Chapter II — Illumination and Ecstasy
by Reynold A Nicholson
According to a mystical interpretation of the famous passage in the Koran where the light of Allah is compared to a candle burning in a lantern of transparent glass which is placed in a niche in the wall, the niche is the true believer's heart; therefore his speech is light and his works are light and he moves in light. "He who discourses of eternity", said Bayazid, "must have within him the lamp of eternity".
When Nuri was questioned concerning the origin of mystical firasat, he answered by quoting the Koranic verse in which God says that He breathed His spirit into Adam; but the more orthodox Sufis, who strenuously combat the doctrine that the human spirit is uncreated and eternal, affirm that firasat is the result of knowledge and insight, metaphorically called 'light' or 'inspiration', which God creates and bestows upon His favourites.
The Tradition, "Beware of the discernment of the true believer, for he sees by the light of Allah", is exemplified in such anecdotes as these:
I need not anticipate here the question which will be discussed in the following chapter — how far the claims of an infallible conscience are reconcilable with external religion and morality. The Prophet, too, prayed that God would put a light into his ear and into his eye; and after mentioning the different members of his body, he concluded, "and make the whole of me one light". [The reader should be reminded that most, if not all, mystical Traditions ascribed to Mohammed were forged and fathered upon him by the Sufis, who represent themselves as the true interpreters of his esoteric teaching. — RAN]
From illumination of gradually increasing splendour, the mystic rises to contemplation of the divine attributes and ultimately, when his consciousness is wholly melted away, he becomes transubstantiated (tajawhara) in the radiance of the divine essence. This is the 'station' of well-doing (ihsan) — for "God is with the well-doers" (Kor. 29:69), and we have Prophetic authority for the statement that "well-doing consists in worshipping God as if you were seeing Him".
Here are two passages from the oldest Persian treatise on Sufism, the Kashf al-Mahjub of Hujwiri:
There is no punishment in Hell more painful and hard to bear than that of being veiled. If God were revealed in Hell to the people of Hell, sinful believers would never think of Paradise, since the sight of God would so fill them with joy that they would not feel bodily pain.
And in Paradise there is no pleasure more perfect than unveiledness. If the people there enjoyed all the pleasures of that place and other pleasures a hundredfold, but were veiled from God, their hearts would be utterly broken. Therefore it is the way of God to let the hearts of those who love Him have vision of Him always, in order that the delight thereof may enable them to endure every tribulation; and they say in their visions, "We deem all torments more desirable than to be veiled from Thee. When Thy beauty is revealed to our hearts, we take no thought of affliction".
Muhammad ibn Wasi said: "I never saw anything without seeing God therein", i.e. through perfect faith.
Shibli said: "I never saw anything except God", i.e. in the rapture of love and the fervour of contemplation.
One mystic sees the act with his bodily eye and, as he looks, beholds the Agent with his spiritual eye; another is rapt by love of the Agent from all things else, so that he sees only the Agent. The one method is demonstrative, the other is ecstatic. In the former case, a manifest proof is derived from the evidences of God; in the latter case, the seer is enraptured and transported by desire: evidences are a veil to him, because he who knows a thing does not care for aught besides, and he who loves a thing does not regard aught besides, but renounces contention with God and interference with Him in his decrees and acts.
When the lover turns his eye away from created things, he will inevitably see the Creator with his heart. God has said, "Tell the believers to close their eyes" (Kor. 24:80), i.e. to close their bodily eyes to lusts and their spiritual eyes to created things. He who is most sincere in self-mortification is most firmly grounded in contemplation.
Sahl ibn 'Abdallah of Tustar said: "If any one shuts his eye to God for a single moment, he will never be rightly guided all his life long", because to regard other than God is to be handed over to other than God, and one who is left at the mercy of other than God is lost. Therefore the life of contemplatives is the time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular vision they do not reckon life, for that to them is really death. Thus, when Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied. "Four years". They said to him, "How can that be?" He answered, "I have been veiled from God for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one is veiled does not belong to one's life".
"A certain Sufi said, 'I made the pilgrimage and saw the Ka'ba, but not the Lord of the Ka'ba'. This is contemplation of the one who is veiled. Then he said, 'I made the pilgrimage again, and I saw both the Ka'ba and the Lord of the Ka'ba'. This is contemplation of the Self-subsistence through which everything subsists, i.e. he saw the Ka'ba subsisting through the Lord of the Ka'ba. Then he said, 'I made the pilgrimage a third time, and I saw the Lord of the Ka'ba, but not the Ka'ba'. This is the 'station' of waqfat (passing-away in the essence). In the present case the author is referring to contemplation of the Self-subsistence."
The whole of Sufism rests on the belief that when the individual self is lost, the Universal Self is found or, in religious language, that ecstasy affords the only means by which the soul can directly communicate and become united with God. Asceticism, purification, love, gnosis, saintship — all the leading ideas of Sufism — are developed from this cardinal principle.
Among the metaphorical terms commonly employed by the Sufis as, more or less, equivalent to 'ecstasy' are fana (passing-away), wajd (feeling), sama (hearing), dhawq (taste), shirb (drinking), ghaybat (absence from self), jadhbat (attraction), sukr (intoxication), and hal (emotion).
It would be tedious and not, I think, specially instructive to examine in detail the definitions of those terms and of many others akin to them which occur in Sufi text-books. We are not brought appreciably nearer to understanding the nature of ecstasy when it is described as "a divine mystery which God communicates to true believers who behold Him with the eye of certainty", or as "a flame which moves in the ground of the soul and is produced by love-desire". The Mohammedan theory of ecstasy, however, can hardly be discussed without reference to two of the above-mentioned technical expressions, namely, fana and sama.
The first stage closely resembles the Buddhistic Nirvana. It is a 'passing-away' of evil qualities and states of mind, which involves the simultaneous 'continuance' of good qualities and states of mind. This is necessarily an ecstatic process inasmuch as all the attributes of 'self' are evil in relation to God. No one can make himself perfectly moral, i.e. perfectly 'selfless'. This must be done for him, through 'a flash of the divine beauty' in his heart.
While the first stage refers to the moral 'self', the second refers to the percipient and intellectual 'self'. Using the classification generally adopted by Christian mystics, we may regard the former as the consummation of the Purgative Life, and the latter as the goal of the Illuminative Life. The third and last stage constitutes the highest level of the Contemplative Life.
Often, though not invariably, fana is accompanied by loss of sensation. Sari al-Saqati, a famous Sufi of the third (sic) century, expressed the opinion that if a man in this state were struck on the face with a sword, he would not feel the blow. Abu 'l-Khayr al-Aqta had a gangrene in his foot. The physician declared that his foot must be amputated, but he would not allow this to be done. His disciples said, "Cut it off while he is praying, for he is then unconscious". The physicians acted on their advice, and when Abu 'l-Khayr finished his prayers he found that the amputation had taken place.
It is difficult to see how any one far advanced in fana could be capable of keeping the religious law — a point on which the orthodox mystics lay great emphasis. Here the doctrine of saintship comes in. God takes care to preserve His elect from disobedience to His commands. We are told that Bayazid, Shibli, and other saints were continually in a state of rapture until the hour of prayer arrived; then they returned to consciousness, and after performing their prayers became enraptured again.
In theory, the ecstatic trance is involuntary, although certain conditions are recognised as being specially favourable to its occurrence. "It comes to a man through vision of the majesty of God and through revelation of the divine omnipotence to his heart". Such, for instance, was the case of Abu Hamza who, while walking in the streets of Baghdad and meditating on the nearness of God, suddenly fell into an ecstasy and went on his way, neither seeing nor hearing, until he recovered his senses and found himself in the desert. Trances of this kind sometimes lasted many weeks. It is recorded of Sahl ibn 'Abdallah that he used to remain in ecstasy twenty-five days at a time, eating no food; yet he would answer questions put to him by the doctors of theology, and even in winter his shirt would be damp with sweat.
That Moslems are extraordinarily susceptible to the sweet influences of sound will not be doubted by any one who remembers how, in the 'Arabian Nights', heroes and heroines alike swoon upon the slightest provocation afforded by a singing-girl touching her lute and trilling a few lines of passionate verse.
The fiction is true to life. When Sufi writers discuss the analogous phenomena of ecstasy, they commonly do so in a chapter entitled 'Concerning the Sama'. Under this heading Hujwiri, in the final chapter of his 'Kashf al-Mahjub', gives us an excellent summary of his own and other Mohammedan theories, together with numerous anecdotes of persons who were thrown into ecstasy on hearing a verse of the Koran, or a heavenly voice (hatif), or poetry, or music. Many are said to have died from the emotion thus aroused.
I may add by way of explanation that, according to a well-known mystical belief, God has inspired every created thing to praise him in its own language, so that all the sounds in the Universe form, as it were, one vast choral hymn by which He glorifies Himself. Consequently those whose hearts He has opened and endowed with spiritual perception hear His voice everywhere, and ecstasy overcomes them as they listen to the rhythmic chant of the muezzin, or the street cry of the saqqa shouldering his water-skin, or, perchance, to the noise of wind or the bleating of a sheep or the piping of a bird.
Pythagoras and Plato are responsible for another theory, to which the Sufis frequently allude, that music awakens in the soul a memory of celestial harmonies heard in a state of pre-existence, before the soul was separated from God. Thus Jalaluddin Rumi:
[E H Whinfield, abridged translation of the 'Masnavi', p. 182. — RAN]
The formal practice of sama quickly spread amongst the Sufis and produced an acute cleavage of opinion, some holding it to be lawful and praiseworthy, whilst others condemned it as an abominable innovation and incitement to vice. Hujwiri adopts the middle view expressed in a saying of Dhu 'l-Nun the Egyptian:
When the dance was finished, Majduddin said, "I did not know whether it was a negro or a sparrow on my neck". On getting off the Shaykh's shoulders, the negro bit his cheek so severely that the scar remained visible ever after. Majduddin often used to say that on the Day of Judgment he would not boast of anything except that he bore the mark of the negro's teeth on his face.
let us acknowledge that the transports of spiritual intoxication are not always sublime, and that human nature has a trick of avenging itself on those who would cast it off.