The Book of Muinuddin Chishti
Page 9
To describe the personal, inner journey of individual mystics is an almost impossible task. The mystic seeks direct experience of the divine and considers this insight to be wisdom. In the opinion of a Sufi it is possible that a true perception of the world may transcend logic and intellectual comprehension. It can escape traditional interpretations and even create misunderstandings in the collective consciousness of the world. The mystic therefore continues to frustrate rationalists, especially since he is unable to share his sacred but exclusivist experience with other individuals.
In Mysticism and Logic, Bertrand Russell calls intuition—considered by a mystic as a source of super-sensory knowledge—a mere modification of instinct and therefore not a source of new knowledge. In their enthusiasm for universal love, he explains, mystics deny the difference between good and evil and remain incapable of decisive action despite the good feeling that they have towards all human beings.
J.N. Findlay, the twentieth-century philosopher who believes in ‘rational mysticism’, writes in Ascent to the Absolute that far from being abnormal or irrelevant the discovery of a mystical unity at the heart of things is the true knowledge that gives meaning to our daily work. Some sociologists explain mystical phenomena as the product of special social conditions perhaps on the assumption that mysticism would disappear if conditions in society ‘improved’.
In A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a manuscript from 1843, Karl Marx wrote, ‘Religion is the cry of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses.’
Other social scientists say that mystical experience is spontaneous, occurs all the time, everywhere and under diverse social circumstances. But it may be better recorded and given more attention sometimes and less at other times. Both sociologists and theologians recognize the universality of mystical experience, periods of spiritual dryness and ‘dark nights of the soul’ that are sometimes long and sometimes short.
However, Geoffrey Parrinder says in Mysticism in the World’s Religions that since God is eternal and unchanging he speaks again in his own good time. Parrinder is not impressed by Max Weber’s conclusion that the failure of India to win the race for modernization was due to its irrational and ecstatic religion and the country is unable to accept the rationalization of life and the benefits of ‘the spirit of capitalism’. Weber wrote about India without ever visiting it and Parrinder finds it astonishing that those who blame an ethereal philosophy or a mystical religion for modern economic difficulties that have other causes do not consider the achievements of the past developed under similar religious influences.
At the turn of the last century, William James, American psychologist and philosopher, concluded that like our rational state the mystical state too is both true and deceptive and involves pleasure and pain. Abraham Maslow, a twentieth-century proponent of the theory of self-actualization, secularizes mystical experience. He says that an ego transcending ‘peak experience’ is able to unify and provide a sense of purpose and integration to any individual whether he is religious or not.
The relationship of mysticism to religion is rooted in the belief that the extreme exultation and ecstasy experienced by mystics can only be the work of a higher force. The motivation of this force must be love as nothing but love is capable of creating the feelings of powerful satisfaction, joy and bliss that have the capacity to change an individual’s life forever. This is irrespective of the fact that most of the time it is not easy to express the same feelings in words.
Professor Robert Ornstein, author of The Right Mind, deals with split brain studies. He says that all individuals have access to knowledge beyond the intellect but many cultures ignore this knowledge as they do many forms of information that are not blatantly obvious. All individuals, it seems, have tools to enter the depths of rationality and intuition, the two facets of consciousness. The most creative life is one that is able to combine the two polar opposite forces for a more wholesome engagement with the world. Others trying to grasp esoteric ideas and sensations feel that till non-duality is better understood the range of mystical experiences will remain a mystery. Till then individuals will, in their own different ways, continue to try and conquer the duality between the self and the other and to transcend the ego in order to become one with that which is universal and absolute.
The vocation, experiences and attitudes of mystics are multiple and the word Sufi coined by European Orientalists only in the nineteenth century is just partly able to explain the difference between the temperaments of a gentle human being like Muinuddin and the aggressive Hafiz of Shiraz, another Sufi born a decade or so before Muinuddin’s death in 1236.
In the verse ‘Tired of Speaking Sweetly’, Hafiz feels love wants to shake us out of our stupor and end all teatime talk of divinity. The poet imagines the lover being dragged around the room by the hair by the beloved, who also snatches away from him all the toys of the world that bring no joy. This is the description of a state of extreme love experienced by the poet who has had enough of speaking sweetly and wants to shred all notions of truth that make the lover fight with himself and the beloved and shed tears even on a good day. The greatest favour that a beloved can bestow upon the lover, he writes, is to maul him in the tiny, locked room within the self and to kick and hang the lover upside down, to shake out the nonsense within even as the world looks upon this as a playful drunken state and nonchalantly turns its back upon the act as nothing but madness.
J. Spencer Trimingham, Islamic scholar and author of The Sufi Orders in Islam, defines the Sufi as someone who believes it is possible to have direct experience of God and is prepared to go out of his way to achieve a state which will enable him to do this. He feels this is the only possible definition of a variety of people attracted today to different schools of Sufi thought.
Islamic fundamentalists disown Sufism as a perversion of Islam while many secular modernists look upon it as medieval superstition. Sufis claim that they are Muslims who believe in the existence of immaterial, invisible reality that they say is possible to experience with the senses.
The way of the tariqa, or path, is in itself a search for the whole truth, the seen and the unseen. The Sufi feels it is worth his while to spend an entire lifetime looking for the unseen. Uncomfortable with the growing influence of jurisprudence that has reduced Islam to outward-looking laws, the Sufi tries to create around him an ambience or sama similar to the one that led the Prophet Muhammad to discover his inner self and prepared him to receive the revelation from God.
Muinuddin, like all Muslims, looked upon Muhammad’s life as the primary source of mystical inspiration. The Quran was of utmost importance to Muinuddin. But he searched the holy text for batin, or the hidden meaning, in contrast to jurists who looked only at laws. Following in the same tradition, Sufis today may defy strict laws but they are never in opposition to the Quran. In fact, the vocabulary of the Sufi is derived from the Quran in which all wisdom is revealed if the text is interpreted with insight. Within the lines of the shahadad or acceptance that there is no God but God is cradled the concept of tawhid, the oneness of God. The creator and his creatures are seen here as two aspects of the same reality, reflecting one another and depending upon each other as wahdat-al-wajud, or the unity of existence.
The opening sura or verse of the Quran is most important.
The Fatiha contains, in a condensed form, all the fundamental principles laid down in the Holy Book from the principle of God’s oneness and uniqueness, of his being the originator and fosterer of the universe, the fountain of all life-giving grace, the one to whom man is ultimately responsible, the only power that can really guide and help, the call to righteous action in the life of this world … the principle of life after death and of the organic consequences of man’s action and behaviour … the principle of guidance through God’s message-bearers … and, flowing from it, the principle of continuity of all true religions … and, finally, to the need for
voluntary self-surrender to the will of the Supreme Being and, thus, for worshipping Him alone.1
In contemporary times Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim, advocates a reinterpretation of Islamic texts and inspires Muslims in Europe to reimagine their religion in a way that will help them to engage better with European society.
From the beginning and at the very heart of Islam, the relation between spirituality and reason has been a ‘relation of inspiration’. The heart must be always trying to remind reason of its fragility, of ‘the need of Him’, of the need not to forget Him. The strength of this influence depends on people’s concern that this flame live in them. There is no doubt that the environment exercises a crucial role and that it is difficult in a society focused on consumerism, performance, and indvidualism, so this really is the heart of the work on the self, the jihad al-nafs (struggle to conquer the ego), to which all Muslims are called.2
In No God but God Reza Aslan compiles a wonderful list of the views of mysticism according to different Sufis of different times.
‘It is numberless waves, lapping and momentarily reflecting the sun, all from the same sea,’ declares Halki.
‘It is the practice of adopting every higher quality and leaving every lower quality,’ says Junaid. He defines unity as ‘to separate the eternal essence from the originated essence’, the soul being the eternal, divine idea that is dipped for a moment into the temporal world but it returns to the divine unity enriched by its experiences.
‘The Sufi is not Christian or Jew or Muslim. He is not of any religion or cultural system … not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all … not an entity of the world or the next,’ Jalaluddin Rumi writes in the thirteenth century.
Sufism is the secret subtle reality concealed at the very depths of the Muslim faith, and only by mining those depths can one gain any understanding of this enigmatic sect. The Sufi is the actual temple of the fire worshippers, the priest of the Magian, the inner reality of the cross-legged Brahman meditating, the brush and the colour of the artist,’ Ishan Kaiser says.3
Sufism is a religious movement, characterized by a medley of divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an empty cauldron into which have been poured the principles of Christian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islamic thought, a touch of Islamic Shiaism, with Manichaeism and Central Asian Shamanism thrown in for good measure. Such a hodgepodge of influences may frustrate scholarly analysis, but it also indicates how Sufism may have formed in its earliest stages when the first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individuals who travelled throughout the world seeking intimate knowledge of God.
Drunk without wine, sated without food, a king beneath a humble cloak, a treasure within a ruin, Sufism is to Islam what the heart is to the human being, its vital centre, the seat of its essence. It is in Majnun’s words the pearl hidden in the shell, the face beneath the veil. Sufism is the secret, subtle reality concealed at the very depths of the Muslim faith, and only by mining those depths can one gain any understanding of this enigmatic sect.4
Muhammad’s life is, in fact, the perfect example of ascetic practice so necessary for mystical communion and yet orthodox Muslims dismiss mysticism as un-Islamic.
When Professor Carl W. Ernst, Islamic studies specialist, visited Pakistan to write a book on Sufism in South Asia, he was warned that Sufism has nothing to do with Islam. The idea that Sufism has nothing to do with Islam did not exist before the nineteenth century when European Orientalists introduced the Orient to the West for political gain. This period coincided with the rise of the Wahhabi movement and the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia.
Edward Said has this to say about the attitude of the Orientalists:
To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realism as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant … many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use.5
The aim of the Islamic orthodox community is fundamentally to reform the faith according to their perception of it and through a selective propagation of the holy text, and Sufism clashes with this desire of the fundamentalists. What Islamic fundamentalists share in common with modernists influenced by the scholarly works of Orientalists is hostility towards the very personal path of the Sufi. Both see Sufism as having survived medieval superstition, idolatry and corruption, as something that is derived from saint-worshipping Christians and from the doctrines of pantheistic Greek philosophers. The worship of tombs and pagan music, similar to Hindu modes of worship, is distasteful to them.
The seriousness with which fundamentalists take Sufism is indicated by the Wahabi movement in Arabia in the 1800s, considered the progenitor of today’s fundamentalist movements; when their tribal alliance first came to power, one of their first actions was to destroy all the stately tombs of Sufi saints and Shia imams in Arabia and Iraq. Adept at the manipulation of mass media, fundamentalists have tried to monopolize the rhetoric of religious legitimacy … Their authoritarian tendencies, couched in the language of submission to God, permit no competing visions of religious truth.6
Islamic mysticism is only one way for some people to reach out to the unseen. There are other ways that other people in different parts of the world follow in similar attempts to conquer ego and to find out more about the self despite bans and warnings that discourage them not to do so. Muhammad Iqbal puts it best when he says:
The martyrs of Love are not Muslim nor Pagan
The manners of Love are not Arab nor Turk!
Some passion far other than Love was the power
That taught Ghazni’s high ruler to dote on his slave.
When the spirit of Love has no place on the throne,
All wisdom and learning vain tricks and pretence!
Paying court to no king, by no king held in awe,
Love is freedom and honour, whose scorn of the world
Holds more than the magic that made Alexander
His fabulous mirror, its magic makes men.7
The Early Life of Muinuddin Chishti
1 Colin Turner, The Muslim World, p. 28.
2 al-Ghazali, Revival of Religious Sciences, p. 237; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, p. 199.
3 Ainslee T. Embree (ed.) Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, p. 451.
4 Muhammad Iqbal, The Secrets of the Self, p. 96.
Muinuddin Arrives in India
1 Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, p. 71.
2 John D. Yohannan, A Treasury of Asian Literature, p. 251.
3 Ibid., p. 253.
4 Ibid., p. 256.
5 Muneera Haeri, The Chishtis, p. 26.
6 A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 430.
7 Ibid., p.431.
8 In a sort of cultural apartheid, orthodox Hindus condemned the intermixing of communities, but maintained that for each caste and each religion its own faith and practices were legitimate. Abraham Eraly, Last Spring, p. 838.
Bibi
1 Both Shaivism and Vaishnavism originated from the hymns of Tamil sages of the seventh century and remained localized movements for about 500 years. Then around the time of the Muslim invasion of Hindustan began the great surge of Vaishnavism, receiving its stimulus from the teachings of Ramanuja, a twelfth-century Tamil sage Thereafter the movement spread rapidly through the subcontinent, and in a short time became the dominant Hindu cult. As the Vaishnava movement spread in North India, it became supercharged with emotion, as a release for Hindus from the frustrations of living under Muslim rule. Abraham Eraly, Last Spring, p. 837.
2 Ainslie T. Embree (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, p. 21.
Gharib Nawaz, a Friend of the Poor
1 Ainslie T. Embree (ed.), So
urces of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, p. 348.
2 A.K. Ramanujan (trans.), Speaking of Siva, p. 134.
3 Devotional poetry in the language of the people began in South India in the Tamil speaking area with saints living under the Pallava rulers of Kanchi between fourth to ninth centuries. The most important among these saints lived in the period from the seventh to the ninth century; others followed and kept the tradition in full vogue throughout the subsequent centuries. From Tamil country devotional singing spread to the Kannada-speaking area, whence the spark was ignited in Maharashtra, then Hindi speaking areas took it up, and North India was aflame with this fervent faith. Ainslie T. Embree (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, p. 344.
4 Peter Lamborn Wilson, The Drunken Universe, p. 118.
5 Muneera Haeri, The Chishtis, p. 22.
6 Peter Lamborn Wilson, The Drunken Universe, p. 127.
7 A.K. Ramanujan (trans.), Speaking of Siva, p. 168.
8 W.D. Begg, The Holy Biography of Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, p. 140.
9 Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, p. 71.
10 W.D. Begg, The Holy Biography of Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, p. 92.
11 Ibid., p. 91.
12 Anna Suvorova, Muslim Saints of South Asia, p. 69.
Sufi Thought
1 Ainslie T. Embree (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, p. 352.
2 Reza Aslan, No God but God, p. 210.
3 Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Quran, p. 603.
4 Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, p. 235.
Muinuddin’s Legacy
1 Anna Suvorova, Muslim Saints of South Asia, p. 68.