkul) has been opened to me.” “(Unfortunate one!) You have used your life to construct your interior dwelling (fi’umran batinika); when will you make up your mind to consume yourself in the divine Unity?” ’. (Massignon, 1982, p. 60) The story of love in Sufism has an interesting history that has been long explored, but it also has a Persian twist. The subject is love, and the discourse entails its specific use in a region that had far-reaching cultural and linguistic influence throughout the heartlands of medieval Muslim civilisation. Love as an aspect of religion does not have an obvious place in Islam; not because there is no love to be found in Islamic praxis, but rather it does not play a prominent role as part of its language, and furthermore, it is not on the forefront of its religious discourse historically. However, Muslims do find love in Islam and, in due course, they do see their religion in the light of love, in particular, thanks to the Persian affair with Islam. The element of love, which was peripheral to the main thrust of Muslim consciousness during the first two centuries, is brought to the fore, emphasised, and developed in the Islamic context because of the Persian experience. Persian culture, as such, facilitated the emergence of a new mystical language that brought the latent experience of love more sharply into focus than ever before in Islamic history. The language and experience of love are made prominent because of Persian influence. The love tradition was particularly harnessed and refined in the works of Ahmad Ghazali, Ruzbihan Baqli, Abu Said Abu’l Khayr, and culminated with the poetic masterpieces of Attar and Rumi. Yet it was not exclusively Persian nor a Sufi invention. The Arabs had always had poetry, but the Persians became masters of the art of poetic writing and storytelling – as they had excelled in all things Islamic, including Arabic – since their conversion to the faith. The virtue of love’s creed was a popular theme outside of the mystics’ circle too. It was appreciated by the cultured who admired the works of prominent literati such as Firdausi, Khayyam, Nizami, Sa’di, and Hafiz who gave it pride of place. Whilst the ideal of love was shared through general and popular stories like Vis and Ramin, Layli and Majnoon, Farhad and Shirin, and Rustam and Sohrab, the mystics used them for didactic purposes in relaying the mystical interpretations of them, and ultimately, it was for the advocates of the religion of love a way to express how their experience was distinct from Islam. Such ancient tales may have conveyed unrequited love on the surface (say, between ‘star-crossed’ lovers or between father and son), but they were made to reflect the sorrowful and tragic state of human affairs, not in its plain misfortune, but rather in its blind search for truth. Love’s face was the dark locks of Layli’s hair, while the aesthetics of beauty represented the delights of the divine that was visible only to the fated lover (majnoun) struck by the rain of arrows from the Beloved’s gaze. All such stories represented the popular expression of the human search and longing for its Creator, but such stories were also poignantly about the taking for granted of the latter until it was too late. In

72  ‘Being Sufi’ the Muslim world, and through the Persian-inspired mystical experience, in particular, the great tale about the sacrifice of love finds new soil and a new voice through multiplicity of expression. Ultimately, what comes to be known as the ‘religion of love’ is representative of the Sufi appropriation of what has its source in the cardinal genre of the New Testament, becoming not only the prominent theme of sacrifice as the pinnacle expression of divine love, as it is in Scripture, but also love as the central theme, within the literary world of Persian culture and language. In pronouncing this, Ibn al-Arabi is the most noticeable, but it was already noticeable much earlier on with Rabia al-Adawiya. These two figures are basically the outliers to the Persian figures that dominate the mystical love tradition; and yet, even though they were not Persian, they were affected deeply by the gravity of its ethos. In Basra, Rabia was in the ancient Persian heartlands, and Ibn al-Arabi relocated to Syria where he was exposed to the already established traditions of Persianate Sufism.2 The language of poetry, especially when in the employ of a mystic – where it is engrossed by the metaphoric language of love to convey meaning as excavated in the religious corpus – was meant as a sign for theoretical exploration and not confined to literalism. So, a verse from the Divan-e Hafiz reads: Hafiz in haal-e ajib baa kee tavaan goft ke maa/bolbolaaneem ke dar moosem-e gol khamoosheem. Oh Hafiz, with whom can we speak of such peculiar feeling? For we are like nightingales that have fallen silent before the rose.3 The value in paying attention to the Persian is not symbolic or for its own sake; nor is it out of a desire to pay homage to the exotic in an Orientalist revival kind of way. It rather demonstrates how the majority of the Sufis were socially and culturally contextualised in an area heavily Persianised. It was because of the Persian milieu that certain Sufi figures were able to redress fear of God with love of God. That is not to say that there is something about the Persian per se that allows for love – though Persianate modifications to Islam were particularly open to fresh ideas, either through a reworking of originals or the exploration of foreign – but that the mere distance in culture and language from the ‘mother tongue’ of Islam (i.e., Arabic) gave it enough room for independence, allowing the blossoming of its mystical tradition. Persian lent itself easily to the poetic, and the poetic provided the alternative to the theological as the language dominated by Arabic. Of course, Persians as grammarians of Arabic were expert theologians too, but the Persian language was characteristically utilised for poetic expression as a show of being cultured and refined. In this way, the Persian-poetic factor has its place as a force of resistance to religious change imposed by the Arab-Islamic. This is not dissimilar to the Hellene attempt to preserve the Hellenic from the rise of Christian power just a few centuries prior. The Neoplatonic School is a well-known example of a final desperate attempt to salvage important Hellenic ideas. The Persian exchange, however, is overtly about cultural and linguistic identity, because in the case of the Hellenic crisis, Christianity did not impose language or culture;

‘Being Sufi’  73 in fact, it absorbs the Hellenic in the end. Whereas in the case of Persian culture and language, it was mainly a confrontation of ethos rather than ideas, since Islam enforced Arabic culture and language from the outset, so much so that a persisting false impression is that the two are synonymous. This important difference aside, the Persian effort to reassert itself, like the Hellenic, is comparable as an effort to salvage the past in the face of emerging religious powers. What is distinct, however, about the Persian effort within the mystical domain is its championing of the doctrine of love, which is precisely because of the revelation of mysticism that leads to a shift in Muslim consciousness. The framework of culture and language Martin Heidegger, in his lifetime, made a big deal out of the importance of language and a people’s destiny. He valued the Greeks, and fancied the Germans as inheritors of the Greeks, arguing that it is they alone that have had a nation and they alone that make their own destiny (Heidegger, 1976; Richardson, [1981] 2017]). His chauvinism, understood in context, that is, in light of his project to tackle the history of Western thought, demonstrated the great importance of language and thinking as integral to the question of Being. The human being is essentially a thinking being, that is, it is a plane of intelligibility, but one that is in essence and function a speaking being. Ergo, intelligibility culminates in language whereby Being is intimately linked to language (Heidegger, 2011). To his mind, it was the link between the German language and Greek language and thought that gave the German people a special place in history. He spoke about the way that language played a part in shaping not only ideas but ultimately the destiny of a people. The general purview of Heidegger’s thinking allows us to think about the role of language as either enabling or restrictive. German was by no means restrictive; its language and people were inheritors of a history. To him, the idea of language (in relation to Being) was closely tied to its role in bringing forth what was not there before: poiesis. For Heidegger, the challenge was to demonstrate the unfolding of Being as the essential thrust of meaningful existence. The pursuit of meaning – to make sense of who we are – was, therefore, a constant activity of the engagement between intelligibility and language for the sake of a ‘bringing forth’ to life new possibilities through human existence. Language was, therefore, key to philosophy, but not always in the conven­ tional sense. There is an unspoken mysticism in the way that language is used in Heidegger’s philosophy. Language can be studied for the retrieval of what has hitherto been unknown – that is to say, it was there to begin with in order to be retrieved – but it can also be formulated anew to convey something that was not formerly available. What Heidegger makes possible is language as a fundamen­ tal experience of being human, which is a key to understanding that there is an unspoken mysticism in his work about the role of Being and the destiny of the human being (Caputo, 1986). Heidegger’s thinking, and indeed what makes him a great thinker, is that he is never in the category of thought or paradigm of thinking in which others operate or expect him to do so. He is a thinker who exercised his

74  ‘Being Sufi’ thought at the limits, the very boundary, of philosophy (Caputo, 1986, p.  1). Heidegger was never interested in philosophy for its own sake, but perhaps as a tool to undo the threads of metaphysics; yet it was indubitably about the overcoming of both metaphysics and, in due course, philosophy itself. The task was ‘thinking’ (Denken) not philosophy; and certainly not metaphysics, new or old (Caputo, 1986, p. 1). No doubt, he distinguished ‘thinking’ from ‘philosophy’, and he did his thinking in a space that was neither quite philosophy nor metaphysics, at least as far as he was concerned. Perhaps if we conceive of his exercise in thought as a thinking through philosophy, since it is as he himself says, ‘But with the end of philosophy, thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning’ (VA, p. 83/96; cited in Caputo, p. 1). Most importantly, Heidegger’s mysticism is in the very nature of his thinking, not in, but between spaces wherein his contemporaries dwelt. Most strikingly, it was before philosophy – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – that great thinkers existed and, as such, now that philosophy is at an end, great thinking can once again emerge: ‘Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet “philosophers”. Why not? Because they were the great thinkers’ (WdP, 52–53; cited in Caputo, p. 1). Some important observations: Persian culture and language play both a revelatory as well as a revolutionary role in the course of Islamic history. My positioning of the ‘the Persian’ is not to elevate it above Arabic, ­neither to set it up as the climax of mystical experience. Not the least, it is another barrier in thinking and seeking (like that of metaphysics) that needs to be left to itself (Caputo, 1986, p. 5). The love tradition is itself not about the ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’ of love, but the experiential transformation that it perpetuates for the individual(s) engaged in the exercise of seeking truth and meaning through and beyond the boundaries of religion and tradition. It is for those who are in-between what is and what is yet to be. In this sense, Persian culture, when it comes to the fore in the history of Sufism, offers through the fundamental experience of its language, not only everything that yet remains latent for retrieval, but more importantly, potentiality for new understanding. I suspect, and I can only anticipate this as a historical happenstance, as there is no irrevocable evidence, that ‘Persian’ was understood, and used, by those who were immersed in its culturo-linguistic revolution in the same way as ‘Hellenic’ was used to capture a people, their culture and language by the Neoplatonists. And it is specifically a culture and language that reveals a new way of thinking by transitioning from the old, which is common to a mystical identity without a name. So, in an inverse of Iranian Studies, I would set ‘Persian’ apart from Iranian, taking Iranian as part of a specific ethnic group in a larger pool of peoples today defined by their own independent national identity, but all of which can be arguably posed under a common heritage, that is, the Persian. I would go so far as to say that Persia does not belong to Iran, but Iran belongs to Persia! After all, in the Greco-Anglo world, the Persians are the namesake for the empire they built from the small tribe they were. Persia is, therefore, heir to a range of languages, all of which speak the language of culture that has been historically shaped by revelations and revolutions, being a land that has undergone countless transformations and whose psyche is witness to an eternity of suffering, death, and reinvention. As such, the birth of Farsi brings with it a system of communication (i.e., language

‘Being Sufi’  75 and thinking) already richly endowed with its own unique symbolism and emotionality. It is no surprise, then, that it lends itself so readily to poetics – and more importantly to the poietic – and, because of this, to mysticism. The mysticism that comes through to us in the Persian language and culture is not technical or intellectual, as is, for example, the Neoplatonic, but rather and primarily emotional and expressive. The words used to convey ideas or experiences of the sacred are distinctively Persian, in the sense here discussed, and draw on an experience that is defined by the zeitgeist of the ninth through to the fourteenth century. The Persian milieu is therefore a fertile ground for new ideas and thinking. Whether Arab speaking or Farsi speaking, mystics who were genuinely engaged in the search for truth and meaning had at their disposal an alternative conceptual framework made possible due to the shift in language. This allowed for the increased possibility (in the medieval era) to interpret the experience of the human–divine relationship in a way that was markedly distinct to that which was available in the Islamic Arabic framework at the time. The product of this exercise was the intricate development of the ‘religion of love’ or the Persian mystical tradition, which was undoubtedly linked to Sufism but not necessarily confined to it. The Persian-speaking Muslims made not only a new language for describing their experience of the divine but a new ‘religion’ based on a fundamental appropriation of the loanword ishq (passionate-excessive-crazy-love). The intensity of this experience in the Persian language sets out an entirely new epistemology for the mystical path as seen for instance most distinctively in Attar’s portrayal of the Seven Valleys of Love. So, I would suggest that it is the Persian culturo-linguistic factor that determines the distinctive nature of Persian religious experience generally, including its experience of Islam as well as Sufism. Before we go on to expand on the ontology of love and the use of the terminology in the framework of Persian language, it is apt to say a few words about the figures I have in mind, singled out as ‘partisans of love’ (shi’at al-ishq) and ‘the people of love’ (ahl al-ishq), who follow the ‘way and method of love’ (tariqat al-ishq), and exercise its ‘doctrine and creed’ (madhhab al-ishq), as is based in the ‘commandments of love’ (shari’at al-ishq), thus participating in the ‘religion of love’ (din al-ishq), and for whom there is ‘naught but love’ (ila ishq)! The lovers’ school of thought Of the 75 ‘saints’ listed in Attar’s tadhkirat al-awliya, a significant number are of Persian descent and the greater portion still – including those who are not ­Persian – from regions within the Persian sphere of influence. In any case, it can be said that from those that substantially impacted upon the development of Sufism, the most well-known and recognised (apart from our two noted outliers) were Persian. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Attar’s list is not one of Sufis per se. The intention here is not to place unwarranted emphasis on the Persian aspect of Sufism; on the contrary, the point (I believe) that even Attar had made by producing his list was that being of Arab or Persian stock was not the issue. The qualification of what constituted a ‘Sufi’ was something far more fragile. It certainly was not contained by, or in, the category, but rather in the correct ontology. To reiterate the point made

76  ‘Being Sufi’ earlier in Chapter 1, it seems that Attar intended to point the reader to the meaning of text rather than the biographical surface of his prose work. My own list, which draws on Attar’s, includes figures that outreach the historical stamina of his own. Like Attar’s, it is about the qualitative representation of the figures included, but unlike Attar’s it is a shortlist of those determined as advocates of the love tradition alone. The list is by no means constrained by or limited to the figures noted. The love tradition is a product of the mystical experience within the Persianate world, but it is not exclusive to Persians. Lastly, I have noted those that I believe have an unquestioned place on the list. There may be more here not noted, but whom can be added with justification. These figures are selected not necessarily because they have been a profound influence in the development of the Sufi tradition, though some of them unquestionably have had a lasting impact on it. They are selected primarily because their discourse on love is such that it stands apart from the ordinary reference

Table 3.1 List of Sufi figures of Persian love tradition, denoting ethnicity and linguistic orientation Name

Originality

Language of significant works

Rabia al-Adawiyya (d. 801) Bayazid al-Bistami (d. 874)

Arab, born and lived in Basra Persian, native of northcentral Iran Persian, born Khuzestan province Persian, born and lived in Baghdad, family from Khurasan Persian, born Fars province and travelled widely Persian, born in Khurasan and lived in Nishapur Persian, born in Tus

Arabic speaking Arabic speaking Persian Sufi Arabic speaking Persian Sufi Arabic speaking Persian Sufi

Sahl al-Tustari (d. 896) Abu’l Hussain al-Nuri (d. 908) Mansour al-Hallaj (m. 922) Abu Sa’id Abu al-Khayr (d. 1049) Ahmad al-Ghazali (d. 1126) Ayn al-Quzat al-Hamadani (m. 1131) Ruzbihan al-Baqli (d. 1209)

Persian, born in Hamadan Persian Daylamite, born in Fars

Attar Nishapuri (d. 1221)

Persian, born in Nishapur (?)

Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240)

Arab/Berber, born in Murcia, lived in southern Spain, Mecca, Damascus Persian, born in Balkh and lived in Konya Persian, born in Komajan

Jalaluddin Rumi (d. 1273) Fakhruddin Eraqi (d. 1289)

Arabic speaking Persian Sufi Farsi speaking Persian Sufi Farsi speaking Persian Sufi Farsi speaking Persian Sufi Farsi and Arabic speaking Persian Sufi Farsi speaking Persian Sufi Arab speaking Farsi speaking Persian Sufi Farsi speaking Persian Sufi

‘Being Sufi’  77 that is made to the theme in Sufism generally, for one finds a discussion on love from many quarters in the world of Sufism such as the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the twelfth-century Qur’an commentator Rashid al-Din Maybudi or even the Hanbalite Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). Notwithstanding, the intensity of the language in the literature associated with the figures in my list begs the question as to whether their discussion on love is more than what it seems. The problem with previous studies on the role of love in Sufism is that love is taken for granted as part of the Sufi tradition. I have been explicit about this point in the preceding chapters that love is certainly not to be expected as part and parcel of Sufism per se, let alone Islam, just because Sufis (and for that matter, Muslims) are expected to be all-loving, merciful, and compassionate. It also goes without saying that not all Sufis are Whirling Dervishes reciting poetry, even though the impact of popular culture has largely succeeded in producing a fantasised view of Sufism. William C. Chittick and the late Leonard Lewisohn have been the chief proponents of the argument that love has its place in the Islamic tradition, which is championed by the Sufis and embodied in their literature. They made the move to underline love not only in the Tradition (Hadith and Sunna) but also to locate love as being emblematic of the din as based on the Qur’anic text. The commendable efforts of Chittick and Lewisohn aside, which of course helped produce a generation of scholarship more acutely aware of the ‘heart’ of Islam, the hermeneutics of love is, I  argue, made possible by a shift in perspective, and thus language, and ultimately interpretation of Islam. For certain, the Qur’an and Hadith contain enough to lend themselves to an interpretation of Islam through the lens of love, so that the virtuous effort of Lewisohn and Chittick was not entirely in vain, but the point not underlined by either of them is that the canon itself was impacted upon by the force of love through the ages in the longstanding tradition of JudeoChristian reckoning of the virtue. Yet, the shift in perspective, or rather the shift in consciousness, throughout the ages is something that must be underpinned by experience; something that was dormant, but which became prominent through the efforts of some, based on their new-found understanding. And herein lies the importance of the ‘Persianate’ of which both Lewisohn and Chittick were well aware and more or less highlighted in their work. It is important to note, therefore, that those included in my list demonstrate clear signs of making a distinction between ordinary religiosity and mystical experience; they also illustrate this in their poems by distinctive language that demarcates mystical experience from normative Islam. They embody a gradual, almost imperceptible, move away from religious love to mystical love. I have thus left out quite a number of figures who are included in the range allowed in the works of Chittick and Lewisohn (Chittick, 2013b; Lewisohn, 2015). I would reiterate that Chittick and Lewisohn’s contribution to the study of love in Sufism, as set in the Islamic tradition, is both prolific and dedicated. The difference here being that my work is on the anomaly, the exceptions to the (Islamic) norm. Having already explained why I have included those that I have, I will say something about three figures whom I did not include, but who are nevertheless significant in their contribution to the wider tradition of love and its culture of influence

78  ‘Being Sufi’ generally. These are Abdullah Ansari (d. 1088), Ahmad Sam’ani (d. 1140), and Rashid al-din Maybudi (d. c1175–1200?). Even though these figures speak profoundly about love in their works, it is strictly framed by the religion (Islam). As such, they are ‘religious lovers’ and ‘lovers in religion’ who are driven by their ‘love of God by acquiescence to religion’. What the reader must take note of is that the affair with ishq in the world of Sufism is one that is unmistakeably both riddled with controversy and borders on heresy, yet it is so precisely because of its ontological fixation on the human–divine/divine–human dynamic. Bringing into play the word ishq, therefore, stirs up the problem of divine manifestation and the accompanying tension that is connected to having the presence of the divine in the world and, more specifically, in the flesh. Whilst the Islamic theological framework absolutely does not allow for such a consideration as the Incarnation (recalling that al-Hallaj who famously said ana al-haqq was crucified [!]), those receptive to such analogical reasoning about the relationship of the divine to the human have found ways to convey such sensitivities in the form of stories and newly developed alternative (non-specific) ontologies about sacred manifestation and personification such as found in the Khidr (‘the green saint’).4 Scaffolding love Whoever dies in love, lives (!). Such is the sentiment from a famous verse of Rumi. But it is much older. It is what Jesus says to his disciples in reply to their conveying the desire of the Greeks to see him: unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it produces many grains. Whoever loves their life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12: 24–26, my translation) In what can only be an echo of the aforementioned verse, the poet sings: If you die in this love (ishq), you will gain life; Die and do not fear death, for you will rise up from this ground to the heavens. (DS: 636, my translation) Jesus is not alone among the charismatics of his time in emphasising the message of love in the scripture. He is, however, unique in his embodiment of it (Vermes, 1993, pp.  200–207). When asked about the Greatest Commandment, Jesus directly quotes the Old Testament: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:5) You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

(Leviticus 19:18)

‘Being Sufi’  79 The active verb used is habta. The New Testament Greek utilises agape (agapēseis) to capture the fullness of the meaning of the Hebrew and to tease out the Christian reading of the text in conveying that it is a reciprocal love between God (the Father) and human beings. Yet, it also draws on both eros and philia to illustrate that this is not a love removed or distanced, but a perfected love that is imminent and intimate, and that it is characterised by both a fondness and passion not contingent upon reciprocity. The lover simply loves. In the Islamic context, the balancing act of the divine and human relationship is, even in such a way of wording it, contentious, if not difficult to expound. Nevertheless, some Sufi, of whom the most celebrated is the Great Master, Ibn al-Arabi, were able to express the intimacy of human–divine relations by using erotic allegory thanks to the variety of expressions of love that were already available, in particular, as it had been cultivated within the Persianate literary climate. Ibn al-Arabi carefully elaborated on the ‘station of love’ (maqam-i ishq) as being made up of four related aspects: hubb, wadd, ishq, and hawa.5 It is noteworthy that in setting out the order of his list he offers a Gnostic-styled aeonic hierarchy, in which the lowest (or rather, the closest to us) of a fourstaged manifestation is ‘passionate love’. This proximity is a combination of the last two levels (ishq and hawa) given that this kind of love is the most tangible and felt experience of the divine, which is necessarily in the ‘fallen form’ (as denoted by hawa, i.e., Eve). In effect, Ibn al-Arabi wanted to cautiously prepare the grounds for making his point that ‘man can best contemplate God in the form of a woman’ because ‘man’s witnessing of God cannot take place outside of matter’ (Lewisohn, 2015, p. 175).6 Though not obvious by any means, this reading of love as produced by Ibn al-Arabi is no less demonstrative of the direct link between what he had appreciated in the state and station of love supreme. In fact, it was made possible only because of a personal encounter with a Persian girl from Isfihan who became for him the epitome of both the beauty and meaning of sacred manifestation (Shaikh, 2012, p. 14). In Sufi literature, more broadly, the genre is referred to as shahid bazi (‘the practice of witnessing beauty’). On the other hand, both hubb and wadd (i.e., al-Wudud, the active verb for ‘The Loving’, one of God’s names) are in the classical sense related to God and His mercy for creation and thus the more elevated terms utilised by those Sufis like al-Ghazali who perceived of love as chiefly a transcendental achievement. What is key in this exposition is the hierarchical method to show the link in the chain between human and divine as was prudently demonstrated by Ibn al-Arabi. The comparison on the other hand is to make the point about the Persianate, and not the Persian, in the circumstance: Ibn al-Arabi, though not Persian, is affected by the Persianate; whilst al-Ghazali, though a Persian, maintains the status quo in towing the line of Ash’arite dogma. Among the Farsi-speaking Sufis, ishq became the dominant reference point for love, representing the fullness of meaning conveyed by both the extremity and passion component of love. This is important not necessarily because the term ishq per se is used, as will be discussed later, but precisely because the meaning intended when ‘love’ is referenced was such as when Rabia used only hubb and muhabba to communicate her state in relation to God.

80  ‘Being Sufi’ The ‘religion of love’ in the mirror of Islam On the religion of love, the works of Chittick and Lewisohn are among the most distinguished. Lewisohn’s ‘Sufism’s religion of love’ (2015) that offered a thorough survey of the language of love in Sufism from Rabia to Ibn al-Arabi is perhaps the most directly relevant text on the subject. Chittick’s ‘The religion of love revisited’ (2013b), while primarily a comparison of Rumi and Ibn alArabi’s notions of love, is of equal relevance to the present analysis. As I have already indicated, my reading of the religion of love differs from the conclusions reached by Lewisohn and Chittick. I will shortly refer to some specific points that Lewisohn raises in his article in the following section. Immediately after that, I will turn my attention to Chittick’s sketch of love in Sufi thought. Chittick (2013b) in effect produced an outline for the religion of love located within the Islamic framework. Whilst I  do not disagree with his analysis, I  am inclined to read further into what he had outlined. To be sure, one can read Rumi and others into their proper Islamic context and carefully recognise their role as lovers in relation to their Muslimness. This much is responsible scholarship. In my analysis, however, I want to push past the ordinary scope of investigation. In the first instance, I do not at all envisage Sufi figures – such as those noted in my list – as having a finality to them. On the one hand, they are restricted by the finite structures in which they operate, yet on the other hand, they are also unrestricted beings within a finite structure with unlimited potential. For example, what I mean is that what Rumi says about dying in love to truly live forever is not about an Islamic lesson per se, but something that a Muslim can contemplate and understand (and ultimately perhaps experience) at a deeper level as a human being. Here I  want to present what is essentially a summary of Chittick’s rendition of the religion of love for the sake of clarification and so as to demarcate what is effectively the religious as opposed to the mystical reading in the sense I endeavour to explain in this chapter. The religion of love technically has three tenets: 1 2 3

God loves human beings unconditionally; although God loves human beings unconditionally, He also loves them conditionally; and the lovers’ goal is to achieve union (wisal) with the Beloved.

These tenets, Chittick (2013b) explains, are underpinned by a singular principle which is ultimately based on the Shahadah: There is no true lover but God; And no true Beloved but God. In turn, the tenets are contextualised in relation to three broad themes that correspond to three principles of the Islamic faith: 1 2 3

tawhid – no true lover and true Beloved but God. prophecy – the path of actualising God’s love is in following prophetic guidance (sunna). the Return – the return to the Beloved where the lover’s goal is to achieve union with the Creator.

‘Being Sufi’  81 Chittick offers the aforementioned tenets based on the amorous language in the texts of Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi. However, and importantly, he sets the scene by demonstrating first that they were not inventors of the language of love nor were they unique in their usage (Ansari, Sam’ani, and Maybudi played a large part earlier on in setting the scene); they were simply exposed to it since ‘ “the religion of love” was part of the cultural ambience’ (Chittick, 2013b). In his reading of Ibn al-Arabi’s poem about the ‘religion of love’, Chittick asserts that the meaning is encoded as a reference to what Ibn al-Arabi takes to be religion as acquiescence. Specifically, acquiescence to Sharia (which is the religion from God) and to the Sunna of the Prophet. But what Ibn al-Arabi describes as the highest condition of acquiescence is the religion of love itself: ‘there is no religion higher than the religion that stands upon love and yearning’ (Chittick, 2013b). Sure enough, Ibn al-Arabi explains what he means by quoting the passage in the Qur’an that instructs Muhammad to say, ‘If you would love Allah then follow me, and Allah will love you’ (3:31). Yet the twist in the language of Ibn al-Arabi and, as such, in his meaning, is where he makes the reference to ‘Muhammadans’ which Chittick is right to point out (being Ibn al-Arabi’s distinction) as not meaning ‘the ordinary/everyday Muslims’, but rather ‘the perfect human beings . . . achieved only by the Prophet and a few of his great followers’ (Chittick, 2013b). Thus, the Muhammadan is code for those who (like Muhammad) had achieved the perfected state of love. What was the marker of such figures was that they stood in the station of no station (maqam la maqam). It might be a hair-splitting point, and one that differs from Chittick’s assessment only a little, but the little that it does, makes the greatest of difference, I think. Ibn al-Arabi refers to love in the context of his hermeneutics of religion, but his understanding of love is not limited to understanding love in the religious context. While he does literally refer to the broad themes of tawhid, prophecy, and the Return, his hermeneutics of Muhammad as love embodied makes his understanding unique not only from the ordinary everyday Muslim but from Muslims per se. What is distinctive in Ibn al-Arabi’s view of love – thanks to Chittick’s interpretation – is a new ontology of being Muslim. The Great Master is speaking about the love, which is not just acquiescence to the principles of love and loving as the real act of the religious, but also in the emersion of the agent in becoming the ontological model of that perfected being (Muhammad). Hence, becoming ‘Muhammadan’ is not only the definition par excellence in the language of Ibn al-Arabi as being Muslim, but rather, and in fact, in ‘being Sufi’. The lovers are ‘Muhammadans’ whereas the Muslims are not yet aware of their state as lovers. This is an incredibly important difference. Even though Ibn al-Arabi might be rightly called by some as a religious lover, he is nevertheless on my list because he is making a distinction with normative Islam at a deeper level still than others before him such as Ansari, Sam’ani, and Maybudi. Even though he would appear the best ‘religious lover’ in his adoration of Muhammad as the exemplar of being perfected, the difference between him and Rumi is also a point of clarification in this chapter: for Rumi, love – in its purity  – was possible only through Shams (as God/Lord=shams al-haqq) (DS: 1869).

82  ‘Being Sufi’ There is an indebtedness to the works of Chittick and Lewisohn’s in having paved the way in the study of the religion of love in Sufism. Although they do not make explicit the claim that they are examining the religion of love as Sufism, yet what is implicit in their study is that the religion of love is Sufism. We can glean from their study something far more than what they presented as the religious interpretation of Sufism’s religion of love. The religious reading is demarcated by clear factors such as has been discussed: that God loves all creation and humans can realise their state as lover and live by it in loving God; they can do this only when they acquiesce and follow the religion (Shariah and Sunna) to know what God wants from them in how to be a good lover; and therefore, the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet is what God wants one to follow, which is what it means when it is said that one must submit to the wishes of the Beloved. Even though neither Chittick nor Lewisohn had wished to openly suggest that this religion of love was something esoteric, and thus pertaining to a select (not elect) number of Sufis historically, housed within the religious Weltanschauung of Islam, it is nevertheless precisely what is derived from a careful analysis of their work. The religion of love is not the preoccupation of all Sufism or Sufis. It might even be said that although love is a theme embedded at the core of Sufi understanding, the religion of love was a product of the cultural experience of a spiritually infused Persianate world, which some Sufis built upon. Indefinable mysticism: the ontology of love in Sufism Atop the archway of the entrance to the mausoleum of Rumi, in Konya, there is a verse written in Persian: ka’bat al-usshaq baashad in maqaam ke har ke naaghess aamad injaa shod tamaam The Ka’ba of Lovers is the station Where those that arrive imperfect, are perfected. The technical use of Ka’ba as a station of lovers is highly provocative to say the least, but to suggest it might be a place other than the historical Ka’ba is even more tantalising. Of course, the esoteric language about the Ka’ba is not original to Rumi. It is the tradition of al-Hallaj, which has influenced Rumi’s thoughts. Al-Hallaj, it is reported, had a mock Ka’ba in his house for private worship, not because he did not make the pilgrimage (he did so three times in his lifetime) but seemingly to suggest something about the spiritual reality of pilgrimage (Mojaddedi, 2003).7 This idea is deeply planted in the mystical imagination of Rumi as told through a story about the ‘pilgrimage of Bayazid’ in the mathnawi (M2: 2227– 2251). In the story, Bayazid encounters an old man en route to the Ka’ba who asks that Bayazid donate the money for pilgrimage to him instead and circumambulate him seven times to fulfil the hajj. The story makes a clear distinction between the actual and spiritual Ka’ba, wherein the words are put into the mouth of the old

‘Being Sufi’  83 man who says to Bayazid that he is the hidden Ka’ba of the pious.8 ‘If you have seen me, the Lord also you have seen; around the Ka’ba of sincerity you have been’ (M2: 2247, my translation). So, there is an interlaced message implanted in the mathnawi of Rumi that harks back to the Hallajian legacy: the interlinked experience of that which appears to be what it seems and the underlying reality that it is. It is portrayed in the poetry as a paradox of what is visible but cannot be seen by the naked eye unless otherwise conceived in its correct context: the pir as the hidden-manifest Face of the Sacred and the secret-visible Gate to His presence. Now, above the verse at the entrance of the mausoleum is written the invocation: ya hazrat-e mawlana! Which is more provocative still than the verse after it in that it makes the connection complete in what Rumi makes apparent in his mysticism. Here, then, it is Rumi who is perceived as the pir and invoked by those who have understood the context of the master: ‘Oh Saint Mawlana!’ is in fact translated in its long form as ‘hear us our master, our saint, our saviour!’ The term hazrat is pregnant with a richness of meaning, one of which conveys the meaning ‘sacred-presence’ or the presence of the sacred. Long ago, in what seems now ‘a galaxy far, far away’, I  wrote in my first book about the critical point of departure in Sufi consciousness by citing Rumi’s famous verse in the opening pages of his mathnawi. He wrote that where the pen would favourably write what it knew, it nevertheless shattered upon its arriving to love (M1: 114); albeit, I noted the verse in conjunction with the Qur’anic line that God taught man by the pen (96:1–4). For me, this unequivocally illustrated the transformed experience of mystical awareness through divine love. At the time I argued strongly that this meant Sufism had entered into a new phase of understanding that was irreconcilable with Islam. The point I wanted to make was that Sufism had come into its own as the ‘Christianity’ to Islam’s ‘Judaism’. It was a strong point, and a hard one to make, but the more subtle version of it is presented in the previous chapter. The point I make here in this chapter is no less impactful. In fact, it follows through with the thinking unpacked in that chapter. Love opens a new chapter in Islamic history not as Sufism per se, but through key individuals who take up the love tradition, and by doing so take Sufism to the next phase of its manifestation. This newly emerging mystical consciousness in the Persianate world sprouted from the seedbed of experience relating to that indelibly spiritually infused culture and language and, Sufi or not, it located the ‘religion of love’ as a historically relative and culturally determined form of mysticism which had its own noticeable criteria. Its adherents were creative with religion and they had a profound relationship with the world in which they lived (that is to say, they were not disconnected from it); also, the nature of their works was distinctly about the subversion of normative views. As such, there are several points of concern that need to be addressed. One concern is whether the ‘religion of love’ (mazhab-e esqh) is a universal expression that generally pertains to, and defines, all Sufism. This is problematic, because a) it is simply not true that all Sufi tariqas centralise ‘love’ as a key ­doctrine – though they might value its virtue  – nor do they all self-identify as love-crazy

84  ‘Being Sufi’ dervishes! And b) Sufism’s ‘religion of love’ cannot properly be contextualised in the absence of the Persian cultural and linguistic element – a point which both Chittick and Lewisohn conceded in their work, that is, that ‘ “the religion of love” was part of the cultural ambience’ (Chittick, 2013b) – but which nevertheless remained problematic in their work, because, in my opinion, they took it for granted in their attempt to demonstrate the creed of love as comprehensively Islamic. Another concern is whether Islam is in fact a religion of love, and therefore, what the Sufis secretly knew to be ‘true’ Islam. This is especially problematic because the ‘religion of love’ does not emerge before the advent of certain Sufis who lived in the Persianate world. Even Rabia who was not a Sufi per se, but an ascetic, nor was she Persian or Persian-speaking, offered her mystical intuitions based on a love for God so ‘heretic’ in nature that her expressions forsook all else besides (not excluding religion, heaven and hell, even the Prophet!). The anomaly of her experience, which is so foreign to normative Islam, can only be explained by the context in which she was based. Moreover, even those who were born outside of the Persianate world, like Ibn Arabi, who was from Muslim Spain, came to be affected by its style and was to be heavily influenced by the love-tradition of the East upon entering its cultural atmosphere. This much is clear from the fact that nowhere does he speak about the idea of love’s religion in the entire futuhat al-makiyya (Chittick, 2013b). So, when we speak about the religion of love being Persian, we do not mean that one has to be Persian to experience it. It can be said that this Persianate religion of love, which is identifiable in the literature of prominent Sufis, was not a premeditated doctrine of the Islamic tradition. The Sufis who espoused its creed did not find it there waiting in the Islamic sources. Further, such a doctrine of love is not founded in Islam nor established there, but rather it was Persian Sufi thinkers who found phrases and excerpts within the Qur’an and Hadith, which they garnered through their own effort of independent interpretation (ijtihad) in support of the doctrine of love they espoused. It is, without doubt, therefore, at the time, a new development in Islamic history, both consistently and directly associated with the Sufi trend that favoured love over legality ( jurisprudence) and tradition (hadith) in the Islamised Persian world. Moreover, the notion that Islam is a religion of love – or that the Qur’an holds a doctrine of love – is ambitious and a misreading of the adherents of the ‘religion of love’. The commonly referenced Qur’anic passage that is summoned in support is: ‘He loves them and they love Him’ (5:54) (yuhibbuhum wa yuhibbu nahu). The Sufi reading of this isolated portion of the entire verse is extracted for a new purpose as seen in Ahmad al-Ghazali, being in particular that love is ultimately spiritual. Yet here is how the verse reads in its entirety: O you who have believed, whoever of you should revert from his religion – Allah will bring forth [in place of them] a people He will love and who will love Him [who are] humble toward the believers, powerful against the disbelievers; they strive in the cause of Allah and do not fear the blame of a critic. That is the favour of Allah; He bestows it upon whom He wills. And Allah is all-Encompassing and Knowing.

‘Being Sufi’  85 The Sufis who focused on this verse wanted to build on the relationship that is implied between the Creator and His creation, but what the verse is unequivocally clear about – in its proper context – is that this relationship, albeit mentioning love, is one that is conditional, that is, it is indicative of the love of God for His believing creature who, if they do not believe, will be replaced by another ‘people’ that will believe and then God will love them, allowing them to love Him. This is not the same thing as saying Islam is a religion of love. To be sure, the Sufi ‘religion of love’ has its own conditions, which are no less unforgiving, but its tenor is markedly different. The mystical reading of the portion lifted from the Qur’anic verse is based on a flirtation with heresy that foregrounds the contradictions and hypocrisy of religion. Its language draws on a combination of passionate love and divine love and fuses them within a single context for the purpose of making a point about the ultimate unity (wahdat) of being (wujud). So that Attar says: ‘whosoever becomes firmly rooted in love will transcend both blasphemy and Islam’ (MT: 1178), and Rumi echoes the same sentiment much later: ‘love’s state is apart from religions and faith; God is the lover’s religion; God is the lover’s state’ (M2: 1770). A marked difference is that the latter two verses employ the deliberate use of ishq; hence, mazhab-e eshq as opposed to 5:54 which uses hubb. It may also strike the reader that the Qur’anic verse 5:54 is a continuation of the Biblical Commandments on love as religion: to love God (and one’s neighbour) (Deut 6: 4–5; Lev 19: 18). Even a surface reading of 5:54 is enough to corroborate the correlation between it and the Mosaic Law. Yet what is unique to the New Testament in its utilisation of the same Old Testament passages is Jesus’ usage of the ‘Great[est] Commandment’ (cf. Deut 6: 4–5 and Mk 12: 28–34) which has its parallel in what the Sufis do with the Qur’anic verse in question. Both Jesus and the Sufis are engaged in a reading of the text that is interpretive, and that looks to the substance and not the letter. Moreover, in James’ epistle, he has the ‘law of love’ rendered further still to a higher status as the ‘royal law’ (Jm 2: 8). So again, we see the same recurrence in the Sufi literature of the adherents of love a comparable example to Jesus in the case of the ‘religion of love’, its school of thought and way (tariqat al-ishq). What is meaningful here is that the example of Jesus is comparable. Jesus did not preach against Judaism but taught within and through the Scripture as a basis for interpretation and in order to pronounce specific points of value pertaining to inner ethical and spiritual qualities of religiosity. The Sufi too had never objected to Islam, nor undermined its core integrity. Similarly, they were involved in the enterprise of underlining the practical spirituality of poverty and sincerity. In both Jesus and the Sufi, one can discern the twofold aspect of charismatic prophesying: by underlining the ethical and spiritual obligation of the religious, an unspoken challenge to historical authority is presented. All this is not to say that a notion of love does not (or cannot) exist in Islam or that it cannot be found there, nor that the Qur’an cannot yield itself to such an interpretation; far from it, the Sufis are testament to the fact that it can. Indeed, Islam was made to represent a religion of love by the mystical adherents that believed themselves Muslims in the most profoundly spiritual sense, such as

86  ‘Being Sufi’ Sam’ani, Maybudi, and Ansari would exemplify. Yet the transformation of its understanding undoubtedly took place at the hands of Muslim hermeneuts, that is, the Persian Sufi theoreticians such as Shaqiq al-Balkhi (d.  810), Ahmad alGhazali (d. 1121), Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209), Attar (d. 1220), and Rumi (d. 1273), as well as culturally significant mystical poets such as Khayyam (d. 1131), Nizami (d. 1209), Sa’di (d. 1292), and Hafiz (d. 1390). As a last point, it is worth stating that language is a sticking point in the debates about ‘Persian Sufism’, as though to say that being ethnically Persian and speaking or writing in Persian is a qualifier. But the issue does not relate to either Farsi or Arabic as languages for written or oral communication. Words can be borrowed from Arabic to be used in Farsi, like ishq for example, but the concept would be changed or shifted in some way. The sense in which language has been treated in mystical circles is more about language in the abstract and in relation to the mystical tradition that has its own repertoire of terms, categories, metaphors, and conceptualisations; in other words, its own ‘language’. As such, the point is more about the emphasis on cardinal terms, like ‘love’, that create new directions and define the distinctive orientation of the tradition in question. Even if we were to call on figures such as Tustari (d.  806), Nuri (d.  908), and Hallaj (m. 922), who wrote in Arabic, but were Persian, this would not matter. The point of the argument would still stand because they were agents of the Persian cultural style wherein the formal language being Arabic but the conceptual language being Persian, which meant that they used the term ishq (passionate love) as core doctrine for their mysticism. It was not Sufism that informed their mysticism, but their unique mystical consciousness that defined their Sufism.

Conclusion: a new paradigm for reading who is ‘Sufi’ Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) made two important points that are relevant to the argument made in this chapter: that we are thrown into the world/existence, where we find ourselves; and that we are also engaged in projecting ourselves into the future of our existence. In this sense, what it means to be Sufi must be discovered through the process of its self-disclosedness as itself, and also to be consistently facing towards its present–future of opening-up in itself. In the Sufi literature, this is not so uncommon, though the language used is often read in terms, and in the context of, a metaphysical understanding: the being of what Sufi/Sufism is, is dependent upon apophatic expressions such as that which undermines whatever constructed meaning of ‘Sufi’ or ‘Sufism’ is brought to bear at any one time in the historical process of viewing the phenomenon(a) in question. The Sufi themselves have simply referred to this as ‘the station of stationlessness’ (Arabo-Persian compound: maqam-e bi maqami) (Chittick, 2013a) or the ‘station of no station’ (Arabic: maqam la maqam) (Chittick, 1989). There are many more instances in classical Sufi literature that demonstrate this negation of the signifier of identity, and not always necessarily in terms of reinforcing the expected metaphysical trope of fana fi’llah:

‘Being Sufi’  87 Know for certain that the lover is not a Muslim. In the Religion of Love, there is no unbelief or faith. In love, there is neither body, nor intellect, nor heart, nor spirit – anyone who has not become like this is not that [i.e., a lover]. (R 768)9 Indeed, what is in Persian termed ‘non-being’ (nisti) better retains the phenomenal (rather than the metaphysical, which dominates in the Arabic). Even though this quatrain of Rumi’s is read in the light of a purely theological sense that undergirds the views of doctrinaire Muslims, it is more properly to be understood in terms of the Destruktion, in that it is about the task of destroying standing ontological concepts, or I  would argue, in our case, pre-existent onto-theological concepts that have been carried forward as custom and as almost an expected occurrence historically. In this chapter, I  have asserted authentic-Sufi-Dasein and inauthentic-SufiDasein as denoting the distinction between mystical Sufis and religious Sufis respectively. That is to say, that what I have argued to be authentic and inauthentic in order to make a further determination about the difference between the mystic and the religious known. The former, that is, the mystic is authentic because it is the self-responsible and self-realised agent, whilst the latter, that is, the religious is, in its refusal to understand and thus to become what it is, inauthentic. This is not to say that these stasis (let us call them) are fixed or determined; they are capable of change if and when the prerequisite is met. In effect, what I am indicating, in the language that I am deliberately using, is that which is defined in moments of existing. These moments allow for the opportunity of experiences to arise, and for something new to emerge. These moments are not indefinite, but momentary, and they are consistently representative of the state of the mystic (authentic-Sufi-Dasein). The Persian ethos shows that which defines its Being, that is, its distinctive style or mood; and this is what in this chapter  I  have foregrounded (because it is properly in the background, so that it can be the principal mood) as love. In the Persian ethos, love plays the role in the literature as world-creating and world-opening so much so that it is the most prominent renewal factor through which authentic-Sufi-Dasein finds the truth of (its) being. The most important point that needs to be made about love (in its Persian world-style-mood) is that it is purely the phenomenal aspect of what defines Sufi authenticity as mystical. Because it renews (without having recourse to the need for a metaphysic) the ontology of faith as a possibility of being over and above the Islamic actuality of being. Now, suppose that we consider the classical argument of the sober school of Sufism (advanced by Junayd and perpetuated in the discourse of al-Ghazali) that the Sufi is truly Sufi because they are more Muslim than a Muslim. If we are to read who is ‘Sufi’, we have to depart from this mode of ontotheological rendering of Sufism, and even go so far as to say that the real Sufi is who is not Muslim – even if only for the purposes of shattering the ideological barriers that have conventionally stood in the way of new ways of looking at Sufism. As such, the sign

88  ‘Being Sufi’ of authenticity would be to not be more Muslim, but not Muslim! Assuming that to be authentic is to be genuinely Muslim (that is, not to play pretend) is missing the point and reading what authenticity is only at a surface level. The authentic-SufiDasein is not interested in convincing other Muslims of its state of Muslimness. To do this would be the mark of insincerity instead. It is so, in a sense that must be now discussed in contrary terms, authentic-Sufi-Dasein feigned Muslimness because of the conditions in which they existed which forced them to do such a thing because there was no other choice but to not disclose their true identity. To go on with our thought experiment, they may have only revealed themselves fully to their closest disciples; and even then, it is not entirely clear whether they would have done that too – or to what degree in fact. We can be sure of this much about the ‘real’ state of Muslimness of Attar, Ibn al-Arabi, and Rumi, at least, all of whom represent the enclosed modality of discourse. Mansour al-Hallaj on the other hand represents the disclosed modality of discourse. Historically, the former are defined by enclosedness because of the latter’s disclosedness, but it is the latter that set the precedence for future authentic-Sufi-Dasein to emerge. In this sense, al-Hallaj is the reconfigurer, and the others (Attar, Rumi, Ibn al-Arabi) are the articulators, the distinction being that one enables and opens up a new world of being, while the other expands upon and perpetuates the new mode. In this way, al-Hallaj is in the Sufi historical context, what Jesus was to Heidegger as the representative of a paradigm shift. For Heidegger, the ground of being – the clearing is God, if God is to be considered at all. Jesus is, therefore, a God because his examples set up a new style/world. The work of art of what the sacrifice of Jesus represents is in itself capable of opening up new possibilities of perpetuating the mood of what it is to retain authenticity. Similarly, the strife implicit in the experience of al-Hallaj is that very clearing that allows for things to occur anew. As to the details of these examples, we will take them up in the following two chapters. For now, I would like to finish by way of reference to Heidegger’s explication of the mystery in art through discussing the ‘strife of earth and world’. This idea in Heidegger’s thinking conveys the necessary impossibility of completely disclosing what is implicit. In taking up the examples of al-Hallaj and Jesus, I have wanted to show that each of them is an event of significant change to their respective worlds as works of art. They represent the strife of earth and world in that they simultaneously reveal and conceal what they represent as truth. To bring to bear Heidegger on how we can read the Sufi, the examples I have drawn upon from the world of Sufism portray the competing aspects of the demand for comprehension and the impossibility of understanding. It is this process that Heidegger – having later arrived at through the Kehr (‘the turn’) – asserted as what gives the impression of history but which is in fact a series of understandings of being that makes history, in a Heideggerian sense, as Seinsgeschichtlich, in its continuous attempts to make known what is implicit. Because the world aspect is that which strives to make things known in full (to bring them to light as it were) so as to make the understanding complete, the earth aspect resists this at every turn. The inevitable failure to understand what everyone seeks to understand is what ultimately defines the work of art and presents us with the ground of being

‘Being Sufi’  89 and its work, as Heidegger demonstrated. The Persian world in which al-Hallaj found himself similarly offered later figures like Attar, Rumi, and Ibn al-Arabi the opportunity to appropriate the poetic language and the use of the poem as art to underline the necessity of strife that is needed for new ways of understanding. Though the Persian influence is generally recognised in the literature, it has nevertheless been presented as contextual happenstance and as secondary to the main phenomenon of Islam (see Chittick and Lewisohn). However, it is more correct to see it – as I have argued – as it having shown a world through a culture in which the religion flourished. As I have demonstrated, the Persian ethos has impacted the Islamic and allowed for a new kind of tension to emerge in which Muslims in the Islamicate world have been able to produce a sense of authenticity that had not been available since perhaps the initial phase of Muhammad’s own experience in Mecca.

Notes 1 On the technicality of Heidegger’s language and reference to his philosophical project see Thomas Sheehan (2015, pp. 123–125): ‘doctrine of meaning’ (Bedeutungslehre). 2 The often-cited evidence to this effect is his famous collection of poetry called tarjuman al-ashwaq, which expresses his love for an erudite girl named Nizam, from Isfihan (Shaikh, 2012, pp. 102–104). 3 I have offered a parallel translation to convey the literal sense of the words Hafiz employs in the Persian. However, this verse can be rendered more freely to convey the mood that Hafiz captures which is about a certain kind of mood that has befallen the subject in the verse who is unable to convey it with words. 4 Khidr appears to different prophets and saintly figures of importance in the Islamic tradition. However, his appearance is non-discriminatory, that is, there is no specific way that Khidr looks or is expected to look, let alone agreed to look like, except for the fact that he is somehow recognised as ‘green’. 5 See al-futuhat al-makiyya (The Meccan Revelations), ch. 178; cited in Lewisohn (2015, p. 174). 6 Lewisohn is paraphrasing Ibn al-Arabi’s comments on the issue from the last chapter of fusus al-hikam which elaborates on the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad. 7 It was also alleged that he advocated the building replicas of the Ka’aba for those unable to travel on Hajj. See Mojaddedi, 2003, notes: Massignon and Ernst. 8 Rumi describes Bayazid’s sincerity in seeking out God by way of discovering the ‘green saint’ (khidr) of the time. 9 I am using Chittick’s translation (Chittick, 2013b) because I agree with it and thus see no reason to translate it differently. It is from the Furuzanfar edition of the Kulliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi (Rumi, [1380] 2002).

Works Cited Caputo, J. D., 1986. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press. Chittick, W. C., 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chittick, W. C., 2013a. Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God. New Haven: Yale University Press.

90  ‘Being Sufi’ Chittick, W. C., 2013b. The Religion of Love Revisited. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 54. [Online] Available at: www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/religion-oflove-revisited.html. Heidegger, M., 1976, May 31. Der Spiegel. Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, pp. 193–219. Heidegger, M., 2011. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrel Krell. Abingdon: Routledge. Heidegger, M., 2019, February. Martin Heidegger Interviewed in 1963 (1964?) by Buddhist Monk Bikku Maha Mani. [Online] Available at: https://youtu.be/XcsBtl1SwuY [Accessed 14 March 2019]. Ibn al-Arabi, M., 1911. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq: A Collection of Mystical Odes. Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. London: Royal Asiatic Society. Lewisohn, L., 2015. Sufism’s Religion of Love, from Rabi’a to Ibn ‘Arabi. In: L. Ridgeon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sufism. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 150–180. Massignon, L., 1982. The Passion of al-Hallaj. Translated and edited by Herbert Mason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mojaddedi, J., 2003. Hallaj, Abu’l-Mogit Hosayn. Encyclopaedia Iranica, 10(6), pp. 589–592. Richardson, W. J., [1981] 2017. Only a God Can Save Us. In: T. Sheehan, ed. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 45–67. Rumi, J., [1380] 2002. (Diwan-e Shams) Kulliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Edited by Badi al-Zaman Furuzanfar Tehran: Talayeh. Shah, I., 1968. The Way of the Sufi. London: Octagon Press. Shaikh, S., 2012. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sheehan, T., 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Vermes, G., 1993. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. London: SCM Press Ltd.

4 Jesus as sign

Introduction: withdrawal This chapter is an exploration of Jesus as Sign in the Sufi experience. The main assertion of this chapter is that while the Sufi clearly use Qur’anic language to speak about their ‘Jesus experience’, it remains that their understanding of Jesus is comparable to the Gospelic account. Through an analysis of the language used by the Sufi in reference to Jesus, as well as a close examination of surah al-maryam (specifically, Q 19:16–35), I make the case that the phenomenological source of the Sufi experience of Jesus is an inspired Gospelic Jesus. Up to this point, I  have been slowly putting the pieces of an argument in place that the ontological underpinning of the Persian Sufi love-mysticism has its source, ontologically (and not historically), in an experience of Jesus that is peculiar to the Sufi style. Here, I will lay out the rationale at length with respect to the evidence at hand. For one thing, the Persian Sufi style is far more attuned to aesthetics, so much so that it has mastered the art, and presents its formulations (whether imagery or poetry) of the experience of the Beloved daringly, holding nothing back. In fact, Iranian artistic works, especially film-making in the present time, are of particular renown; but their notoriety is long established through religious art (going back to the sixteenth-century miniature art) wherein Persian artists depicted images of key religious figures, even revealing their faces. The point being, in the Persian Sufi tradition, which, I argue, is a world ‘worlding’ in which is contained ‘works of art’ – and the Sufi as ‘artist’ – has a sense for artistic expression as a mode of disclosure of the sacred through art. Here is where Persian Sufi poetry is particularly powerful in its representation, and although it might easily be glossed over as merely enjoyable works of literature, that is, in the ordinary sense, it is by no means anything less than art in the Heideggerian sense – as the most perfect anticipation of truth-as-self-disclosing. Where John the theologian penned: Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή Hafiz composed: ‫ انجا جزانکه جان بسپارند چاره نیست‬، ‫راهیست راه عشق که هیچش کنارنیست‬ DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-5

92  Jesus as sign Herein resides the premise of my argument. When Jesus is present in the text, there is no need for love to be mentioned. When he is absent in the text, love [by necessity] takes his place. We know that whenever there is mention of love in Persian literature in such a poignant way – as, say, in Hafiz – it is a referential to Jesus because it was his single and utmost commandment, and everybody knew it. Take the verse from Fakhruddin Eraqi (d. 1289): ‘Love courses through all things. . . . What has appeared – if not for Love – would not have been. . . . No, all of it is Love’ (Eraqi, 1982). In terms of Biblical typology, within the context of Persian Sufi literature, Jesus himself becomes an unspoken ‘antitype’ to Love as ‘type’, albeit, anachronistically; that is, the fulfilment of the promise of his teaching is brought to bear in the innermost secret (sirr) aspect of Sufi consciousness. It might be reasonable to ask on what grounds can such a proposition be advanced? We are reminded that Sufi literature is always read as part of the ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) of the Islamic. What if Sufi poems were read in relation to the teachings of Jesus contained in the Gospels, and thus allowing for a new clearing for understanding the language of Sufi poets, unconstrained by the Islamic? In Heideggerian terms, life is a natural process of disclosure, but it is always understood by us through the condition of its beingness. The reason that Sufism is not usually read outside of Islamic is because it is unusual to do so. The ‘Islamic’ is not something that we have constructed, nor is it anything that we have control over, but a dominant style that permeates a worldview that is germane to it. Accordingly, in the language of early Heidegger, ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-sein) is understood as our structural familiarity with the world of meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeitsein) (Sheehan, 2015, p.  146). In other words, in taking up a task, we already understand it in terms of what the task entails. If I take up a pen, for example, by doing so I am engaging with it through ‘being-in-the-world-of-meaningfulness’, that is, the need for it in terms of its final purpose (where both what it is and what the job is at hand) gives it its meaning for me (Sheehan, 2015, p. 146). There is hope in later Heidegger that the human condition might be able to transcend this situation that has historically defined it. If how we might understand anything is dependent upon its projected purpose, our relationship to it might change if we were aware of the process in the first place. In the same way, whenever Sufism is discussed, it is typically addressed in the sense of what it means to do so in terms of meaning having been already derived from its thrown-aheadness. Yet Sufism makes sense in the context of the Islamic only when it is seen as already being a part of it in terms of its telos. The example of Jesus as antitype, however counterintuitive, should suffice  – even if momentarily to help us suspend what we have always assumed about ‘Jesus’ and ‘Sufism’ – to make my point. In the Christian context, Jesus was not instantly or fully revealed [as ‘God the Son’] to all, and in fact, one could make the argument that aspects of his reality remained hidden to some. He is known as the Lord by textual witnesses that claim him as such. Now, in the Sufi context, ‘Isa (Arabic for Jesus) is distinguished from ishq in that the former is representative of the revealed and the latter the hidden aspect of the same person that is the Gospelic subject. Thus, the textual witnessing style of the Persian Sufi tradition is inverse, though not adverse, to the Gospel accounts.

Jesus as sign  93 Among certain Sufis, the Sufis that are the subject of this study, are not only those that are authentic, in the way that I have explained previously, but also, they are such precisely because they go beyond the Islamic in their mysticism. Excursus: metaphysics and philosophy in Heidegger1 At this point, it is important to underline what Heidegger believed distinguished his work from those philosophers before him, because it has a bearing on the argument made in this chapter  about how the Sufis referred to as ‘authentic’ are distinguished. This is an important point because it is linked to Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics, and to which I am also limiting my speaking about that subject. What he saw as the fundamental activity of so-called philosophers hitherto was that they were all fundamentally engaged in metaphysics; they were effectively metaphysicians. It is why he ultimately abandoned even his identification with philosophy (preferring ‘thinker’ instead) so as to demarcate a new era in the quest that began with the pre-Socratics, which unfortunately never came to fruition; not until, that is, with him. Heidegger distinguished the exercise of metaphysics and philosophy (and accordingly the misapprehension of metaphysicians and philosophers) in the following way. He said that style or mood – that which sets up the condition of being in a particular time or place  – was according to metaphysics the way things are (now, have been in the past, and probably into the future), forever and everywhere the same; whilst according to philosophy, style or mood was the truth of essence, which was inconceivable. But what he had come to conclude was that philosophers were, in fact, no different from metaphysicians. And what both had failed to see was precisely what made his work different from theirs: that the quest till now had been based on the assumption that there is a Being of beings (behind everything – regardless of whether it was thought of as possible to be conceived or not). Even Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were metaphysicians, because both the former’s nihilism and the latter’s new morality was a totalising philosophy to replace the Being of beings (emphasis being on the plural). For Heidegger it was Plato who made the disastrous move philosophically in talking about essence as Eidos – the realness/whatness of things; that which is fixed and unchanging about things – and thus began the metaphysical enterprise that has cast a long shadow on the intellectual history of the West. Heidegger’s understanding of ‘essence’ is markedly different. He thought of essence as meaning the way things work, rather than the ‘whatness’ of something. Heidegger is, furthermore, talking in his way of doing philosophy about being (always in the sense that is conveyed in the lower-case) and thus he is interested in the beingness of being, meaning: the understanding of being and the condition of possibility of the opening or ‘the clearing’ in which beings (including human beings) are found. Before Plato, Heidegger said, it was the pre-Socratics who had come the closest to understanding what he was then disclosing. The pre-Socratics had a better feel for alētheia (‘un-disclosedness’ or ‘unconcealment’), but they did not interrogate it further; though, the very point of which both Plato and Aristotle missed. What he meant was that those before him had not thought about the clearing in which

94  Jesus as sign beings show up at all. Heidegger is therefore thinking about the clearing (which is taken for granted by everyone before him) which allows for different styles, and not in the way that says there is an only one or the real one. For instance, in the ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ Heidegger wanted to show how things could go wrong if we thought about art like Plato thinks about truth. Despite his critique of metaphysics, Heidegger makes an unexpected move. He asks: what can be salvaged from the exercise of metaphysics? What is the lesson learned from metaphysicians? What metaphysics demonstrated and metaphysicians correctly apprehended was the surpassing of being, that is, there is something greater than, and which exceeds, us out of view. But where it became tangential and digressed greatly into the error begun by Plato is in its assumption about a super being behind everything – because of which there was one truth only. What Heidegger said instead was twofold: firstly, that the clearing always withdraws itself from view, and so it is never grasped by us, but because of it everything else is made comprehensible to us, and secondly that there could not be only one clearing. The associated problem of metaphysical thinking is its historicism: the promise of a past utopia recreated. For Heidegger, recreating the past was a misconceived idea, because the past could never be recreated; that was not the goal, so to speak. What he did concede was that something can be saved from the past and adapted to the present, perhaps. The idea, as it so happens, is that nothing is lost that needs recovering; nothing except our connection with being, wherein lies the greatest danger. Why Heidegger had valued the pre-Socratic society was that theirs was a time that was defined by poiesis: they were nurturers and preservers of truth as phusis. Heidegger values the poetic, therefore, as closest to understanding and connection with the unknown, because to dwell poetically is to be in touch with the mystery. And so, this ties our excursus back to the Sufis about whom I have been discussing as poetically dwelling Sufi, especially those of the Persian love tradition, whose foundation of mysticism is the poetic. *** The fact of the matter is that Sufism has produced a literature of a kind that is anomalous and antinomian in style. Whether it is an unspoken truth in Sufism that Jesus represents the way to God and the life of promise for those that love God, they [i.e., the Sufi] are – in their experience of Jesus – to God as god reflected in the mirror of the human. As we will see in the following, the Sufis understand the mystery of the grace of God through the activity of the Holy Spirit (ruhul qudus) as associated with Jesus. The difference between the Sufi and Christianity, in this instance, is that the Sufis are not bound even by Jesus, who is for them, nevertheless, iconic. What the Sufi experience of Jesus, I argue, reflects, is Heidegger’s ontological point about the phenomenology of the sacred: the thing itself is not even the totalising object. In other words, Jesus is Sign because he is indicative of a clearing; Jesus is not the (absolute, total) clearing. And so, the Jesus experience par excellence in the view of authentic-Sufi-Dasein is always withdrawn, hidden from view, unspoken. Those that belong to this tradition of mystery connected to

Jesus as sign 95 the enigma of the Jesus experience are not only the authentic but also the landmark figures in Sufi history. These Sufis are part of the ontology of mysticism I have been expounding hitherto, but which now arrives back to the starting point of that genealogy, here, in this chapter: in our exegesis on Jesus. By way of a reminder, authenticity is about the movement towards death (and not stagnation in established tradition), which is to be understood in the light of Heidegger’s discourse on the reconfigurer and articulator, and earth and world. It is certainly not what we might call ‘authentic’ in the orthodox use of the term. Those Sufi listed in Table  4.1 are not argued to have been Christian, pseudoChristian, or even quasi-Christian. Sufi-authentic-Dasein is not about the Jesus of the past (as in the belief in, and the following of, the Messiah [Christ], i.e., being Christ-ian), but Jesus as the experience in the present-future of disclosure (beyond Christ and Christianity). There is a great irony in religion that is always lost on the traditionist: Jesus died for one thing (i.e., his beliefs in an ethical and spiritual basis for justice here and now), while Christians are martyred for another entirely (i.e., for the sake of their belief in Jesus as God). The Sufis, on the other hand, are not Christian, but they are in the shadow of the grace of his teachings, which becomes evident in the Persian ethos of love-mysticism, which defines and shapes their Sufi style as distinct from Sufism elsewhere. As mentioned in the previous chapter, not all Sufis of Persian origin are of this tradition of love, and being Persian does not automatically denote membership. This is something of a deeply encrypted nature, and it is only with careful examination and cautious attention to the anomaly that it can be made disclosed. Having already expounded on Heidegger’s ideas on the strife of earth and world, something brief should also be said about the reconfigurer and the articulator in his terminology. Basically, the former is a reference to a person, work of art, etc., that allows for something new to emerge, defining something original; the latter is a reference to the preserver(s) or preserving mode, explaining and perpetuating on what was original and new – for example, in a very crude manner: Jesus and the Christians.2 Admittedly, the categories can become confused easily, because how do we know when something is ‘new’ or otherwise being ‘renewed’? Technically speaking, we might say that for argument’s sake, if someone is renewing an understanding forgotten, that then is not considered original. Hubert Dreyfus (2005) carefully guides us through the complexity of language in Heidegger’s Table 4.1 List of Sufi figures representing paradigm shift Sufi figures

Paradigmatic shift in Sufi history

Bayazid al-Hallaj

ekstasis. Resurrection. Toward death and beyond, heralding the commencement of a new beginning. (Carries on through Ruzbihan and Ahmad al-Ghazali.) The ontology of God. Incarnation. ‘The new theologian’.

Attar Rumi Ibn al-Arabi

96  Jesus as sign thinking in describing that a reconfigurer is about something extraordinary that happens and takes over, and as a result, something ordinary is thrust down. In this sense, the Sufi (i.e., those belonging to the love tradition) are renewers of an understanding forgotten, though unlike Christians, who are preservers, and thus the articulators of Christ, they are not perpetuating the legacy of the Christ, but bring forth a new experience of the hidden or absent ‘Christ’. In fact, this is not uncommon within the history of Christianity. St Ephrem, the Syrian, wrote: ‘You, concealed from all; for I have made bold to speak of Your generation, hidden from all; in silence I have bounded the Word’ (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 101).

The Sufi understanding of Jesus in the light of Eastern Syrian Christianity An important starting point in situating the argument for the connection between the Sufi and the experience of Jesus is that the Sufi understanding is close to, and in some respects, reflects, the Syriac Christian ethos. There is still quite a gap between the Syriac and the Persian, however; and what I mean to underline is that the Syriac tradition is the closest to the Islamic perspective on Jesus, probably by means of the Diatessaron (or harmony tradition) in the Syriac Church. An important early figure related to this tradition, and one who wrote a commentary on it, was St Ephrem the Syrian, a fourth-century ascetic (though not to be confused as a monastic) (St Ephrem, 1990, pp. 25–26). In his commentary on Genesis 2:23, St Ephrem highlights the mode of the Syriac tradition (as distinct from the typically perceived Hellenic Christianity) in terms that are quite familiar to the Sufi experience of Jesus. For him, the ‘ultimate aim of the Incarnation . . . was . . . to raise humanity to the position of honor that Adam and Eve would have been granted had they kept the divine commandment’, because ‘They would have acquired divinity [allahutha] in humanity’ (St Ephrem, 1990, pp. 72–73). What might seem a curious passage to those unfamiliar with the Eastern Christian tradition is a good indication of the proximity of Persian to Syriac in terms of how Biblical language is used and understood: ‘The Most High knew that Adam wanted to become a god, so He sent His Son who put him on in order to grant him his desire’ (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 73). In Syriac, as in Persian, ‘Adam’ (‫ )آدم‬is commonly seen as both an individual person and humanity as a whole, whereby the author is at liberty (either St Ephrem or the Sufi) to quite easily switch from the individual to the collective at will and is understood accordingly based on context. What is unique about this mode of understanding in the Eastern languages, and thus in the Eastern psychology of religious experience is that religious symbolism is utilised as ‘basic to all human experience’; furthermore, these worlds represent what is so crucially important in understanding the divine–human relationship in terms of types and symbols that are active in nature and scripture (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 41): By allowing Himself  – the indescribable  – to be described in Scripture in human terms and language, and then, supremely, by actually becoming part of the created world, at the Incarnation.

Jesus as sign  97 For this reason, St  Ephrem emphasised the metaphorical reading of the Bible and in writing his hymns employed the poetic. There is a sense in which all things testify to God by means of symbols and types that they contain, which ultimately point to the spiritual reality that we, as recipients are meant to understand in our interaction with them. A  significant word in St  Ephrem’s usage is raza or ‘mystery’, a Persian word in origin that connotes a ‘secret’, which rightly informs St Paul’s use of mysterion (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 42). Importantly, during St Ephrem’s lifetime, this same word was used also to refer to the liturgical ‘Mysteries’, which was the pinnacle of the function of the term as type and symbol in denoting the connection between the material and the spiritual world, showing that ‘they “reveal” something of what is otherwise “hidden” ’ (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 42). In connection, the all-important theme in the Eastern Christian tradition of theosis or divinisation was already present to the mind of St Ephrem (who was literally isolated from the influence of Hellenic language and culture as well as being diametrically opposed to it) in a way that brings us back to the humanity of Jesus without forgoing the divinity therein. In this context, the phrase ‘son of’3 was also understood in terms of ‘children of God’ wherein in the Semitic tradition all Christians at Baptism would potentially attain ‘the characteristics of divine beings’ (St Ephrem, 1990, pp. 73–74). Though this might be seeming similar to the Greek Fathers such as St Athanasius who spoke about the great mystery (‘God became man so that man might become God’), it could not be more distinct in the way that St Ephrem expresses the same secret in his terms: ‘He gave us divinity, we gave Him humanity’ (St Ephrem, 1990). Having laid out this background, it becomes easier to understand the peculiarity of the Sufi reference to the humanity of Jesus which does not lose sight of the inborn divinity: The hermitage of Jesus is the Sufis’ table spread; take heed, O sick one, never forsake this doorway.4 This verse speaks to the role of Jesus as key in the Sufi imagination. Jesus as sanctuary provides for the spiritually impoverished darvish; and is thus the ‘doorway’ (for those who recognise it) to God. Were the Holy Spirit to favour us once more by its Grace, others too would perform all the works of Christ.5 This line of poetry recounts the humanity of Jesus as the Messiah who is the vehicle of God. Indeed, highlighting that after him the Apostles were charged by the Spirit to perform the same miraculous deeds as he had. Implied is the daring proposition by the poet that ordinary folk can even be moved by the Hand of God to the greatness of Spirit, even though they are not Jesus, the Christ. My boy, all the saints are sons of God: whether here or there, present or absent, always aware, vigilant and awake.6

98  Jesus as sign This line summons the powerful language of Psalm 2:7, but it widens the scope of those deemed elect beyond the Christian singular focus on Jesus to ‘the friends of God’ (awliya) as connected to the Biblical notion of the children of God. This breath of Jesus, which hourly brings forth another dawn, causes a sleeping world to raise its head from the earth.7 The centrality of Jesus is stressed as the singular example of one whose breath was the breath of the life-giving God and renewer of souls in human form. It would seem that those Sufi who wrote such formidable poetry were informed about the nuances in Eastern Christian tradition on the enigmatic figure of Jesus; a figure of such magnitude that even the Qur’an does not fail to distinguish among the host of prophets it boasts.

The ocean of love: locating Jesus in Sufism This section is an overview of some basic quantifiable data on Jesus in Islam and Sufism, broadly conceived. To date, and to my knowledge, no extensive scholarly attempt has been made to quantify data on Jesus in Sufism by means of mining a wide range of key Sufi texts. The closest attempt, though without digital means, still remains the small book written by Javad Nurbakhsh in 1983 on Jesus from the point of view of the Sufis, translated into English by Terry Graham, Leonard Lewisohn, and Hamid Mashkuri as Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis. It is well known that while many classical Muslim authors’ interest in Jesus was primarily motivated by refuting Christian doctrine (such as that al-Ghazali’s ihya ulum al-din), they were nonetheless acutely aware of the spiritual value of the Christian Jesus. Indeed, after al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the steady growth of production of poetic works presented an overwhelming degree of reverence for Jesus in the Sufi Weltanschauung and one which signifies a new direction of approach to Jesus by Sufis of the post-classical era. Jesus in the Islamic context: a general overview In Islam Regardless of faith orientation, Jesus is held as a universal and popular symbol of the love of God for humankind. While surprising to some, it is no less strange that the Qur’an should hold Jesus in high esteem, second only to Muhammad, in which he is mentioned 25 times by name and having an entire chapter devoted to him in the infancy gospel entitled The Chapter of Mary (surat al-maryam). Jesus is the most mentioned figure in the Qur’an. He features in 93 verses of the Quran and is mentioned directly and indirectly as well as by way of relational terms over 187 times (Barker & Gregg, 2010, p. 8). The references to him are categorised by name (Isa) 25 times; in third-person 48 times; first-person 35 times as well as various times as titles and attributes:

Jesus as sign 99 Table 4.2 Qur’anic references to Jesus Quantified list of references to Jesus in the Qur’an

Corresponding verses in the Qur’an

Isa (25 times):

2:87, 2:136, 2:253, 3:45, 3:52, 3:55, 3:59, 3:84, 4:157, 4:163, 4:171, 5:46, 5:78, 5:110, 5:112, 5:114, 5:116, 6:85, 19:34, 33:7, 42:13, 43:63, 57:27, 61:6, 61:14 2:87, 2:253, 3:45, 4:157, 4:171, 5:17, 5:46, 5:72, 5:75, 5:78, 5:110, 5:112, 5:114, 5:116, 9:31, 19:34, 23:50, 33:7, 43:57, 57:27, 61:6, 61:14 3:45, 4:171, 4:172, 5:17, 5:72(2), 5:75, 9:30, 9:31 2:87, 2:253, 4:171, 5:110, 12:87, 15.29, 17:85(2), 19:17, 21:91, 58:22 19:19, 19:20, 19:21, 19:29, 19:35, 19:88, 19:91, 19:92, 21:91 3:39, 3:45, 3:48, 4:171, 5:46, 5:110 3:49, 4:157, 4:171, 19:30, 61:6 19:21, 21:91, 23:50, 43:61 19:19 19:21 19:30 19:31 19:34 19:27 43:57 43:61 4:159 3:45

Son of Mary/ibn Maryam (23 times):

Messiah/al-Masih (11 times): Spirit (of God)/ruh (11 times): child/pure boy (9 times): Word (of God)/kalima (6 times): Messenger/Apostle/Prophet (5 times): Sign (4 times): The Gift (1 time): Mercy from Us (1 time): Servant (1 time): Blessed (1 time): Word of Truth/Statement of Truth (1 time): Amazing thing/thing unheard of (1 time): Example (1 time): Straight Path/Right Way (1 time): Witness (1 time): His Name (1 time):

The biographical tradition recounts the story of an early Muslim migration to Abyssinia. In it, the Abyssinian king denies the pursuant Meccans their claim to the small group of Muslims who had sought refuge at his court after hearing the Chapter of Mary recited.8 There are also obscure early reports (hadith) that recount Muhammad’s admiration of Jesus (Zwemer, 1922, p. 263).9 Muhammad personally protected the mural of Mary and Baby Jesus inside the Meccan sanctuary (the Ka’ba) from being defiled during the smashing of the pagan idols that were housed therein.10 Most important are the references made to Jesus in the vast collection of available reports (hadith) – ranging from the eighth to the eighteenth century – noted collectively as ‘the Muslim gospel’ (Khalidi, 2001, p. 3). Finally, the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem is positioned such that its entrance is visible from the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is no surprise, then, that Muslims historically have wished to be close to Jesus and even claim him as their own.

100  Jesus as sign In Sufism In Islam, Jesus is presented as a virginal figure (who is born without sin), miraculous, and eschatological. Whereas religious creed has kept Muslims and Christians apart, the mystics of Islam – the Sufis – have long engaged in an intimate exchange of deep understanding that keeps an unusual (and for some an uncomfortable) balance between the two creeds. Most prominent is the theme of Jesus’ breath in Sufi poetry that corresponds with the state of being in constant remembrance of God (Ar. dhikr Pers. zekr). The Sufi practice of zekr (remembrance) is a breathing exercise accompanied by a given mantra. The aim of this practice is, in essence, to bring one closer to God. The idea is that that which one loves is always on one’s lips. Through the constant remembrance of God, the lover is to be ‘annihilated’ (fana) and thus to ‘subsist’ (baqa) in Him. Jesus is thus represented as fana fi’llah and baqa bi’llah par excellence. Indeed, Jesus is likely the first of the major prophets to be explicitly seen to be as ‘one’ with God to the extent of being on intimate terms. (I am reflecting on what in traditional Christian terms is denoted about this relationship in the Gospels as God the Father to him [Jesus] and he the Son.) The Sufis in this way confirm the magnificence of Jesus upheld by Christians as the Christ who came from the Father and was made one with Him. While the majority of Islamic schools have denied Jesus’ divine status (in reaction to the Christian doctrine of Jesus as God), the Sufi tradition has often acknowledged Jesus as the embodiment of divine attributes that mirror God (Leirvik, 2010) (Bennett, 2008, p. 155). Ideas about Jesus as the Perfect Man who is one with God, is the Sacred Breath and a symbol of spiritual rebirth for every human soul, became iconic of Jesus as the perfect Sufi in the works of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) and Rumi (d. 1273). The literary precursor to them is Attar of Nishapur (d.  1221) who maintained Jesus’ enigmatic and elevated status, most famously preserved (in gory detail) as an allegory through the passion and crucifixion of Mansour al-Hallaj (m. 922) in Baghdad at the height of the Sufi persecutions. Al-Hallaj wrote verses that were reminiscent of the Christological position of the Nicaean Creed: the belief that Jesus was of two Natures (divine and human) in one Person. More intriguingly, he likely replicated the Jesus-Event in the Muslim context by his embodiment of ‘Jesus’ for a Muslim age (Milani, 2011, p. 60ff ). Lastly, the picture of Jesus as the perfect prophet in the mirror of the sacred is refracted in the person of Muhammad out of whose historical image is produced the ‘Sufi Muhammad’ who was a Light from God that existed from pre-eternity before Adam (Milani, 2018, chs. 6, 7). This is the climax of the apophatic aspect of Jesus in Islamic thought: that the Christian Christ is made into the Muslim Messiah. Interconnected histories Jesus is a figure who features in the interconnected histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He was a first-century Jewish charismatic preacher who is believed by Christians to be God incarnate and the Messiah. Islam maintains his

Jesus as sign 101 status as a prominent Prophet (a status above those without a book of scripture) and as the Messiah who was born of a Virgin. Judaism, however, rejects his status as the awaited Messiah who did not fulfil the foretold prophecies and was neither divine nor resurrected. Whether he is accepted in part, in full, or not at all, the proponents and detractors of Jesus equally confirm the significance of his presence in religious history. Sufism reveals more about Jesus still. A pinnacle of mystical piety, Jesus is represented as the meaning of the written and, more significantly, the unspoken word in the Qur’an. The Sufi reading of Jesus exemplifies the Christian articulation of the interplay between human–divine relations through a variety of storyline templates that capture the archetypal message of unconquerable love as the principal Commandment at the heart of religion (Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5). What the Sufi stories powerfully portray is just how fragile religious relationships are and how we need to put aside differences to overcome the greatest obstacle that is ourselves.

Jesus in history The connection between the Sufi and Jesus is not at all conceived in the same way as a link between Sufism and Christianity. The latter can be ascertained with the aid of historical empiricism; the former, however, the exercise of historical imagination. The task of this chapter is not to offer a comparative analysis of Sufi doctrine and the doctrine of Eastern Christian Fathers, for example, which might shed some light on the tell-tale signs of cross-pollination of religious ideas and practice. Instead, the definitive focus of the chapter will be on the message of love that is at the heart of Persian Sufi ethos as connected to the teachings of Jesus, the prophet (of first-century Palestine) who called people to the kingdom of God. Furthermore, the present investigation is not offered as an isolated case that defines the belief-system of a small group of Sufi who held peculiar affinities with Jesus, but rather it speaks to the core of the message of Sufism – free from the mythological layers of its own tradition-making within the Islamic matrix – and is more readily visible within certain figures that best represent this dormant connection and best flesh out the associated values. To better illustrate my point, what follows is a summary of ‘the religion of Jesus’ extracted from The Religion of Jesus the Jew by Geza Vermes (1993). The veracity of Vermes’ Jesus scholarship is unparalleled and, his effort to present Jesus in history well founded. The religion of Jesus11 Jesus taught within the framework of the Law of Moses. He was concerned specifically with the impact of the Torah on individual piety. His was a pure eschatological religion, personal in nature (not concerned with group or communal aspect of religion).

102  Jesus as sign His eschatological Judaism The teaching of Jesus was underpinned by an eschatological vision that emphasised three things in particular: imminence, immediacy, and urgency. As such, there was no future event (to eventually arrive at as promised), but rather – and more to the point – a continuing future. Individual men and women must search for progress and improvement (in themselves, towards God), which is based on a choice and a decision. The kingdom of God is at hand – it is not coming at a later time – and there is no second chance! Essential to his teaching is belief in the imminence of God’s decisive intervention. His eschatological individualism The teaching of Jesus was encapsulated by three important aspects of eschatology: eschatological individualism, eschatological urgency, and eschatological absoluteness. The tone was very much that time is of the essence, which requires unreserved devotion to seeking the kingdom, and demands a decisive break with the past, provoking a concentration on the present moment, and personal experience of faith. This is a decisive individual act of repentance (teshuvah): a complete reversal of direction away from sin and a turning away from all non-God-centred pursuits and thus conversion to the kingdom. He stood for a personal appeal to each of those seeking the kingdom, a solitary search for the kingdom of God, a recognition that duties connected to the kingdom of God are to be performed now, and for each to renounce all for the kingdom in the act of faith defined as the absoluteness of devotion. His eschatological religious action Following the prophetic teaching of the Old Testament prophets, he practiced the religion of the heart, emphasised the inward aspects and root causes of religious action, in order to seek to perfect inner spiritual persona. According to the wellknown Gospelic injunctions, he advanced that people exercise piety in private, commune with the Father alone, and that almsgiving and fasting are to be done in secret, because God alone need see. This is not just to avoid public appearance of someone devout, but to transform the acts of prayer, charity, and self-mortification into steps towards the kingdom of heaven. Religious wellsprings There are two wellsprings in the teaching of Jesus. The first is faith (emunah) – total self-commitment to God at whatever cost, which is the ‘life-blood’ of repentance (teshuva) (Vermes, 1993, pp. 196–197). The second is imitatio Dei – shaping human action on a pattern established by Deity. Its summation is in the maxim: ‘Be merciful as your Father is merciful’ (Luke 6:36). Since the first is self-explanatory, an elaboration of the second will follow. Accordingly, the core of Jesus’

Jesus as sign  103 religion is not Torah observance as such, though this is not excluded, but instead prompts inner spirituality. It is not a search for purity, whether ritual or ethical, which feeds into self-sanctification in the form of a life of prayer and worship, done in the Temple or the synagogue. And it is not even the pursuit of God for His own sake; rather it is for us to be in relation to God by means of devotion to our brethren after the pattern of a merciful heavenly Father. Jesus asserts that at the Last Judgement, the divine King’s (who is the Father) single criterion will be whether or not a person imitated Him in his deeds of love. The prize of salvation is awarded to those who have acted with generosity towards a God in disguise: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food.’ (Matt. 25:35f ). We know when God has met with such kindness when He has shown it to persons of no importance: to ‘the little ones’ (Matt. 25:40). Typical of the teaching style and religious outlook of Jesus is the coherent whole: Graciousness towards God (i.e., the edict to love God) and extending a loving hand to the distressed (i.e., to love your neighbour) and the ‘little ones’ who are those unable to reciprocate. Note: Jesus sends his disciples to ‘heal and exorcise’ and forbade them to receive donation: ‘You received (your charismatic powers) without paying, give without payment!’ (Matt. 10:8). Thus, the true sign of loving-kindness is to give where there is no hope of reciprocation, that is, ‘the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind’ (Luke 14:12–14). Jesus’ true vision of goodness is encapsulated in the hyperbole par excellence wherein the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour includes also one’s enemies, which is the purest form of altruism, whereby God makes the sun shine and the rain fall over the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:46). Jesus’ doctrine of imitatio Dei culminates in a loving embrace of God’s ‘enemies’, such as the tax-collectors, and indirectly even the Gentiles who are seen as the foes of the righteous (Matt. 5:45f; Luke 6:32–34). Jesus, as a healer-exorcist, showed compassion not only to the unfortunate, the sick, and the helpless, but also the pariahs of his society shunned by the well-todo. He is regularly in contact with the ‘unclean’ (those afflicted by disease or ‘possessed by demons’). Jesus was also a ‘friend’ to the social, political, and moral outcasts who were known as ‘publicans and sinners’ (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34). As a devoted physician and pastor, he received with warmth and readiness those who had strayed from the straight path (Mark 2:17). His concern was not with the healthy and the conventionally good. Son of god As to the question of the divinity of Jesus in this scenario, Vermes pointed out the Jewish Palestinian understanding of son of god was a tradition already established there and that later the Hellenistic ‘divine man’ was superimposed onto it. So, it was likely Jesus did think of himself (or at least was seen by others) and did speak about himself in reference to son of god. In the Jewish Palestinian context, therefore, it was never a question of whether Jesus was the Son of God, but rather what did it mean precisely to him and his followers? On this, Vermes (1993) asserts this meant a special place of piety in the Hasidism of the time, and

104  Jesus as sign it may have been developed further by Jesus to fit his own teaching about being a just man. The ‘good’ were not just those who followed blindly the religious law, but they were committed to the moral value of the law as the devout. This brings to bare a careful distinction noted by Vermes during the time of Jesus with regard to the subtle difference that existed between the Hasidim and the Pharisees. The Hasidim were charismatics defined by their strict attachment ‘to God with all their heart, and serving their fellow-men with all their soul’ and who had a distinctive style of being ‘highly individual’ and opposed to the ‘generally prevailing’ rabbinic tradition with whom ‘the Hasidim were not identical’ (Vermes, 1983, p. 80). This was a tension between the charismatic and institutional Judaism of the time, wherein the Hasidim are noted for their ‘refusal to conform in the matters of behaviour and religious observance’, and as such, they were seen as a threat ‘to the upholders of the established religious order’ (Vermes, 1983, p.  80). Yet this was not a show of antinomianism on their behalf. Rather, they were, in their devotion, perhaps ‘stricter in their ritual observances than the average Pharisee’; what is true, however, is that the material aspect of religious observance was far from ‘the centre of their religious concern . . . their informal familiarity with God and confidence in the efficacy of their words’ was seen to destabilise ‘the correct order of values and priorities’ of those ‘whose authority derived from established channels’ (Vermes, 1983, p. 81). It is among the Hasidim that ‘Jesus of Nazareth would seem very much at home’ (Vermes, 1983, p. 81). The fact of the matter is that it is not surprising that overtime halakhah became the cornerstone of rabbinic Judaism and competed with the role of charismatic hasid like Jesus and others like him who ‘were slowly but surely squeezed out beyond the pale of true respectability’ (Vermes, 1983, p. 82). Vermes’ careful thesis, more importantly, ties into some bolder assertions made by Thomas Sheehan in his seminal book The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986). Sheehan presents a philosophical thesis that hopes to engage the modern Christian, based on historical knowledge centred in the method of the Jesus Seminar, yet affording greater liberties to his interpretation in true Heideggerian style. Despite the differences of style and approach between the two authors, Sheehan similarly presents the radical teachings of the man Jesus, outlined in detail and stripped of the layers of Christological conceptualisation that is added in the first one-hundred years of Christian history. He makes short work of the problems in a literal reading of the Biblical content, as he says, in the manner that Christian followers do. But Sheehan is more forthcoming about the implications of what he finds in the historical detail: he advanced the experience of Jesus as the present-future of God-with-man. It is the event of our existence that marks the activity of the divine but which remains indistinct as human and divine. The Jesus of history – not unlike the Jesus of Christianity – imparted a radical teaching about the end of religion and the death of God; and he represented an undecidability of the presence of God-with-man in the absence of God (Sheehan, 1986, p. 225).

Jesus as sign 105 The god incarnate Here I offer a summary of Sheehan’s thesis (1986) on the origins of Christianity as background to the main points of argument that will be made. Sheehan takes the view that the resurrection is not a historical phenomenon. As far as can be ascertained, the initial period was marked by the Jesus movement that gradually formed the early Christian communities in Jerusalem and those scattered abroad. It is not clear whether the Jesus movement upheld the view of resurrection. The Jerusalem community was made up of the Aramaic-speaking Jews. The emerging Hellenised community of Greek-speaking Jews, however, would be pivotal in the spread of the Christian ideas beyond Palestine. In the early history of the Jesus movement there are a number of figures of importance, but notable are Simon (Peter) and Paul. In fact, it is their influence that has the greatest bearing on the history of Christianity and in the shaping of Christian doctrine. Principal to Peter was the resurrection theme or what is called the ‘Easter experience’. The key to Paul was the realisation: the Son of Man as God Incarnate. It is Peter’s ‘Easter experience’ and Paul’s theological vision that predominantly feeds into the Gospel accounts, that is, as sustaining its newly felt religious outlook as based on the Jesus-Event: the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark, the only account that leaves the audience with the question of Jesus’ resurrection and conveys the terror of the women in having found the empty tomb, was, as Sheehan notes, probably meant to captivate prospective initiates. These passion-plays were mainly produced for a Greek-speaking audience with performance quality and for dramatic effect with the aim of conversion. To digress from Sheehan’s exposition for a moment, a figure  least acknowledged in the Christian tradition is James, whose epistle (‘The Epistle of James’) is likely the first New Testament book, written probably c.45 CE, placing it earlier than Paul’s 1 Corinthians (c.55 CE) and 1 Peter (c.64 CE). The fascinating thing about James’ epistle is that its language is not distinctly or overtly ‘Christian’ and, were it not for the mention of Jesus in it, it could easily fit within the Hebrew Scripture. Though not the antithesis to Paul’s reckoning on faith in Jesus, as usually perceived, it is, nevertheless, far more practical in nature, offering advice on how to live in the world in reflection of the teaching of Jesus. In James is emphasised the humility and humanity of Jesus, the great teacher, and the value of what he taught for the possibility of the embodiment of the quality of a Godly life. To return to Sheehan, he starts with the Pauline epistles and pinpoints Paul’s understanding of Jesus as the shifting moment of Christian history. Paul’s epistles are regardless an early source of Christian doctrine, but by his writing, it is clear that he is historicising events about the Apostles and Peter (in relation to Jesus) and that Jesus is already turned into the Son of God by him. Peter’s unwritten experience/witnessing, and thus teaching, of Jesus predates both Paul’s writings and his vision on the road to Damascus, but Peter is fixated on the ‘Easter experience’ (i.e., the resurrection of Jesus). Thus, Peter is the progenitor of the Jesus-Event as ‘Christ’, while Paul is the progenitor of the Jesus-Event as ‘God’. At the time of

106  Jesus as sign their ministry, they are both of them already adopting a language pregnant with what will be the basis of established Church dogma. The language of Paul, in particular, is loaded with a theological rendering of Jesus as the Son of God, pointing ultimately to Jesus as the God Incarnate. The assertion of ‘resurrection’ was how Peter and the disciples articulated ‘their conviction that God had vindicated Jesus and was coming soon to dwell among his people’ – this they would have believed, says Sheehan, even if ‘an exhumation of Jesus’ grave had discovered his rotting flesh and bones’ (1986, pp. 108–109). In short, Peter’s Easter faith was based on an eschatological revelation – and not the discovery of an empty tomb nor seeing the body of the risen Jesus in ­person – neither of which had, according to Sheehan, in the apocalyptic experience of Peter ‘overrode his doubts and led him to identify Jesus with the coming Son of Man’ (1986, p. 109). In Paul’s case, a Jewish evangelist who was converted to the Jesus movement only a short time after the crucifixion, we see an expert interpreter of Peter’s experience. Peter’s limitations in theological knowledge were countered in Paul’s formulations of an elaborate theology of the ‘resurrection’ and ‘appearance’ in his letters, starting with I  Corinthians. Peter and the disciples happily understood their Easter faith as stating God’s plan for Jesus to return again. Their experience of Jesus was ‘that God had rescued Jesus from death and appointed him the coming Son of Man’ (Sheehan, 1986, p.  118). Paul had learned about the proclamation of faith in Jesus (kerygma) shortly after his joining the Jesus movement, probably around 32–34 CE. He ‘recorded and expanded it in his First Letter to the Corinthians’ some 20 years later; the formula in its basic form had already previously gained currency among Jews in Palestine and Syria, and it ‘declared that Jesus, having died and been buried, had been raised up on the third day and . . . and had appeared to his followers’ (Sheehan, 1986, p. 110). Paul’s faith experience, however, took the formula beyond the statement and to its factual conclusion – interpreting it in the light of Hebrew Scriptures as having fulfilled the Jewish hopes of redemption – situating himself as among those he listed by name to whom Jesus had appeared (I Corinthians 15:3–8; cited in Sheehan, 1986, pp. 110–111). So, why did Peter and Paul’s experience of Jesus and their interpretation of the basic formula of belief of the Jesus movement gain greater traction – and thus became central to doctrinal reification – than that of James’? It would seem that beyond the influence of Peter and Paul is the fate of the communities that embodied the formula of faith in Jesus in certain ways that fitted well with the Apostles’ own experience. In Christian history, there are three groups to be accounted for in chronological order of significance in making up the historical layers of Christian experience. The first members of the Jesus movement were Aramaic-speaking Jews who lived in Palestine; some of whom had directly experienced Jesus preach the kingdom of God when he was alive, while others found their way through the first disciples after the death of Jesus. They spread the reputation of Jesus as the Son of Man who would return. There also developed in Palestine a distinct second group of converts known as the Hellenistic Jews of the Mediterranean

Jesus as sign  107 Diaspora. They had adopted the Greek language and culture and upon their return to Palestine continued to worship in a heavily Hellenised way. Because of this they stood out more than their Aramaic-speaking brethren and were thus attacked by the religious authorities on account of their aggressive proselytising. Many relocated to Samaria and Antioch in Syria, where it is possible ‘they first acquired the name “Christian” ’ (Sheehan, 1986, p. 180). It is they, only a short time after the crucifixion, that brought about a ‘momentous shift in the interpretation of Jesus . . . declaring him to be already reigning as the Lord and Christ, who was now enthroned at God’s right hand until his second coming in glory’ (Sheehan, 1986, pp. 180–181). The third of the early group of believers was made up of the Gentile converts, which forced open the Jesus movement beyond its original Jewish community of believers. The Gentile contingent had to first join Judaism as a prerequisite for their faith in Jesus (which meant they had to undergo circumcision and observe Jewish law). They were probably evangelised by the Hellenistic Jewish community and as such the Gentiles attended ‘the liberal synagogues of Greek-speaking Jews in the Diaspora’ (Sheehan, 1986, p. 181). Around about the middle of the century (48 or 49 CE), the Jerusalem community seemed to have dropped circumcision as a precondition for membership so long as the basics of law, in particular in relation to dietary rules, was not ignored. The relaxing of policy towards Gentile converts made it possible for an even more unrestricted approach to missionising among the Gentile communities. And it was these new communities ‘rooted as they were in both Judaism and the Graeco-Roman world’ that declared Jesus ‘had pre-existed as a divine being before becoming a man’ (Sheehan, 1986, p. 181). It would seem that these three groups of converts more or less agreed in faith and differed only in the way that they articulated their beliefs, but that they held fundamentally the same view about Jesus, albeit, in a highly interpreted sense. It is, however, worth noting the way Sheehan outlines the distinct manner in which each of their interpretations of Jesus differs (Sheehan, 1986, pp. 181–182): 1 2 3

The Apocalyptic Judge: The Aramaic Jews held that Jesus had been appointed by his Father to assume the role of Son of Man in the near future. The Reigning Lord and Christ: The Hellenistic Jews declared that Jesus, was already reigning as the messiah in the interim before his glorious return. The Divine Son of God: The Gentile converts came to believe that Jesus was God’s divine Son who had pre-existed even before creation, had become a human being to save mankind, and had returned to heaven after his death.

Peter and Paul build the foundations of what forms the envisioned ideal of the early Christian community out of the Jesus movement. Consequently, it is the inheritors of the Church – the powers that be during the time of Christian prominence – that fashion Christianity in the image of the Jesus of Peter and Paul, doing so with greater certainty about Jesus as the Christ and the one and only godhead. The two Apostles, however, based their ministry on their love for Jesus as the

108  Jesus as sign Christ and, what became gradually explicit and fleshed out in their language, God. In the process of their adoration and celebration of Jesus, they (whether knowingly or not) capture and perpetuate the Jesus-Event as it happened, but which remained hidden beneath their vision of him as Christ and God. Sheehan points to the contradiction and paradoxical tension that is at the heart of the textual narrative. At what point is someone a ‘Christian’ or ‘heretic’? He asserts that in this there is a lesson for the Christian of today in the task of the hermeneutical process of discovery; whereby the Christian, historically speaking, is synonymous with the hermeneut, rendered from the Greek as cognizant with ‘heresy’ in the sense of being different and unrestrained and ultimately as engaged in interpretation (Sheehan, 1986, pp. 223–224). The theology of Jesus-as-God and God-as-Jesus is only reflective of the indistinguishable and inconclusive nature of the relationship between the divine and human, which is to be realised by the Christian hermeneut as a direct experience of themselves as God, man. Historically, the early followers in the post-crucifixion period are understood as the cult of the Messiah who had come. Following this, what remains an unresolved tension at the core of Christian identity is that Christianity is seen as the religion of those who believe in the second coming – more specifically, in the return of the Messiah – but it is defined as a religion built around the God Incarnate as Jesus, the Messiah. Such notions, hopes, and aspirations of the early Christian communities are already far removed from the charismatic prophet, Jesus in history. This tension remains as the mark of the synthesis of the two cultural divisions of the early Christian community: the Aramaic-speaking Jews of Jerusalem and the Hellenised Greek-speaking Jews of Palestine, Syria, and beyond. To the point, and in relation to my argument, there are elements of Jesus’ teachings within the Christian tradition that are nevertheless independently discernible. Importantly for the thesis that I am advancing with regards to the Sufi correlation with the Jesus experience, the Christian tradition is itself developed through a New Testament interpretation of Old Testament religion via – and because of – the variety of ways that was possible for new converts (as well as the early followers) to make sense of their experience of Jesus. Yet Christianity and Jesus’ own experience remain ontologically two separate things. To clarify, what we call the ‘Old Testament’ is written in a historicising way by diasporic Jews during the Babylonian exile. In writing the text, they reflect back on events already past in order to make sense of them as part of a pre-ordained telos. This is thus a distinct style that repeats again in what we call the ‘New Testament’ text. Similarly, the ‘New Testament’ is written in a historicising way by evangels so as to organise the events of the life of Jesus according to the fulfilment of that same preordained telos. This is therefore a distinct style that is consistent across, and connects, the two texts. I doubt the intention of the aforementioned authors was ever to deconstruct the Christian past in order to unravel its faith-tradition. Christianity is made of harder stuff than that. What I  have provided in the summary of our aforementioned authors is a way to see how the Sufi experience of Jesus could be possible independent of, and without reducing that experience to something less than, the Christian.

Jesus as sign 109 The Chapter of Mary12 The simplest way to convey what the Islamic experience of Jesus is like would be to imagine what Christianity would have been like without either Peter or Paul. A Muslim would have very little to disagree about in what they would find in the Epistle of James. There may not even be a major issue with Peter’s eschatological revelation, but there would for certain be a great concern with the language of Paul. The Pauline epistles would sound very strange to a Muslim indeed. In the converse, for a Christian to appreciate the Qur’an would be to imagine the New Testament without the premise of God Incarnate. Then, it would read much on par with the Qur’an’s message on justice and mercy, and a God that calls his creation back to himself through the medium of his prophets. There is not even a great emphasis on Muhammad other than the known fact that the Book’s Narrator is speaking to Muhammad as the messenger to the Arabs. Perhaps there is no clearer example than that of the Chapter of Mary (surah al-maryam or maryam) to demonstrate this. But the story of Islam is far more complex than the straightforward depiction given here. In this section, I will offer an exegesis on the Chapter of Mary, but with a focus on what it would mean in the light of the Sufi experience of Jesus. A Sufi reading of Jesus as set out in the Chapter of Mary gives proper scope for an ontological reading of the Gospelic Jesus as an inspired phenomenological, though not historical, source of the Sufi. The Chapter of Mary is among those revealed to Muhammad in Mecca. It is a short chapter consisting of 98 verses (ayat). Whilst Mary features in the shortest part of it (19:16–35), the chapter is nevertheless named in honour of her, and it is clear that Mary and Jesus set the tone of discourse that frames the entire Chapter: the discourse being on the true nature of worship, resurrection, and the Day of Judgment. It honours Mary as the mother of Jesus, righteous of faith, and defends her status as the Virgin with Child (19:29–35), yet ostensibly denying the Trinitarian outlook in that it mocks the claim that God could take a son (19:36). Yet, the Chapter has the infant Jesus speak from the cradle in defence of his mother who had taken a vow of silence (28:34).13 Then, Jesus proceeds to instruct the audience on the matter of his status as God’s servant, a recipient of ‘the Book’, and a blessed prophet; he continues to explain that what is required of him (as of all [true] believers) is that he, like all the other prophets, must pray and offer alms so long as he lives (19:31–34). Before the section on Mary and Jesus, which is really the centrepiece of the Chapter, the Chapter  opens by recalling the story of Zachariah. God speaks to Zacharia who is old and his wife barren, whereby his request for a son and heir is granted and John (the Baptist) is born. John is mightily recognised: ‘O John! Take the Book with strength’; and we gave him judgement when a boy, and grace from us, and purity; and he was pious and righteous to his parents, and was not a rebellious tyrant. So peace upon him the day he was born, and the day he died, and the day he shall be raised up alive. (19: 14–15) (emphasis mine)

110  Jesus as sign The story of Zachariah is the prelude in the Chapter to the story of Mary which is next recalled, and which I am assuming to be the core story. Both convey that God works miracles as the result of the fruits of the power of prayer based on the covenant made with Him. This is important because it shows parallel knowledge of injil (from the Syriac awongaleeyoon) ‘good news’ or ‘gospel’, wherein John is the forerunner of Jesus. Since the chapter makes it clear ‘John’ is a name given for the first time to a chosen prophet (19:8), we are forced to consider its significance in relation to Jesus and how both these figures are featured in the context of the Chapter in question. Etymologically, John means ‘the grace of Yah’. Jesus in contrast means ‘Yah saves’. The significance of John and Jesus in this Chapter is that their roles are connected in a number of ways through the language of its message. These include similarities, but also subtle differences of emphasis. For instance, Zachariah beseeches God: ‘then grant me from Thee a successor’ (19:5) (emphasis mine), while Mary retreats from the ‘spirit’ of God who takes the form of a man, saying: ‘Verily, I take refuge in the Merciful One from thee’ (19:19); the unprecedented name of ‘John’ compared with the unprecedented event of the virgin birth of Jesus; they are both recipients of ‘the Book’; John is given discernment, grace, and purity from God, whilst Jesus is made by God a ‘sign’ and a ‘mercy’ for humankind; John is dutiful to his parents and Jesus to his mother; John was not a ‘rebellious tyrant’, nor has God made Jesus a ‘miserable tyrant’. Yet a most striking difference is that John (along with all other prophetic figures noted, are spoken about and their virtues described in the past tense as they are recalled by the narration in their turn, while only Jesus is allowed to speak in the first person in describing his own standing before God. Any importance to this can be explained away as simply happenstance of textual organisation, given that it is a mere consequence of Jesus speaking in (the inserted) dialogue with his mother’s accusers (19:30–35). However, I would see it as a considered technique to maintain the stasis of Jesus as the (presently) absent Sign. As is known, in the Qur’an, Jesus is not crucified nor does he die, but so it was made to appear (4:157–158). In other words, Jesus (who is not dead) is therefore alive, and living, according to Muslim belief. Finally, I would point out the curious connecting formula between the figures of John and Jesus: So peace be upon him the day he was born, and the day he died, and the day he shall be raised up alive. (19:15) And peace be upon me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised up alive. (19:34) *** Focusing more specifically on what I think is really the hidden gem within the crown of the Chapter. I would point out that Jesus is referred to as a ‘sign unto man’ and ‘a mercy’ from God, but also that he is said to be ‘the word of truth’

Jesus as sign 111 (19:35). The verse 19:35 can be variously rendered, and I think it is another carefully inserted passage that honours the extraordinary status of Jesus in Muslim consciousness. In principle, it can be read as the narration having confirmed the confession of Jesus’s statement about himself in dialogue with the accusers. That is, the chapter can be read in clarifying the issue (i.e., the nature of the person of Jesus) about which there has been confusion – the Qur’an shows us that it was aware of some aspects of the Christological debates. In this way of reading it, the passage can be shown to mean to say something like the following in the vernacular: This is the truth about Jesus about whom there is confusion. However, the Arabic choice of words here is not only quite decisive about the matter mentioned earlier but also that its position on the issue is absolute, so much that it could be rendered as making a statement about Jesus’ standing: This is Jesus, the Word of Truth (qul al-haqq), in which they doubt. This much is certainly accurate concerning the nature of the person of Jesus, which is disputed both within the Christian fold and outside of it. As far as we can tell, then the latter statement is equally valid, if not more to the point – or rather, perhaps more pointed. Looking closer at the language of the Chapter, we can observe the paradoxical nature of the Qur’anic stance concerning Jesus. The glaring example being that Jesus is ‘a sign [of God] unto man’ and ‘a mercy from’ Him; and though Jesus is not God’s son, yet, one could ask, is he not He? The quandary is thus: on one level, the Qur’an, and in this Chapter especially, wants to utterly divorce itself from the Trinitarian creed, which it decrees (on its own terms) as void. So, the point is made that ‘It is easy’ for God (who is omnipotent) – He only has to say ‘ “Be”, and it is’ (2:110[117]) ( ُ‫) ُكن فَيَ ُكون‬. Therefore, despite the fact that the virgin birth of Jesus and the miracle of his speaking from the cradle is admitted, it is normālis in the grander scheme of things that happen in the Qur’an, and indeed in the Chapter in question.14 The paradox is that you have a unique and miraculous occurrence, but it is by no means any more or less special than other miraculous events recorded in the Qur’an, such as the equally miraculous birth of Yahya (John [the Baptist]), which repeats the cycle of miracles connected to the births of Isaac (to Sarah) and Jacob and Esau (to Rebekah). Miracles, then, have a secondary standing per se and are as a consequence of God’s will. At another level, the Qur’an maintains ultimate discretion in how something is to be perceived as such. In the case of what we are to make of the distinctly unique and miraculous example of Jesus, the Chapter of Mary, also says this: ‘and we sent unto her our spirit; and he took for her the semblance of a well-made man’ (19:18). What is at first easily glossed, becomes the most discerning evidence for just how elevated the case of Jesus is, in spite of the Qur’an’s otherwise usual insistence on equanimity (e.g., ‘there is none in the heavens or the earth but comes to the Merciful as a servant’, 19:94). Considered carefully, the passage actually discloses the following fact: that the ‘spirit’ of God (i.e., who is in this context understood to be the archangel Gabriel) becomes manifest in flesh and blood and says ‘I am only a messenger of thy Lord to bestow on thee a pure boy’ (19:19) (emphasis mine). It is too much of a coincidence for there not to be a meaningful connection here with the language of St Ephrem the Syrian, who in numerous hymns illustrates

112  Jesus as sign the Incarnation by way of the analogy of ‘the Robe imagery’, that is, the putting on of a garment: Jesus ‘came to find Adam who had gone astray, to return him to Eden in the garment of light’ (St Ephrem, 1990, p. 68). Here ‘Adam’ is not only the singular First Man but also the collective of humanity. What St Ephrem brings to light is that ‘God the Word . . . has to strip himself of his divine glory and “put on Adam’s body” ’: ‘Blessed is He who descended, put Adam on and ascended’ (St Ephrem, 1990, pp. 68–69). Ultimately, that God’s love is for ‘those who believe and act right’ (19:96) remains a powerfully visible message of the Qur’an. Yet it cannot be cast aside that how this love is enacted very much depends on how it is embodied. In this regard, Jesus, who is really just another prophet in the line of others in the Qur’an, has but an implicit significance that is noticeably different from the rest. It seems to me, at least, that the Qur’an underlines Jesus as significant but not central to the narrative, at least not in any obvious way. I would go further to say that indeed the language that is applied to the account of Jesus in the Chapter is very likely intended as transferable to all the prophets mentioned equally: for all of them are signs for humanity to turn to God; they speak the words of truth revealed to them by God, they are pure of heart, and that they are a mercy from God. Hence, it might not be unfair to say that the Qur’an presents the bare minimum of the seed of potentiality contained in it. It is not difficult to imagine how the Chapter  of Mary would have served as a point of inspiration for the Sufi to find supporting evidence for the views they may have heard or learned from Syrian Orthodox hermits, or those who could themselves read and had access to the injil, would see some things here reflected. Certainly, the idea that all is possible by the power of the Holy Spirit – a commonly cited expression in Sufi poetry – and its association with the figure of Jesus who is singled out but not isolated. I think the content of the Chapter of Mary goes a long way in demonstrating the extent to which it validated the Jesus experience of the Sufi as being an exemplar, but not the example. The Attar thesis To offer a demonstration of the phenomenon of Jesus as Sign in Sufi imagination, I will provide a short exegesis on an important reference to Mary and Jesus made by Attar. I draw the parallel with St Symeon the New Theologian because his exposition on ‘the mystery of the marriages’ reveals just how much Attar, even though writing almost 200 years later, seems to convey a shared point about the treasured mystery of ‘birthing God’. This, a foreign phrase in the Islamic context, is by no means – and by clear proof of Attar’s tale about the birds – an unfamiliar notion. Attar of Nishapur is best known for his seminal work, mantiq al-tayr (usually translated in English as ‘The Conference of the Birds’). Written in Persian, it is a relatively short epic poem made up of approximately 4,700 verses; English translations are usually shorter still, around 3,840 verses, and exclude Attar’s prologue and epilogue. The epic has captured the imagination of the West due to the fascinating tale it tells about a journey of some multitude of birds who are led by the hoopoe (their guide) to their king, the Simorgh. In the course of explaining the

Jesus as sign  113 journey, Attar reveals some of the most intimate secrets of the mystical path; he particularly highlights the trials and tribulations of the Sufi wayfarer. What he calls the ‘valley’ (vaadi) is also in the native Persian understood as a burial ground or the gathering place at the end of time. There are seven ‘valleys’ in the story: quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, perplexity, and poverty and annihilation, and these constitute the core of the story. The meaning of each of these is infinite; suffice to say that these are not only resting grounds but that they also symbolically represent seven deaths that prepare the wayfarer for arriving at the penultimate stage before the sought-after-truth is unveiled: ‘thirty birds in the presence of the Thirtybird’ (simorgh dar peeshgaah-e simorgh) (Attar, 1964, p. 229). The ‘Attar thesis’, as I am referring to it, is simply that at the end of the journey the 30 (remaining) birds are shown the Simogh in themselves, reflected. (‘Thirtybird’ is a play on words in Attar’s plot twist.) Soundless words progressed from the Master of discourse: For like a mirror is the Lord of Light Whoever arrives, themselves they will see in it For life and limb, life and limb will see in it Since you came here as thirty birds Thirty in the mirror you will see revealed For if forty or fifty birds you should come again That exact number you will see present Even though you might be perplexed and confused Look upon yourselves and there yourselves you will have seen.15 The ‘thesis’ is a key to rendering a possible reading of the tale that Attar discloses about the birds’ journey: an underlying message about Jesus as Sign. This is not to be confused with Jesus the prophet of Islam, who is referenced throughout the text numerous times. Rather, this is what I have been asserting as the Jesus experience of the Sufi – a deeply hidden aspect of the mystery of God that not even Attar dares mention plainly (Attar, 1984, p. 229). Instead, he alludes to it by means of the birds’ telos and, following the climax of that central story, with two final stories that follow it: a) a short interim about the secrets of the ashes of Hallaj, which then leads to the finale about the birds’ renewal, and b) the story of the king who ordered his beloved to be killed. Before I go on, the connexion to St Symeon the New Theologian is helpful to make the point as lucidly as possible. St Symeon labours to make the point quite hesitantly, but when he does it is as a booming light: ‘We conceive the Word of God in our hearts, like the Virgin . . . He is present in the body bodilessly . . ., and deifying us . . . who are become flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone’ (St Symeon, 1995, pp. 56–57). Even more uncanny is the fact that Attar postulates about the same mystery of Mary and Jesus as St Symeon

114  Jesus as sign in laying the analogical foundations for his profound assertion: ‘Can’t you see Womankind Eve from Mankind Adam was born? Don’t you know that Man Jesus who from Mary was born?’.16 That the entire epic is an encrypted tale about Jesus as Sign is possible to deduce first in the example of al-Hallaj who for Attar is the most openly expressed analogy of Jesus, for it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to make the connection (Attar, 1984, p. 220). Yet it is in the following story about the king and his beloved that we see the symbolism of Attar at its best in this regard. This final story is about a king who is captivated by a handsome young man whom he wishes to possess. The boy is, however, enchanted by a fair maiden of the court. The king discovers the lovers together and in a drunken rage orders his beloved to be killed – to be flayed and hung upside down till dead. The young boy’s father, who was also the court minister, intervenes and another, a crook, is made to take his son’s place. As the king’s rage eventually subsides, he laments his hasty move to have his beloved killed. He mourns, repents, and wishes to forfeit his life, confessing to God that the boy was his one and true love that he hastily passed by. The minister overhearing this brings his son out of hiding and the two unite. The king can be read as worldliness; the boy, Jesus; and the minister, divine intervention. That the story retains the Islamic creed about Jesus not being killed on the cross – that it was made to appear as such – is clear, and supports the view that Attar preserved a hidden meaning left to be discovered about his epic: ‘Become nothing so that your beingness can arrive; as long as you remain, when can that being through you appear?’17 The ‘Gospel’ of Rumi Here, I  will be brief and recount only what has already been mentioned in the previous chapter  to make the necessary point. The spiritual couplets of Rumi, known as the masnavi-e ma’navi (‘spiritual couplets’) is a collection of six books made up of a total of 25,000 verses. Rumi was not the first to write in the style of the ‘couplets’ (Pers. masnavi Ar. mathnawi), nor was his the most committed to poetic form. Rumi was not a poet, but a mystic. He did not write poetry for its own sake, but to disclose a hidden world of mysteries that he had understood through the pain of love and loss in his encounter with his beloved teacher and friend, Shams of Tabriz. The masnavi has been rendered a thousand different ways by popularists, modernists, and traditionalists: depicted mainly as either having no regard for religion or as being rooted in it. Both are wrong. The masnavi of Rumi is famously known as the Qur’an in the Persian tongue. This is due to a saying attributed to Jami, the famous fifteenth-century Persian poet, who praised Rumi as a great individual who, as he said, although was not a prophet, had in his possession a ‘book’ (i.e., of revelation) (Irfani, 1976). The overt statement is that the masnavi is a work of biblical proportions, placed on par with the noblest and most precious text in Islam: the Qur’an. This just noted is the established Sufi point of view on the corpus; For Muslims, generally, there is only respect and adoration for both the text and its author in relaying the supremacy of Islam and holding

Jesus as sign 115 in esteem the Prophet throughout its pages – keeping in mind the book is itself an extensive commentary on various verses of the Qur’anic and that it relates an array of hadith. Yet – and I stress – this is an outward observation of the text. The text is about much more than this beneath the surface. Rumi says: ‘Now that Shams’ name has been mentioned, I should explain the secret of his favours . . . and while it is better to keep the lover’s secret hidden, listen close . . . it will be revealed through the tale of others’ (Rumi, 1997, pp.  10–11).18 What comes to view is that the masnavi of Rumi is, in fact, a ‘gospel’. The masnavi is a text that contains the secret of Rumi’s most intimate experience on the path to mystical enlightenment. And Rumi is quite open about this fact, actually. What he does not openly share, however, and instead alludes to by analogy throughout the text, is what he means for his reader to discover upon closer inspection. I believe this is what Rumi points to as a text within the text, which I am asserting is a secret gospel account. Rumi promises at the commencement of the masnavi that he will proceed to convey its truth through the stories of other tales about friendship, love, and intimacy. But who is this gospel account about? It would appear the subject is Shams, though this would be forgetting the argument advanced in chapter two: tariqa as master. It is about an experience. As he clearly states in the beginning, Rumi will disclose the secret of his experience by way of analogy. The masnavi is thus a text that is multilayered with meaning. That he utilises numerous interlocking stories tells us that the entirety is a parable about his experience of the sacred, and that Shams is only the ‘face’ of the sacred and an embodiment of its truth. Since the ‘gospel’ of Rumi wants to reveal something about the experience of the incarnate, it is, without doubt, a hidden parable about the experience of Jesus as Sign. There are many stories that can help demonstrate the point, but one in particular is perfectly suitable: the story of the old man and the Ka’ba (Rumi, 1997, pp. 270– 271). I have referred to this story previously in Chapter 3 in order to underline the point about divine presence. I will offer a condensed prose summary of the story but will divide it up into two parts for emphasis. In the first part (M2: 2237–2243) Bayazid is on his way to fulfil the hajj and takes notice of an old man along the way. Bayazid decides to sit beside the old man and inquires about his health. He discovers the old man is not only darvish but a family man too. The old man asks him what has brought him far from home. Bayazid tells him his intention to reach the Ka’ba. The old man asks what provisions have you for the journey and Bayazid says he has 200 silver pieces. The old man suggests Bayazid go around him seven times instead and that would fulfil his quest. And to give him the coins as an act of generosity to complete his pilgrimage. In the second part (M2: 2244–2251) the old man discloses that God holds him in higher esteem than His house of worship; and although the Ka’ba was made a home for the pious, his being housed the deepest mysteries. He says that no one has entered the Ka’ba, and that none but His Life dwells in him. And because Bayazid has seen him, he has seen God – thus having had circumambulated the real House of God! Lastly, he says to Bayazid that to serve him is to serve God, since the two are one, and that he should perceive with his inner eye to see there within the old man the Light of Truth in humanity.

116  Jesus as sign

Conclusion: questions and remarks Perhaps I am pushing the boundaries of accepted norms in attributing an apostolic role to Attar and Rumi. Perhaps, even more abominable is the implication that the Simorgh and Shams allude to a deeper and secretive truth about Jesus as Sign contained within these texts. That likewise, the mantiq al-tayr and the masnavi-e ma’navi are evangelion. Unthinkable that the Sufi would produce these texts as a new testament that realigns the message of Muhammad with the Jesus experience. Could the Sufi be perceived as Islam’s recipients – as agents of God’s mystery – of ruh al-qudus? Counterintuitive though it may be, the evidence points to the affirmative, that is, some of the most sacred aspects of Sufi thought were made plain in the texts just looked at; texts that had revealed (for those with eyes to see) the face of God – the ‘Jesus’ experience of Islam. On a more abstract level, Jesus as Sign is well explained, by using Heidegger’s language, as the non-totalising clearing for the Sufi experience of Jesus. This is most telling about the nature of Sufism, because the Sufis did not cling to a total view of Jesus as the one and only clearing, but that Jesus as a clearing that has withdrawn, is the ever-present element of love in Persian Sufism especially, though not exclusively. In this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate the precedent of the Qur’aniccome-Sufi-Jesus in classic Sufism which preserves a distinct, but (traditionally and historically) obscured, ontological link with the Jesus of early Christianity: the teacher of an internal kingdom of heaven. In the next chapter, I will pursue this issue in terms of the absence of Christ in Islam.

Notes 1 This section summarises key ideas of Heidegger in the light of Hubert Dreyfus’ interpretation given in the three-part lecture series on YouTube (Dreyfus, 2019). 2 On the terminology, see Dreyfus (2005). 3 Note, ‘The Lord said to me, “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You” ’ (Psalm 2:7). 4 Rumi (cited in Nurbakhsh, 1983, p. 7). 5 Hafiz (cited in Nurbakhsh, 1983, p. 9). 6 Rumi (cited in Nurbakhsh, 1983, p. 23). 7 Attar (cited in Nurbakhsh, 1983, p. 51). 8 The account is recorded in Ibn Ishaq’s Siratu Rasullah (the earliest recorded biographical tradition of the Prophet dated to the eighth century) (Guillaume, 1955, p. 146). 9 A hadith narration recorded in Abu Dawood’s collection relates that Muhammad taught his followers what appears to be a version of the Lord’s Prayer (Zwemer, 1922, p. 163, n. 3). 10 In the hadith from Ibn Abi Najih, from his father, from Huwaytab ibn Abd al-Uzza and other than him [it is narrated that]: when it was the day of Mecca’s conquest, the Messenger of God entered the House of God [i.e., the Ka’ba] and commanded [that he be given] a garment. He made it wet with water and commanded that the images [inside the Ka’ba] be wiped out but he placed his hands on the image (ṣurah) of Jesus and his mother and said: erase everything except for what is under my hands. Al-Azraqi narrated it (cited in Tabrizi, 2008); see the same source for the translation of this narration. 11 This section summarises Vermes (1993), ch. 7. 12 The sequence of verses is according to the Palmer translation (1900).

Jesus as sign  117 13 Mary is instructed to take a vow of silence probably, it seems, by her yet-be-born son (from the womb). So, it is surmised that voice speaking to her is likely the infant Jesus, but it could also be the archangel Gabriel, or the palm tree (Palmer, 1900, p. 594). 14 This is demonstrated by recalling the story of Abraham and a host of other prophets and confessors. Here I reproduce the names of the figures that are associated with the recalling verb ‘and mention’ (in the chapter, along with their designated titles, as written in this chapter only): Zachariah (‘servant’); Mary, mother of Jesus (no title given); Abraham (‘confessor’ and ‘prophet’); Isaac (‘prophet’); Jacob (‘prophet’); Moses (‘sincere’, ‘prophet’, ‘apostle’); Ishmael (‘apostle’ and ‘prophet’); Idris (‘confessor’ and ‘prophet’). Here I reproduce the names of the figures that fall under those main figures that are recalled: John [the Baptist] (no title given), under Zachariah; Jesus, son of Mary (‘servant’, ‘prophet’ – N.B. by his own omission in the present tense, that is, through the mouth of Jesus himself, whereas the others are all spoken about by the narration in past tense), under Mary; Isaac (‘prophet’) and Jacob (‘prophet’), under Abraham; Aaron (‘prophet’), under Moses. 15 My translation. For the Farsi, see (Attar, 1964, pp. 235–236). 16 Attar (1964, p. 199), my translation. Note, the parallel in St Symeon (1995, p. 31) on a section where he discusses the mystery of the Incarnation in terms of Christ from Mary as Eve from Adam: ‘He took the rib from Adam’s already living side and built it up into a woman . . . – in just the same fashion, taking living flesh from the holy Theotokos and ever-Virgin Mary . . . did the Creator of Adam become Himself perfect man’. 17 (Attar, 1964, p. 238), my translation. 18 M1:124, my translation.

Works Cited Attar, 1964. Mantiq al-Tayr. Edited by Seyed Sadeq Gohari. Tehran: Publishing House for Scientific and Cultural knowledge. Attar, 1984. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. London: Penguin. Barker, G. A. & Gregg, S. E., 2010. Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, C., 2008. Understanding Christian-Muslim Relations: Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Dreyfus, H. L., 2005. A Companion to Heidegger. In: H. L. Dreyfus & M. A. Wrathall, eds. Heidegger’s Ontology of Art. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 407–420. Dreyfus, H. L., 2019. Hubert Dreyfus – Heidegger’s Later Works. [Online] Available at: https://youtu.be/DIzBSj2vc3o [Accessed 1 January 2020]. Eraqi, F., 1982. Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi: The Divine Flashes. Translated by William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson. New York: Paulist Press. Guillaume, A., 1955. The Life of Muhammad: A  Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irfani, K. A. H., 1976. The Sayings of Rumi and Iqbal. Sialkot: Bazm-e Rumi. Khalidi, T., 2001. The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leirvik, O., 2010. Images of Jesus Christ in Islam. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum. Milani, M., 2011. Representations of Jesus in Islamic Mysticism: Defining the ‘Sufi Jesus’. Literature & Aesthetics, 21(2), pp. 45–64. Milani, M., 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Nurbakhsh, J., 1983. Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis. London: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications.

118  Jesus as sign Palmer, E. H., 1900. The Koran: The Holy Book of Islam with Introduction and Notes. London: Watkins. Rumi, J., 1997. Masnavi-e Ma’navi. Tehran: Safi Alishah Publishers. Sheehan, T., 1986. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. New York: Random House. Sheehan, T., 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift. London: Rowman & Littlefield. St  Ephrem, T. S., 1990. Hymns on Paradise. Introduction and Translation by Sebastian Brock. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. St Symeon, T. N. T., 1995. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. Vol. 1, translated by Alexander Golitzin. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Tabrizi, T., 2008. The Prophet Muhammad Safegaurds Jesus and Mary’s Icon in the Kaba. [Online] Available at: www.bliis.org/essay/prophet-muhammad-jesus-marys-icons-kaba/ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. Vermes, G., 1983. Jesus the Jew. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press. Vermes, G., 1993. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. London: SCM Press Ltd. Zwemer, S. M., 1922. The So-Called Hadith Qudsi. The Muslim World, 12(3), pp. 263–275.

5 Absent Christ, present God

Introduction Following the interval commenced in the preceding chapter, the present chapter addresses the messianic element within Islam. Islam is the historical expression of a tradition born in the absence of the Prophet (Muhammad). Yet, Islam is not without Christ, for it is His return that is decreed by tradition at the Apocalypse along with the Mahdi. Islamic identity is retrospective in its historical mode, since it is fortified by what Muhammad did (as per his Sunna), but it is also prospective with Jesus as the Sign of the Day of Resurrection and the slayer of al-dajjal (the antichrist). As such, Islam is a religion that is defined by two ‘absences’: one being retrospective in nature and thus that of the Prophet Muhammad, and another being prospective in nature and so that of the Messiah (Jesus). Therefore, there are two ontologies pertinent to understanding Islam as a historical and phenomenological force: Muhammad and Jesus. The Sufis, it is argued – and as has been hitherto demonstrated – have found this balance in their Jesus-inspired ontology as definitive of their understanding of him, which is distinctive from a traditional Islamic reading and distanced from seeing Jesus as just a prophet; in this, theirs is phenomenologically closer to a Christianite interpretation.

Jesus: a Heideggerian reading There is a haunting feeling that when Heidegger coined Dasein, he was reflecting in an unconventional way on an ontological reading of Christian theology. Perhaps in his unfolding of the idea of Being and Time he was in fact working on re-presenting the message of the Crucified and the sacrificial crisis complete with a renewed linguistic repertoire.1 It is not to say that he was undertaking a surreptitious theological enterprise, but rather a transformative one that drew out of theology, or rather Christology, what was needing to be retrieved for a future the Tradition had not imagined. Dasein is an uncanny stand-in for Jesus, even if we are less inclined to believe Heidegger would – despite having freed himself both early on from Catholic institutional sway and later from his mentor’s Protestant ethic – have concerned himself with the fate of religion. What is also a convenient fit is that the Christ-figure is representative of the imperceptible nature of human agency as both being in time (as in a phenomenon in time) and being as time (as in DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-6

120  Absent Christ, present God the fabric of consciousness through the course of life). What is most interesting for me, however, is Heidegger’s turn from the singularity of a theological Jesus to the universality of an ontological Jesus representative of human agency. In his proclaimed originality, Heidegger did, after all, endeavour to surpass metaphysical philosophy and metaphysical theology (effectively, ontotheology) but not without demonstrating what was needing to be recovered from their effort to communicate that which was beyond ordinary comprehension.2 Jesus, then, is the befitting agent par excellence – though understood afresh – as being and time – past (God the beginning), present (man-present/God disclosed), and future (God the end). Jesus is Being in the sense that God finds Himself in the world as being. The intention is not to make Heidegger fit into a pseudo-theology, which contradicts what is clearly set out in his phenomenology of religious life.3 This involved the concerted effort to set apart theology and philosophy and set aside conventional theology and the tradition of philosophy of religion.4 In that spirit (of Heidegger’s thrust to break from the past), but without getting caught up in the debates of John Milbank and James K. A. Smith’s on ‘radical orthodoxy’, I present in what follows a reading of Jesus not as Heidegger may have seen it, but what Heidegger makes possible for us to see. The first thing that is striking about Jesus in this kind of reading is the sense of thrownness and inauthenticity associated with his humanness, his existential facticity. This puts into sharp view the sense of temporality of his being, since being in the world reveals his potentiality and possibility, but only because of its finiteness – that he (knows he) has to die. Jesus moves towards his death with clarity, and this gives meaning to his life as being-in-the-world. The full disclosedness of his existence to his own self is what makes him a being in the world in authenticity and as ‘mine-self’, and thus his encounter with the Pharisees demonstrates his being distinct from ‘they-self’. The Christian experience is to live time (cf. PRL, 57). But to be Christian is phenomenologically to be like Jesus  – being in the world with the fullness of knowing that you have to die – which for Heidegger was the condition for the authenticity of Dasein as being toward death. This means, and it is clear, that without question the experience of religion for Heidegger is entirely historical. Dasein is found in the place of existence. It may even be synonymous in that if we read the ‘human being’ as a verb. Thus, Dasein is temporal (time-lived) – Being is Time. What is certain about Heidegger’s thinking about religion, if anything, is that it is about the question of being, that is, it is ontological as it is historical. It is the question of being that opens the pursuit for meaning in a life that is lived. For Heidegger, it would seem, there is no absolute meaning or non-meaning; no truth or non-truth to be found in the world, but that which we make out of our being in it. Heidegger’s move was to reclaim the domain of ‘thinking’ in the light of the question of being and historicality of religious experience. By leaving metaphysics out of the equation – as in the inherited delimitation of ‘thinking’ in Plato and Aristotle as ontotheology – he was free to pursue ontology (and not philosophy, the legacy of Aristotle per se) and faith as they were originally in their true state of inquiry. In his reworking of Nietzsche, Heidegger sidesteps the metaphysical theology inherent in the statement ‘God is dead’, and instead takes up the idea of the absence of God that can only be adequately and, finally properly, addressed

Absent Christ, present God 121 by the poets. Far from a lapsed metaphysical point, this is the fundamental idea in Heidegger that once and for all does away with it: Heidegger links the experience of the holy to the experience of being as wholesomeness . . . The holy has to appear as that in which human being can find its wholeness. The holy is not God, the godhead, the highest entity of metaphysics, or the divine grace. It is an ontological phenomenon, expressed in the thinking of being, that can be the entrance to the religious. (emphasis mine) (Vedder, 2016, pp. 334–335) The connection between the holy and the being is the point about the meeting place in the event of the ‘passing God’, ‘the last God’ in Heidegger’s thought. What they share in common is the care for the word (Vedder, 2016), which then presents the new approach to a non-metaphysical Christology that is activated in both language and art. Language, as speaking beings, discloses but also distorts, corrupts, and manipulates that which is talked about. Heidegger talked about having to bring ‘care’ to speaking to ensure disclosure. That is why there is much fault in what has been said that needs to be detected, and the meaningfulness of the object still to be disclosed. In a way, Plato and Aristotle were not wrong, but what they said was not true, so Heidegger would argue. There is no philosophy (in the sense of metaphysics) other than the ontological quest, which is grounded in the task of the thinker. There is no theology, but the origin of the work of art, which in the religious sense is to be the Gospel experience at the heart of conversion. I would say that in the context of religion and theology art par excellence is foremost the Gospel accounts themselves as representative and containments of something beyond themselves, namely, the life and work of Jesus. What makes it artistic is the care taken in the way that they were composed to convey a parabolic telling of the Jesus experience. Jesus is the subject of the work of art, the Gospels in this case. So, there is no theology per se, but only the activity of walking in the footsteps of Jesus as a participant in the artwork. The event of Jesus is an ontic and ontological mystery that unfolds through our experience of it. The artist, then, as in the composer of the Gospel of Luke, for instance, is working within the world of early Christian experience unearthing its secrets as he does the work with care. In the role of the artist is contained the dual responsibilities of the thinker (in saying being) and the poet (in naming the holy). They together maintain the proper relationship between being and the holy where a place is opened up by the poet for the meeting of the divinities and humanity. Something too can be said about the Islamic tradition in this sense, but with a special reference to the Sufi who engage in the mystical delights of poetic exploration. Such figures as discussed: Bayazid, Hallaj, Attar, Ibn Arabi, Rumi, are not ‘Sufi’, but artists working within the lifeworld of Islam unearthing its secrets. The point with all such figures is that they represent possibility in their activity. They are not inauthentic-Dasein in their religious tradition (as followers), but rather they engage with the material of revelation as revelation – they are agents of dynamic religiosity.

122  Absent Christ, present God Heidegger’s hermeneutics as analytical tool The roots of monotheistic religious experience go deep into the past of Israelite religion from whence its consciousness sprang. This is more than a historical theory; it is something that is germane to the memory and the interpretation of experience based on the information, which is to say the mytho-poetic narrative, that is available to it and out of which it is able to make sense or even occasionally new meaning altogether. Therefore, the approach to understanding Muhammad is not to contextualise him in the Islamic mind but to see him in relation to the teachings of Jesus. Similarly, to speak about Jesus is to see him in relation to Moses as a lawgiver and not, as the Christian would have it, projected unto the past as the pre-eternal Cosmic Christ. (Likewise, Moses would have to be seen as the raw recipient of (and witness to) the divine manifestation (and presence) and not as the appropriated Judaic model of the authors of the Babylonian exile.) Yet, and at the same time, none of these figures would make sense without the point of reference to their respective religious traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The activity of these traditions is in essence a sophisticated method of remembering and preserving, and not retrieving and reinstating. The question is what do you ultimately peel back the layer to when you search for what is beyond tradition? This kind of a question is problematic for religious tradition because it is metaphysically attuned, but it is not so much an issue for an inquiry with an ontological basis. In looking through and beyond, say, Jesus and Muhammad as historical figures, there is something essential and unknown here that defines the experience of the source of adoration (i.e., Jesus, Muhammad). This is the essence of the religious experience at the individual level – the constant out-of-reachness of the source of adoration and the reaching beyond always to grasp it is what makes this experience authentic. Because it is only then that it is innovative, creative, and not stagnant in its understanding that is always in the process of deepening and enrichment. Admittedly, the same can happen in tradition, but this will depend on the individual’s perception – to not see tradition in a closed sense. But this (i.e., the religious tradition) becomes about itself more than that of the object of its adoration (i.e., Jesus or Muhammad). The object is lost in the adoration of it by the subject that enters into the tradition and is consumed by it, unable to see tradition as an experience of opening up. Jesus the historical (passing and possibly the last) God At this point, I would reiterate the hypothesis of Sheehan (1986) in order to set up the following reading of Muhammad in the light of what has hitherto being discussed. Jesus was not the God Incarnate, but rather declared the incarnation of God. He taught a doctrine of faith, hope, and love constituted by the doing of mercy and justice. This was carried out in a number of ways that remain characteristic of Jesus in the New Testament, and which is echoed in the literature of the Sufis who had direct contact with the Gospels: a) common table fellowship, b) overturning the dominant social hierarchy, c) consorting with outcasts,

Absent Christ, present God  123 and d) challenging the empire and religious establishments. Yet the Jesus of faith reflects what he was seen to have been: the embodiment of his belief, the living activity of it; he identified with it. Christianity was the tradition that emerged based on the (mis)take of the Apostles (Simon Peter/Paul) that took Jesus as the point of the message rather than the message that he proclaimed. It was never meant to be about Jesus, as Sheehan purports, but rather his message. The meaning of the Crucifixion, therefore, pointed to the removal of the final obstacle for the disciple. Correspondingly, this has some important relation to certain Sufis and their understanding: a) that God was not in man; nor man could become God; b) there is no goal of ‘unity’;5 c) death was the true end of the journey; d) love of God was reciprocal and central to communion with Him, asserting God as imminent; and e) the use of ‘Friend’ (doost) was a synonym for God/Master, but especially to indicate the proximity of the divine (in the same way that Jesus used Father [Abba]). Considering the unlikelihood that Jesus was tried for claiming (or not rejecting the accusation) to be the Son of Man or God (depending on Gospel), but instead simply and purely because he defied the extant priestly authority, he brought the end of religion and God as they knew it then (Vermes, 1993; Sheehan, 1986). Congruently, Sufism  – of the variety presented in this study  – challenged normative Islamic religiosity, bringing about the end of religion and God as it was upheld by the exoteric scholars. So here the idea may be presented that Jesus becomes the historical – passing, and possibly last  – God of the Christians who is then prophet to the Muslims. Within the Christian experience, there is the dual notion of God being in the world and God out of it. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in tradition are the situating of God beyond time. The Islamic experience has it that God is out of the world but his signs are visible and his agents are at work in the world. This leaves the window of possibility for the Sufi imagination to integrate ancient ideas of sacred agency into its frame of reference. Hence, in Islamic tradition, the point that Jesus did not die on the cross is paramount: because he was instead ‘taken up’ (Q 4:157–8) and there he remains awaiting the end of time (Q 43:61). Indeed, what is clear is that in both instances, tradition has Jesus removed from being and suspended in time. Not so with the mystics. Whether Christian or Muslim, the ‘Master’ and ‘Lord’ is reinserted and reasserted as prime. What is clear is that the Sufi cannot fulfil this Islamically with regard to Allah; but they can in terms of the mashiah – the anointed healer, especially in rendering him the example of the mystics (Abd El-Jalil, 1950) and what I assert – their secret of secret (al-sirr wakhfi, Q 20:7) teacher. The absent Christ in Sufism is the present God.

The two absences: a view to the past of ‘before Islam’ With Muhammad in the past and Jesus in the future, Islamic tradition found room to develop a civil religion, in every sense, giving rise to the Pax Islamica, starting with the dynastic era (the Umayyad and Abbasid).6 These absences become the catalyst for a mystical eruption in the form of a Sufi ontology of Jesus. Islam

124  Absent Christ, present God takes shape through the absence of Muhammad and it is to be fulfilled with the return of Jesus. Here the traditional narrative espouses the creed that Muhammad had bestowed the message of Islam and that Jesus (as a Muslim and follower of Muhammad) would restore it in the end times. Jesus’ second coming is, in Islamic tradition, the eschatological force for a future Islamic revival. But this is the view made possible because of the gap created by the absence of both Muhammad and Jesus in the present time of faith. Living tradition has closed the loop on two figures of import as bookends to its historical time. Therefore, it may be possible to assert that ‘Islam’ is because of the two absences. If so, what would it have been in the presence of Muhammad? Also, if according to the extant Qur’anic verses Muhammad knew about Jesus’ second coming, why would Jesus be a follower of Muhammad and not vice versa? Would it indeed not imply – for example, as does verses 4:159 and 43:61 – that Muhammad looks to Jesus as the ‘sign’ for things to come? I want to be clear that there is no insinuation here about the superiority of one religion/faith over the other. Rather, I think there is something under the surface of the ordinary narrative and thus just beyond the reach of the traditional reading that yields not only an alternative reading but one that may better explain persisting oddities. Muhammad, the ‘second coming’ If we follow the narrative of the Qur’an, it tells us that Jesus proclaims his successor ‘Ahmad’ [Muhammad] (61:6). In this verse, if treated on its own, because it does stand out for one, and also because it does not connect in any obvious way with the reading of tradition that Jesus is the futuristic second coming, the latter would be obviously a distorted borrowing of the extant Christian creed. In terms of both historical trajectory and phenomenological process, Jesus not only precedes Muhammad but also the latter (and not the former) would be naturally (if at all) seen as the logical conclusion in terms of a ‘second coming’. The reason it is not seen this way is because of the Islamic belief in khatim al-nabiyyin (Q 33:40). Respectively, then, tradition maintains the balance of remainders by bestowing each their rightful place. It is a rationalisation and one that aims for the mean, which is in effect the Islamic standard, but it also simultaneously betrays a forced resolution. Were we to place on parallel the descriptions of the second coming from the Christian perspective with that of the advent of Muhammad in the seventh century, a continuity can be observed in terms of the degree of turmoil, chaos, violence, and confrontation that will ensue for in order to usher in the thousand-year reign of peace. Compare, for example, the Return of the Lord in Zechariah 14:3–6 with the Battle of Badr in Qur’an 3:123–125: the ‘Lord’ – which for Christian tradition is the second coming of Jesus to establish the Kingdom on earth (Rev. 19:11–16; Cor. 15:23) – can be read in the context of Islamic history as Muhammad who repels the Quraysh and the Meccans who war against him. In both instances, the ‘Lord’ (Jesus/Muhammad) is accompanied to victory by the heavenly host.

Absent Christ, present God 125 ‘Islam’ and the message of Muhammad It would be highly unorthodox to state with any certainty that the early history of Islam might have been the second coming. In fact, to Christianity it (i.e., Islam) – until very recently – was anathema. But it is curious, nevertheless. I would not be so bold as to rewrite the history of Islam, yet it is not that history in which my interests lie. Muhammad, though, more specifically his message, stands apart just enough to present the germ of an idea. The sirat rasul allah transmits a phrase uttered by Khadija and Waraqa: ‘Verily, by Him in whose hand is Khadija’s soul’ and ‘Surely, by Him in whose hand is Waraqa’s soul’ (Guillaume, 1955, p. 107). It is also widely repeated in Hadith that records Muhammad’s utterance of the same phrase as the premise to statements made (e.g., Sahih Muslim, Riyad al-Salihin 422). The phrase, of course, connects almost verbatim with Job 12:10: ‘In His hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind’. The idea is not that Muhammad was ‘Christianised’ or even ‘Christian’, but that the utterance is Christian-like. Given the complexity of the period in which neither the category of Jewish, Christian, nor Islamic satisfactorily captures the monotheistic faith experience, the thrust of Muhammad’s prophetic temperament has to be grounded in ancient Israelite religion. This is further complicated by the fact that Muhammad describes his angelic visitor  – whom he later learns was Gabriel – as having brought a parchment with writing on it, asking him to ‘Read’ (Guillaume, 1955, p. 106). What is preserved faithfully in the sirat is also preserved in Eastern Orthodox iconography wherein the saints are commonly portrayed as holding an unfurled scroll; this is especially applicable to those saints of the Syriac tradition: St Ephrem and St Isaac the Syrian, for example. Of these, the saint usually looks directly at the onlooker displaying the scroll in his left hand and, either pointing or, drawing attention to it with his right. One explanation is that the message of Muhammad in its simplest and earliest form conformed to the holy man or man of God (i.e., prophetic) genre of Israelite scripture. This would also explain the reading of him as the literal second coming in the full sense of Israelite eschatological expectation. Furthermore, it would also be aligned with Muhammad’s own expectations to be seen as such by the Jews of Medina (Guillaume, 1954). Indeed, Guillaume notes: ‘by denying the divinity of Jesus he brought peace to Arabian Christian lands which had suffered bitterly from Christological disputes’; moreover, he followed in the footsteps of Christian preaching that went centuries before him ‘when he addressed his message to those who had been prepared for monotheism by Jewish teaching’ (Guillaume, 1954, p. 38). It is likely that what Muhammad taught was not yet formulated as ‘Islam’, and that it is only after his death that the identity of the new religion takes shape not only as a consequence of the Arab experience of Muhammad and his teaching but also in reaction to its call for radical change. What we are left with in the case of Muhammad might be the endowment of early hasidic piety that bears distinct markers of aniconism and ascesis as constants in an otherwise changing tradition with religious practice as its variable. The term that would be applicable to Muhammad – as per the implication of the

126  Absent Christ, present God sirat  – would be hanif. Here, then, the message of Muhammad is not equated with the Qur’an text. The Qur’an as revelation becomes the Qur’an in a text as a recension of that message. Muhammadan piety and the Qur’an text It is already well established that the Qur’an text does not contain the entire divine message but only what was salvaged from memory and available written record. The fact that revelations were, for the most part, periodically revealed by Muhammad to his audience during the course of his mission, which completely ceased only upon his death in 632, is one such indication. The other is that which can be derived from surah 56 ayah 77–79: ‘This is the glorious Qur’an hidden in a book that cannot be touched by any other than the purified’.7 The point, however, is that the Qur’an was only a part of, and not the whole message. Firstly, this is because the full grasp of the intended message is always subject to the hermeneutical principle of the subject’s capacity of meaningful comprehension.8 Secondly, it is because what is revealed – in this case, by Muhammad to the Arabs of his town – has always to be contextualised and read in the light of its relevant social and political setting. As such, I do not assert that there are or ever were additional materials that remain unaccounted for, but rather in referring to ‘part’ and ‘whole’ I am of the view that it is merely one expression of Muhammad’s message, which we can say with relative certainty was not one-dimensional in meaning. The hadith canon is one way through which we can be reassured of this supposition, since thousands of known reports contained in it give us a different vantage point with which to observe Muhammad’s message. In addition, the Sufi biographical tradition presents a further level of complexity in grasping the message of Muhammad. The famed story of Abu Sa’id Abu al-Khayr serves to illustrate the relationality between the aspired Muhammadan piety and the Qur’an text: One day . . . Abu Sa’id was preaching in Nishapur, a learned theologian who was present thought to himself that such doctrine is not to be found in the seven sevenths (i.e., the whole) of the Koran. Abu Sa’id immediately turned towards him and said, ‘Doctor, thy thought is not hidden from me. The doctrine that I preach is contained in the eighth seventh of the Koran’. ‘What is that?’ the theologian inquired. Abu Sa’id answered: ‘The seven sevenths are, O Apostle, deliver the message that hath been sent down to thee (Kor. 5, 71), and the eight seventh is, He revealed unto His servant that which He revealed (Kor. 53, 10). Ye imagine that the Word of God that was sent down to Mohammed is the whole seven seventh of the Koran; but that which He causes to come into the hearts of His servants does not admit of being numbered and limited, nor does it ever cease. Every moment there comes a messenger from Him to the hearts of His servants, as the Prophet declared, saying, “Beware of the clairvoyance (firasa) of the true believer, for verily he sees by the light of God” ’. . . . In a Tradition (he went on) it is stated that the Guarded Tablet (lawh-i mahfuz) is so broad that a fleet of Arab horses would not be able to cross it in four years, and the writing thereon is finer than a hair. Of all the

Absent Christ, present God  127 writing which covers it only a single line has been communicated to God’s creatures. That little keeps them in perplexity until the Resurrection. As for the rest, no one knows anything about it.9 The aptitude of this Sufi example is, in essence, the sentiment already in play at the time of Abu Sa’id, which is then enshrined in the biography of the saint, written a hundred years after his death, framing the tension that existed between the lettered men of religion and the ‘illiterate’ mystics; but more importantly demonstrating the crucial difference between Muhammadan piety and the Qur’an text. What is at stake here is not the credibility of the Qur’an text, nor even that of the sunnah. It is instead that using both, the early Sufi movement represented a return to Muhammadan piety. It was not Islamic piety as defined by religious zeal for law and ritual, nor metaphysics and poetry. The difference that is key to the point made is that Muhammadan piety represents something different to the Muhammad of ulama and the Muhammad of Sufi metaphysicians and poets. This, in keeping with the theme of this chapter, is the Muhammad as gleaned through a careful survey of the Qur’an and hadith literature. That is to say, he is not the Muhammad of ‘Islam’, but Muhammad before Islam, the religion. He is someone who practices piety, but forbids austerities (harshness) and entreats guarding against poverty (for it makes people commit ill deeds) (e.g., Sunan al-Nisa’I 5461)10; he recommends fasting, but only ‘if you wish’ (e.g.,  Jami al-Tirmidhi 711; Q 43:43); he withdrew into seclusion periodically and kept the night vigil in recitation and prayer (e.g., Mishkat al-Masabih 2104; Q 76:26); he wore wool (Sunan ibn Majah 3556), extolled fear of God (e.g., Q 3:175 and Sahih al-Bukhari 1252) and renunciation of the world (e.g., Q 4:77 and Nawawi 31), but forbade celibacy and sadness (Jami al-Tirmidhi 1082; Sahih al-Bukhari 5641–2; Q 9:40); when asked of miracles, he split the moon, water flowed from his hands for those needing ablution, but said that ‘Divine Inspiration’ was his only miracle (Sahih al-Bukhari 3868; Sahih al-Bukhari 169; Sahih al-Bukhari 7274). The outline of the straight path becomes more an invitation to uphold the mean in one’s piety; hence the Muhammadan way. Two versions of Sufism come to the surface in this exercise. On the one hand, early on we can see the Muhammadan-piety Sufism of those who sought not merely to revive but more significantly to recreate an experience. On the other hand, and later, comes the religious Sufism of those who contained Muhammad to a narrow view of religion and law. In between these is love-Sufism as the enigmatic expression of what was both the message as well as the religious experience of being in communion. This, although similar to Muhammadan piety, was nevertheless distinct. So, to close, in this section, I have been developing the idea that it is possible for Muhammad to have been a follower of the religion of Jesus the Jew. It is reasonable to speculate that what becomes of the message after his death in Arabia is no different, in essence, from what happens to the message in Palestine after Jesus’ death – the Companions/Apostles take over and set off the course of events that lead to the founding of the religions Christianity and Islam. In each case,

128  Absent Christ, present God there is a move to return to the original teaching with the mysticism that emerges as a consequence of internal aspects and inward focus of religion. There again we can observe the same pattern of piety-mysticism and religious-mysticism arising, and amidst these love-mysticism. Because love-mysticism is by nature incomprehensible, nonrepresentational, and evanescent, it is a thing that proceeds through time as being part of one or the other kind. As extensively discussed in Chapter 2, the intoxicated and sober schools of thought in Sufism are the very manifestation of this distinction in the style of Sufi practice. As argued in that chapter, the intoxicated Sufis appear ‘Christianised’ though they remain committed Muslims, because their practice more closely reflects the developments of early Christian mystics who developed a language of love for their crucified Lord. This Jesusmysticism – which again is a less visible thing compared to the Christian mysticism of Jesus as God kind – contemplated on his life and death as a whole (and not just his teachings as a charismatic and itinerant prophet-turned-God). This subtle kind of mysticism within the Christian tradition focused on the ‘broken heart’11 of an abandoned man on the cross – a dark night of the soul kind of mysticism – underpinned by the notion of unrequited love – examples of which abound in the lives of martyrs, which embody and enact that same passion. Unsurprisingly, this is the very expression of that same forlorn and love forsaken lover of God theme that is encountered in Persianate Sufism (see Chapter 3). Such mysticism is therefore unmistakably detected in the Islamic tradition in the folkloric examples of Layli and Majnun, Farhad and Shirin, and Vis and Ramin, all of which (as already discussed in Chapter 3) reflect the tragedy of Jesus as the archetype. The image of the religion of the heart becomes the centrepiece of Sufi mystical idealism, which is counterintuitive to the Muhammadan piety  per se, but not absent from it as such, because were he to have been a student of religion as Jesus taught it, his approach would reflect such devotional aspiration, even if well-guarded and shared with the closest circle of aspirants. Nevertheless, this heart-religion is something that bursts onto the scene of Islamic history through the rise of the mystics of Islam, the lovers of God.

Sufism: a legacy of Muhammad or Jesus? The question is not with which religious tradition the Sufis had the greater affinity, but whether they did follow the message of Muhammad and thus Jesus about the impending kingdom of God. The ‘message’ here does not equate to either Christianity or Islam, but to the basic meaning of what it was to be in communion with God and to be expectant of His kingdom. The orientation of the Sufi seems to be greatly aligned with such a reckoning. But why? A principal issue facing any consideration of Muhammad in connection to Sufism  – even despite the obvious sign of his having likely worn wool  – is that the Qur’an text presents dual outlooks that represent the change in circumstance, and not necessarily the man: one Meccan, the other Medinan. Yet the choice is to which period does the legacy hark back to, if at all? Or is it that Sufis are to be as their Prophet both warrior and spiritual? It is clear that

Absent Christ, present God 129 authentic-Sufi-Dasein is about the mysticality of the journey through religion. It cannot be about the preservation of religion as such. Sufism is then the openness point, the event of being, intelligibility, and the clearing. The experience of Sufism allows for this (i.e., the open-clearing) within Islam and through Islam as other possibilities of understanding. As such, I am reluctant to say that Sufism looks to Muhammad, not even to Jesus per se, but rather to the message of the latter about the nature of the kingdom of God. Whatever use the Sufis had made of both the event of Revelation and the subsequent Tradition which they inherited, they did in order to communicate that core message to the populace among whom they lived. Strikingly, Muhammad becomes the perfect man, a Jesus-like figure  in the medieval Sufi imagination (Milani, 2018, chs. 6, 7). Drawing on those verses of the Qur’an that lent themselves to the portrayal of Muhammad as a cosmic precursor to Adam and taking liberty with the construction of hadith that assisted their point of view, the Sufi took pains to render Muhammad as superior to the Christian Christ, albeit, with Jesus in mind as the unspoken model of their mysticalMuhammad. This irony is not lost on the observer who takes note of the paradox that is carefully put into motion. In following the clues as I have laid them out in this chapter, the Sufi relationship to Muhammad and Jesus as points of reference actually shows that ‘authentic’ Sufism is a continuation of the teaching of Jesus through the image of Muhammad. What becomes hard to ignore is that the genuine Sufi mysticism – in being overcome with intoxicated speech and state of drunkenness with the divine – was in fact an overcompensation of the (im)possibility of stating the truth of their experience as the state of God-with-man. The Sufis were not so much interested in the Muhammad of tradition, but the Jesus of history; they settled for Muhammad-mysticism. God-with-man Sufi I think a major point that is taken for granted is the automatic assumption about Muhammad as the point of reference for Sufis. This is, rightly so, to think about Sufism in terms of Islamic mysticism, and within the context of Islamic tradition, and therefore to connect the obvious dots between the Sufi and Muhammad. I  do not doubt that there is much more to Muhammad than tradition presents. As implied previously, Muhammad was probably forced to withhold, and likely conceal, much of what he knew by way of his own experiences.12 But there is also the issue outlined that ‘Muhammad’ is seen by those as they want to see him – he was for many what they needed him to be. The vast Sunni hadith canon gives us a good indication of this, if nothing else. What if we begin by removing the assumption that the Sufi looked to Muhammad and that we do not proceed by taking for granted Muhammad as the point of reference? Many anomalies already discussed in Chapter 2, for instance, would begin to make sense. This is not to say that the Sufi had not already made sense of the anomalous features of their tradition by forcing the connection to Muhammad (even where it seems at odds) as its source or as the example for the model

130  Absent Christ, present God life they sought. It is to say, however, the basis of the mystical life that the Sufi pursued was grounded in the perceived relationship between God and man. What they demonstrate in their feats of mystical acuity is evidence of the belief they held about the reality of God-with-man based on the experience being Sufi. The following excerpts convey no better proof of ecstatic speech, but they concurrently display the state of which I speak: I saw that my spirit (sirr) was borne to the heavens. It looked at nothing and gave no heed, though Paradise and Hell were displayed to it, for it was freed of phenomena and veils. Then I became a bird, whose body was of Oneness and whose wings were of Everlastingness, and I continued to fly in the air of the Absolute (huwiyyat), until I passed into the sphere of Purification (tanzih), and gazed upon the field of Eternity (azaliyyat) and beheld there the tree of Oneness. When I looked I myself was all those. I cried: ‘O Lord, with my egoism (mani-yi man) I cannot attain to Thee, and I cannot escape from my selfhood. What am I to do?’ God spake: ‘O Abu Yazid, thou must win release from thy ‘thou-ness’ by following My beloved (Muhammad). Smear thine eyes with the dust of his feet and follow him continually’.13 These lines are attributed to Bayazid Bistami (d.  874). They reveal the full expanse of the ontology of Sufi experience and immediacy of the divine presence. It may be reasonable to suspect the ending by which the account is enclosed. The reference to Muhammad is a means to ‘sober’ the mood and return the reader’s attention to the ground of religion. Yet, it should be noted that here Muhammad is ‘beloved’ and not a prophet. The moral twist of the story is also worth noting, since the described experience of Bayazid is something obviously more than what has been preserved about Muhammad’s own such miraculous feats, even that of the Mi’raj (cf. Q 17:1; 17:60; 53:10–14). Muhammad’s status as ‘servant’ (abd) and ‘messenger’ (rasul), whilst obvious as to its meaning, point to a most enigmatic reading of his place in relation to God. Tradition reads it as indicative of Muhammad the man as a channel of divine message and the vessel of divine will. Mystics, like Bayazid, unlock the mystery of his absence (of self ) in the presence of God. Yet, in what they express we do not find Muhammad the Prophet of Islam, but Muhammad a reflection of the mystics themselves, who incidentally transport us to the charisma of the God-with-man event of Jesus. So now I have a tongue of everlasting grace, a heart of light divine, an eye of godly handiwork. By his succour I speak, with His power I grasp. Since through Him I live, I shall never die. Since I have reached this stage, my token is eternal, my expression everlasting; my tongue is the tongue of unity, my spirit is the spirit of divestiture. Not of myself I speak, that I should be mere narrator, neither through myself do I  speak, that I  should be mere remembrancer. He moves my tongue according as He wills, and in all this I am but an interpreter. In reality the speaker is He, not I. (Arberry, 1966, pp. 108–109)

Absent Christ, present God  131

Conclusion In this chapter, I have demonstrated that the historicality of Sufism is subject to the modes of being through which it is made to give rise to both its meaning and functionality for the observer. That is to say, we cannot determine what the past of Sufism means unless we are working through some paradigm of understanding that allows us to make sense and derive meaning from what we observe as the historical condition of Sufism. This being especially important with regard to the question about the orientation of Sufi mysticism. This is of course in reference to Heidegger’s terminology of ‘present-athand[edness’ (Vorhanden) and ‘ready-to-hand[edness]’ (Zuhanden). In my analysis, I have, therefore, problematised the Sufi relationality to Muhammad to show that the orientation of Sufism to its past is not a given, but very much a significant point of inquiry that has been severely overlooked. Heidegger’s modes of being as tools for analysis allow for a reconsideration of this relationship as it becomes present-to-hand. The ontological structure of Sufism instead arises through interaction with the past and through unfolding in the way that it handles this relationship. I have argued that it more readily lends itself to the ontological framework of Jesus as the exemplar of the God-with-man event. That Christ is not a theological feature of Islamic consciousness is not the point. For Christ would not be a centrepiece in a post-crucifixion narrative beyond the remit of the ‘Easter’ experience of Peter. Instead, the absence of Christ allows for the present experience of Godwith-man in Sufi mysticism to emerge as the quality of authentic-Sufi-Dasein. Muhammad’s incorporation into Sufism is something that is typically ready-tohand, seamlessly fitting into a meaningful network of mystical activity, purpose, and function. As such, it has never been a point of inquiry. In being part of the Sufi activity, it has become part of the ‘Sufi body of experience’ and part of the domain of its sameness. In using the specific and significant example of the mystic, Bayazid, however, I  have shown clear instances of the breakdown of such assumed connectivity, where it ceases to be a seamless function, thus changing the orientation towards Muhammad and instead signalling an underlying historic connectivity that has been brought to the fore in this chapter.

Notes 1 See, for example, Bartlett, 2003. 2 This was always for Heidegger the original motive that was forgotten in the operational tragedy of ontotheology. Ontology was essentially about the question of being and theology working through of the faith experience of Christianity (Vedder, 2016). 3 See, for example, Swazo, 2019. 4 Consult, Hemming, 2002, p. 266; cited in Hankey, 2006, p. 3. 5 N.B. this is a questionable term with an indeterminate category, commonly associated with tawhid (which best represents God’s quality of ‘Oneness’ rather than the attainable pursuit of ‘unification’ with Him). The generally accepted view that Sufism has a goal of unity is typically supported by reference to the technical Sufi terminology fana wa baqa, the application of which remains varied among Sufi authors of the medieval period. 6 See Milani (2018, ch. 3).

132  Absent Christ, present God 7 My translation. Consult N.J. Dawood’s rendition for comparison: ‘This is a glorious Koran, inscribed in a hidden which none may touch except the purified’ (1970, p. 110). 8 I am referring here to Heidegger’s concept of the hermeneutical circle (cf., Heidegger, 1960). 9 From the Halat u Sukhunan-i Shaykh Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr and Asraru’l-tawhid fi maqamati’l-Shaykh Abi Sa’id, cited in (Nicholson, 1994 [1921], pp. 59–60). 10 Poverty is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in the traditional reports. These maintain the position of Muhammad as one of being moderate in the ebb and flow of life (see for example, Sunan al-Nisa’i 1306). God bestows poverty or wealth unto a person as a test of faith (Jami al-Tirmidhi 3495); Muhammad is reported to forbid making show of it (i.e., poverty in particular), resorting to begging (Sahih al-Bukhari 4539), and complaining of it (Sunan Abi Dawood 1645). 11 See Geza Vermes (1993, pp. 206–207). 12 For discussion on this, see Milani (2013, pp. 170–171). 13 This refers to what the Sufis call ‘The Ascension of Bayazid’, the full account of which can be found in the tadhkirat al-awliya (Attar, 2003, pp. 222–226). For the English translation of this account in full see A.J. Arberry (1966, pp. 105–110). The summary of the account given in the text is taken from R.A. Nicholson (Nicholson, 2000, p. 238).

Works Cited Abd El-Jalil, J., 1950. Marie et l’Islam. Paris: s.n. Arberry, A. J., 1966. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliya’ (Memorial of the Saints) by Farid al-Din Attar. s.l.:s.n. Attar, 2003. Tadhkirat al-awliya. Tehran: Movasseseh Farhangi Andisheh Darogsar. Bartlett, A. W., 2003. A Flight of God: M. Heidegger and R. Girard. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 59(4), pp. 1101–1120. Dawood, N. J., 1970. The Koran. London: Penguin Books. Guillaume, A., 1954. Islam. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Guillaume, A., 1955. The Life of Muhammad: A  Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hankey, W., 2006. Augustine, Heidegger, and Bultmann. [Online] Available at: https:// cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/fass/Classics/Hankey/Augustine%2C%20 Heidegger%2C%20and%20Bultmann.pdf [Accessed 1 April 2020]. Heidegger, M., 1960. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hemming, L. P., 2002. Heidegger’s Atheism. The Refusal of a Theological Voice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Milani, M., 2013. Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. Abingdon: Routledge. Milani, M., 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Nicholson, R. A., [1921] 1994. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Nicholson, R. A., 2000. Kashf al-Mahjub “The Revelation of the Veiled”: An Early Persian Treatise on Sufism/Ali b. Uthman al-Jullabi al-Hujwiri. Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris & Phillips Ltd., Teddingdon House. Sheehan, T., 1986. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. New York: Random House. Swazo, N. K., 2019. Heidegger’s Destruktion of Theology: ‘Primordial Faith’ and ‘Recognition’ of the Messiah. Modern Theology, 35(1), pp. 138–162. Vedder, B., 2016. Religion and Theology. In: F. R. a. E. S. Nelson, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 329–335. Vermes, G., 1993. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. London: SCM Press Ltd.

6 Break with the past Transgressing restrictions of the category and scholarship on ‘mysticism’

Introduction In this chapter, the hypothesis that Sufism is historically anomalous and analogous in relation to Islam is brought full circle: Sufism is always an unexpected ontology of Islamic lived experience. This view will now be addressed in terms of the category of ‘mysticism’, but also the category in relation to the two foundational figures, as I have argued, central to Sufism: Jesus and Muhammad. The discussion in this chapter will not be greatly focused on the history of scholarship on the category of ‘mysticism’, but rather and more importantly the aim is to give due attention to that which the category is supposed to allude: the other, beyond what the term is conventionally thought to express. To start, although the term ‘mysticism’ is a western academic construct, it is not one to be quickly dismissed. The term is, after all, representative of an effort to define an aspect of religion that remains beyond comprehension and thus confined to the realm of experience. As such, I am not of the view that ‘mysticism’ is a meaningless label. I concede, however, that the aim of rationalising it, explaining it, and talking about it, was and always will be a scholarly goal. As pointed out in Chapter 3, the phenomenon of mysticism is one which is best defined by Heidegger as the ‘strife of earth and world’. Heidegger does not directly address ‘mysticism’ because to use it would be to forego the tension that is key for anyone wanting to grasp at just what it is as a thing (phenomenon), and thus to normalise it instead as something supposedly understood. In this way, Sufism has to be a thing that is ‘mystical’ in the fullest sense precisely because of the fact of what it is as a point of tension that is always maintained in the struggle between its revealedness and concealedness. This, to be sure, is what I have pointed to as Sufism’s authenticity or the authentic-Sufi-Dasein.

Eat the flesh but do not break the bones For those familiar with Old Norse mythology, the section heading alludes to the cherished story in the Prose Edda of Thor and Loki visiting a peasant family and where Thor offers a feast of his goats but asks that the bones are placed in the goatskins at the end of the meal. The goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngjóstr are DOI: 10.4324/9780429448737-7

134  Break with the past slaughtered but brought back to life again by Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. The next day, when the goats are revived, Thor notices one has a limp leg, meaning someone had broken the bone to eat the marrow, thus disobeying the god. I relate this story as a segue into the discussion on the category of mysticism in Sufi studies. Our story begins with what is now a fashionable disregard of Orientalism and Oriental scholarship.1 That the great Orientalists can be called out for their prejudiced reading of Sufi history is not reason enough to relegate them to the dustbin of history. I, for one, am fond of the Orientalists, in particular, because they bring to light something that I believe to be crucial that has been missed by their detractors in their own preoccupation with the emancipation of scholarly objects of study. The accusation typically levelled against Orientalists like A.J. Arberry, R.A. Nicholson, Louis Massignon, and Henry Corbin, for instance, is that they narrowly focused their attention on a select few Sufi figures of the past and of those chiefly from the classical Persian period, thus leaving out many others. Subsequently, and understandably, their limited scope of research could only reflect a biased conclusion that spoke to the selectivity of the data under scrutiny. In short, figures such as Ibn Taymiyya who represented the predominant medieval Sufi view of the day, and that of the dominant mode of the tariqah Sufism, went unnoticed until after. The image of Sufism that the Orientalist research revealed was one of the enigmatic, ecstatic, and poetic, giving the impression that ‘Sufism’ was essentially defined as such. Notwithstanding, it should be noted that their works had actually pointed to a specific phenomenon within the broader conceptualisation of Sufism as mysticism within the Islamic. (This is not, mind you, ‘Islamic mysticism’, in the sense that is now commonly understood as mysticism that arose from within the Islamic, but rather mysticism that is both appropriated and ‘Islamised’.) One might hazard a guess as to their real vested interest, seeing in the mirror of the Orient an image of ‘the noble savage’. Because of the criticism of their works and due to the increased number of publications on Sufism from a more liberal perspective,2 it comes to light that the Orientalists in fact presented the case for a fringe movement within the larger organised network of normative Sufism. Theirs was a study of dissidents and antinomians and extreme introverts, that is, a study of the ‘mystics’ within a much larger current of Islamic piety than previously anticipated or presently realised. At this point in time, scholars of Sufism are in fact presented with the more interesting question of typology. There are clearly types or kinds of ‘Sufism’, if we agree to call it that, but just how varied a phenomenon is Sufism to warrant a typological study? I see two kinds. On the one hand, what emerges is the mystical element within Islam, which is contrasted, on the other hand, with Islamic mysticism. And it would seem that ‘Sufism’ is readily employed in both camps. Were we to resort to stricter use of terminology, this differentiation might be juxtaposed in terms of ‘mystic’ and ‘Sufi’, reserving ‘Sufism’ for ‘Islamic mysticism’ because it represents the configuration of mystical experience as observing the strictures of formal religion. ‘Mystic’, then, is reserved for the anomalous and analogous aspect of religious experience not confined to one religion or the other, but something that moves through and in between, commonly found expressed in

Break with the past  135 Islam and elsewhere. This might seem an arbitrary distinction, but it is one that is presently emergent in scholarly discourse on Sufism and for some the default narrative. In any case, scholars do, unwittingly, fall into one or the other camp. Also, to speak about the ‘mystics’ as representative of a fringe movement avoids the homogenisation of Sufism – both that which suffered the Orientalist rendering, as well as the kind of scholarship that would purge Sufi studies of unwanted peripheral elements. What then of the term ‘mystic’, ‘mystical’, and ‘mysticism’? These terms signal, in my view, the ineffable with which those from within the Islamicate had a principal fascination.

The limit of language Words are not supposed to be precisely as they appear; at least not in the classical sense, and certainly not in Arabic and Farsi. Words point – at all times – in two simultaneous directions: to its root meaning (and thus its connectedness with cognate terms and their meanings) and to something other than itself. In this way, words become a puzzle of possible meaning as well as navigational coordinates for potentiality. The exercise in this chapter is to show the value of using ‘mysticism’ by freeing it from conceptual historicisation. In the first instance, it is important to note that the appropriation of the category for Protestant and Catholic polemics had created the schism of opinion about whether mysticism is separate from formal religion or if it is a deepening of understanding of traditional religion. These are anachronistic and thus part of modern conundrums with regard to the question of mysticism. The historical categorisation of mysticism in twentieth-century scholarship mainly reflects the heuristics of Protestant outlook (esp., James, 1977; Bergson, 1935; Weber, 1963), which is demonstrative of the effort to isolate the mystical within the broader experience of religion. Their role, for instance, is intriguing to the extent that in them mysticism is seen as the ‘real religion’ within the institution of religion, but which rejects formalistic religiosity. Set in this framework, Sufism would be preconceived as separate from Islam. Though prominent, it was not without a response from the perspective of tradition (Zahner; Massignon), whereby mysticism was presented as germane to the religious body (its institution, ritualism, text, and so on). This would give the impression of Sufism as ‘Islamic mysticism’; that is, as something that extends out from religion’s core. In the second instance, ‘mysticism’ – in the English-speaking world primarily and Western scholarship generally – is a derived notion rooted in ancient Greek. The Greek μύω and μυστικός denote two core ideas about the ‘initiate’ and the ‘secret’ which stand in relation to what is and remains concealed. This idea features heavily in the New Testament because it is Hellenised and as such deals directly with the subject of μυστήριον: ‘the mystery’ of Revelation (of God becoming flesh), particularly in John’s Gospel. Therefore, the fact that the word ‘mysticism’ or any of its variations such as ‘mystic’ and/or ‘mystical’ do not appear in Arabic and Farsi is tangential. Terms that do appear in both Arabic and Farsi are used

136  Break with the past to describe the same intentionality of meaning that is relative to the corresponding experience. More importantly, the revelatory basis of the religious experience commonly shared by monotheistic religions has its roots in the ancient Orient, Persia in particular stands out. The Gathas of Zarathushtra and Mithraic symbolism are two of the oldest examples in living memory to signify the ‘mystery’ that is already at play and with which the candidates are in contact through ritual initiation. Thus, the terms ‘initiate’, ‘secret’, and ‘mystery’, whilst found in written history among Greek-speaking peoples – and from there finding its way to modern Western usage via the New Testament – point to an archaic Eastern origin well before written history. In Arabic, the key term is ‫ سر‬and in Farsi, it is ‫( راز‬both of them conveying the ‘mystery’ and ‘secret’ that is known only to an initiate: a Sufi or ‘āref ). The question is, however, were Jesus and Muhammad ‘mystics’? Is this a reasonable inference? And if so, what can we say about the relationship between what we take mysticism to mean and the role and the function of the two figures? Having raised the question here, as it follows from saying that initiates into the secrets of the divine are ‘mystics’, I will return to this issue in the next section that focuses on the identity of the mystic and the phenomenon of mysticism. For the purposes of this section, I have wanted to explain mysticism in terms of the ineffable, which regardless of scholarly constructionism, is something both real and felt  – and thus described, albeit, in the cryptic language (i.e., through analogy, allegory, and more prominently through poetics) – in historical religion. Indeed, mysticism is the particular type of engagement with religious content that is primarily experiential and profoundly personal and individual. My speaking about mysticism in this way is a deliberate ploy to problematise it significantly. The benefit of the process is that it demonstrates the error of confusion as conceptual and not linguistic. That is to say, mysticism is not something that evolves later on out of asceticism, which is how it is generally historicised (and consequently assumed as two separate phenomena, one following the other), but that asceticism is the very condition that allows for the emergence of mysticism. I have already treated this point in Chapter 1 and have also expanded upon it in subsequent chapters. Here, I want to show the problem is not that certain words are absent in Arabic and Farsi, but rather the problem is the presumption that because an equivalent word for ‘mysticism’ is missing, the conclusion is drawn that the idea is borrowed. Whilst I cannot deny the flow of ideas, even though we can never say with any certainty how and when they were taken up and by whom specifically, we should give due credit to the history of ideas and their genealogy in a particular place. It is not that the Persians had not any idea about ‘mysticism’ and then suddenly thanks to the Greeks it dawns on them how useful it is(!); rather, I assert the idea was already known and that what we have instead is the process of its intensification and refinement coming into focus through cultural exchange. Attachment to a specific genealogy of ‘mysticism’, that is, via the Greek terms noted previously, will naturally only yield the fundamental view that has dominated Western scholarship: it is a Greek idea because the word does not exist anywhere else. I  am not particularly invested in the origins of terms, but I  am interested in the correct interpretation and usage of ‘mysticism’ and related terms.

Break with the past  137 As I have said, the problem is conceptual (and not linguistic) but for two reasons. First, sufficient linguistic terms exist in Arabic and Farsi to denote the same basic idea without an etymological link. This strengthens the view that the idea had mostly likely existed and was known even before its Greek form was made known in the Muslim East. Second, the term simply denotes initiation into secrets, which, as noted, has parallel meaning in both Greek and Arabic and Farsi. For Sufis, as for the Christian, the term ‘mysticism’ remains key because of associated rites that prepare the novice to gain first-hand experience of what otherwise remains inaccessible throughout the spiritual journey. The shortcut word for this in later Sufi literature is tasawwuf; and in Western Christianity, at least, it is mysticism.

The mystic and mysticism Now to the question of Jesus and Muhammad. Were they mystics? I  have not tried, in this book, to retroactively fit either figure  into a mystical theme; yet I have reported on the matter of their treatment by Christians and Muslims alike as such. If, in the simplest way of rendering the term ‘mystic’, we see Jesus and Muhammad as major initiatory figures who enter into – and facilitate the entering into – the fullness of the (divine) secrets, then it is a case readily closed. We might also consider that if we settle on this reference for them, then would it not render the traditional nomenclature of ‘prophet’ and ‘messenger’ obsolete? Could they be all three: mystic, prophet, and messenger? Here I am inclined to agree that they are mystics in the primary sense as described and not as a lesser postprophetic figure for whom being a mystic is a consolation prize in traditional religious taxonomy. Clearly, from the traditional standpoint, they are not mystics; for in that rendering, a mystic is of a lower category to prophethood and of the kind that belongs to the historical period following the absence of prophecy. We must not forget the Muhammad of tradition is a lowly servant of God selected for the highest honour to fulfil God’s message. The Jesus of tradition is God incarnate. In both cases, the fact that Muhammad is a vessel and Jesus the physical presence of God dismisses any possible need to attribute the term ‘mystic’ to either one. It is only if we view them in their historical context as human persons with agency that the designation ‘mystic’ might be seen as viable and even perhaps necessary. I say this with the proviso that I am only considering Jesus and Muhammad as such, and that the category does not necessarily extend to all or other foundational figures as a fait accompli. If we are to see Jesus and Muhammad as ‘mystics’, indeed, of the exemplary kind, it would be in the most unconventional sense of their having revealed what had remained concealed to the ordinary understanding. Quintessentially, they both displayed a way by which anyone could gain access to, and enter into, divine grace. Two clear examples of this are the rite of baptism and the act of witnessing (shahadah). So, the process is essentially one of mysticism as unrevealed. What defines a Sufi, Jewish, or Christian mystic, is the way in which they enter into a state of being in relation to the religious body of text and ritual performance,

138  Break with the past as well as the nature of the experience of this engagement that is deemed extraordinary according to chronicles about them.3 Drawing on Bouyer (1990), the point here about what makes this a mystical experience is that in both instances – of reading sacred texts and performing the regular act of worship as defines each faith – the same aspects of the religion are being engaged with ordinarily as part of the normality of worshiping in a religious setting by all worshipers. Yet, the mystical is experienced extraordinarily in that very same moment and through the very same activity by some for reasons that cannot be adequately explained by rational means.4 So, the mystical is a phenomenal possibility as part of the religious. It must be. But it is not – nor has it ever been – delimited to the formality of religious practice and worship in an institutional setting. ‘Grace’, therefore, is a fitting reference in biblical context (especially that of New Testament theology) to discern a mysterious ‘movement’ of the sacred among the ordinary. I would assert Jesus and Muhammad as mystics in this sense of having experienced the sacred first-hand and having become living embodiments of the outpouring of the sacred. I  am speaking about mysticism as outlining a religious experience that is both phenomenal and existential. It is not a hard categorical delineation. Jesus and Muhammad are retroactively embellished by tradition as ‘prophets’ or ‘Lord’. Traditional hermeneutics allows us to see them as the revelatory medium or as revelation personified, alluding to the ideal and reality of their existence in terms the sacred exemplified. For even Muhammad as the medium of revelation is joined with the sacred through the activity of transmittance. Even the history of the religious tradition holds within it the historical portrayal of the figures as fluid and transmutable in their experience of being-in-the-world. At a deeper level of hermeneutics still, they are not revealing but remaining within a state of being consumed by their relationship to (and in) the sacred. The basis of mysticism and the condition for being a mystic, in this sense, is built upon the relationship between the sacred and the human. The nature of this relationship can be differently put into practice and it does not ipso facto determine necessarily any one person a mystic who has come into contact, or is in a relationship, with the sacred (this too is part of its own inherent mystery!). Piety, religious zeal, and sincere devotion, for instance, are not necessarily and always correlative with mysticism, but they cannot be excluded from the wide reach of its activity as defined here. This is an important point of consideration because it signals the pragmatic necessity for a classification in the Heideggerian sense about the authenticity of experience, phenomenologically.

Conclusion: mysticisms of Jesus and Muhammad as archetypes We cannot say that Jesus was a mystic any more than we can say that about Muhammad without raising serious concern about the historical blind side in one’s analysis. However, I am saying they were mystics as a way of liberating them from the delimitation of tradition. Yet in doing so, we are unable to place them on par with each other in this respect. A typology of mysticism emerges immediately in a close examination of Jesus and Muhammad. They represent the archetype mystic,

Break with the past  139 but each in a different way. In the Heideggerian framework that I have been using, they are separated by the category of authenticity and inauthenticity. Jesus preached the interiorisation of faith as the religion of the heart and the way to the kingdom of God. Muhammad recited the ‘gospel’ in Arabic, ‘reading’ the Word of God for his audience to receive the message about the promised ‘garden’. I  note this as a reminder that what Muhammad communicated is the same biblical content as Jesus had known. But there is a difference to them, one would rightly assume. Jesus represents the open-hiddenness of the sacred and Muhammad its hidden-openness. Salvation is an experience that is ontological in nature yet in Jesus it is a way shown to be discovered internally, whereas in Muhammad it is primarily an expectation to be fulfilled externally. Here, I want to stress that the issue is chiefly a matter of emphasis and not of finality for both exemplify internalised and externalised aspects of religion. It is only that the difference between Jesus and Muhammad is one that is sharply characterised by the interiority and exteriority of faith respectively. In this way, it makes sense to see Muhammad – as did the classical Sufi authors such as al-Sarraj and al-Makki – as ‘Sufi’ and thus ‘Sufism’ in terms of ‘Islamic mysticism’ as aforementioned, whilst leaving available ‘mystic’ for exceptional instances and of more anomalous personas such as that of Jesus – that is, if we were to follow a historicisation model of reading mysticism. As noted, Muhammad cannot be excluded or sidelined from the category, and thus of being a ‘mystic’; though, we are obliged to classify him within the category. Thus, Jesus and Muhammad are mystics of a kind, based on an assessment of their stylistic condition of being in relation to the sacred. Importantly, we now determine that the underlying connection between Jesus and the Sufis (of the kind I have explored in this book) is the severity and authenticity of mystical experience to which both belong. Clear lines of trajectory can now be drawn, therefore, from Jesus and Muhammad to the practitioners of Sufism in the Islamicate in a way that readily discerns them in terms of authentic-Sufi-Dasein and inauthentic-Sufi-Dasein.

Notes 1 Carl W. Ernst’s passing comment ‘Islamic studies as a field has outgrown its Orientalist roots’ signals the general trend now set in (2018, p.  417). More severe is Hamid Dabashi’s polemical villainization of Orientalism in his opening chapter (2018). 2 See Ovamir Anjum (2010). 3 See for example, Attar’s tadhkirat (2003). 4 The reader may wish to draw parallel in what I  am describing here to Rudolf Otto’s theorisation of mystical experience. Yet I would maintain that I am at pains to avoid the neo-Kantian dichotomisation of the non-rational and rational that has been drawn attention to by Otto’s critics (King, 2010, pp. 328–329).

Works Cited Anjum, O., 2010. Sufism without Mysticism? Ibn Qayyim al-Gawziyyah’s Objectives in Madarig al-Salikin. Oriente Moderno, 90(1), pp. 166–188. Attar, 2003. Tadhkirat al-awliya. Tehran: Movasseseh Farhangi Andisheh Darogsar. Bergson, H., 1935. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

140  Break with the past Bouyer, L., 1990. The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth of Christian Mysticism. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Dabashi, H., 2018. Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn al-Quzat al-Hamadani. Abingdon: Routledge. Ernst, C. W., 2018. It’s Not Just Academic! Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies. London: SAGE/Yoda Press. James, W., 1977. The Varieties of Religious Experience (The Gifford Lectures 1901–2). Glasgow: Collins. King, R., 2010. Mysticism and Spirituality. In: J. Hinnells, ed. The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 323–338. Weber, M., 1963. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

7 Conclusion The ontological question for Sufism

Overview This final chapter  is about retrieving the Sufi. It brings together the threads in the thesis of this book that the Sufis are the product of a phenomenological (in this sense, first-person experience) process of being Muslim. That is, they have engaged with their tradition and holy text as through a conversation with the past (interpreting their experience of the heroes of the past, e.g., Muhammad) and the object as art (the Qur’an) in the way that Heidegger defined ‘art’ as the openingup of meaning. Sufism is, using Heidegger’s terminology, the ‘clearing’ or ‘event’ of disclosure for potentiality and possibility for being Muslim in the Islamic lifeworld. The authenticity of Sufism is, therefore, dependent upon agency and poiesis, that is, the ability or potentiality for transitioning from ontic to ontological and the bringing-forth of what Sufism is as it is. As mentioned at the start of the book, my aim is not to follow Heidegger. I take inspiration from the man to speak about Sufism anew. The purpose of this book has been about exploration and, to a degree, experimentation. But mostly, labouring over the concerns raised in the various chapters has been, as Heidegger had said, ‘as spadework for discovering’. Indeed, in this task I have utilised, in particular, Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as the blueprint for carrying out the present study of Sufism. The question regarding the essence of Sufism, therefore, must be placed ‘on a firm ground again’: The answer to the question, like every genuine answer, is only the final result of the last step in a long series of questions. Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning. (Heidegger, 2011, p. 126) I take this quote because it places the emphasis on the correct point whereupon our attention needs to be in order to grasp the nature of Sufism as situated within the ontological, without the distraction and confusion of the categorical inquiries that have persisted about the meaning of Sufism historically.

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142  Conclusion

Recovering the lost question of Sufism The ontological question for Sufism relates not to its past having been forgotten, but to the present condition of its being in the Islamic. Sufism is ordinarily found within the Islamic as part of the Islamic, but without knowing that it stands in as a potentiality for the Islamic as beyond itself. The way that Sufism is read historically is as Islamic, but this is the state of being (i.e., ontic) in the Islamic, that is, not as yet moving towards a radical transformation of its nature of being what it is. What it is has remained unrealised. This is why Sufism has been interpreted as ‘Islamic mysticism’, representing its ontic condition as consumed by the Islamic. The ontological state of Sufism is about its coming to be as it is in the way that  it is within the Islamic intuitively as Sufism. Now, Sufism is furthest from what it is when it is in reflection of the Islamic; contrastingly, Sufism is closest to what it is when it is in and through the Islamic as it is intuitively, that is, ready-to-hand. Only then does Sufism go beyond what is Islamic by virtue of the functionality of what it does. This is the state of its authentic-Sufi-Dasein, as I have discussed it. In what is described we can see the immaculate experience of the early mystics (whom Knysh calls ‘proto-Sufis’) who were in the Islamic as Sufis and not Sufis within the Islamic. This difference is important because it demonstrates the problem of the lost question of Sufism. The early Sufis such as Bayazid and Hallaj were essentially Sufis, that is, they were [truly, i.e., in a true sense] Sufi in essence: that by which something ‘is what it is as it is’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 89) and so their ‘Sufism’ was not visible to observers. The observation of Sufism, therefore, emerges when Sufis cease to be Sufis in the Islamic by stopping to reflect on the Islamic as Sufis within it. The era in question comes to the fore with al-Junayd. This kind of being Sufi reaches its culmination with the figure of Ibn Taymiyya. At this point, there is no longer Sufism as it is, but inauthentic-Sufi-Dasein, that is, Islam present-at-hand to Sufis. The importance of the recovery of Sufism is precisely connected to the lost question of ontology for Sufism. The authenticity question for Sufism is therefore dependent upon the pushing back onto the question of what it is in itself and not as what it seems in terms of the separation of object (Islam/Islamic) and subject (Sufi/Sufism). Importantly, Sufism in essence, as ready-to-handedness, is no longer a thing apart from the world in which it is found, but rather it is as an access to its function as Sufism and not as understood in terms of its properties. Here the most important thing for us to consider is the worldhood of the world of Sufism in the Islamic, that is, the equipment, goals, identity, and/or roles of the world of Sufism.

The origin of Sufism as ‘the work of art’ in the Islamic The origin of Sufism is Sufism. This is to understand it as it is without forgoing the ontological question for the sake of the ‘sequence in time of events’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 131). There is nothing metaphysical to be concerned with at all in the way that I have determined to speak about the nature of Sufism. In other words, Sufism

Conclusion  143 is the point of origin and beginning of itself as essence. The reader will note that by ‘essence’ I mean what Heidegger meant: ‘what something is, as it is, we call its essence’, and therefore the reader can appreciate the key to unpicking the riddle that Heidegger left behind in his line of inquiry about the fact that the ‘origin of something is the source of its essence’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 89). As such, I have explained the essence of Sufism as being determined in the language that it calls forth in its naming of things Islamic. What it discloses is in essence poesy. Sufism takes on both the role and function of an artwork in this sense in order to become itself an art and thus to set-into-work religiously meaningful truth through poetry. It is therefore itself defined as an openness and ‘open region which poetry lets happen’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 128). I am therefore taking Sufism to be ‘art’ in that it has the quality of an artwork – to which I have already alluded as that of the particular style of the Persian Sufi tradition. There, Sufis, of the kind I have spent the majority of this book writing about, are ‘artists’ that take a stand in relation to the art (Sufism) within the worldhood (the Islamic) in which they exist. What we need to understand at this point is that these Sufi are what they are because of the artwork (and not the other way around, as Heidegger had cautioned): ‘Art then is a becoming and happening of truth’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 127). But ‘truth’ for Heidegger was not a theological and metaphysical concept. It was quite literally ‘unconcealing’ (alētheia) and thus the open-clearing so as to represent a ‘double concealment’ as part of the essence of truth. This has been a key point in speaking about Sufism within the Islamic in this book. Because to speak about Sufism is to both simultaneously talk about it openly and to let it remain hidden as what it is in its unconcealment. What Sufism does in essence and in its functioning is precisely this open region that ‘happens in the midst of beings’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 115), that is, for us, within the ordinary purview of the Islamic. So, it always appears that Sufism is Islamic, but it does not cease to be affected by what Heidegger described as ‘strife’, because the ‘denial’ aspect of the double concealment that has been underlined is always and necessarily the condition of its being. Hence ‘authentic-Sufi-Dasein’ is what I have introduced as the quality of the cessation of Sufism’s ‘thrownness’. On the one level, I have addressed the importance of understanding Sufism as a phenomenon within the Islamic and, on another level, the role/identity of the Sufi as part of that worldhood. On the one hand, therefore, it is the task of my thinking about Sufism with the aim to show it as it is and not as it is found. On the other hand, it has been shown that Sufis themselves have had to face the challenge of their own condition of being within the Islamic as Sufi.

Jesus and Sufism The connection to Jesus explains the anomalous and analogous nature of Sufism in its condition of authenticity. Because I have not tried to explain this connection historically, that is to say, as a trajectory of events linked together by a chain of evidence, I have been free to examine it in the light of history in terms that Heidegger

144  Conclusion defined it: Sufism as art ‘happens’ as a ‘thrust enters history’, and thus ‘history either begins or starts over again’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 131). Because the history of Sufism has been conducted ordinarily in the opposite way by trying to answer the question ‘what is meant by Sufism?’ it has remained within the predictable pattern of its understanding as historically Islamic. Yet, Sufism is what it is because it is both the point of origin and the unfolding, that is, ‘the happening of truth’ (Heidegger, 2011, p. 117). Thus, we have to face an uncomfortable fact about the nature of Sufism as has been historically conceived: the ‘thingly’ nature of Sufism tells us irrevocably about its having become just another object (a thing) among many in history. Heidegger perceived ‘truth’ as godly. And godly not as eternal. To possess the quality of ‘truth’ a thing had to ‘shine’; that is to say, it would be as it was and then taper off and die. Therefore, ‘god’ or ‘a god’ had to be real in the sense of having been in history. Jesus would be the obvious referent. Correspondingly, ‘art’ contains within it the happening of truth and it is the moment of unconcealing. It is therefore in this way that I have tried to establish the connection between Jesus and Sufism. The historical and material aspects of its ground of being as historical were discussed to demonstrate the worldhood of the world of Sufism in the Islamic in order to establish the possibility of Sufism as art in the Persianate. As noted, it was the Persians who first caught onto the idea of Sufism as art, but not always and openly perceiving the possibility of the connection between Sufism and Jesus, that is, between art and truth. I have left aside Muhammad in this calculation because Muhammad was never ‘a god’ either for tradition or by virtue of his own standing, historically. He was a messenger, a slave, a servant of God. Unless we are to understand tradition as disingenuous in its recount of him? He perpetuated a message, and therefore he would naturally not be considered a source or the ground of truth for the Sufi. I have made this very carefully known to the reader throughout the chapters of this book that the difference to be noted is between Muhammad as the source of Islam and the Islamic, and thus the Muslim, though not the Sufi in the terms laid out as being in its authenticity what it is.

Looking ahead to the clearing The study of Sufism has plateaued and it is time for a new way of thinking about Sufism. I deliberately use the term ‘thinking’, as did Heidegger, because thinking is required in order to see past the obvious in order to be able to take note of the unrevealed condition of our processes of analysis – at least beyond the literacy of disciplinary approach(es). The paradigm of study has become, therefore, invisible to scholarship on Sufism because thinking has been pushed to the background and processes have become prominent. There is a need to go beyond the repetitive cycle of ideas that perpetuate what has unfortunately become an ecosystem of stagnancy in the scholarly pursuit of this subject. From one perspective, the study of Sufism has been dominated by Islamic studies scholars with principal interests in Sufism as some-thing Islamic. From another perspective, these and other scholars from fields of anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, amongst others, have sought to give critical

Conclusion  145 edge to the study of Sufism by way of examining it as a category and through a categorisation of terms and concepts related to it. As I have endeavoured to point out, the problem of Sufism is the blindside of scholarship as to the varieties of activity from different types of agency within the world of Sufism. All would agree that Sufism is not homogenous and similarly all would concur that the Sufis were each of them differently climatised to the world of Sufism to which they belonged. (An example of this is the tariqah model where each of these represents the varieties of Sufi practice and belief.) Yet this is something that is taken for granted because it is something with which scholars of Sufism have become too familiar and perhaps to it too close, conceptually. One major aspect of Sufism that is taken for granted is the mystical. The mystical is not just a separate category to be figured out, but the principal concept to be understood as signalling the reason for diversification in Sufism. The Sufis, so-called, are themselves divided along this line of reckoning. The ‘mystics’ and the ‘religionists’ each  take a stand in the Islamic as ‘Sufis’, but doing so often in stark opposition. These figures and the qualities of their outlooks I have discussed in relation to the religio-cultural ethos of the Sufi milieu of medieval Persia. Mysticism is not just a category under scrutiny, but it is a factor of rather great importance in the study of Sufism that has been generally ignored for reasons of academic convenience, since ‘mysticism’ is underlined (and subsequently sidelined) by scholars as notoriously difficult to define. There is, as such, a certain nihilism in the academic approach that naturally resists change. But this is not new. The history of Sufism was reified with the nihilism of Junayd’s idealism. The possibilities of history were (and are still) overlooked as they are found always at the inception of Sufism. Sufism both is and is not what it seems. Is not Sufism always in itself historically at the origin? Are we then looking to the essence of the origin, or are we in our relation to Sufism continually appealing to a learned familiarity with the past? To treat Sufism as art, as I have in the course of this book, is to present it as something that ‘lets truth originate . . . because art is in its essence an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical’. In this ‘lived experience’ art, therefore, lives and dies. So it is that Sufism has lived and died. Thus, nothing of substance would be said in declaring the value of Sufism as immortal other than what its saying so demonstrates about those that hold on to the past that has passed. Sufism in its happening is at the beginning – it is the ‘origin’: ‘the essence of truth’, that is, ‘the unconcealment of beings as beings’ (Heidegger, 2011, pp. 133–134). It is in the light of the entire course of discussion, then, that this seemingly benign quote that was first encountered in Chapter  1 is revealed its potency in having been posed: ‘Sufism was a reality without a name, but now it is a name without a reality’ (Attar, 2003, p. 546).

Works Cited Attar, 2003. Tadhkirat al-awliya. Tehran: Movasseseh Farhangi Andisheh Darogsar. Heidegger, M., 2011. The Origin of the Workd of Art. In: Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 85–139.

Index

ἀ–λήθεια 33 Abba 123 Abbasid 123 absence 13, 39, 84, 104, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 130, 131, 137 Absolute 52, 130 Abu Hashim 28 Abu Nu’aym 31, 32, 42 Abyssinia 99 Acikgenc, A. 15 actuality 51, 52, 69, 70, 87 adoration 81, 108, 114, 122 aesthetics xvii, 71, 91 agency 2, 45, 58, 60, 119, 120, 123, 137, 141, 145 Ahmed, S. 4, 18, 43, 60, 64; analytical model of 4; reading of Islam by 4; thesis of 4 al-Adham 36 al-Basri 36 al-Bushanji 28, 29, 39, 40 al-dadjal 13 al-Dhahabi 37 Algar, H. 16, 18 al-Ghazali 11, 31, 41, 42, 79, 80, 87, 98; and orthodoxy 40; as Sufi 23; and Sufism as the essence of Sunnism 21 al-Ghazali, Ahmad 8, 23, 55, 76, 77, 84, 95 al-Gilani 39 al-Hallaj 8, 12, 21, 24, 32 – 4, 55, 56, 59, 70, 76, 78, 82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95, 121, 142; and Jesus 10, 88, 95, 113, 114; the legacy of 12, 21, 83; and the Nicaean Creed 100; public execution of 24 al-Hamadani 8, 19, 76, 140 al-Hujwiri 2, 31, 40, 55, 64, 132 al-Junayd 2, 6, 7, 12, 21, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37 – 9, 40, 41, 55 – 6, 87, 142; and formulation of mystical metaphysics 31,

32, 33, 35; idealism of 6, 145; and Sufi metaphysical language 6; the synthesis of 35; and triadic methodology 33 al-Kharaqani 56 al-Khayr 56, 69, 71, 76, 126, 132 allegory 14, 59, 79, 100, 136 al-Makki 2, 31 – 2, 39, 55, 139 al-Nasafi 38 al-Nuri 33 – 4, 76, 86 al-Qushayri 31, 39 al-Sarraj 2, 31, 33, 42, 55, 139 al-Suhrawardi 8 al-Sulami 31 al-Tustari 39, 76, 86 Anfang 6 Ansari 78, 81, 86 antinomianism 39, 50, 56, 61, 94, 104, 134 anomaly 4, 13, 29, 47, 48, 66, 77, 84, 95 Apocalypse 13, 119 apophatic 1, 86, 100 appropriation 4, 5, 34, 61, 67, 72, 75, 135 aql 40 Arabic 29, 63, 71 – 4, 75, 76, 86, 87, 11, 135, 136, 137, 139 Arberry, A. J. 11, 24, 42, 55, 64, 130, 132, 134 archetype 128, 138 ‘āref 136 Aristotle 38, 67, 69, 74, 93, 120, 121 Arjomand, S. A. 11, 18 art xiii, 9, 14, 48, 52, 61, 71, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 121, 141 – 5 asceticism 4, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 35, 36 – 7, 42, 43, 136; anti-mystical 25, 33, 34, 35; Christian 2, 17, 25, 30, 49; early Muslim 4, 26, 36, 37; Jewish 30 Ash’arite 54, 79 Attar 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 19, 24, 28, 32, 34, 36, 42, 43, 50, 51, 52 – 3, 56, 57, 59,

Index  147 61, 66, 75, 76, 85, 86, 88, 89, 95, 100, 112 – 14, 116, 117, 121, 145; works of 23, 25, 52, 54, 63, 64, 67, 71, 75, 132, 139, 145 authenticity xiii, 9, 10, 12, 46, 47, 66, 87 – 9, 95, 120, 133, 138, 139, 141 – 4 authority 56, 85, 104, 123 awareness 36, 47, 58, 66, 83 awliya’ 23, 24, 34 Baghdad 33, 34, 35, 76, 100 baqa 33, 46, 100, 131 Baqli, Ruzbihan 6, 8, 15, 71, 76, 86 bay’a 67 Bayazid 32, 42, 49, 55 – 6, 60, 67, 76, 82, 83, 89, 95, 115, 121, 130, 131, 132, 142 beauty 15, 71, 79 becoming 12, 47, 61, 66, 143 Being xii, 46, 52, 67, 86, 93, 121; and language 68, 73; question of xiii, 6, 15, 38, 67, 68, 73, 120, 131 Bergson, H. 13, 135, 139 biblical narrative 22 biography 1, 2, 23, 24, 31, 32, 99, 116, 126, 127; emphasis on 7 Buddhism 2, 27 Buehler, A. F. 15 Bulliet, R. 2, 5, 6, 12, 19, 42, 43, 61, 64 celibacy 26, 127 charisma 4, 29, 34, 37, 61, 103, 104, 130 Chittick, W. 11, 16, 19, 77, 80 – 2, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90 chivalry 36 Christ 13, 30, 96, 97, 100, 107, 119, 129; Cosmic 122 Christian 4, 10, 25, 27, 29, 49, 60, 79, 92, 98, 100, 101, 105, 108, 111, 120, 122, 124, 128; theology 119 – 21 Christianite 13, 119 Christianity 2, 3, 13, 16, 17, 25, 26, 29, 31, 38, 49, 60, 61, 72, 83, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 116, 122, 125, 127, 128, 131, 137; Eastern Syrian 96 – 8; esoteric 16; Hellenic 96; historicization of 16, 38, 105, 108; as mystery religion 30 Christology 100, 104, 111, 119, 121, 126 Church xiv, 30, 36, 106, 107; Fathers of the 30, 49, 97, 101 civic/civil 26, 28, 42; life 35, 36; religion 123; society 26 civility 36, 41

clearing 9, 14, 15, 68, 88, 92 – 4, 116, 129, 141, 143, 144 Companions 26, 31, 41, 127 comparativism 15, 24, 25, 29, 61, 63, 101 compassion 66, 70, 103 consciousness 29, 30, 35, 77, 83, 120, 122; Muslim 70, 71, 73, 111, 131; Sufi 49, 83, 86, 92 constructionism 14, 136 conversion 27, 71, 102, 105, 121 Corbin, H. 5, 11, 14, 18, 19, 134; and phenomenological hermeneutics 14 (the) cross 36, 114, 123, 128 crucifixion 36, 78, 100, 106, 107, 108, 110, 119, 123, 128, 131 Dabashi, H. 16, 18, 19, 139, 140 Dasein/Da-sein 13, 46 – 8, 51 – 2, 54, 57 – 9, 60, 62 – 3, 66 – 8, 69, 70, 87 – 8, 94, 95, 119, 120 – 1, 129, 131, 133, 139, 142 – 3 death 10, 26, 31, 33, 36, 52 – 3, 74, 78, 95, 104, 105, 106, 106, 113, 120, 123, 125; symbolic 54 deity 30, 52, 102 Denken 74 dervish/darvish 7, 8, 50, 77, 84, 97, 115 Destruktion 12, 47, 87, 132 devotion 32, 102, 103, 104, 128, 138 dhikr 100 Dhu al-Nun 32 Diaspora 107 divine xvi, 1, 4, 11, 26, 32, 33, 41, 53, 60, 71, 72, 75, 79, 83, 85, 96, 97, 100, 103, 107, 112, 114, 115, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 137; -human relationship 22, 50, 54, 75, 78, 79, 85, 96, 108, 121, 130, 138; manifestation 78, 79, 122 diwan-e Shams 50, 53 doost 123 dualism 30 earth 32, 88, 95, 98, 111, 124, 133 ecstasy 8, 33 Eidos 93 Eigentlichkeit 46 emotionality 48, 75 Ephrem the Syrian 96 – 7, 111 – 12, 125 Eraqi, Fakhruddin 76, 92, 117 Ereignis 15, 20 eros 79 Erschlossenheit 12, 47 eschatology xiv, xvi, 26, 27, 41, 100, 101, 102, 106, 109, 124, 125

148  Index essence xiii, 21, 23, 31, 57, 68 – 9, 73, 93, 122, 141, 143, 145 essentialism 10 (the) event 68, 104, 121, 129 ‘evidence’ 9; textual evidence 9 exchange 6, 17, 53, 72, 100; cultural 26, 136 exegesis 13, 23, 95, 109, 112; Muslim 4 experience 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 41, 46, 48, 49, 53, 54 – 8, 60 – 1, 66, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 82 – 4, 87, 89, 91, 94 – 6, 104 – 6, 108, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120 – 3, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 145; bipolarity of 13, 21, 66; a coincidence of religious 25; eschatological 41; intimate 115; Muslim 2, 5, 13, 37, 38, 49, 51, 55, 123, 133; ‘mystical’ 22, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 48, 55, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 134, 138, 139; of mysticism 29; personal 102; polarization of 12, 21; of Sufism 7, 12, 48, 59, 75, 129; Sufism as 45, 47, 55, 56, 58, 60, 66, 91, 130; of tariqa and master 12, 45 – 7, 50 – 1, 53, 54, 57 – 9, 63; transformative and transformational 10 exteriority 55, 139 facticity 5, 48, 52, 120 factuality 5, 48 faith 17, 22, 29, 31, 35, 36, 41, 42, 45, 49, 55, 60, 61, 66, 69, 70, 71, 79, 85, 87, 98, 102, 105, 106 – 9, 120, 122 – 5, 131, 132, 138, 139 falsafa 39 fana 33, 46, 52, 86, 100, 131 farq 33 Farsi 7, 8, 74, 75, 76, 79, 86, 117, 135 – 7 fasting 30, 42, 102, 127 framework xv, 1, 29, 55, 62, 67, 73, 75, 78, 80, 101, 131, 135, 139 Frye, R. N. 11 futuhat al-Makkiyya 39 Gabriel 22, 57, 111, 117, 125 Gathas 136 genealogy 56, 57, 95, 136 Gentile 103, 107 Gèosken, U. 15 geschehen 57 Geworfenheit 46, 86 ghazal 48, 63 Ghazali, A. 8, 71, 76, 84, 86, 95 Gnostic 79

God 11, 22, 25 – 8, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 46, 50, 52 – 4, 56 – 61, 63, 69 – 71, 78, 81 – 5, 88 – 9, 92, 94 – 7, 100, 135 – 9, 144, 145; absence of 104, 120; communion with 34, 41, 128; death of 104; fear of 27, 34, 72, 127; love of 34, 72, 78, 85, 98, 123; -realisation 29 Gospelic 13, 91, 92, 102, 109 Gospels 92, 100, 121, 122 grace 30, 40, 54, 59, 94, 95, 97, 121, 137, 138 Green, N. 2, 5, 12, 19, 42, 43 Gregory of Nyssa 59 hadith 22, 33, 42, 45, 54, 84, 99, 115, 116, 126, 127, 129 Hadith 1, 22, 25, 27, 57, 77, 84, 125 Hafiz 16, 48, 63, 71, 72, 86, 89, 91 – 2, 116 hagiography 2, 31 hajj 82, 89, 115 halakhah 104 hameh oost 25 hanif 126 haqiqa 57, 62 hasid 29, 104 Hasidim 103 – 4, 125 hawa 79 Hayes, J. 15 hazrat 54, 83 Heidegger, M. xiii, 2, 6, 9, 14, 15, 38, 46 – 8, 51, 67 – 9, 74, 88 – 9, 92 – 4, 116, 119 – 21, 131, 133, 141, 143, 144; hermeneutical phenomenology of 46, 47, 62; language of 89, 116; mysticism of 74; paradigm of exploration inspired by 2; phenomenological approach of xiii, 14, 46, 47, 69 – 70, 94, 120; philosophy of 5, 38, 46, 51, 57, 68, 69, 73; philosophy of history by 2; reception of 15; and search for meaning 14, 48; and study of Sufism 21, 141, 144; theory of xiii, 46 Hellenic 37, 42, 72, 73, 97 Hellenism 2 Heraclitus 74 heresy 8, 33, 61, 78, 85 ‘hermeneutic circle’ 9 hermeneutics 12, 14, 47, 48, 51, 63, 69, 77, 81, 122, 138; of history 2; of Shahab Ahmed 4; Sufi 51 heterodox 12, 21 Hinduism 2 historicality 47, 54, 57, 59, 120, 131 historicism 29, 94

Index  149 historicity 56, 57 history xiii, xiv, 1 – 3, 5, 8 – 11, 13, 16, 18, 21 – 3, 26, 29 – 30, 35 – 42, 46, 49, 57, 58, 60 – 3, 67, 71, 73 – 4, 83, 84, 88, 93, 96, 101 – 6, 108, 124, 125, 128, 129, 133, 134, 136, 138, 143 – 5; Hodgson, M. 11, 16; and Persian civilizational element 16; pseudo- 24; of religions 5, 12; of Sufism xiii, 6, 7, 10, 19, 35, 39, 40, 48, 67, 74, 95, 144, 145 (the) holy 121 Holy Spirit 10, 30, 94, 97, 112 hubb 33, 79 human-being 73 Ibn Arabi xiii, 6, 8, 10, 15, 17, 38, 40, 67, 70 – 2, 76, 79, 84, 88 – 9, 95, 121; and Jesus 100; and love 80 – 1; and speculative worldview 23 Ibn Ata 32, 33 Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad 24, 38 Ibn Khaldun 37 Ibn Taymiyya 3, 7, 37, 38, 39 – 40, 77, 134, 142; and ‘orthodox Sufism’ 21 identity 1, 7, 13, 17, 31, 40, 45, 47, 58, 61, 67, 72, 74, 86, 88, 108, 119, 125, 136, 142, 143 ihsan 22, 57 ihya ulum al-din 11, 55, 98 ijtihad 84 ilm 57 iman 22, 57 imitatio Dei 102 Incarnation 78, 95, 96, 112, 117 individual 30, 31, 50, 56, 58, 60, 61, 74, 96, 101, 102, 104, 114, 136 ineffable 14, 135 initiation 136, 137 injil 110, 112 intelligibility 69, 73, 129 intentionality 55, 136 interiority 55, 60, 139 internalisation 28, 58 Iran 3, 11, 12, 16, 74, 76; converts in 3, 12 Iranian Revolution 11 Iraqi, Fakhr al-Din 8 Isaac the Syrian 125 ‘ishq 7, 33, 75, 78 – 9, 85, 86, 92 islam 22, 57 Islamic xii, xiii, 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 – 1, 39, 42, 45, 49, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80, 84, 87, 89, 92, 93, 101, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 134, 142 – 5; being

4, 45; esotericism 5; framework 1, 80; history 1, 2, 9, 11, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25, 37, 41, 60, 62, 63, 71, 74, 83, 84, 124, 128; identity 2, 13, 40, 119; lifeworld 14, 141; Mysticism, mysticism xii, 3, 7, 25, 29, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 45, 129, 134, 135, 139, 142; orthopraxy 3; paradigm 1, 12, 13, 45, 47, 48, 66; phenomenological experience of the 30; piety 3, 26, 29, 35, 40, 127, 134; praxis 22, 25, 71; Republic 11; structure 2; Studies xiii, 2, 17, 40, 139, 145; ‘Sufism’ as 142; worldview 2, 92; worship 27 Islamicate xii, 15, 16, 17, 40, 89, 135, 139 Islamicness 1, 62 Islamisation 26 James, W. 13, 135 Jami 114, 127 Jesus xiii, xiv, 16, 30, 60 – 1, 78, 85, 88, 91, 119, 133, 136 – 9, 143, 144; as ‘antitype’ 92; the apophatic aspect of 100; as charismatic xiii, 4, 61, 78, 100, 104, 108, 128; Christianite interpretation of 119; in classical Sufism 10, 98; divinity of 103, 125; -Event 100, 105, 108; experience of 91, 94, 96, 104, 106, 108, 109, 115; Gospelic 13, 91, 109; as healer-exorcist 103; and Holy Spirit 94, 97, 112; and love-based mysticism 15; movement of 3, 31, 60, 105 – 7; in Muslim thought 16; as ‘physician of souls’ 10; the ‘religion of’ 38, 41, 101, 127; scholarship xiii, 5, 101; as ‘Seal of the Saints’ 11; as Sign 91 – 118; Synoptic teachings of 29 Jews 106 – 8, 125 John the Baptist 109 – 10, 111, 117 Judaism 25, 26, 29, 30, 85, 102, 107; charismatic 104 Judeo-Christian 66 justice 95, 109, 122 Ka’ba 82, 83, 99, 116 kalam 49 Kamal, M. 15 Katz, S. T. 13 kerygma 106 khatim al-nabiyyin 124 Khayyam 71, 86 Khurasan 8, 34, 76 kingdom of God 13, 101 – 2, 104, 106, 116, 128, 129, 139 Knysh, A. 2, 15, 35 – 8, 42, 51, 52, 56, 142

150  Index language 5, 6, 12, 14, 17, 23, 33, 36, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55, 59, 62, 66, 68, 71 – 7, 80, 81 – 3, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105 – 12, 116, 121, 128, 135, 136, 143; cryptic 14, 136; poetic 48, 51, 72, 89; and the study of Sufism 23 Last Judgment 26, 103 legalism 11 Lewisohn, L. 11, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 98; and Persianate Sufism 11, 16, 18 Lichtung 92 Loki 133 love: hermeneutics of 77; and Jesus 92, 95, 103; pure 53; religion of 3, 70 – 2, 75, 80 – 5, 87; as ‘type’ 92 Mahdi 13, 121 Malik, J. 15 martyrs 128 Mary xiii, 98, 99, 109 – 14, 117 Massignon, L. 2, 28, 37, 71, 89, 134 master 12, 14, 34, 45, 47 – 51, 53 – 9, 71, 79, 81, 83, 91, 113, 115; phenomenology of 50 Mathnawi 8, 22, 42, 52, 82, 83, 114 Maybudi 77, 78, 81, 86 McGinn, B. 29, 37 meaning 9, 12, 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 36, 38, 41, 42, 46, 47 – 53, 55, 56, 61, 63, 66, 70, 73 – 6, 79, 81, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 101, 113, 114, 115, 120, 122, 123, 126, 128, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 14; esoteric 34; quest for 21, 48, 49; -making 4; Sufism as appropriation of 5 meaningfulness 48, 67, 69, 70, 92, 121 Melchert, Ch. 15, 25, 27 – 8, 30, 32 – 5, 37, 42; and ‘Hadith Folk’ 27 mercy 11, 70, 79, 99, 109 – 12, 122 message 9, 56, 60, 78, 83, 101, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116, 119, 123 – 30, 137, 139, 144 Messiah 13, 60, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 107, 108; absence of 13, 116, 119 metaphysics 7, 14, 31, 32, 35, 46, 52, 54, 68, 74, 93 – 4, 120, 121, 127 methodology 5, 33, 40, 49; as tool of interrogation and discovery 5 mihna 33, 35 Milbank, J. 120 miracle 10, 11, 27, 33, 110, 111, 127 Mi’raj 130 modernity 18 monasticism 17, 30; the how of 30; the what of 30

monism 39 Moser, K. 15 Muhammad 11, 13, 14, 17, 22, 26, 31, 39, 42, 56, 57, 58, 59, 81, 89, 98, 99, 100, 109, 116, 119, 122, 136 – 9, 141, 142, 144; as perfect man 129 (the) Muhammadan 81 Mulla Sadra 15 Murata, K. 15 murid 56 Muslimness 17, 80, 88 muwahhid 25 mystic 25, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 40, 42, 45, 53, 58, 72, 87, 114 mysticism 17, 22, 23 – 42, 45, 47, 49, 56, 60, 66, 67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 82, 83, 86, 91, 93, 94, 95, 128, 129, 131, 133 – 9, 142, 145; category of 2, 13, 46, 67, 134; Christian 17, 29, 30, 37, 128; of drunkenness 33, 34, 129; emergence of the term 25, 29, 37, 41, 71, 136; as knowledge 3, 23, 24; as love 16, 91, 95, 128; Muhammad- 129; orthodox 35; as piety 128; religiously appropriated 3; of sobriety 33, 34, 35, 51; Sufi- 7; types of 38 nafs 47 Neoplatonism 2 neo-Sufism 3 New Testament 30, 72, 79, 85, 105, 109, 116, 122, 135, 136, 138 Nicholson, R. A. 11, 24, 28, 56, 63, 132, 134 (das) Nichts 46 Nietzsche, Fr. xiii, 93, 120 nihilism 6, 93, 145 Nizami 71, 86 Nurbakhsh, J. 18, 98 ontic 121, 141 ontological xii, xiii, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17, 29, 32, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 78, 81, 87, 91, 94, 109, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 129, 139, 141, 142 ontology 15, 16, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 61, 69, 70, 75, 81, 82, 87, 95, 119, 120, 123, 130, 131, 142; of Islamic lived experience 13, 134; Jesus-inspired 13, 119; language of 6; of Sufism 12, 46, 130 Orientalism 8, 139; scholarship 134 orthodoxy 1, 2, 4, 7, 23, 39, 40, 61, 120 (the) other 63

Index  151 Pahlavi dynasty 11 Papas, A. 15 paradigm 45, 47, 48, 66, 73, 86, 88, 95, 131, 144 paradise 26, 130 paradoxical 1, 7, 50, 108, 111 Parmenides 67, 74 Paul of Tarsus 38, 105, 106, 107, 109, 123 Perfect Man 100, 117, 129 Persian xiv, 6, 8, 15, 16, 25, 40, 49, 61, 71, 73, 74, 75, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95, 116, 134; cultural tradition 15, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 84; culturo-religious influence 3; language 3, 11, 12, 16, 71 – 2, 74, 75, 84, 96 – 7, 112, 114; milieu of post-classical Sufism 6; Sufi literature 10, 18, 91, 92 Persianate 7, 11, 16, 72, 77, 79, 82, 84, 144; point of view 3; society 11; Studies 11 – 12, 16; Sufism 3, 16, 72, 128; world 3, 11 – 12, 76, 83, 84 Peter 105 – 7, 109, 123, 131 Pharisees 104, 120 phenomenological 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 29, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 66, 91, 109, 119, 124, 141 phenomenology xiii, 2, 14, 46, 47, 50, 62, 67, 69, 94, 120 phenomenon 2, 3, 4, 16, 29, 35, 39, 41, 42, 62, 86, 89, 105, 112, 119, 121, 133, 134, 136, 143 philia 79 philosophy 2, 5, 14, 15, 17, 38, 42, 46, 51, 57, 60, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 93, 120, 121 phusis 94 pietism 17, 23, 30, 34, 35, 49; Jewish 31; Islamic 22, 24, 25, 31, 39 piety: ascetic 7; charismatic 4, 29; dogmatic type of mystical 7, 30, 31, 36 – 38; inward 27; mystical 4, 30 – 32, 34 – 40, 55, 101; renunciant 15, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 39; rigorous 27 pir 83 Piraino, F. 15 Plato 6, 74, 93, 94, 120, 121 pluralism 6, 7; religious and cultural 6 poet 48, 52, 78, 97, 114, 121 poetry 3, 17, 48, 49, 50 – 4, 57, 71, 72, 77, 83, 89, 91, 97, 98, 100, 112, 114, 127, 143 poiesis/ποίησις 49, 73, 94, 141 possibility 4, 12, 14, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 66, 67, 69, 70, 75, 87, 93, 105, 120, 121, 129, 138, 141, 144 potentiality 14, 40, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 74, 112, 120, 135, 141, 142

poverty 30, 85, 113, 127, 132 praxis 6, 22, 25, 37, 42, 49, 58, 61, 71 prayer 26, 26, 30, 34, 42, 102, 103, 110, 117, 127 pre-Socratic 38, 93, 94 (the) Prophet 13, 22, 31, 41, 50, 56, 57, 58, 60, 81, 82, 84, 89, 115, 116, 126, 130; absence of 13, 119; as hero 57 prophethood 11, 137 ‘prophetic experience’ 57, 58, 60 prophets 11, 34, 89, 98, 100, 102, 109, 112, 117, 138 ‘proto-Sufi’ 23, 42 Qur’an 4, 8, 13, 22, 25, 36, 39, 57, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 98, 109, 11, 112, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129; and Jesus 98 – 9; redaction of the 36; the unspoken word of 101 Quraysh 124 Rabia 32, 72, 76, 79, 80, 84 Radtke, B. 37, 38 rasul 125, 130 Razi, Fakhr al-Din 6 religion: ascetical 27, 36; conventional, end of 22; eschatological 26, 101; formality of 10, 138; historical 14, 136; institutional 45; Israelite 122; of love 3, 70 – 2, 74, 75, 80 – 5, 87; of Muhammad 3, 31; mystical appreciation of 3; popular 28; relational facets of 2; study of 2 renunciation 25, 26, 27, 30, 127; Islamic 26, 27 repentance 102 resurrection 10, 13, 95, 105, 106, 109, 119, 123 revelation 4, 60, 61, 62, 66, 70, 73, 106, 109, 114, 121, 126, 129, 135, 138; divine 4; mystery of 22 revisionism 35; approach 2, 16 Ridgeon, L. 11, 16, 18, 22 – 3, 25, 28, 36, 38, 39, 42 Robinson, N. 10, 16, 18 Rumi 6, 8, 10, 16, 22, 32, 42, 50 – 4, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 70, 71, 76, 78, 80 – 3, 85 – 9, 95, 100, 114, 115, 116, 121; and creation 53 – 4; and the experience of the incarnate 115; the secret gospel of 115 (the) sacred 38, 75, 83, 91, 94, 100, 115, 138 – 9 sacrifice 72, 88, 118

152  Index Sa’di 86 Salafis 25 salik 56 sama’ 34, 41 Sam’ani 78, 81, 86 Seinsgeschichtich 9, 88 Sein und Zeit 46, 69 self-realisation 48, 53, 87 self-reflection 29, 52 self-understanding 68 shahada 59, 80, 137 Shaikh, S. 15, 79, 89 Shams 50, 53 – 4, 59, 67, 81, 114, 115, 116 sharia 4, 57, 62, 81 Sheehan, Th. xiii, xiv, 5, 9, 13, 15, 68 – 9, 89, 92, 104 – 8, 122, 123 Shi’a 11, 42, 58 Shiraz 48 silsila 50, 56, 57, 67 sirat 125, 126 Smith, J. K. A. 120 Socrates 74 Son of God 103, 105, 106, 107 Son of Man 105, 106, 107, 123 Sufigari 39, 40 Sunni 3, 12, 21, 28, 30, 35, 54, 55, 56, 58, 129; catholic attitude of 28; the Sufi as ‘real’ 31 surat al-maryam 98 symbolism 16, 75, 96, 114; Mithraic 136 Symeon the New Theologian 112, 113, 117

time 6, 30, 57, 58, 93, 102, 113, 119, 120, 123, 124 tolerance 2, 16, 28 Torah 101, 103 tradition xii, 3, 4, 6, 8, 13, 14, 17, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67, 69, 74, 77, 82, 84, 86, 94, 95, 96 – 8, 99, 103, 104, 105, 108, 116, 119, 120, 122 – 3, 126, 128, 129, 130, 135, 138, 141, 143, 144; Aristotelian 7; biographical 99, 116, 126; esoteric 11; Iranian 7; Judaic 30; legalistic 1; of love-mysticism 16; mystical 17, 25, 30, 70, 72, 75, 86; Neoplatonic 7; Persian Sufi love 8; pietistic 27; of sobriety 33; Sufi 3, 8, 16, 18, 23, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41, 47, 49, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 76, 77, 91, 92, 100, 143; Western intellectual 21 traditionalism 8 transcendence 32 Trinitarian 109, 111 truth xiii, 23, 52, 57, 71, 74, 75, 87, 88, 91, 94, 99, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 120, 143 – 5 typology 11, 46, 47, 49, 62, 92, 134, 138; of Sufism 134

tabaghat 13, 66 tadhkirat al-awliya’ 23 tadjalli 49 tariqa 7, 12, 45, 47, 49, 50 – 1, 53, 54, 56, 57 – 9, 62, 63, 67, 115; -Sufism 7 tasawwuf 28 – 9, 35, 40, 41, 137 taslim 26 tawhid 25, 80, 81, 131 tawwakul 26 text 4, 9, 11, 13, 14, 22, 25, 36, 48, 55, 67, 76, 77, 79, 85, 92, 108, 114, 115, 116, 126, 127, 135, 137, 138 textuality 9 theodicy 52 theology 6, 15, 49, 54, 106, 108, 119, 120 – 1, 131, 138 theoria 37 Thor 133

Vermes, G. xiii, 5, 29, 41, 78, 101 – 4, 116, 123

Umayyad 123 Uneigentlichkeit 46 union 33, 34, 60, 80 unorthodoxy 1, 7, 53, 61, 125

wadd 79 wahdat al-wujud 25, 39 warriors 36 Weber, M. 13, 37, 135; the thesis of 37 Weltanschauung 48, 82, 98 Whirling Dervishes 8, 77 wholeness 53, 121 wool-wearing 29 worldhood 142 – 4 Zaehner, R. C. 2 Zarathushtra 136 Zarrabi-Zadeh, S. 15 Zekr 100 Zoroastrianism 2