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The heart of the path: the spiritual guide and the transmission of the secret

By Faouzi Skali · June 2, 2021 · 6 min read

Contents

Renewing contact with this ‘true nature of religion’ requires an effort of distancing with regard to the event, and of discernment with regard to a natural and reassuring tendency of man: that of limiting everything to what he believes he knows, and neglecting the spirit that exceeds him, in order to take refuge in the letter he believes he masters.

The breath of religious aspiration, contained within our simple intellectual limits, petrifies into a desiccated and flavourless form, emptied of its purely spiritual dimension, which is yet the most fundamental of all. Veiled to this dimension, we codify systems of moral and behavioural values, factors of social and personal balance which, too remote from their substance, will quickly come to be limited to the context in which they are expressed, until they are instrumentalised to the extreme.

This tendency towards formalism spares no religion. In the Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad’s life-giving message would be perceived, over the centuries, as a mere social cement, easily modulable for purposes quite foreign to the deep meaning of Islam.

In such a context, the Sufi communities, nourished by the exemplarity of the Prophet and by the purest simplicity of his teaching, would cultivate and transmit the inner dimension of the Qur’anic Revelation. Its uninterrupted transmission would go from guide to disciple, hidden or unveiled to the eyes of the greatest number according to the conditions of the epoch and providential designs whose wisdom and scope are hard to grasp mentally. This teaching indeed implies that we be sensitised to another perception, another dimension, than that of discursive reason: a perception of the heart, open to the presence of a shaykh (a spiritual master) himself awakened to that dimension, and around whom a community linked to a living spiritual education will be constituted.

The importance of the community

The fundamental justification of a spiritual community, its beating heart and its true raison d’être, is indeed the presence of a realised being, whose vocation is to transmit a spiritual influx he has received from divine inspiration, without his own will intervening. This influx is designated in Arabic by the word ‘sirr’, which literally means ‘the secret’, although no translation can penetrate the intimate reality in question.

If the spiritual quest is a mystery, the sirr is a mystery within the mystery. It is, so to speak, the spiritual energy characterising a way made living by the presence of a guide, commissioned by God to transmit it to the disciple’s heart.

Benefiting from divine assistance in the accomplishment of this task, the shaykh will communicate a wisdom comparable to the fountain flowing in the midst of the community, irrigating everything around it: hearts, relations, conduct, each one’s attitudes. The disciples are then like gardeners who channel the divine water and bring it to the place where it must spread, so as to communicate to it its power and its force of transformation. They are that link, that transmission belt, and become at once those who receive and those who give.

Towards inner healing

The Prophet Muhammad said: ‘This religion came as something strange, and it will end as something strange.’

The most accomplished spiritual teaching necessarily passes through perplexity, that is, the calling into question of our certainties, the loss of our landmarks. That the master places the disciple in a state of perplexity is a manifestation of this strange dimension of the teaching. It is not of the order of what is known, of what can be interpreted through words. This state of perplexity will lead the disciple to discover something radically other, which will transform him from within, under the effect of the spiritual secret. This is the sacred fire that must be preserved, because it constitutes the whole weight of being.

In this, the spiritual master brings a remedy for the heart’s infirmity. For the ignorance of the heart is like a form of illness. All the forms of the ego are like fetters, like delusions. The knowledge transmitted by the guide’s teaching will make it possible to reach that root of oneself; it will allow an inner transformation, a change, the simplification then the effacement of certain aspects of the ego. This is what the saints realise in themselves, and the guide makes it possible to reach that point. Total transparency is in fact the very heart of the guide, since that heart has rid itself of all idols, of the quest for power, and has returned to the state of absolute servitude, the state in which one truly is ’abd Allah (servant of God).

‘The master is not the one whose words transport you; he is the one whose presence transforms you’, says a Sufi maxim. The master is a ferryman; he is ‘the one who has arrived and who makes others arrive’ from the shore of the ego to the shore where there is no longer any ego. Through his teaching, he conveys the disciple to the origin of the Revelation. On such a path, religion ceases to be merely a system and becomes a reality lived by the disciple’s heart. Everything is set in place by this relation that establishes itself from heart to heart with the spiritual guide. To orient oneself towards the guide is to orient oneself towards that transparency which opens a window onto the absolute. Thus religion recovers its dimension, which is to be of divine source.

By Faouzi Skali.

The guide in the Qur’an

The Qur’an evokes the notion of the spiritual guide on several occasions:

This last verse defines the two conditions a spiritual master must fulfil to guide disciples:

  1. He must first be a wali, that is, a saint, whose individuality has been extinguished in God and who contemplates the divine unity in all things and at every moment. ‘It is He who chooses the saints’ (Qur’an VII, 196). A saint who has died to himself to be reborn in God. Certain hadiths refer to the ‘death’ of the ego: ‘Die before you die’; ‘Men are asleep; when they die, they awaken’; ‘If you want to see a dead man walking, look at Abu Bakr’. Al-Junayd, a great Sufi master, defined the way thus: ‘Sufism is when God makes you die to yourself to raise you up again in Him.’
  2. He must then be a murshid, that is, a guide who has received the spiritual authorisation (idhn) to guide.

Illustration

Portrait of Faouzi Skali

Faouzi Skali

Further reading

Further reading