Some say Majnun’s body lay on top of Layla’s grave for months; others say years. No one dared approach, for the grave was guarded night and day by the beasts of the desert. Even the vultures that swooped above the tomb would not touch Majnun. Eventually, all that remained of him was dust and bones. Only then did the animals abandon their master to lope back into the wilderness. After the animals had gone and the dust of Majnun was swept away by the wind, a new headstone was fashioned for Layla’s tomb. It read:
Two lovers lie in this one tomb
United forever in death’s dark womb.
Faithful in separation; true in love:
May one tent house them in heaven above.
Sufism—the term given to Islam’s immensely complex and infinitely diverse mystical tradition—is, as Reynold Nicholson long ago observed, fundamentally indefinable. Even the word Sufi provides little help in classifying this movement. The term tasawwuf, meaning “the state of being a Sufi,” is without significance, referring as it probably does to the coarse wool garments, or suf, which the first Sufis wore as an emblem of their poverty and detachment from the world. Indeed, as a descriptive term, the word Sufi is practically interchangeable with the words darvish or faqir, meaning “mendicant” or “poor.” Some have argued that Sufi is derived from the Arabic word safwe, meaning “elected,” or suffa, meaning “purity,” though both of these must be rejected on etymological grounds. Others have suggested that Sufi is a corruption of the Greek word sophia: “wisdom.” This is also unlikely, though there is a tempting symbolic connection between the two words. For if sophia is to be understood in its Aristotelian sense as “knowledge of ultimate things,” then it is very much related to the term Sufi, just not linguistically.
As a religious movement, Sufism is characterized by a medley of divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an empty caldron 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 Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi‘ism, 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.
The first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individuals who traveled throughout the Muslim Empire seeking intimate knowledge of God. As these “wandering darvishes” grew in number, temporary boarding houses were constructed in high traffic areas like Baghdad and Khurasan where the mendicants could gather together and share what they had learned during their spiritual journeys. By the eleventh century—around the same time that the Abassids were actively persecuting the Shi‘ah for their heterodox behavior—these boarding houses had become permanent structures resembling cloisters, a few of which gradually evolved into sophisticated schools, or Orders, of mysticism.
The Sufi Orders centered on a spiritual master who had withdrawn permanently from the Ummah to pursue the path of self-purification and inner enlightenment. Called Shaykhs in Arabic and Pirs in Persian (both of which mean “old man”), these Sufi masters were themselves the disciples of earlier, legendary masters whose unsystematic teachings they had collected so as to pass them on to a new generation of disciples. As each disciple reached a level of spiritual maturity, he would then be charged with transmitting his master’s words to his own pupils, and so on. It is therefore easy to see why Sufism appears like an eclectic recipe whose ingredients have been collected from a variety of sources over a long period of time. Of course, as the Sufi master Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri teaches, “there is a big difference between merely collecting recipes and actually cooking and eating.”
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Sufism, like Shi‘ism, was a reactionary movement against both the Imperial Islam of the Muslim Dynasties and the rigid formalism of Islam’s “orthodox” learned class, the Ulama. Both sects vigorously employed ta’wil to uncover the hidden meaning of the Quran, both concentrated their spiritual activities on devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, and both developed cults of personality around saintly characters—whether Imams or Pirs.
~~No god but God -by- Reza Aslan
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