by
SIRDAR IKBAL ALI SHAHOriginally published in Hibbert Journal. 20 (1921-1922) pp 524-35;
revised version published in Sufi Thought and Action, assembled by Idries Shah (1990)
We must here lay stress upon the great central
doctrine of Sufism that the human soul is one in
essence with the Divine. The difference is one of
degree and not of kind. However much men may differ
from Divinity, they are, after all, particles of
the Divine Being, broken lights of God, as Tennyson
so beautifully says, and will ultimately be reabsorbed
in the Great Cause which projected them into
the darksome regions of the earth-plane. God is universal.He interpenetrates all matter, all substance. Perfect
in His truth, goodness,and beauty, they who love Him
alone know the real fullness of love. Mere physical
love is an illusion, a seeming, a snare to the feet
and an enemy in the path.
The great mirror in which the Divine splendour
reflects itself is nature. From the beginning of things,
ay, from the first, it has been the task of the Supreme
Goodness to diffuse happiness among those fitted to
receive it. Thousands ignore it, mistaking the pomps
and pleasures of earth for joy, rejecting the greater
bliss to their hands.
In many faiths we hear of a covenant betwixt God
and man. This is also the Sufi creed. That covenant
has been broken by the sin of the creature against his
Creator. Only when man once more finds reunion with God
shall he be restored to his ancient privileges of full
and unalloyed fellowship with the Divine. This alone
is true happiness. The pursuit of the material is a
vain thing. As Longfellow says:
"Things are not what they seem."
Nature, the earth, that which we see, feel, and hear,
are but the subjective visions of God, suggested to
our minds by the great Artist. Mind or Spirit alone
is immanent. The fleeting phantoms thrown by the
phantasmagoria of matter we must beware of. We must
attach ourselves to none of their manifestations.
God alone is the one real existence, the only great
Reality. He exists in us and we in Him. The visions
He grants us, the pictures He casts upon the screen of
our imaginations, we may use as a means of approach to
the Eternal Beauty, to the consideration of the Divine.
They are what Wordsworth calls "Intimations of Immortality."
As a great Frenchman once said, we weep when we listen to
beautiful music, our eyes fill with tears on looking at
a great picture or noble statue. A wonderful prospect
in nature affects us in like manner. Wherefore? We weep
because we feel that these things are but shadows of the
real, the imperishable beauty which we have lost, and
which we will not regain until we are once more made
one with God. That Frenchman would have found in Sufism
the complement, the ideal, of his philosophy.
The microcosmos, or small world, said the great
Paracelsus, one of the most learned Europeans of the
sixteenth century, who had travelled widely in the East,
was but the reflection of the macrocosmos or great world
above - the spiritual world, which mirrored itself in
the plane below. To him the illusory and phantasmal nature
of the sphere in which we dwell w'as very plain. Indeed,
no European mystic of old could possibly have found anything
at which he could have demurred in the tenets of
Sufism. In my opinion, Western as well as Oriental
mysticism is heavily indebted to the Sufi philosophy,
and those who believe in one must naturally believe in both.
It requires a mind of the first rank to recognise
the great scheme of God at first sight. Few minds succeed
in doing so. With most persons, long experience is needed
ere they appreciate the marvellous arch-plan of the
Almighty. To a mind naturally pure and angelic
this wondrous cosmic symphony is apparent from the
first. It was so to Mohammed, to Boehme, to Swedenborg,
to Blake. What is man, after all, but the cloak of the
soul? When we say that a man is "naturally bad," we
allude to the state of his inherited mind, not to his
soul. The garment may be ragged, dross may cover the
gold, but it is there all the same. Our bodies are
of the earth and such as our fathers leave us. Our
souls are of God. O man! is there aught that, possessing
the friendship of God, thou canst not compass? Doth not
thy soul strain to Him as the mountains strain unto
the sun and the waters of the sea unto the moon?
Verily thou dost move forth in the light of His
strength, in the unquenchable brilliance of His boundless
majesty, as a great star, lit by the beams of a
still greater sun, launches forth into the millionlamped
avenues of the night. As a ship is moved by
the bright waves of the morning, so art thou urged by
the breath of His spirit. Verily thou art of God as a
child is of its father. What then hast thou to fear,
O son of such a Father?
With such a hope before us - before every one of us,
if we accept it - we must turn our souls from vanity,
from all that is not of God, striving to approximate to
His perfection and discover the secret of our kinship
with Him, until at last we reach the happy consummation
of union with the Divine. The Sufi doctrine tells us
that at the moment of the creation of each creature
a divine voice was heard asking the question, "Art
thou not with God? Art thou not bound by solemn
covenant with thy Creator?" and each created spirit
replied "Yes," as it stood in the presence of the
Almighty Himself. Hence it is that the mystic words,
Alastu, "Art thou not," and Bala, "Yes," occur so
frequently in Sufi poetry. For example, Rumi began
his celebrated Masnawi, which I have ventured to
render into English verse, as follows:-
THE FLUTE
"Oh! hear the flute's sad tale again:
Of Separations I complain;
E'er since it was my fate to be
Thus cut off from my parent tree,
Sweet moan I've made with pensive sigh,
While men and women join my cry.
Man's life is like this hollow rod;
One end is in the lips of God,
And from the other sweet notes fall
That to the mind the spirit call,
And join us with the All in All."
A regular vocabulary of the terms employed by the
Sufis in their mystical poetry exists. Wine, for
example, signifies devotion; sleep, meditation on the
divine perfection; perfume, the hope of the divine
afflatus. Zephyrs signify the gift of godly grace, and
kisses the transports of devotion and piety. But the
terms of significance are often inverted, in order that
they may not be comprehended by the profane. Thus
idolaters, free-thinkers, and revellers are the
terms employed to indicate those whose faith is of
the purest description. The idol they adore is the
Creator Himself; the tavern is the place of prayer;
and the wine drunk therein is the holy beverage of
love, with which they become inebriated. The keeper
of the tavern is the hierophant, or spiritual leader. ,-
The term beauty is used to denote the perfection
of
God, and love-locks and tresses the infinitude of
His glory. Down on the cheeks is symbolic of the
multitudinous spirits which serve Him. Inebriation
and dallian-ce typify that abstraction of soul which
shows contempt of mundane affairs.
The following extract from Sufi poetry will serve
to illustrate the use of many of these mystical terms.
At first sight it would appear to be inspired by the
spirit of amorous and bacchanalian frenzy, but when
translated into its true terms it reveals itself as of
the veritable essence of mysticism.
"Yesterday, half inebriated, I passed by the quarter where
the wine-sellers dwell,
To seek out the daughter of an Infidel, who is a vendor of wine.
At the end of the street, a damsel, with a fairy.'s cheek,
advanced before me,
Who, pagan-like, wore her tresses dishevelled over her
shoulders like the sacerdotal thread.
I said, '0 thou, to the arch of whose eyebrows the new moon
is a shame!
What quarter is this, and where is thy place of abode?'
'Cast,' she replied, 'thy rosary on the ground, and lay the
thread of paganism thy shoulder upon;
Cast stones at the glass of piety; and from an o'erflowing
goblet quaff the wine.
After that draw near me, that I may whisper one word in thine ear;
For thou wilt accomplish thy journey, if thou hearken to my words.
1
Abandoning my heart altogether, and in ecstasy rapt, I followed her.
Till I came to a place where, alike, reason and religion forsook me.
At a distance, I beheld a Company, all inebriated and beside
themselves,
Who came all frenzied, and boiling with ardour from wine of love;
Without lutes, cymbals, or viols; yet all full of mirth and melody
Without wine, or goblet, or flask; yet all drinking unceasingly.
When the thread of restraint slipped away from my hand,
I desired to ask her one question, but she said unto me 'Silence.
This is no square temple whose gate thou canst precipitately attain;
This is no mosque which thou canst reach with tumult, but without
knowledge.
This is the banquet-house of Infidels, and all within are
intoxicated;
All, from eternity's dawn to the day of doom, in astonishment lost!
Depart, then, from the cloister and towards the tavern bend
thy steps.
Cast away the cloak of the Dervish, and don thou the
libertine's robe.'
I obeyed: and if thou desire with me the same hue and colour
to acquire,
Imitate me, and both this and the next world sell for a drop
of pure wine."
One of the most celebrated exponents of Sufi doctrine
is Jami, the author of the Laila and Majnun. His name is
venerated throughout Central Asia as one of the champions of
the faith. In his belief, when the Creator pours the effulgence
of His Holy Spirit upon the creature, such a one himself
becomes divine. So closely, indeed, is he identified
with the great Source of all good, that he finds the
power has been conferred upon him of sharing the
regulation and direction of other beings. With the
created beings whom he governs he is connected by a
powerful bond of sympathy, so strong, indeed, that in
a mystical sense they are spoken of as his limbs, as
parts of his body; nor can they suffer and endure
anything that he must not endure and suffer as well,
through a process of psychical sympathy.
One of the many mistaken objections to this
portion of Sufi belief is that it implies that saintship
is almost one and the same thing as deification.
This is not so. At the basis of Sufi philosophy will
be found the fundamental axiom that no mortal can be
as a god. The union of the creature with God is not
an apatheosis of man, but a return of a portion of the
Divine Spirit to its original fount and nucleus.
The result of the union of man and God is annihilation
of the merely human part of man and the withdrawal of
his spiritual part to that place whence it emanated.
On the annihilation of self, man realises that his
own real and imperishable ego is one with the essence
of God. In this union, so great is the influence of
the Eternal Spirit that man's human judgment - that
which we might describe as his logical faculty, his
understanding - is entirely quenched and destroyed by
it; "even as error passeth away on the appearance of
truth," in like manner his ability to discriminate
between the perishable and the imperishable is rendered
negligible. This feeling of oneness with deity
it was which urged the sage Mansur Hallaj to ejaculate
in a fit of ecstasy, "I am Truth"; meaning thereby,
"I am God." But in the eyes of the orthodox this
statement appeared blasphemous, and in making it Mansur
forfeited his life - so little are those who grope
in the purlieus and courts of the outer temple able
to appreciate the wisdom and the speech of those who
dwell in the inner sanctuaries.
The presentation of the idea of the origin of
evil - the question of dualism - has been the cause of
much learned contention among erudite Sufis. Many have
argued that evil cannot exist in face of the fact that
God is wholly good and all things are from Him. One
Sufi poet has said:
"The writer of our destiny is a fair and truthful writer,
And never did He write that which is evil."
Evil is, therefore, a thing entirely human, due
to the frailty of man, to the perversion of the human will
and the circumstances by which humanity is surrounded -
the material environment which man believes to be real,
and which serves to distort his vision. It has no part in
the being of God. It follows that all the so-called spiritual
powers of evil, those principalities of the air and
demons of the abyss, the existence of which
so many
religious philosophies admit, and even expressly urge,
are nothing but figments of the human mind, misled by
the phantasmagoria, the unrealities, by which man is
surrounded.
Underlying the gorgeous imagery and lofty
mysticism of Sufi poetry, then, whether it be that
of Persia or of the Middle East, there dwells a deep
significance
of hidden instruction, which he who
seeks may find - shall find, if he be eager enough,
ardent enough. In vain we search elsewhere for a
system so satisfying to the soul, so full - when all
is understood - of the higher, the more spiritual
reasoning. We will not find it in the teachings of
ancient Athens, in the wonderful philosophy of old
Egypt, or in that child of both, the Neo-Platonism
of Alexandria.. To. these sources the expression of
Sufism undoubtedly owes much, as we have seen. But
it has refined them, has excogitated for itself a
manner
of thought beside which they seem almost
elementary, and a symbolism and mystic teaching of
much greater scope and loftiness. As I have indicated,
there can be little doubt that it powerfully affected
European mysticism, especially through Paracelsus
and Boehme. It is, indeed, the true allegory of the
inner life - its erotic imagery, its glorification
of the grape, are but veils which seek to hide the
great truths of existence, as the language of alchemy
sought to preserve its discoveries from the vulgar.
Sufi poetry speaks of a love which is not carnal,
and of an inebriation produced by no material vine.
These are the ecstasies and transports of divine
affection. If it be mysterious, shall the bread of
life be given to fools, shall pearls be cast before
swine? No! Let the wise seek till they find. That is
the last word of all mysticism, Oriental and
Occidental - meditation upon it is the one true way
to exaltation.
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