"Spirituality as a reminder of the essential, in forms proper to each epoch"

By Faouzi Skali · June 2, 2021 · 4 min read

When it comes to spirituality and time, one could evoke that famous Sufi wisdom saying: “the Sufi is the son of the instant”, or else, in another translation just as valid: “the Sufi is the son of his time”.

It is true that one permanent idea in the whole spiritual approach of Sufism is that, according to contexts and epochs, there are different pedagogical forms and different forms of spiritual initiation.

Thus, for example, as early as the second century of the Hegira (eighth century of our era), in Basra, in Baghdad, personalities who had no ties with the institutions, who taught in a very uncodified manner, drew to themselves the people of their time, whom they recalled to the essential, to wisdom.

At that time, the civilisation of islam was already well institutionalised, with a “caste” of scholars, of “professionals of religion”, as al-Ghazali was to call them. And it is perhaps for this very reason that it was more necessary than ever to recall the essential.

Religions do not escape the risk of crystallisation; they too risk congealing, becoming formalised and forgetting the essential, which is the heart. The heart is the very reason for which religions were revealed.

Rabi’a and the way of love

Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya was one of those sages, those precursors of essential spiritual teaching. She left mystical odes often taken up by sama’ ensembles, which speak of this spiritual love. In one of her poems, addressing God, she says: “Some worship Thee because they want Paradise, others worship Thee because they fear Hell; as for me, I have no opinion to give on either, I shall exchange nothing for my Love.” It is this way of love, this way of the heart, of the essential, that she and many others recall.

Religion is not a sort of “ready-to-think” or “ready-to-believe” that one need only don. It is a wayfaring bearing transformation; it is at the same time a combat against our inclinations, those tendencies in us that we all know: self-satisfaction, pride, vanity, the search for power, the will to dominate. They constitute so many veils that inhabit our heart and prevent us from entering into contact with that other dimension, which is that of the heart and of love: the divine presence.

To transmit their teaching, the sages use mirror effects with their disciples.

Spiritual teaching is not something programmable, where each answer of the master would correspond to a single question of the disciple. Take the following example: someone who came to see Rabi’a, quite full of himself, said to her: “Rabi’a, it is twenty years since I last committed the slightest sin.” Rabi’a looked at him and answered, a little cruelly it is true: “My dear child, that is all you have been doing for twenty years.” It was not really the answer he expected, and seeing his astonishment she completed her reply: “For twenty years you have been self-satisfied with yourself.”

This kind of exchange occurs within a living relation of initiation. That is why spirituality can only be born of this relation and can only be relative to living persons who question, who seek. There is no standard answer. Only an answer that precisely readjusts an orientation, that suddenly opens onto a perception, a comprehension.

A thirst for meaning

These spiritual beings who play the role of a mirror of wisdom are perhaps less visible today than they have been at certain moments. But I do not think the world can definitively do without them. For we need the very search for meaning, which today becomes so intensely necessary.

There is such an absence of meaning that one realises that something is missing. The thirst is all the stronger, as in the poem: “I drank the wine of Love, cup after cup; the wine was not exhausted and my thirst was not quenched.”

These questionings about meaning are at least as important as the answers that can be brought to them. That is why today the question of spirituality is not a subsidiary question, but indeed a central one; and that not only in an individual capacity, but also in a collective capacity, in the capacity of the world and of the orientations it is taking today.

Faouzi Skali

Extracts from a dialogue, during the Mediterranean Encounters on Sufism, between Ghaleb Bencheikh (physicist, specialist in islam, writer) and Faouzi Skali (anthropologist, writer, specialist in Sufism, director of the Fes Festival).

Faouzi Skali

Ghaleb Bencheikh

Further reading

• Wisdom, or the recognition of Love
• Sufism in daily life
• The spiritual guide on the Sufi path

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