Fana'
Extinction in God: the effacement of the self before the sole Real, described by Junayd as the end of the path.
Fana’ means extinction, passing away, what fades. The Baghdad masters, al-Junayd first among them, made it the name of the journey’s end: the extinction of the self that watches itself, the end of the experience in which the disciple still stood as a subject before God. The Qur’an supplies the doctrine’s supporting verse: ‘All things pass, save His Face’ (XXVIII, 88).
Fana’ is neither death nor an annihilation of the body nor, as the early orientalists caricatured it, a pantheist absorption. The masters describe it as the extinction of the illusion that the self commands: one is extinguished to oneself in order to subsist through God. That is why the complete doctrine adds baqa’: subsistence in God after extinction, man sent back to creatures in service, his work done.
The return to mankind after extinction is the very definition of the shaykh in the tradition of the path: one who has died to himself and whom God has left among his own to guide them. See the presentation of the guides of the path.