لطفا منتظر باشید ...
is not the desire of Knowledge which dominates the ideal of the Sufis of this
school, but the characteristic features of their life are piety, unworldliness,
and an intense longing for God due to the consciousness of sin. Their object is
not to philosophise, but principally to work out a certain ideal of life. From
our standpoint, therefore, they are not of much importance.
B.
Reality as Beauty
In the beginning of the 9th Century Ma'ruf Karkhi defined Sufiism as " Apprehension of Divine realities(1)" - a definition which marks the movement
from Faith to Knowledge. But the method of apprehending the ultimate reality was
formally stated by Al-Qushairi about the end of the 10th Century. The teachers
of this school adopted the Neo-Platonic idea of creation by intermediary
agencies; and though this idea lingered in the minds of Sufi writers for a long
time, yet their Pantheism led them to abandon the Emanation theory altogether.
Like Avicenna they looked upon the Ultimate Reality as "Eternal Beauty ", whose
very nature consists in seeing its own "face" reflected in the Universe-mirror.
The Universe, therefore, became to them a reflected image of the "Eternal
Beauty", and not an emanation as the Neo-Platonists had taught. The cause of
creation , says Mir Sayyid Sharif, is the manifestation of Beauty,
1 Mr. Nicholson has collected
the various definitions of Sufiism. See J. R. A. S. April, 1906.
