Voices of Islam (53 page)

1. While the trends of inner knowledge and divine selection of
   awliya’
   were certainly in the air and were cultivated by some eminent renunciants and early mystics of the first half of the ninth century
   CE
   , they did not form a coherent and unifi whole but could only be found as correlated and occasionally intertwined strands of piety. In the second half of the ninth century, how- ever, and especially in Baghdad, which had emerged as the political and cul- tural capital of the Abbasid domains, they coalesced with several other elements of religiosity to form a distinct type of piety that became the foun- dation of what would prove to be one of the most durable pietistic approaches in Islam. Furthermore, for reasons that remain obscure, the members of this Baghdad-centered movement came to be known as Sufi and the new movement was given the name
   sufiyya.
   

   Thus, from the middle of the ninth century, the term
   sufi
   came to be used increasingly as a technical term to designate a group of people who belonged to a clearly identifiable social movement in Baghdad based on a distinct type of piety. The most prominent members of this movement were Abu Sa‘id al- Kharraz (d. 899
   CE
   or a few years earlier), Abu’l-Husayn al-Nuri (d. 907
   CE
   ), and Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd (d. 910
   CE
   ). In time, the Baghdad Sufis them- selves adopted this name and began to use it for themselves. Henceforth, the word no longer signifi ‘‘wool-wearing renunciant’’ but came to be
   

   What Is Sufism?
   253
   

   applied to the members of this new group. In this way, an epithet that had signified certain trends of renunciatory piety now became the name of a dis- tinctive form of pious living that could no longer be characterized simply as renunciation.
   

   The early Sufis of Baghdad were most concerned with obtaining experien- tial knowledge (
   ma‘rifa
   ) of God, while distilling the reality of the Islamic profession of faith, ‘‘There is no god but God,’’ into their daily lives. Human life presented itself to them as a journey toward the ever-elusive goal of achiev- ing ‘‘God-consciousness,’’ an ongoing attempt to draw near God. In the Sufi perspective, human beings, viewed as servants of God, experienced such prox- imity to their Lord before the beginning of time. Before their creation, all human beings bore witness in spirit to God’s Lordship on the Day of the Covenant (Qur’an 7:172). As a reward for this act of acknowledgment, they were promised an even more intimate closeness to God at the end of time. While on earth, however, they had to strive to preserve and renew the memory of their proximity to their Creator by turning their backs on everything other than God and by living their lives in constant recognition of His presence.
   

   In practice, this meant the training and domestication of the lower self through measures that included, for many but not all Sufis, asceticism, seclu- sion, and poverty as well as continuous cultivation of the heart. The heart was understood as the spiritual organ of God’s presence in the person, and its chief sustenance was the remembrance or mention of God through invoca- tion (
   dhikr
   ) and ‘‘hearing’’ or witnessing God in poetry and music (
   sama‘
   ). Paradoxically, the journey (
   suluk
   ) toward the Lord started only when the Sufi realized his own weakness as an autonomous agent and acknowledged God as the only true actor in the universe. Only when the reins of human action were turned over to God did the individual become a wayfarer (
   salik
   ) and begin the journey toward the goal of achieving proximity to the Creator.
   

   This journey was envisaged as a path (
   tariq
   or
   tariqa
   ) marked by various stations (
   manzil
   ), locations (
   maqam
   ), and states (
   hal
   ) that the wayfarer passed through. However, at this earliest stage of Sufi there was not yet any systematic thinking, let alone any agreement, on the number, nature, and order of these states and stations. Nor was there a consensus on the des- tination of the journey. Everyone agreed that closeness to God entailed a sharp turn from lower concerns of this world toward the realm of ultimate matters and a movement away from the lower self toward the inner locus of God’s presence, but it proved diffi lt to characterize the fi l encounter with God located at the end of the journey. While some, like Kharraz and Nuri, described the highest stage of intimacy with God as the dissolution of self-consciousness, others like Junayd viewed the ultimate goal as a reconsti- tuted self, a human identity recomposed in the image of God after being thoroughly deconstructed during the Sufi journey. All agreed, however, that the ultimate Sufi experience was to be viewed as the passing away or reab- sorption of the created human being into the only true/real (
   haqq
   ) being of
   

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   Voices of Tradition
   

   God and, most emphatically, not as a divinization of the human. More gen- erally, the encounter between the Sufi and God was a ‘‘unidirectional merger,’’ whereby the Sufi was thought to flow into God. However, move- ment in the other direction was off limits or at least extremely limited, since such a flow from the divine into the human could pave the way for the divin- ization of the human and lead to the suspect, even heretical, doctrines of incarnation and inherence (
   hulul
   ).
   

   No matter what their approach to the thorny issue of encounter with the Divine, those who shared the common aim of drawing close to God through experiential knowing enjoyed a special camaraderie with one another in the form of circles of fellowship, mutual mentoring, and relationships of master and disciple. Not all human beings became Sufi wayfarers, let alone grew close to God: that privilege was, it seems, reserved for the few ‘‘Friends of God’’ (
   awliya’ Allah
   ) that were conscious of their special status and viewed themselves as the spiritual elect. Many friends, much like the prophets, saw themselves as God’s special agents among humans, rendered distinct by their special status as intermediaries between the divine and the human planes of being. In their view, they channeled God’s mercy to humankind and served to increase God-consciousness among the otherwise heedless, self-absorbed human race through their personal example and their tireless advocacy of God’s cause in human affairs.
   

   The special status of the friends of God manifested itself in a number of practices that simultaneously underscored their distinctness from common believers and served to forge bonds of fellowship, loyalty, and mutual alle- giance among the spiritual elect. They began to assemble in certain places of congregation and travel in groups, developed distinctive prayer rituals in the form of invocations and auditions to poetry and music that frequently led to rapture or ecstasy (
   wajd
   ), and adopted special initiation practices, nota- bly investiture with a white woolen robe (
   khirqa
   ).
   15
   It seems likely, although diffi to verify, that other initiatic acts that came to be characteristic of Sufism, such as the handclasp, the bestowal of a cord with prayer beads (
   tas- bih
   ), and the entrusting of the initiate with an invocation formula, were also practiced by the first Sufis of Baghdad.
   16
   

   While the institution of the
   Sufiyya
   was taking shape in Baghdad, individ- uals and social groups with similar views and practices could also be found among Muslim communities in other locations, even though these latter were not generally known as Sufis. Most notable among these were Sahl al- Tustari (d. 896
   CE
   ) in lower Iraq, al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi (d. probably between 905 and 910
   CE
   ) in Central Asia, and a group of mystics in northeastern Iran who were known as the ‘‘People of Blame’’ (
   Malamatiyya
   ). There was a con- siderable overlap between the ideas and practices of Tustari, Tirmidhi, the People of Blame, and the Baghdad Sufis. They shared a number of common features: (1) the stress on the necessity of a permanent reorientation of the individual self toward God in the form of repentance (
   tawba
   ); (2) the
   

   What Is Sufism?
   255
   

   assumption of a fierce antagonism between the lower self and the heart;
   

2. the acceptance of human weakness and the recognition of God as the only true agent and savior; (4) the invocation as the sure link between God and His chosen servants; (5) the idea of a primordial covenant; (6) belief in the existence of a spiritual elect.
   

Nevertheless, the similarities among these different mystics and the broader communities around them were by no means comprehensive. Cer- tain aspects of the thought and practice of Tustari, Tirmidhi, and the People of Blame, such as vegetarianism, a proclivity for having visions, and a peculiar ‘‘light’’ cosmology centered on the idea of ‘‘the light of Muhammad,’’ did not have clear parallels among the Sufis of Baghdad. There were also points of disagreement. For instance, when Junayd was told that the followers of Tustari fasted during the day and ate from food saved in their baskets at night, he expressed regret that they did not forgo reliance on saved food.
17
Tustari endorsed earning a living as part of the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, while Junayd preferred complete reliance on God (
tawakkul
), unadulterated with the search for sustenance.
18
Although the Sufis of Bagh- dad were discrete about their status as God’s elect, both Tustari and Tirmidhi were explicit about their own standing among the Friends of God. Tustari used to say: ‘‘I am the proof of God for created beings and I am a proof for the saints of my time.’’ Tirmidhi, who gave one of the most systematic treat- ments of the concept of ‘‘friendship with God’’ (
walaya
) in Islamic thought, claimed the key role in this saintly hierarchy for himself.
19
The People of Blame, on the other hand, viewed all claims of spiritual rank with utmost sus- picion and preferred anonymity and social conformity.
20
However, despite such real differences in approach, there was a sense of generic affinity among the various regional mystical tendencies and the term
Sufiyya
was already used by some at the beginning of the tenth century
CE
to express this shared com- mitment to the cultivation of the inner life.

Already during the days of Junayd, Nuri, and Kharraz, Baghdad Sufi

taught numerous students from different regions of the Abbasid Empire. These students later spread the distinctive teachings and practices of their Sufi teachers to southwestern Iran, western Arabia, and northeastern Iran. For example, Abu ‘Abdallah Ibn Khafif (d. 982
CE
) of Shiraz in southwestern Iran played a major role in the establishment of Baghdad style Sufism in his home city. Ibn Khafi is better known than many of his contemporaries because one of his disciples, Abu’l-Hasan al-Daylami (fl tenth century
CE
), wrote a biography of his teacher. Not counting the relatively short autobiog- raphy of Tirmidhi, this is the earliest biography we possess for any Muslim mystic. During the lifetime of Ibn Khafif, there were at least seven different Sufi centers in Shiraz, including Ibn Khafif’s own lodge (
ribat
), and the total number of Sufis in that city was reportedly in the thousands. Many of these Sufi like Ibn Khafi himself, were disciples of Baghdad Sufi especially of Junayd. In Mecca, several students of Baghdad Sufi lived as permanent

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Voices of Tradition

‘‘visitors’’ (
mujawir
) of the Sacred Mosque (
al-Masjid al-Haram
) at the beginning of the tenth century
CE
.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the picture was similar, with Sufi lodges reported in different towns in Syria, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. The mystics of these regions were all closely connected, keeping in touch with one another through travel and written correspondence. The majority, it appears, were connected to the first generation of Baghdad Sufis as well as to Tustari of Basra. They honored especially Junayd and Tustari as their most important leaders. The legacy of local figures continued to exercise considerable influ- ence, but the impact of Baghdad and, to some extent, Basra Sufi networks was defi tely on the rise. This was increasingly the case also with northeastern regions of Iran, where Baghdad-style Sufi grew fi roots during the course of the tenth century.
21

The growth of Sufism in northeastern Iran came about as a merger between the Sufis of Iraq and the indigenous People of Blame of this region, especially in its major urban center Nishapur, a merger in which the domi- nant partner was increasingly Sufism, the new arrival in town.
22
During the course of the tenth century, the Sufis emerged as the more vocal and visible mystical movement in Nishapur and, it appears, also in many other locations in northeastern Iran, while the People of Blame remained faithful to their principles of anonymity and disappeared into the background. Our under- standing of the merger between Sufis and the People of Blame in Nishapur is based largely on the rich literary legacy of a key figure whose many works form the principal source for the history of both Sufi and the Path of Blame, Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 1021
CE
). Sulami’s extant works, in particular his biographical anthology
Tabaqat al-sufi
(Generations of the Sufi , his compendium of Sufi Qur’an interpretation
Haqa’iq al-tafsir
(Truths of Qur’anic Exegesis), and his treatise on the Path of Blame, along with his many other works of varying length, have a distinct place in the cor- pus of early Sufi literature. Indeed, in most of his treatises, Sulami’s voice is that of an authoritative representative of Sufi and the care he took in recording the biographies, sayings, and discourses of Sufis, male as well as female, is ample proof of his special standing as a most valuable informant for the early history of Islamic mysticism.
23