ILLUMINATION AND ECSTASY
God, who is described in the Koran as “the Light of the heavens and the
earth,” cannot be seen by the bodily eye. He is visible only to the
inward sight of the ‘heart.’ In the next chapter we shall return to
this spiritual organ, but I am not going to enter into the intricacies
of Sūfī psychology any further than is necessary. The ‘vision of the
heart’ (_ruʾyat al-qalb_) is defined as “the heart’s beholding by the
light of certainty that which is hidden in the unseen world.” This
is what ʿAlī meant when he was asked, “Do you see God?” and replied:
“How should we worship One whom we do not see?” The light of intuitive
certainty (_yaqīn_) by which the heart sees God is a beam of God’s own
light cast therein by Himself; else no vision of Him were possible.
“’Tis the sun’s self that lets the sun be seen.”
According to a mystical interpretation of the famous passage in the
Koran where the light of Allah is compared to a candle burning in a
lantern of transparent glass, which is placed in a niche in the wall,
the niche is the true believer’s heart; therefore his speech is light
and his works are light and he moves in light. “He who discourses of
eternity,” said Bāyazīd, “must have within him the lamp of eternity.”
The light which gleams in the heart of the illuminated mystic endows
him with a supernatural power of discernment (_firāsat_). Although the
Sūfīs, like all other Moslems, acknowledge Mohammed to be the last of
the prophets (as, from a different point of view, he is the Logos or
first of created beings), they really claim to possess a minor form
of inspiration. When Nūrī was questioned concerning the origin of
mystical _firāsat_, he answered by quoting the Koranic verse in which
God says that He breathed His spirit into Adam; but the more orthodox
Sūfīs, who strenuously combat the doctrine that the human spirit is
uncreated and eternal, affirm that _firāsat_ is the result of knowledge
and insight, metaphorically called ‘light’ or ‘inspiration,’ which God
creates and bestows upon His favourites. The Tradition, “Beware of the
discernment of the true believer, for he sees by the light of Allah,”
is exemplified in such anecdotes as these:
Abū ʿAbdallah al-Rāzī said:
“Ibn al-Anbārī presented me with a woollen frock, and seeing
on the head of Shiblī a bonnet that would just match it, I
conceived the wish that they were both mine. When Shiblī rose to
depart, he looked at me, as he was in the habit of doing when he
desired me to follow him. So I followed him to his house, and when
we had gone in, he bade me put off the frock and took it from me
and folded it and threw his bonnet on the top. Then he called for a
fire and burnt both frock and bonnet.”
Sarī al-Saqatī frequently urged Junayd to speak in public, but Junayd
was unwilling to consent, for he doubted whether he was worthy of such
an honour. One Friday night he dreamed that the Prophet appeared and
commanded him to speak to the people. He awoke and went to Sarī’s house
before daybreak, and knocked at the door. Sarī opened the door and
said: “You would not believe me until the Prophet came and told you.”
Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah was sitting in the congregational mosque when a
pigeon, overcome by the intense heat, dropped on the floor. Sahl
exclaimed: “Please God, Shāh al-Kirmānī has just died.” They wrote it
down, and it was found to be true.
When the heart is purged of sin and evil thoughts, the light of
certainty strikes upon it and makes it a shining mirror, so that the
Devil cannot approach it without being observed. Hence the saying of
some gnostic: “If I disobey my heart, I disobey God.” It was a man thus
illuminated to whom the Prophet said: “Consult thy heart, and thou
wilt hear the secret ordinance of God proclaimed by the heart’s inward
knowledge, which is real faith and divinity”--something much better
than the learning of divines. I need not anticipate here the question,
which will be discussed in the following chapter, how far the claims
of an infallible conscience are reconcilable with external religion
and morality. The Prophet, too, prayed that God would put a light into
his ear and into his eye; and after mentioning the different members
of his body, he concluded, “and make the whole of me one light.”[6]
From illumination of gradually increasing splendour, the mystic rises
to contemplation of the divine attributes, and ultimately, when his
consciousness is wholly melted away, he becomes transubstantiated
(_tajawhara_) in the radiance of the divine essence. This is the
‘station’ of well-doing (_ihsān_)--for “God is with the well-doers”
(Kor. =29.= 69), and we have Prophetic authority for the statement
that “well-doing consists in worshipping God as though thou wert seeing
Him.”
[6] The reader should be reminded that most, if not all, mystical
Traditions ascribed to Mohammed were forged and fathered upon him by
the Sūfīs, who represent themselves as the true interpreters of his
esoteric teaching.
I will not waste the time and abuse the patience of my readers
by endeavouring to classify and describe these various grades of
illumination, which may be depicted symbolically but cannot be
explained in scientific language. We must allow the mystics to
speak for themselves. Granted that their teaching is often hard to
understand, it conveys more of the truth than we can ever hope to
obtain from analysis and dissection.
Here are two passages from the oldest Persian treatise on Sūfism, the
_Kashf al-Mahjūb_ of Hujwīrī:
“It is related that Sarī al-Saqatī said, ‘O God, whatever
punishment thou mayst inflict upon me, do not punish me with the
humiliation of being veiled from Thee,’ because, if I am not veiled
from Thee, my torment and affliction will be lightened by the
recollection and contemplation of Thee; but if I am veiled from
Thee, even Thy bounty will be deadly to me. There is no punishment
in Hell more painful and hard to bear than that of being veiled. If
God were revealed in Hell to the people of Hell, sinful believers
would never think of Paradise, since the sight of God would so
fill them with joy that they would not feel bodily pain. And in
Paradise there is no pleasure more perfect than unveiledness. If
the people there enjoyed all the pleasures of that place and other
pleasures a hundredfold, but were veiled from God, their hearts
would be utterly broken. Therefore it is the way of God to let
the hearts of those who love Him have vision of Him always, in
order that the delight thereof may enable them to endure every
tribulation; and they say in their visions, ‘We deem all torments
more desirable than to be veiled from Thee. When Thy beauty is
revealed to our hearts, we take no thought of affliction.’”
“There are really two kinds of contemplation. The former is the
result of perfect faith, the latter of rapturous love, for in the
rapture of love a man attains to such a degree that his whole being
is absorbed in the thought of his Beloved and he sees nothing else.
Muhammad ibn Wāsiʿ said: ‘I never saw anything without seeing God
therein,’ _i.e._ through perfect faith. Shiblī said: ‘I never saw
anything except God,’ _i.e._ in the rapture of love and the fervour
of contemplation. One mystic sees the act with his bodily eye,
and, as he looks, beholds the Agent with his spiritual eye; another
is rapt by love of the Agent from all things else, so that he sees
only the Agent. The one method is demonstrative, the other is
ecstatic. In the former case, a manifest proof is derived from the
evidences of God; in the latter case, the seer is enraptured and
transported by desire: evidences are a veil to him, because he who
knows a thing does not care for aught besides, and he who loves a
thing does not regard aught besides, but renounces contention with
God and interference with Him in His decrees and acts. When the
lover turns his eye away from created things, he will inevitably
see the Creator with his heart. God hath said, ‘Tell the believers
to close their eyes’ (Kor. =24.= 30), _i.e._ to close their bodily
eyes to lusts and their spiritual eyes to created things. He who
is most sincere in self-mortification is most firmly grounded in
contemplation. Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah of Tustar said: ‘If any one shuts
his eye to God for a single moment, he will never be rightly guided
all his life long,’ because to regard other than God is to be
handed over to other than God, and one who is left at the mercy of
other than God is lost. Therefore the life of contemplatives is the
time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular
vision they do not reckon as life, for that to them is really
death. Thus, when Bāyazīd was asked how old he was, he replied,
‘Four years.’ They said to him, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I
have been veiled from God by this world for seventy years, but I
have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one
is veiled does not belong to one’s life.’”
I take the following quotation from the _Mawāqif_ of Niffarī, an author
with whom we shall become better acquainted as we proceed:
“God said to me, ‘The least of the sciences of nearness is that
you should see in everything the effects of beholding Me, and that
this vision should prevail over you more than your gnosis of Me.’”
Explanation by the commentator:
“He means that the least of the sciences of nearness
(proximity to God) is that when you look at anything, sensibly or
intellectually or otherwise, you should be conscious of beholding
God with a vision clearer than your vision of that thing. There
are diverse degrees in this matter. Some mystics say that they
never see anything without seeing God before it. Others say,
‘without seeing God after it,’ or ‘with it’; or they say that they
see nothing but God. A certain Sūfī said, ‘I made the pilgrimage
and saw the Kaʿba, but not the Lord of the Kaʿba.’ This is the
perception of one who is veiled. Then he said, ‘I made the
pilgrimage again, and I saw both the Kaʿba and the Lord of the
Kaʿba.’ This is contemplation of the Self-subsistence through which
everything subsists, _i.e._ he saw the Kaʿba subsisting through the
Lord of the Kaʿba. Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage a third
time, and I saw the Lord of the Kaʿba, but not the Kaʿba.’ This
is the ‘station’ of _waqfat_ (passing-away in the essence). In
the present case the author is referring to contemplation of the
Self-subsistence.”
So much concerning the theory of illumination. But, as Mephistopheles
says, “_grau ist alle Theorie_”; and though to most of us the living
experience is denied, we can hear its loudest echoes and feel its
warmest afterglow in the poetry which it has created. Let me translate
part of a Persian ode by the dervish-poet, Bābā Kūhī of Shīrāz, who
died in 1050 A.D.
“In the market, in the cloister--only God I saw.
In the valley and on the mountain--only God I saw.
Him I have seen beside me oft in tribulation;
In favour and in fortune--only God I saw.
In prayer and fasting, in praise and contemplation,
In the religion of the Prophet--only God I saw.
Neither soul nor body, accident nor substance,
Qualities nor causes--only God I saw.
I oped mine eyes and by the light of His face around me
In all the eye discovered--only God I saw.
Like a candle I was melting in His fire:
Amidst the flames outflashing--only God I saw.
Myself with mine own eyes I saw most clearly,
But when I looked with God’s eyes--only God I saw.
I passed away into nothingness, I vanished,
And lo, I was the All-living--only God I saw.”
The whole of Sūfism rests on the belief that when the individual self
is lost, the Universal Self is found, or, in religious language,
that ecstasy affords the only means by which the soul can directly
communicate and become united with God. Asceticism, purification, love,
gnosis, saintship--all the leading ideas of Sūfism--are developed from
this cardinal principle.
Among the metaphorical terms commonly employed by the Sūfīs as, more
or less, equivalent to ‘ecstasy’ are _fanā_ (passing-away), _wajd_
(feeling), _samāʿ_ (hearing), _dhawq_ (taste), _shirb_ (drinking),
_ghaybat_ (absence from self), _jadhbat_ (attraction), _sukr_
(intoxication), and _hāl_ (emotion). It would be tedious and not, I
think, specially instructive to examine in detail the definitions
of those terms and of many others akin to them which occur in Sūfī
text-books. We are not brought appreciably nearer to understanding
the nature of ecstasy when it is described as “a divine mystery which
God communicates to true believers who behold Him with the eye of
certainty,” or as “a flame which moves in the ground of the soul and is
produced by love-desire.” The Mohammedan theory of ecstasy, however,
can hardly be discussed without reference to two of the above-mentioned
technical expressions, namely, _fanā_ and _samāʿ_.
As I have remarked in the Introduction (pp. 17-19), the term _fanā_
includes different stages, aspects, and meanings. These may be
summarised as follows:
1. A moral transformation of the soul through the extinction of all its
passions and desires.
2. A mental abstraction or passing-away of the mind from all objects of
perception, thoughts, actions, and feelings through its concentration
upon the thought of God. Here the thought of God signifies
contemplation of the divine attributes.
3. The cessation of all conscious thought. The highest stage of
_fanā_ is reached when even the consciousness of having attained
_fanā_ disappears. This is what the Sūfīs call ‘the passing-away
of passing-away’ (_fanā al-fanā_). The mystic is now rapt in
contemplation of the divine essence.
The final stage of _fanā_, the complete passing-away from self, forms
the prelude to _baqā_, ‘continuance’ or ‘abiding’ in God, and will be
treated with greater fullness in Chapter VI.
The first stage closely resembles the Buddhistic Nirvāṇa. It is a
‘passing-away’ of evil qualities and states of mind, which involves the
simultaneous ‘continuance’ of good qualities and states of mind. This
is necessarily an ecstatic process, inasmuch as all the attributes of
‘self’ are evil in relation to God. No one can make himself perfectly
moral, _i.e._ perfectly ‘selfless.’ This must be done for him, through
‘a flash of the divine beauty’ in his heart.
While the first stage refers to the moral ‘self,’ the second refers
to the percipient and intellectual ‘self.’ Using the classification
generally adopted by Christian mystics, we may regard the former as the
consummation of the Purgative Life, and the latter as the goal of the
Illuminative Life. The third and last stage constitutes the highest
level of the Contemplative Life.
Often, though not invariably, _fanā_ is accompanied by loss of
sensation. Sarī al-Saqatī, a famous Sūfī of the third century,
expressed the opinion that if a man in this state were struck on the
face with a sword, he would not feel the blow. Abu ’l-Khayr al-Aqtaʿ
had a gangrene in his foot. The physicians declared that his foot must
be amputated, but he would not allow this to be done. His disciples
said, “Cut it off while he is praying, for he is then unconscious.” The
physicians acted on their advice, and when Abu ’l-Khayr finished his
prayers he found that the amputation had taken place. It is difficult
to see how any one far advanced in _fanā_ could be capable of keeping
the religious law--a point on which the orthodox mystics lay great
emphasis. Here the doctrine of saintship comes in. God takes care to
preserve His elect from disobedience to His commands. We are told
that Bāyazīd, Shiblī, and other saints were continually in a state
of rapture until the hour of prayer arrived; then they returned to
consciousness, and after performing their prayers became enraptured
again.
In theory, the ecstatic trance is involuntary, although certain
conditions are recognised as being specially favourable to its
occurrence. “It comes to a man through vision of the majesty of God and
through revelation of the divine omnipotence to his heart.” Such, for
instance, was the case of Abū Hamza, who, while walking in the streets
of Baghdād and meditating on the nearness of God, suddenly fell into
an ecstasy and went on his way, neither seeing nor hearing, until he
recovered his senses and found himself in the desert. Trances of this
kind sometimes lasted many weeks. It is recorded of Sahl ibn ʿAbdallah
that he used to remain in ecstasy twenty-five days at a time, eating
no food; yet he would answer questions put to him by the doctors of
theology, and even in winter his shirt would be damp with sweat. But
the Sūfīs soon discovered that ecstasy might be induced artificially,
not only by concentration of thought, recollection (_dhikr_), and other
innocent methods of autohypnosis, but also by music, singing, and
dancing. These are included in the term _samāʿ_, which properly means
nothing more than audition.
That Moslems are extraordinarily susceptible to the sweet influences of
sound will not be doubted by any one who remembers how, in the _Arabian
Nights_, heroes and heroines alike swoon upon the slightest provocation
afforded by a singing-girl touching her lute and trilling a few lines
of passionate verse. The fiction is true to life. When Sūfī writers
discuss the analogous phenomena of ecstasy, they commonly do so in a
chapter entitled ‘Concerning the _Samāʿ_.’ Under this heading Hujwīrī,
in the final chapter of his _Kashf al-Mahjūb_, gives us an excellent
summary of his own and other Mohammedan theories, together with
numerous anecdotes of persons who were thrown into ecstasy on hearing a
verse of the Koran or a heavenly voice (_hātif_) or poetry or music.
Many are said to have died from the emotion thus aroused. I may add by
way of explanation that, according to a well-known mystical belief, God
has inspired every created thing to praise Him in its own language, so
that all the sounds in the universe form, as it were, one vast choral
hymn by which He glorifies Himself. Consequently those whose hearts
He has opened and endowed with spiritual perception hear His voice
everywhere, and ecstasy overcomes them as they listen to the rhythmic
chant of the muezzin, or the street cry of the saqqā shouldering his
water-skin, or, perchance, to the noise of wind or the bleating of a
sheep or the piping of a bird.
Pythagoras and Plato are responsible for another theory, to which the
Sūfī poets frequently allude, that music awakens in the soul a memory
of celestial harmonies heard in a state of pre-existence, before the
soul was separated from God. Thus Jalāluddīn Rūmī:
“The song of the spheres in their revolutions
Is what men sing with lute and voice.
As we all are members of Adam,
We have heard these melodies in Paradise.
Though earth and water have cast their veil upon us,
We retain faint reminiscences of these heavenly songs;
But while we are thus shrouded by gross earthly veils,
How can the tones of the dancing spheres reach us?”[7]
[7] E. H. Whinfield, abridged translation of the _Masnavī_, p. 182.
The formal practice of _samāʿ_ quickly spread amongst the Sūfīs and
produced an acute cleavage of opinion, some holding it to be lawful and
praiseworthy, whilst others condemned it as an abominable innovation
and incitement to vice. Hujwīrī adopts the middle view expressed in a
saying of Dhu ’l-Nūn the Egyptian:
“Music is a divine influence which stirs the heart to seek God:
those who listen to it spiritually attain unto God, and those who
listen to it sensually fall into unbelief.”
He declares, in effect, that audition is neither good nor bad, and must
be judged by its results.
“When an anchorite goes into a tavern, the tavern becomes his
cell, but when a wine-bibber goes into a cell, that cell becomes
his tavern.”
One whose heart is absorbed in the thought of God cannot be corrupted
by hearing musical instruments. So with dancing.
“When the heart throbs and rapture grows intense, and the
agitation of ecstasy is manifested and conventional forms are gone,
this is not dancing nor bodily indulgence, but a dissolution of the
soul.”
Hujwīrī, however, lays down several precautionary rules for those who
engage in audition, and he confesses that the public concerts given by
dervishes are extremely demoralising. Novices, he thinks, should not be
permitted to attend them. In modern times these orgiastic scenes have
frequently been described by eye-witnesses. I will now translate from
Jāmī’s _Lives of the Saints_ the account of a similar performance which
took place about seven hundred years ago.
“There was a certain dervish, a negro called Zangī Bashgirdī,
who had attained to such a high degree of spirituality that the
mystic dance could not be started until he came out and joined
in it. One day, in the course of the _samāʿ_, he was seized with
ecstasy, and rising into the air seated himself on a lofty arch
which overlooked the dancers. In descending he leaped on to
Majduddīn of Baghdād, and encircled with his legs the neck of the
Sheykh, who nevertheless continued to spin round in the dance,
though he was a very frail and slender man, whereas the negro
was tall and heavy. When the dance was finished, Majduddīn said,
‘I did not know whether it was a negro or a sparrow on my neck.’
On getting off the Sheykh’s shoulders, the negro bit his cheek
so severely that the scar remained visible ever after. Majduddīn
often used to say that on the Day of Judgment he would not boast of
anything except that he bore the mark of this negro’s teeth on his
face.”
Grotesque and ignoble features--not to speak of grosser
deformities--must appear in any faithful delineation of the ecstatic
life of Islam. Nothing is gained by concealing their existence or by
minimising their importance. If, as Jalāluddīn Rūmī says:
“Men incur the reproach of wine and drugs
That they may escape for a while from self-consciousness,
Since all know this life to be a snare,
Volitional memory and thought to be a hell,”
let us acknowledge that the transports of spiritual intoxication are
not always sublime, and that human nature has a trick of avenging
itself on those who would cast it off.