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These ideas--Light, Knowledge, and Love--form, as it were, the keynotes of the new Sufism, and in the following chapters I shall endeavour to show how they were developed.
Ultimately they rest upon a pantheistic faith which deposed the One transcendent God of Islam and worshipped in His stead One Real Being who dwells and works everywhere, and whose throne is not less, but more, in the human heart than in the heaven of heavens.
Before going further, it will be convenient to answer a question which the reader may have asked himself--Whence did the Moslems of the ninth century derive this doctrine?Modern research has proved that the origin of Sufism cannot be traced back to a single definite cause, and has thereby discredited the sweeping generalisations which represent it, for instance, as a reaction of the Aryan mind against a conquering Semitic religion, and as the product, essentially, of Indian or Persian thought.
Statements of this kind, even when they are partially true, ignore the principle that in order to establish an historical connexion between A and B, it is not enough to bring{p.
9}forward evidence of their likeness to one another, without showing at the same time (1) that the actual relation of B to A was such as to render the assumed filiation possible, and (2) that the possible hypothesis fits in with all the ascertained and relevant facts.
Now, the theories which I have mentioned do not satisfy these conditions.
If Sufism was nothing but a revolt of the Aryan spirit, how are we to explain the undoubted fact that some of the leading pioneers of Mohammedan mysticism were natives of Syria and Egypt, and Arabs by race? Similarly, the advocates of a Buddhistic or Vedantic origin forget that the main current of Indian influence upon Islamic civilisation belongs to a later epoch, whereas Moslem theology, philosophy, and science put forth their first luxuriant shoots on a soil that was saturated with Hellenistic culture.
The truth is that Sufism is a complex thing, and therefore no simple answer can be given to the question how it originated.
We shall have gone far, however, towards answering that question when we have distinguished the various movements and forces which moulded Sufism, and determined what direction it should take in the early stages of its growth.
Let us first consider the most important external, i.
e.
non-Islamic, influences.
{p.
10}I.
CHRISTIANITY
It is obvious that the ascetic and quietistic tendencies to which I have referred were in harmony with Christian theory and drew nourishment therefrom.
Many Gospel texts and apocryphal sayings of Jesus are cited in the oldest Sufi biographies, and the Christian anchorite (rahib) often appears in the rle of a teacher giving instruction and advice to wandering Moslem ascetics.
We have seen that the woollen dress, from which the name 'Sufi' is derived, is of Christian origin: vows of silence, litanies (dhikr), and other ascetic practices may be traced to the same source.
As regards the doctrine of divine love, the following extracts speak for themselves:"Jesus passed by three men.
Their bodies were lean and their faces pale.
He asked them, saying, 'What hath brought you to this plight?' They answered, 'Fear of the Fire.
' Jesus said, 'Ye fear a thing created, and it behoves God that He should save those who fear.
' Then he left them and passed by three others, whose faces were paler and their bodies leaner, and asked them, saying, 'What hath brought you to this plight?' They answered, 'Longing for Paradise.
' He said, 'Ye
{p.
11}desire a thing created, and it behoves God that He should give you that which ye hope for.
' Then he went on and passed by three others of exceeding paleness and leanness, so that their faces were as mirrors of light, and he said, 'What hath brought you to this?' They answered, 'Our love of God.
' Jesus said, 'Ye are the nearest to Him, ye are the nearest to Him.
'"
The Syrian mystic, Ahmad ibn al-Hawari, once asked a Christian hermit:"'What is the strongest command that ye find in your Scriptures?' The hermit replied: 'We find none stronger than this: "Love thy Creator with all thy power and might.
"'"
Another hermit was asked by some Moslem ascetics:"'When is a man most persevering in devotion?' 'When love takes possession of his heart,' was the reply; 'for then he hath no joy or pleasure but in continual devotion.
'"
The influence of Christianity through its hermits, monks, and heretical sects (e.
g.
the Messalians or Euchitæ) was twofold: ascetic and mystical.
Oriental Christian mysticism, however, contained a Pagan element: it had long ago absorbed the ideas and adopted the language of Plotinus and the Neo-platonic school.
{p.
12}II.
NEOPLATONISM
Aristotle, not Plato, is the dominant figure in Moslem philosophy, and few Mohammedans are familiar with the name of Plotinus, who was more commonly called 'the Greek Master' (al-Sheykh al-Yaunani).
But since the Arabs gained their first knowledge of Aristotle from his Neoplatonist commentators, the system with which they became imbued was that of Porphyry and Proclus.
Thus the so-called Theology of Aristotle, of which an Arabic version appeared in the ninth century, is actually a manual of Neoplatonism.
Another work of this school deserves particular notice: I mean the writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert of St.
Paul.
The pseudo-Dionysius--he may have been a Syrian monk--names as his teacher a certain Hierotheus, whom Frothingham has identified with Stephen Bar Sudaili, a prominent Syrian gnostic and a contemporary of Jacob of Saruj (451-521 A.
D.
).
Dionysius quotes some fragments of erotic hymns by this Stephen, and a complete work, the Book of Hierotheus on the Hidden Mysteries of the Divinity, has come down to us in a unique manuscript which is now in the British Museum.
The Dionysian writings, turned into Latin by John Scotus Erigena,{p.
13}founded medieval Christian mysticism in Western Europe.
Their influence in the East was hardly less vital.
They were translated from Greek into Syriac almost immediately on their appearance, and their doctrine was vigorously propagated by commentaries in the same tongue.
"About 850 A.
D.
Dionysius was known from the Tigris to the Atlantic.
"Besides literary tradition there were other channels by which the doctrines of emanation, illumination, gnosis, and ecstasy were transmitted, but enough has been said to convince the reader that Greek mystical ideas were in the air and easily accessible to the Moslem inhabitants of Western Asia and Egypt, where the Sufi theosophy first took shape.
One of those who bore the chief part in its development, Dhu l-Nun the Egyptian, is described as a philosopher and alchemist--in other words, a student of Hellenistic science.
When it is added that much of his speculation agrees with what we find, for example, in the writings of Dionysius, we are drawn irresistibly to the conclusion (which, as I have pointed out, is highly probable on general grounds) that Neoplatonism poured into Islam a large tincture of the same mystical element in which Christianity was already steeped.
{p.
14}III.
GNOSTICISM {Cf.
Goldziher, "Neuplatonische und gnostische Elemente im Hadit," in Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, xxii.
317 ff.
}
Though little direct evidence is available, the conspicuous place occupied by the theory of gnosis in early Sufi speculation suggests contact with Christian Gnosticism, and it is worth noting that the parents of Maruf al-Karkhi, whose definition of Sufism as 'the apprehension of divine realities' was quoted on the first page of this Introduction, are said to have been Sabians, i.
e.
Mandæans, dwelling in the Babylonian fenland between Basra and Wasit.
Other Moslem saints had learned 'the mystery of the Great Name.
' It was communicated to Ibrahim ibn Adham by a man whom he met while travelling in the desert, and as soon as he pronounced it he saw the prophet Khadir (Elias).
The ancient Sufis borrowed from the Manichæans the term siddiq, which they apply to their own spiritual adepts, and a later school, returning to the dualism of Mani, held the view that the diversity of phenomena arises from the admixture of light and darkness.
"The ideal of human action is freedom from the taint of darkness; and the freedom of light from darkness
{p.
15}means the self-consciousness of light as light.
" {Shaikh Muhammad Iqbal, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1908), p.
150.
}
The following version of the doctrine of the seventy thousand veils as explained by a modern Rifai dervish shows clear traces of Gnosticism and is so interesting that I cannot refrain from quoting it here:"Seventy Thousand Veils separate Allah, the One Reality, from the world of matter and of sense.
And every soul passes before his birth through these seventy thousand.
The inner half of these are veils of light: the outer half, veils of darkness.
For every one of the veils of light passed through, in this journey towards birth, the soul puts off a divine quality: and for every one of the dark veils, it puts on an earthly quality.
Thus the child is born weeping, for the soul knows its separation from Allah, the One Reality.
And when the child cries in its sleep, it is because the soul remembers something of what it has lost.
Otherwise, the passage through the veils has brought with it forgetfulness (nisyan): and for this reason man is called insan.
He is now, as it were, in prison in his body, separated by these thick curtains from Allah.
{p.
16}* * *"But the whole purpose of Sufism, the Way of the dervish, is to give him an escape from this prison, an apocalypse of the Seventy Thousand Veils, a recovery of the original unity with The One, while still in this body.
The body is not to be put off; it is to be refined and made spiritual--a help and not a hindrance to the spirit.
It is like a metal that has to be refined by fire and transmuted.
And the sheikh tells the aspirant that he has the secret of this transmutation.
'We shall throw you into the fire of Spiritual Passion,' he says, 'and you will emerge refined.
'" {"The Way" of a Mohammedan Mystic, by W.
H.
T.
Gairdner (Leipzig, 1912), pp.
9 f.
}
IV.
BUDDHISM
Before the Mohammedan conquest of India in the eleventh century, the teaching of Buddha exerted considerable influence in Eastern Persia and Transoxania.
We hear of flourishing Buddhist monasteries in Balkh, the metropolis of ancient Bactria, a city famous for the number of Sufis who resided in it.
Professor Goldziher has called attention to the significant circumstance that the Sufi ascetic, Ibrahim ibn Adham, appears in Moslem legend as a prince of Balkh who abandoned his throne and{p.
17}became a wandering dervish--the story of Buddha over again.
The Sufis learned the use of rosaries from Buddhist monks, and, without entering into details, it may be safely asserted that the method of Sufism, so far as it is one of ethical self-culture, ascetic meditation, and intellectual abstraction, owes a good deal to Buddhism.
But the features which the two systems have in common only accentuate the fundamental difference between them.
In spirit they are poles apart.
The Buddhist moralises himself, the Sufi becomes moral only through knowing and loving God.
The Sufi conception of the passing-away (fana) of individual self in Universal Being is certainly, I think, of Indian origin.
Its first great exponent was the Persian mystic, Bayazid of Bistam, who may have received it from his teacher, Abu Ali of Sind (Scinde).
Here are some of his sayings:"Creatures are subject to changing 'states,' but the gnostic has no 'state,' because his vestiges are effaced and his essence annihilated by the essence of another, and his traces are lost in another's traces.
"
"Thirty years the high God was my mirror, now I am my own mirror," i.
e.
according to the explanation given by his biographer, "that which I was I am no more, for 'I' and 'God' is a denial
{p.
18}of the unity of God.
Since I am no more, the high God is His own mirror.
"
"I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, 'O Thou I!'"
This, it will be observed, is not Buddhism, but the pantheism of the Vedanta.
We cannot identify fana with Nirvana unconditionally.
Both terms imply the passing-away of individuality, but while Nirvana is purely negative, fana is accompanied by baqa, everlasting life in God.
The rapture of the Sufi who has lost himself in ecstatic contemplation of the divine beauty is entirely opposed to the passionless intellectual serenity of the Arahat.
I emphasise this contrast because, in my opinion, the influence of Buddhism on Mohammedan thought has been exaggerated.
Much is attributed to Buddhism that is Indian rather than specifically Buddhistic: the fana theory of the Sufis is a case in point.
Ordinary Moslems held the followers of Buddha in abhorrence, regarding them as idolaters, and were not likely to seek personal intercourse with them.
On the other hand, for nearly a thousand years before the Mohammedan conquest, Buddhism had been powerful in Bactria and Eastern Persia generally: it must, therefore, have affected the development of Sufism in these regions.
While fana in its pantheistic form is{p.
19}radically different from Nirvana, the terms coincide so closely in other ways that we cannot regard them as being altogether unconnected.
Fana has an ethical aspect: it involves the extinction of all passions and desires.
The passing-away of evil qualities and of the evil actions which they produce is said to be brought about by the continuance of the corresponding good qualities and actions.
Compare this with the definition of Nirvana given by Professor Rhys Davids:"The extinction of that sinful, grasping condition of mind and heart, which would otherwise, according to the great mystery of Karma, be the cause of renewed individual existence.
That extinction is to be brought about by, and runs parallel with, the growth of the opposite condition of mind and heart; and it is complete when that opposite condition is reached.
"
