Sufism at the heart of Islam
Contents
Sufism constitutes the heart of the Islamic tradition. It cannot therefore claim to be lived outside it. At the same time, beyond the frame of the revealed religion, it aims at the fulfilment of man on this earth, here and now.
From the rind to the core
As a revelation, Islam determines the rules of human activity and defines the ritual supports of meditation; Sufism is the science of spiritual savours and inner states. Since Sufism finds its origin and source in the Islamic revelation, anything that might look like a divergence from Islam can only be tied to a difference of viewpoint on one and the same reality. Thus the ritual ablution, which is a legal obligation in Islam, can be lived as a first approach to the inner purification of the disciple’s soul, which would be its ultimate aim. For the Sufi, the practices of Islam are the prolongation into acts of his spiritual wayfaring.
The relation between exotericism and esotericism is like that between body and spirit. Without spirit, the body is emptied of its meaning, of its living source; without a body, the spirit cannot be grasped and becomes a pure abstraction.
‘To reach the core, one must pass through the rind,’ said Meister Eckhart. A fruit is made of a rind (the Law), a flesh (Faith) and a core (the Spirit). But to reach the core, which alone contains a new fruit in germ, one must first pass through the rind.
The archangel’s teaching
One day, when the Prophet Muhammad was with his companions, they saw a young man arrive dressed in white, bearing no trace upon him of the dust of travel. The man sat facing the Prophet, placed his legs between his own, and asked him: ‘What is islam?’ (literally, the word means ‘submission’). The Prophet replied: islam is submission to God, founded upon the practice of the five pillars: the twofold testimony of divine unity and of the revelation given to Muhammad, the 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 predestination. Here again the young man exclaimed: ‘You have spoken truly!’, then asked: ‘What is ihsan?’ (excellence of conduct). The Prophet replied: ihsan is ‘to worship God as though you saw Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you’. After these words were confirmed by a new ‘you have spoken truly!’, and a few further questions, the young man left. The Prophet then asked his companions whether they knew who this young man was. Faced with their ignorance, he revealed to them that it was the archangel Gabriel, come to teach them their religion.
From this hadith (a saying of the Prophet) three levels of lived experience and understanding of divine reality emerge, corresponding to the three notions evoked by Meister Eckhart:
- submission to the Law, or respect for the rind and the form of things;
- faith, or understanding of the flesh and the content of the religion;
- excellence, or the central core constituted by awareness of the divine presence.
The Sufis draw on this hadith both to show the necessity of a literal practice of the obligations and prohibitions of the religion, and to bring out the pre-eminence of spirit over letter in the application of those commandments. To illustrate the point, one may recall the story of a man who had come to pray in the mosque where the Prophet was. He was finishing his prayer. A companion noticed that one of the movements of the prayer had not been correctly performed. He urged the man to repeat his prayer according to the letter, and the man did so. His second prayer over, the man turned to the companion who had addressed him and asked:
‘In your view, which of my prayers has been accepted by God?’
‘The second, obviously, since it alone was performed according to the rule.’
‘Well, I believe it is 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 the truth of this.
Towards excellence of conduct
All Sufi practices find their source in the verses of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Messenger. There is therefore no innovation on the part of Sufism in relation to the Revelation. ‘Prayer keeps man away from turpitude and blameworthy actions. The invocation of God’s name is the greatest thing of all,’ says the Qur’an, adding immediately: ‘God knows perfectly what you do’ (XXIX, 45). In this way the whole importance of invoking the name of God, a central practice of Sufism, is affirmed. The allusion to the divine gaze fixed upon us, coming immediately afterwards and closely resembling the definition of ihsan given by the archangel Gabriel, can be read as an indication of the degree to which this practice is attached. In relation to such a degree, the practice of invocation even appears superior to that of prayer. Conversely, if one stands at the minimum degree of the Law, invocation is no longer strictly necessary, as the following hadith shows. A man came to the Prophet and asked him: ‘If I practise the five pillars but perform no supererogatory work (additional, non-obligatory), may I hope to enter paradise?’ The Prophet answered in the affirmative. Sufism can thus be presented as an additional dimension, a deepening of Law and Faith with a view to excellence of conduct, for those who feel such an inner demand.
The Qur’an recommends remembering God as often as possible: ‘Remember Me, I shall remember you’ (II, 152); ‘Call to mind the name of your Lord, and devote yourself wholly to Him’ (LXXIII, 8); and again: ‘Invoke God abundantly and glorify Him, at the break of day and at its decline’ (XXXIII, 41-42). This notion of the constant remembrance of the divine presence leads straight into ihsan. Beyond legal conformity, only awareness of this presence can truly transform a person and his daily conduct. Only this sense of presence can bring a man to cease deceiving himself and to acknowledge the reality of his inner state. Beyond the image others reflect back to us of ourselves, there is a gaze from which nothing can be hidden. Sincerity requires that we act in the light of that gaze. To illustrate this, the master Rumi tells the following story: a schoolmaster, having learnt from a man of knowledge that one of his pupils was destined to become a great saint, arranged an experiment to find out which one it was. He asked each pupil to go and buy a bird, then to leave the town until nobody could see him, and to sacrifice the animal. The next day all the pupils came back with a dead bird, except one. He explained that he had gone as far as he could, but that wherever he went he could not escape the gaze of God. Still alive, the bird he had brought took advantage of his account to fly out of the window.
The food of the heart
Imam Ghazali defines dhikr (invocation) as a kind of fasting of the heart, a spiritual combat consisting in ‘making faults disappear, cutting all ties and drawing near to God Most High through perfect spiritual application’. And he adds ‘that it is only within the believer’s power to prepare himself for it through the purification that strips bare’. Purification from all the false idols that dwell within us, and from the gaze of others, allows one to attach oneself to the divine gaze alone. Beyond the legal answers to a certain number of problems, drawn from the Qur’an or from prophetic custom, the question here is how to behave in the multiple situations of daily life, in a permanent search for the right attitude. The answer can then only come from the depths of our being. To a man who had come to ask him about uprightness, the Prophet replied three times: ‘Question your own heart’. A central organ, like the physical heart that breathes life into the whole body, the heart in question is in fact the instrument of spiritual perception. Invocation aims at nothing but the revivification of this heart. And that is what explains the essential importance of this practice in the Sufi wayfaring.
Another hadith, in which God speaks in the first person through the mouth of the Prophet, says this: ‘My servant does not cease to draw near to Me through the practice of supererogatory works until I love him; and when I love him, I become the hearing by which he hears, the sight by which he sees, the tongue by which he speaks, the hand by which he grasps, the foot by which he walks’. Beyond the notion of salvation and conformity to the divine commandments of good and evil, Sufism aims at this transformation of being, at its deliverance, through human qualities being overlaid by the qualities of the divine being. To take up the symbolism of Genesis, one might speak of the Tree of good and evil, and of the Tree of life. The spiritual path being presented as a return to origins, that return is accomplished at the very place where the fall took place.
Ibn Khaldun’s three spiritual combats
A famous Muslim historian and thinker, Ibn Khaldun, distinguishes three kinds of spiritual combat: the first he calls ‘the combat of piety’, the second ‘the combat of rectitude’, and the third ‘the combat of unveiling through intuition’. In his view, the direction of a spiritual master is not equally necessary at each of these three degrees. At the first degree, the presence of a master allows the disciple a teaching ‘in act’ that is preferable to bookish teaching, as the example of the archangel Gabriel teaching the Prophet the movements of prayer shows. At the second degree, Ibn Khaldun shows that the presence of a master allows a better knowledge of the nature of the individual soul, thereby facilitating the search for rectitude. But it is at the level of the third degree that a guide’s teaching becomes absolutely indispensable: ‘As for the spiritual combat of intuition and contemplation, whose aim is the lifting of the veil of the sensible world and the knowledge of the spiritual world […], it depends necessarily and absolutely upon a master of initiation […], without whom this spiritual combat would be vain in most cases’. Ibn Khaldun adds that if the term ‘Sufism’ applies to the three degrees we have just mentioned, it designates the last of them more specifically.
To end on an image, the spiritual life may be pictured by analogy with bodily life. Here the Law is represented by the skin, the visible and outward aspect of the human being. Faith is symbolised by the flesh, the substance and weight of the being. Finally, the spirit is constituted by the bones and the marrow they contain. Sufism claims to be that ‘substantific marrow’, that source of life which nourishes and regenerates the body that contains it.
Marie-Hélène Dassa
