Sufism and Islam
One day, as the Prophet Muhammad was with his companions, they saw a young man approaching, dressed in white and bearing no trace of the dust of travel. The man sat facing the Prophet, placed his legs between his own, and asked: “What is islam?” The Prophet replied: “Islam is submission to God, based on the practice of the five pillars: the twofold testimony of the divine oneness and of the revelation brought by Muhammad, prayer, almsgiving, the fast of the month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca”. The young man then said: “You have spoken truly!”, which could not fail to astonish the companions. Then he asked: “What is iman?” (faith). The Prophet replied: “Iman is to believe in God, in His angels, in His books, in His messengers, in the Day of Judgement and in the divine decree”. Once again the young man exclaimed: “You have spoken truly!”, then asked: “What is ihsan?” (excellence). The Prophet replied: “Ihsan is to worship God as though you saw Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you”. After confirming these words with a further “You have spoken truly!”, and asking a few more questions, the young man left. The Prophet then asked his companions whether they knew who this young man was. They did not, and he revealed to them that it was the archangel Gabriel, “come to teach you your religion”.
Through this famous hadith emerge three levels of experience and understanding of the divine reality: submission to the Law, or respect for the rind and the form of things; faith, or an understanding of the flesh and the content of religion; and excellence, the central kernel formed by awareness of the divine presence. “To reach the kernel, you must pass through the rind”, said Meister Eckhart. The fruit is made of a rind (the Law), a flesh (faith) and a kernel (the spirit). But to reach the kernel, which alone holds a new fruit in germ, you must first pass through the rind.
The relationship between the exoteric and the esoteric can be compared to that between body and spirit. Without the spirit, the body is emptied of its meaning, of its living source; without the body, the spirit cannot be grasped and becomes pure abstraction. Yet we are not pure spirits. Rooted in a space and a time, we possess a body and a soul in perpetual interaction. One only has to see how tiredness or hunger can sometimes wear away our patience or our good humour to be convinced that the life of the body influences our inner state. This interaction is also the basis of the very notion of ritual, that practice which mobilises all the constituent elements of our being. While philosophy, which remains confined to the mind, can be practised with no link to our way of life, spiritual work needs an outward framework if it is to be effective.
For the disciple, the practices of Islam constitute the extension of his spiritual journey into deeds. A great Sufi master explains it in the following way: “Observing the prescriptions of Islam plays the same part as the wax that forms the stopper of a bottle and prevents the liquid from spilling out. A vessel may be filled with water, but if its bottom is split open by a knife, all the liquid escapes. However hard you try to fill it again, if the bottom is pierced nothing can be kept. This image illustrates the situation of the disciple who does not apply these principles.” The spiritual secret is that water, with which the practice of dhikr fills the disciple’s heart. If the bottle formed by his heart has no stopper, or no bottom, it cannot keep that water for long. However intense what he has tasted may be, he will have to resign himself to parting with it.
The practical application of these principles lies essentially in observing the five pillars of Islam. The first is a twofold testimony, both to the divine oneness and to the revelation brought by Muhammad: to affirm that there are no gods but God, and that Muhammad is His messenger; in other words, that God is one and that a path of return to Him exists, shown to us by the Prophet Muhammad’s example. The second consists in performing the five daily prayers, which must be preceded by the ritual ablutions. The third lies in the obligatory alms, which purify the goods allotted to us by setting aside a portion for the needy. The fourth is the fast of the month of Ramadan, kept from dawn to sunset for a lunar cycle. Finally, the fifth pillar consists in making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one’s life, if one has the physical and material means to do so.
It should be stressed that this is not a matter of imposing constraints on oneself, but of becoming inwardly aware of the need to establish, gradually and at each person’s own pace, rules that will allow us to keep what we have received and to receive more. As the Qur’an says: “God desires ease for you; He does not desire hardship for you” (II, 185). Much also depends on the place from which each person begins his quest: if someone of Muslim background enters the path, applying the precepts of Islam may seem easy to him, almost natural. For a Westerner who presumably knows nothing of these practices, things will have to unfold more gradually, if only because he will have everything to learn and these rites will be entirely new to him.
The emphasis is therefore on the need to move, in the end, towards a practice that respects the obligations and prohibitions of the religion, while bringing out the pre-eminence of the spirit over the letter in applying these commandments. To illustrate the point, one may recall the story of the man who came to pray in the mosque where the Prophet was. The man was finishing his prayer when one of the companions noticed that one of its movements had not been correctly performed. He urged the man to repeat his prayer according to the letter, and the man did so. When his second prayer was finished, he turned to the companion who had called out to him and asked: “In your view, which of my two prayers was accepted by God?” “The second, obviously, since it alone was performed according to the rule,” the companion replied. “Well,” the man said to him, “I believe it was the first that was accepted. For that one I did for God, whereas the second I did for you.” The Prophet, who had witnessed the scene, confirmed this. Intention therefore remains paramount. As Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah puts it: “Works are lifeless forms; life enters them through the secret of pure intention”. It is the inner state of mind, the reality of the intimate awareness that accompanies the action, which truly animates it and gives it its deepest meaning.
It is worth noting that the Arabic term shari’a, used for the religious Law, also means “path”. The spirit of the shari’a in fact consists in drawing as close as possible to the state that was ours at the creation of man, that is, in gradually recovering our conformity with our Adamic model. It is therefore a journey, a progressive coming into conformity, which will allow us, in the measure that we are purified, to receive more.
Finally, a word on the rules governing social life and “living together”: it is clearly established that everyone must respect the laws of the country in which he finds himself. The principles of French secularism, for example, are entirely compatible with the principles set out here. Sidi Jamal, shaykh of the path from 2017 to 2025, also advised all his disciples to behave as good citizens in every country in which they reside: such conduct is in itself a form of respect for the shari’a.
A text written collectively by disciples of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path.
Previous chapter: the invocation (dhikr); next chapter: the spiritual work. Back to the table of contents: questions and answers on Sufism.
