Sufism is the attempt of individual Muslims to realize in their personal experience the living presence of Allah. ♣ 

The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.♣ 

Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man's overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience. The mystical experience, it is often claimed, is distinct from the rational or the philosophical, and, less often, it is said to be contrary to it. But ... it can hardly be irrelevant to man's rational or philosophical aspirations, since it allegedly leads to the very object which reason seeks, namely, the total and supreme apprehension of reality. ♣

Who was Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi? According to a leading modern authority on Islamic mysticism, Professor Henry Corbin (1903-78), he was 'a spiritual genius who was not only one of the greatest masters of Sufism in Islam, but also one of the great mystics of all time'. ♣ His mysticism, says Professor Majid Fakhry, 'culminated in a grandiose cosmological and metaphysical world-scheme, which is of decisive philosophical significance.' ♣

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Sufism first arose in Syria and Iraq soon after the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century. Their new home already had a long tradition of ascetic thought and eastern Christian monasticism: religious poverty, contempt of worldly pleasures, the idea of a secret world of virtue beyond that of obedience to law. 'The Gospel of Christ was interpreted metaphysically, especially in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Persia, where conditions existed for an ascetic, otherworldly interpretation.'♣ This must have been abetted by the fact that for three centuries, until after the conversion of Constantine, Levantine Christians were a minority subject to suspicion, and often persecution, by the Romans. 

As Islam took root, the demanding God of the Qur'an asserted: 'Indeed the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most God-fearing' (Sura 49:13).♣ Early theologians painted the Last Judgment in such gory detail that many pious Muslim converts, made conscious again of the wretchedness of man's estate on earth, persisted with the inner life. The worldliness of the early Umayyads was no consolation either. What transformed asceticism into mysticism was something quite radical: an unabashed love of God. This has been symbolically ascribed to a woman from Basra - Rabi'ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801?) - who first formulated the mystic ideal of a disinterested love of God, which she expressed in the following prayer. ♣

O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.

Many who embarked on the path of rational philosophy soon found objective accounts of God unsatisfactory (as did Avicenna late in his life). They yearned for a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers and the legalistic God of the theologians (the ulema). Early Islamic mystics, or Sufis, ♣ thus evolved a more subjective notion of God: each of us can experience the divine differently; revelation is an event that unfolds within our soul; the soul by its own efforts could reach out to the divine. Many practiced celibacy as a mystic ideal, flouting the example on matrimony set by Muhammad himself. A systematic destruction of the ego (fana) and surrender of self to God became central to the Sufi ideal: one who discards his ego to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. 'Man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.' Scholars have noted Hindu influences on 'this bold concept of annihilation of the ego and the reabsorption of the human in the divine.' ♣ Many early mystics in Persia are known to have had Hindu teachers.   

He didn't follow any particular Sufi order for very long and when he disagreed with the teachers, he disputed with them openly. He was briefly employed as a secretary of the governor of Seville when he led a profligate life, indulging in 'carousels and merry pastimes', ♣ before his reorientation to the Sufi path. He was helped in this by his first wife who he speaks of in terms of respectful devotion. He traveled to various cities of Spain and North Africa in search of Sufi masters renowned for their spiritual progress. On one of these trips, al-Arabi had a dramatic encounter with the great Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës; 1126-98) which he related as follows. ♣

I spent a good day in Cordova at the house of Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd. He had expressed a desire to meet with me in person, since he had heard of certain revelations I had received while in retreat, and had shown considerable astonishment concerning them. In consequence, my father, who was one of his close friends, took me with him on the pretext of business, in order to give Ibn Rushd the opportunity of making my acquaintance. I was at the time a beardless youth. As I entered the house the philosopher rose to greet me with all the signs of friendliness and affection, and embraced me. Then he said to me, 'Yes!' and showed pleasure on seeing that I had understood him. I, on the other hand, being aware of the motive for his pleasure, replied, 'No!' Upon this, Ibn Rushd drew back from me, his color changed and he seemed to doubt what he had thought of me. He then put to me the following question, 'What solution have you found as a result of mystical illumination and divine inspiration? Does it agree with what is arrived at by speculative thought?' I replied, 'Yes and No. Between the Yea and Nay the spirits take their flight from their matter, and the heads are separated from their bodies.' At this Ibn Rushd became pale, and I saw him tremble as he muttered the ritual phrase, 'There is no power save from God.' This was because he had understood my allusion.

Later, after our interview, he questioned my father about me, in order to compare the opinion he had formed of me with my father's and to ascertain whether they coincided or differed. For Ibn Rushd was a great master of reflection and philosophical meditation. He gave thanks to God, I was told, for having allowed him to live at such a time and permitted him to see a man who had gone into spiritual retirement and emerged as I had emerged. 'I myself,' he declared, 'had said that such a thing was possible, but never met anyone who had actually experienced it. Glory be to God who has let me live at a time distinguished by one of the masters of this experience, one of those who open the locks of His gates. Glory to be God who has accorded me the personal favor of seeing one of them with my own eyes.' 

I wished to have another interview with Ibn Rushd. God in His mercy caused him to appear to me in an ecstasy in such a form that between his person and myself there was a light veil. I saw him through this veil, but he did not see me or know that I was present. He was indeed too absorbed in his meditation to take notice of me, I said to myself, 'His thought does not guide him to the place where I myself am'. 

I had no further occasion to meet him until his death, which occurred in the year 595 of the Hegira [1198 CE] in Marrakech. His remains were taken to Cordoba, where his tomb is. When the coffin containing his ashes was loaded on the flank of a beast of burden, his works were placed on the other side to counterbalance it. I was standing there motionless; ... and then I said: 'On one side the master, on the other his works. Ah! how I wish I knew whether his hopes have been fulfilled.'

This account also reveals al-Arabi's supreme self-confidence. In light of the subsequent course of Islamic philosophy this encounter is often seen as the symbolic end of medieval Islamic rationalism. 

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According to Professor Corbin, al-Arabi 'knew that the triumph that he sought is obtained neither by the effort of rational philosophy, nor by conversion to what he was later to term a 'God created in dogmas'. It depends on a certain decisive encounter, which is entirely personal, irreplaceable, barely communicable to the most fraternal soul, still less translatable in terms of any change of external allegiance or social quality. It is the fruit of a long quest, the work of an entire lifetime; Ibn Arabi's whole life was this long quest.' 

It was in Fez in the year 1198, while praying in the Azhar mosque, that in al-Arabi's own words, 

I saw a light that seemed to illuminate what was before me, despite the fact that I had lost all sense of front and back, it being as if I had no back at all. Indeed during this vision I had no sense of direction whatever, my sense of vision being, so to speak, spherical in its scope, I recognized my spatial position only as a hypothesis not as reality.

Al-Arabi explains that by this experience he knew that he had reached the Station of Light. It was also in Fez that 'I learnt of the Seal of Mohammedan Sainthood ... where God acquainted me with his identity and revealed to me his mark'. ♣

Prompted by a dream, al-Arabi began a pilgrimage to the east in his thirties and never returned home which was shrinking in the face of the Spanish Reconquista. The previous restless wanderings in North Africa were only a prelude to this inner call which would make him a symbolic pilgrim to the Orient. His first stop was Mecca (1201 CE), where he received a divine commandment to begin his major work al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah. ♣ It was also in Mecca that he met Nizam, a gifted young woman of great beauty who, as a living embodiment of Sophia aeterna, or eternal wisdom, and inspiration, was to play in his life a role much like that which Beatrice played for Dante. Her memories were eternalized by al-Arabi in a collection of love poems. ♣ One of the most accessible goes as follows.♣ 

Everyone who wanted you--
you showered with graces.
Only to me did your lightning flash, unfaithful. 

When the religious establishment protested that such expression was not conducive to religious feelings he wrote a lengthy defense in which he said, 'All our poems are related to divine truths in various forms, such as love themes, eulogy, the names and attributes of women, the names of rivers, places and stars'. His daring 'pantheistic' expressions soon drew upon him the wrath of Muslim orthodoxy, some of whom prohibited the reading of his works even as others were elevating him to the rank of prophets and saints.

Who were his spiritual masters? Al-Arabi came into contact with nearly all the significant Sufi teachers of his day. 'Yet ... he never had more than one, and that one was none of the usual visible masters; we find his name in no archives; we cannot establish his historical coordinates or situate him at any particular moment in the succession of the human generations. Ibn Arabi was, and never ceased to be, the disciple of an invisible master, a mysterious prophet figure ... Ibn Arabi was above all the disciple of Khidr ... a hidden spiritual master.' ♣ 

From Mecca, he traveled to Egypt, Anatolia, Baghdad and Aleppo. In each place he seems to have found favor with the rulers who served to mitigate the hostility of the dogmatic theologians (In Cairo an organization was formed with the express aim of assassinating him). As the story goes, the Seljuk ruler of Konya in Anatolia gave him a house. When a beggar called one day for alms he gave away the house because 'that was all he had to give'. ♣

It was in Baghdad that he met Shihab al Din Umar al Suhrawardi, the great mystical philosopher of Persia, ten years his senior. Both of them bowed their heads for an hour without uttering a word to each other and then parted. When al-Arabi was asked his opinion of Suhrawardi he said, 'He is imbued from head to foot with the norm of the Prophet'. Of al-Arabi Suhrawardi said, 'He is an ocean of divine truths'. ♣

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Al-Arabi did what the traditionalists had done all along: he went back to the Qur'an to find expressions of the mystic ideal. Also drawing upon neo-Platonism, ♣ he created a cogent theosophy by reinterpreting the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet (Hadith), who, al-Arabi claimed, was a mystic himself. In one Hadith, God had said, 'I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, therefore, I created the creatures in order that I might be known'. Man, al-Arabi said, is the embodiment of universal Reason and the being in whom all attributes or perfections of God are reflected - God created man in his own image. It was for this reason that he was designated as God's vicegerent on earth (khalifah). Other Suras claimed God to be closer to the believer than 'his jugular vein' (Qur'an 50:15) and so omnipresent and omniscient as to witness man's every deed and read his every thought. Clearly, man is of God and God is present in him.  

According to al-Arabi, the path of man's ascent to God - i.e., his union with God - leads through various stages of spiritual progress. These stages include repentance, renunciation, trust in the divine, and perseverance, leading ultimately to a spiritual awakening. These are essentially stages in his knowledge of himself: 'he who knows himself knows the lord'. ♣ The role of reason is to inform religious experience, to keep it on track. The rational soul discovers, experientially and intuitively, the absolute unity of the whole and its own identity with it; God's existence cannot be proved by logic; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being.  It was the same Reality that all prophets spoke of; all men worshipped the same God in different forms; He does not belong to any one creed exclusive of all others. Al-Arabi's religious pluralism shines through in the following famous verse. ♣

My heart is capable of every form.

A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,

A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Kabah

The tables of the Torah, the Koran.

Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn

His camels, still the one true faith is mine.

Al-Arabi's metaphysics describes the world as a product of the divine self-reflection that prompts God to manifest himself in the things and phenomenon of the empirical universe.♣  He describes in his own words what is an enchanting and extraordinary creation myth (the Qur'an does not have one except a brief reference to God creating man from clay), ♣

Know that when God had created Adam who was the first human organism to be constituted, and when he had established him as the origin and archetype of all human bodies, there remained a surplus of the leaven of the clay. From this surplus God created the palm tree, so that this plant (nakhla, palm tree, being feminine) is Adam's sister; for us, therefore, it is like an aunt on our father's side. In theology it is so described and is compared to the faithful believer. No other plant bears within it such extraordinary secrets as are hidden in this one. Now, after the creation of the palm tree, there remained hidden a portion of the clay from which the plant had been made; what was left was the equivalent of a sesame seed. And it was in this remainder that God laid out an immense Earth. Since he arranged in it the Throne and what it contains, the Firmament, the Heavens and the Earths, the worlds underground, all the paradises and hells, this means that the whole of our universe is to be found there in that Earth in its entirety, and yet the whole of it together is like a ring lost in one of our deserts in comparison with the immensity of that Earth. And that same Earth has hidden in it so many marvels and strange things that their number cannot be counted and our intelligence remains dazed by them.♣

Al-Arabi wrote several hundred books. 'It is probable that no one has written on a broader range of spiritual matters and certain that these have never been described in greater depth [by one person] ... a vast body of esoteric knowledge, previously confined to oral transmissions, was committed to writing'. He is even credited with translating into Arabic a Persian translation of a Sanskrit work on Tantric Yoga. On his method of writing, al-Arabi says, 

In what I have written I have never had a set purpose, as other writers. Flashes of divine inspiration used to come upon me and almost overwhelm me, so that I could only put them from my mind by committing to paper what they revealed to me. If my works evince any form of composition that form was unintentional. Some works I wrote at the command of God, sent to me in sleep or through a mystical revelation.   

The paths of the poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi (C.E. 1207-73) and his father briefly crossed al-Arabi's on one journey. Rumi was quite young at the time but the father-son duo made a favorable impression on al-Arabi for he said, 'There goes a sea followed by an ocean'. (Of wisdom, presumably.)

By the time his long pilgrimage ended at Damascus (1223), his fame had spread all over the Islamic world. He married three times in the course of his life and had three children and a step-son, Sadruddin Qunawi, who became his closest disciple and a continuing influence on Rumi. Venerated as the greatest spiritual master, al-Arabi spent the rest of his life in Damascus in peaceful contemplation, teaching, and writing.  It was here that he composed one of the most important works of mystical philosophy in Islam: Fusus al-hikam, or The Bezels of Wisdom. ♣  

At this time, he is also said to have entertained messianic pretensions, but only in private - the Seal of Mohammedan Sainthood, reserved for one who embodies the mystery of the revealed God in each age for the benefit of his contemporaries - a public avowal might have been the last straw for the Sunni theologians. 'Ibn Arabi was to die in Damascus in 1240, exactly sixteen years before the capture of Baghdad by the Mongols announced the end of a world.'♣ Later, when the Ottoman sultan Selim II took Syria, he built a lavish tomb upon his grave on the Qasiyun mountain which overshadows Damascus from the west. It was to become a place of pilgrimage.

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The reflective mysticism of al-Arabi evolved quaint mutations in its popular form. He himself never founded a mystic order for he believed, 'The man of wisdom whatever may happen will never allow himself to be caught up in any one form or belief, because he knows his own essence.' In fact, his thought was too abstruse and elusive for most. It was easy for the uninitiated and overzealous to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic master and his union with God. A few began severe self-mortification to cleanse their souls in order to receive God. Others resorted to saint worship, the visiting of tombs and miracle mongering. To reduce worldly distractions, the aspiring mystic was expected to learn techniques of breathing, posture, concentration, and the recitation of ritual mantras. Some Sufi orders (Tariqas) used music, song and dance to enhance concentration (e.g., the whirling dervishes ♣), and their pirs became heroes to the people. It has been said that Sufism, in this popular form, had a 'narcotic effect' on the masses. 

By the 13th century, a time of extreme political turbulence caused by Mongol raids from central Asia, Sufism had become the dominant mood in large parts of the Islamic world, particularly in southwest Asia, and remained so down to the 19th. Country folk received Sufi tenets from wandering monks and mystics, whose faith was far removed from the complex dogmatism of theology and, of course, far more colorful. A characteristic expression was the communal Sufi brotherhood (e.g., Naqshbandiyya). Commentators began harmonizing and integrating the views of Sufi masters such as Avicenna, al-Suhrawardi, al-Ghazali, and al-Arabi . Sufi poets like Rumi expressed the yearning of the lover, and emotions of wonder and elation, attendant upon the path to the union with God, in rich metaphor. Others used Bacchic and erotic imagery to symbolize the mystic union of the devotee with God. These became part of common culture, encouraged later by the Ottomans. Missionaries took Sufism to India which proved particularly amenable to it.♣ Sufi vocabulary infused a special charm to Persian and the related literatures of Turkish, Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, and Punjabi - their poetries, in turn, facilitated the spread of mysticism. 

Medieval Islamic mysticism, with its focus on the inner life, also remained politically quietist - mystic philosophers did not expound on the structure of political authority or right governance. As long as temporal power remained non-intrusive, it went unnoticed: Caliphs could come and go, dynasties rise and fall. Like Islamic rationalism (Falsafah), Islamic mysticism (Tasawwuf) became a parallel current of thought to theological (Sunni and Shi'a) Islam, although with a much larger following. 

An old Turkish anecdote relates that a dervish one day went to the house of a rich man to ask for alms. The latter, to test the dervish's piety, asked him to enumerate the five pillars of Islam.♣ The dervish recited the declaration of faith (no God but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah) and went silent. 'What about the rest, the other four?' the rich man asked. To this the dervish replied, 'You rich men have abandoned pilgrimage and charity, and we poor dervishes have abandoned prayer and fasting, so what remains but the unity of God and the apostolate of Muhammad?' 

The Arabian Nights abounds with wise, gentle dervishes always interceding on behalf of the little guy. The Islamic injunction of jihad too did not find support among the Sufis. On record is an account of a Bektashi dervish who, during the Ottoman war against the Habsburg empire in 1690, 

... went among the Muslim troops when they were encamped for the night, and went from soldier to soldier saying: 'Hey, you fools, why do you squander your lives for nothing? Fie on you! All the talk you hear about the virtues of holy war and martyrdom in battle is so much nonsense. While the Ottoman emperor enjoys himself in his palace, and the Frankish king disports himself in his country, I can't think why you should give your lives fighting on the mountaintops!

The Indian mystic Guru Nanak (1469-1539 CE) of Punjab, regarded by later generations as the founder of Sikhism, squarely condemned the external authorities and the outward response demanded by orthodox Islam. He believed that 'only those who perceived the inner reality of truth could achieve deliverance, and this end could be attained regardless of whether one were a Hindu or a Muslim. Those who followed this ''inner'' path are the ''true'' Hindu and the ''true'' Muslim as opposed to the ''false'' believers who continue to put their trust in ritual and pilgrimage, temple and mosque, Brahman and mullah, Shastras and Qur'an.'♣ He offered the following words of wisdom to the orthodox Muslim of his age, 

Make mercy your mosque and devotion your prayer mat,

        righteousness your Qur'an; 

Meekness your circumcising, goodness your fasting,

        for thus the true Muslim expresses his faith.

Make good works your Ka'bah, take truth as your pir

        compassion your creed and your prayer.

Let service to God be the beads which you tell

        and God will exalt you to glory.

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Sufism was besieged in the modern age by the forces of secularism, nationalism and modernism on one hand (Sufi orders were banned in Turkey in 1925) and neo-orthodoxy, of the Wahhabis in Arabia (18th century) and the Muslim Brotherhood (20th century) in Egypt, on the other. Nevertheless, it has often asserted its vitality, not the least as a progressive voice in the political and social realm. 

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