IB World Religions 5.5.2. Sufism and Mysticism: Dhikr, Dance and Meditation Notes

5.5.2. Sufism and Mysticism: Dhikr, Dance and Meditation

Tasawwuf and the Sufi path

1. Sufism is the English name for tasawwuf, the inward or mystical dimension of Islam. Sufis present it not as a separate teaching but as the same shari'ah lived with the whole attention of the heart.
2. The name is usually traced to suf, the coarse wool worn by early ascetics. Others derive it from safa (purity), or from ahl al-suffa, the poor companions who lodged on the bench of the Prophet's mosque.
3. Sufis take their charter from the hadith of Gabriel, which distinguishes islam, iman and ihsan (excellence). Ihsan is glossed there as worshipping Allah as though you see Him, knowing that if you do not, He sees you.
4. A common image sets shari'ah as the ship, tariqa (the path) as the sea and haqiqa (reality) as the pearl, so the law is never left behind. Sufis organise into turuq (orders) around a shaykh, called a pir in South Asia, and a disciple who gives bay'ah enters the order's silsila, the chain of teachers traced back to the Prophet.
5. Al-Ghazali, an eleventh-century jurist, is credited in Sunni tradition with making Sufi practice respectable to the scholars. His Ihya Ulum al-Din argues that legal knowledge without inward change leaves worship hollow.

Dhikr and its forms

1. Dhikr (remembrance) is the central Sufi practice, the repeated invocation of Allah's names or of set formulas. The Qur'an tells believers to remember Allah often, and says that hearts find rest in His remembrance.
2. The tradition distinguishes dhikr al-lisan, remembrance on the tongue, from dhikr al-qalb, remembrance settled in the heart. Beginners take the spoken form and are taught to expect the silent one to grow out of it.
3. The words themselves are ordinary Muslim ones: la ilaha illa Allah, subhan Allah, and single names such as Allah or Hu. Many draw on the asma al-husna, the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah.
4. A wird is the personal litany a shaykh assigns, fixed in wording and in number and recited daily whatever the mood. Counting is kept on a tasbih of thirty-three or ninety-nine beads.
5. Orders differ over volume. Naqshbandi practice is known for silent dhikr khafi, while Qadiri and Rifa'i groups practise dhikr jahri, aloud and in unison.
6. Communal sessions, called hadra (presence) in Arabic-speaking countries, may be seated or standing, with a leader setting a pulse the breath follows. Participants describe the aim as concentrated attention rather than excitement.

Sama, poetry and dance

1. Sama means listening, and names the hearing of recitation, poetry or music with the intention of remembrance. Sufis hold that certain sounds loosen the heart's grip on itself, and that plain statement cannot carry what is heard there.
2. What is heard is usually poetry of longing for Allah, and the Sufi poets Rumi, Attar and Hafiz are read across the orders. Rumi's Mathnawi opens with a reed flute crying because it was cut from the reed bed, an image read as the soul separated from its source.
3. In South Asia the Chishti order developed qawwali, sung at the dargahs (shrines) of saints such as Mu'in al-Din Chishti at Ajmer. Audiences there include Muslims of every school and, at some shrines, Hindus and Sikhs.
4. The Mevlevi order of Konya shaped the practice into the sema ceremony, danced by the dervishes English calls whirling, each turning with the right palm upward to receive from Allah and the left downward to pass on to creation. The black cloak dropped at the start stands for the tomb, the white skirt for the shroud, and the tall felt hat for the headstone.
5. Sama is contested inside Islam. Many ulama hold instrumental music impermissible in worship and Naqshbandi Sufis avoid it, while defenders answer that the ruling turns on niyyah (intention) and on what the listening produces.

Muraqaba and khalwa

1. Muraqaba is the Sufi word for meditation, and it means watchfulness. The practice is sitting in silence attentive to the heart, under what Sufis call the gaze of Allah.
2. Technique varies by order. Naqshbandi teaching directs attention to subtle centres called lata'if in the chest, while other orders carry a name of Allah on the breath.
3. Muhasaba (self-accounting) is the companion practice, a nightly review of the day's actions and of the motives behind them. The ninth-century Baghdad teacher al-Muhasibi took his name from it.
4. Both are aimed at the nafs, the lower or appetitive self. The Qur'an names its stages, from the nafs al-ammara that commands evil, through the self-reproaching nafs al-lawwama, to the nafs al-mutma'inna at rest.
5. Sufis identify this work with the greater jihad, the struggle against one's own evil, and call it the harder and more constant of the two struggles. The vocabulary belongs to Muslims generally, not to Sufism alone.
6. Khalwa (retreat) intensifies the discipline, and the arba'in, a forty-day seclusion of fasting and continuous dhikr, gives the Khalwatiyya order its name. Visions reported in retreat go to the shaykh for interpretation and carry no authority, since prophecy is held to have closed with the Prophet Muhammad.

Ahwal, maqamat and fana

1. Sufi manuals map the path as maqamat (stations) and ahwal (states). A station is earned and stays, while a state is given, brief and outside the disciple's control.
2. The stations run from tawba (repentance) through zuhd (detachment), sabr (patience), tawakkul (trust in Allah) and rida (contentment with what Allah sends). States come in pairs, contraction with expansion and fear with hope, and teachers warn against measuring progress by them.
3. The summit is fana, the passing away of the self's claim to exist on its own, followed by baqa, abiding in Allah. Junayd of Baghdad set out the sober version, in which fana is completed by a return to ordinary duty.
4. Some Sufis in ecstasy uttered shathiyat (ecstatic sayings) that others found scandalous. Al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in the early tenth century after saying ana al-haqq, I am the Truth, which is a name of Allah.
5. Ibn Arabi, a thirteenth-century Andalusian, is associated with wahdat al-wujud (the oneness of being), read as the claim that only Allah's being is real in itself. Critics such as Ibn Taymiyya held that this blurs Creator and creation and edges toward shirk.
6. Sufis answer that tawhid is preserved exactly. What is annihilated, on their account, is the self's illusion of independent existence, while Allah stays wholly distinct from all He has made.

Sufism across the branches

1. Sufism is not a branch standing alongside Sunni and Shi'ah Islam. Individual Sufis are Sunni or Shi'ah, follow one of the schools of law, and pray the same five daily prayers as other Muslims.
2. Most orders grew in Sunni settings, and figures such as al-Ghazali and Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani are honoured widely in Sunni scholarship. Members of all four Sunni schools of law can be found inside a single order.
3. Shi'ah Islam carries a parallel mystical vocabulary called irfan (gnosis), developed by philosophers such as Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. Some Shi'ah orders exist, notably the Ni'matullahi, though many Shi'ah scholars accept irfan while avoiding organised orders.
4. Salafi and Wahhabi reform movements criticise popular Sufi practice sharply. Their objections centre on ziyara (visiting shrines), tawassul (asking a friend of Allah to intercede) and festivals at the tombs of the awliya, which they class as bid'ah (innovation) or as shirk.
5. Sufis reply that they ask the awliya to pray for them and never worship them, and that Muslims already ask the living for prayers. The dispute is among the sharpest now running inside Sunni Islam.
6. Orders remain large in Senegal, Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and South Asia, and they draw many reverts in Europe and North America. Sufi music now has a concert audience worldwide, welcomed by some Sufis and judged by others to lose the intention that made it worship.